Last Word on America.

With the American presidential election still undecided (but with the map thankfully turning bluer, I know) and with many people forecasting major social unrest once a result is declared, I have to say this before I close the book:

As an outside observer who thinks of America more as a social phenomenon than a nation – partly because that’s how I tend to see most things – it seems that America has enormous potential to be great (as some people already think it is but it clearly isn’t yet.) In order to achieve that greatness, I feel that it needs a leader who is young, erudite, calm, strong, tough, fair minded, humanitarian, charismatic, and possessed of boundless energy to take America by the scruff of the neck, kick its ass with a hobnail boot, and reinvent it. My feeling is that its value systems and social mores are completely skewed and will remain that way until it gets an almighty shock.

Maybe the shock will come another way, but I think I’ll leave it at that. No offence intended. Over and out.

Changing Seats.

I was out clearing the grids on the lane again today when I spied a group of young children standing by the gates of the primary school. They were talking and laughing and fooling around while the teachers occupied themselves with the business of ordering and directing matters. And as I watched them it struck me that Shakespeare’s seven ages of man might be distilled to a simpler three.

The first age is the age of the child when your life is mostly ordered and directed by the grown ups who feed and clothe you, and take you to the doctor’s, and pick you up from school, and tell you what time to go to bed, and place you on the back seat of the car to take you on holiday, and keep you safe from the perils of life. And while you’re a child you look up to the grown ups and rely on them to shield you from the cares of the world.

And then you become a grown up yourself and the roles are reversed. You work to bring the pennies in. You drive the car on the way to the coast. You make decisions affecting those in your orbit, giving both advice and orders when such are needed and approval or denial in the face of requests. People rely on you to play your part, and the part you play comes with consequences. And this we might call the age of control and responsibility.

It goes on for a long time, but life doesn’t stop there. Eventually you reach the post-grown up stage when people stop expecting much of you, when responsibility and control diminish, when you’re forced to accept support again just as you did as a child. And then you feel yourself to be sidelined, sitting idle in a dinghy being towed behind the big boat with the grown ups in it. You don’t like it much because for the past forty or fifty years you’ve grown used to being a player in the big boat, whether as captain, first mate or crew doesn’t matter. At least you were there, and now you’re not. The muscles no longer have quite the power they did, the lungs no longer have quite the capacity they had, the sinews lack the elasticity you’ve come to expect of them, and even the mind works more slowly and with less acuity. And so you become ever less of a player and ever more of an observer.

I sometimes wonder why I’m not writing fiction any more, but instead looking around for things to rant about. I suppose it’s because there’s nothing much else to do when you have your kitbag packed and you’re preparing to take your seat in the dinghy. I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with the approach of a novel situation. Choosing to walk apart as a recluse suits me, but being pushed aside by the tyrant time doesn’t.

Same But Different.

I was spoken to and smiled at by two lovely young ladies today. One was around 3 or 4 and adorably cute. She was out for a bike ride with her dad. The other was a little more mature at around 18 and was taking her dog for a walk.

It struck me as interesting that two encounters which were essentially the same could produce such different pleasure responses in totally different parts of the brain. It isn’t hard to work out, of course. Cute kids bring out the best in me, attractive young women the worst.

(Actually, that’s not true. What really brings out the worst in me is people invading my personal or private space without an invitation. The fact that normal people habitually do so is one of the reasons why I’ve always thought it advisable never to own a shotgun.)

America: the Verdict

It’s Wednesday afternoon and the American presidential election is still undecided. It matters little now whether Trump or Biden takes the final victory because the important question has already been answered. The rational result would have been a landslide for Biden to leave Trump out in the wilderness at last, but instead it’s too close to call. The American people have spoken. It would be impolite of me to say more.

The Spookiness of Stairs.

I’m not easily spooked these days by anything I read in a book or see in a film. I didn’t even find The Exorcist remotely spooky, even though received critical opinion insists that it’s the scariest film ever made. I actually found it a little tedious.

But there’s a scene in The Turn of the Screw which even I found a touch scary. The governess is walking along a landing in the half light of early morning when she sees the apparition of Peter Quint coming up the stairs as she approaches the top of them. They both stop and stare at one another, until the apparition turns and walks back into the darkness lower down. It’s written in simpler prose than James usually uses, and it’s most effective.

And then I remembered that I wrote a post once about the Japanese horror film The Grudge in which I commented that stairs appear to be significant in Japanese horror stories. I also remembered the time when I fell asleep on the sofa in my living room, the back of which faces the bottom of the stairs. Unlike more modern houses, they lead off the living room instead of a separate hallway. As I woke up I had the strongest impression that someone was standing close to the bottom of them and looking down at me over the back of the sofa. I’ve never slept on the sofa since. If I need a few hours sleep now – like the night before I have to be up indecently early for an operation – I get them sitting in my armchair which has its back to a wall and gives a good view of the stairs.

And, of course, there’s that famous old rhyme which has several versions, the one I remember being:

As I was walking up the stair 

I met a man who wasn’t there 

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away

And now I’m not exactly sure how I should close this post, except to say that I’m about to climb my own stairs because I need the bathroom. I expect I’ll manage it well enough.

On the Singular Nature of Cricket Pavilions.

Over the past few weeks while I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the Shire after a year and a half in limbo, I’ve been struck by the changes which have taken place during my absence. Not the least of them is the sad disappearance of an old cricket pavilion which used to stand on the far side of a hedgerow in Mill Lane. It had its back to the lane because the front faced what was once a cricket pitch but is now an arable field.

Cricket pavilions have long been one of the icons of recreational life in Britain. Most of the bigger villages in England (and a few in Wales and Scotland) had a village cricket team at one time. Most of those teams had their own pitch, and where there was a pitch there was a pavilion of more or less standard design.

It was a simple wooden structure divided internally into three areas – two changing rooms and a reception area with a small kitchen where teas were prepared for the teams during the interval between innings. On the front, facing the playing area, there was a covered veranda to accommodate the scorer and one or two batsmen padded up and waiting for their turn to bat. It was a simple but functional design, and very much a part of the game.

I played cricket during the second half of my twenties and the first half of my thirties, and I have fond memories of being out there on the field on warm summer evenings, sniffing the air for the scent of new-mown hay, watching some lonely tractor ploughing or haymaking on the slope of a distant meadow, and hearing the ubiquitous crack of willow on leather. And the whole experience started and finished in the pavilion.

Those were the memories which came back to me every time I walked past the pavilion in Mill Lane. It was in a sorry state by the time I first encountered it. It seems that the gentlemanly game played out by twenty two keen, bucolic amateurs had become history by then in these parts, and the old pavilion was rotting away badly. I suppose it needed demolishing to make way for a few extra square yards of crop at the edge of the field. If the land had been mine I would have had it refurbished because I’m odd like that. To me, a cricket pavilion has an air about it which makes it special and therefore worth saving.

(And as a footnote, I might add that circumstances are currently making me increasingly aware of my oddnesses and my unconventional relationship with the world at large. But I suppose that can be the subject of another post if and when I can be bothered to put my mind to it.)

Declining Temptation.

I had a junk email tonight, purportedly from a woman called Monica, which said:

I am 24 years old. Looking for a lover. My height is 172, weight 57, brunette, brown eyes. Details here.

You know, to somebody like me, that’s like being a reformed alcoholic having his senses titillated by the aroma of a 20-year-old single Highland malt which he knows has a spoonful of cyanide in it.

I tipped it down the sink.

Trump and the State of America.

I was just reading a BBC News feature on the findings of opinion polls ahead of the Presidential election. It appears that, at a national level, Biden is leading Trump by something like 53:47. That troubles me.

Let’s be straight and simple here. Donald Trump is an ego-ridden, not overly intelligent, bigoted braggart and bully. His rallying call ‘Make America Great Again’ has got to be the political joke of the century because I sense that America’s reputation in the world has plummeted during his presidency. To put it simply, America has become something of a laughing stock and very many of us no longer respect it.

So the question is: why does nearly half the population of America not see this and still intends to vote for him? If it were a mere 5-10%, you could put it down to the little rednecks at the bottom of the heap who haven’t a clue what the capital of France is or how many cents make a dollar. But it isn’t 5-10%; it’s nearly half. So what does that say about Americans and American culture? You tell me.

To be honest, I’ve more or less lost interest in Donald Trump. I now find him so boring as to be supremely ignorable. But today has rekindled my interest because today America is going to show us something of significance about itself. That's why I've become a keen spectator again.

Appreciating Beetles.

I opened the door to go into my kitchen last night and saw a beetle wandering around the tiled floor. Beetles do that, you know. If you stand still they wander in a seemingly aimless manner as though they can’t make up their minds where they want to get to. You have to make it up for them, as I did when I guided it carefully to the space under the washing machine.

When I got up this morning, what appeared to be the same beetle was standing still as a statue on the carpet runner in front of the sink unit. They do that, too. If you move about they stand still, seemingly in the instinctive belief that they’re less likely to get trodden on. But I wanted to walk up and down the runner myself – you know, to fetch the milk from the fridge and a bowl of breakfast cereal and so on – and it seemed likely that the poor little chap was rather less safe than it thought it was. And so I nudged it and it ran straight back under the washing machine. Did you know that beetles can learn from experience? Me neither.

The thing is, I get very few visitors to my house, what with being a recluse and feeling reluctant to catch the wretched Covid thing, so it’s nice to have a beetle for company occasionally. They’re so much less irritating than people.

Turning the Screw Again.

It’s been three days since I wrote anything to this blog. The combination of being unusually busy and feeling ill occasionally will serve as an excuse, but now my fingers are getting itchy. So what should I write about? Don’t know.

I suppose I could mention The Turn of the Screw again. I’m still reading it very slowly so as to be sure that I grasp the meaning of every sentence, however long it might be and however maddeningly convoluted the clauses. (I feel a duty to understand it intimately, you see, which is a mystery in itself.) But at least I’m now sure that the dispute over whether it’s a ghost story or a psychological one is easily addressed.

There’s a point quite early in the plot at which the governess sees a man watching her through the windows when she’s in the library. She describes the man’s appearance in the minutest detail to the housekeeper, Mrs Grosse, who confirms without doubt that it is the late Peter Quint. At that point in the story the governess has no knowledge of the existence of Peter Quint, much less be able to describe him so precisely. The idea that his apparition is a figment of her sexually repressed imagination is surely, therefore, irrational, and I see no reason to doubt that James intended this to be a ghost story.

And so I’m led to wonder whether the alternative explanation was imagined by the critics and academics because they were uneasy with the notion that the reputation of one of their beloved literary giants could be polluted by association with the ‘inferior’ genre, speculative fiction. Academics do seem to make a habit of needing to defend the ‘rational explanation’, even when the evidence doesn’t support it. But, as ever, how can I know? And does it matter?

Meanwhile, I wrote this in a recent post:

The weather had turned a little stormy by the time I went to bed that night, with frequent blustery gusts hurling squally rattles of rain against the windows.

It was prophetic. Seems we have the depleted remnants of some damn Atlantic hurricane skirting our western shoreline tonight, and it’s making the Shire irritatingly (or maybe atmospherically) noisy.