Being a Martyr to the Whims of the Weather.

The extent to which my ridiculously sensitive body gets affected by changes in the weather is quite remarkable. Today’s plunge into low pressure and its concomitant conditions – dark sky, growling wind and intermittent light rain – has granted me a persistent headache and extreme tiredness. Another time it might be a tight chest, sore throat, sore sinuses, and even toothache. I really do get very fed up with it, you know. I do.

And now there’s somebody on YouTube answering an old comment of mine with a demand to know whether I think he’s a joke. How should I respond to that when I really am trying to be a better person? Reply under consideration.

That’s probably it for today. I just woke up from an hour's asleep with my head on the desk. Quite absurd. And I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s line:

Blow wind, come wrack, at least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Here’s hoping.

Two Literary Notes.

It’s occasionally struck me as odd that there are so many authors called James. There’s Henry James, MR James, Adobe James, Clive James, PD James… How many authors are there called Dickens, or Fowles, or Nabokov, or Hemmingway? Or even Smith, for that matter. At one time I considered writing my own fiction under the nom-de-plume Jeffrey James, they being my two forenames. I didn’t, and I doubt it would have made the slightest difference to anything anyway, but at least I would have insinuated myself with some justification into good company.

*  *  *

I finished the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula last night. I still have misgivings about it, but it was interesting to see Mina cut off the Count’s head to serve her duty to romantic love for him, rather than for the sake of vengeance or the saving of humanity. And I’m not sure whether I was pleased or disappointed that at no time did the four intrepid vampire hunters – good, brave men all – ever squeeze each other’s hands or become too emotional to weep. I suppose that, at least, was one improvement on the book.

Spoiling Romania's Best Ambassador.

I’m currently watching Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula again. It used to be listed among my favourites on my blog profile, but I’ve removed it. It displeases me now.

I think the main reason is Coppola’s overblown flights of stylistic fancy. In my opinion they’re self-indulgent and unsuited to the dark, Gothic nature of the story. Consequently, I see them as nothing more than an ego trip. I’ve been at the point several times of becoming more aware of the director than the plot, and that can’t be a good thing. Once the artist becomes more important than the art, we’re on the slippery slope. Or so it seems to me.

I also have to say that Keanu Reeves’s attempts at both righteous indignation and a refined English accent fall rather short of the mark. Together they portray Jonathon Harker as being even more ineffectual than Stoker wrote him. And then there’s the matter of Winona Ryder’s ears…

Matching the Animal.

I saw two women out riding horses today. The horses were tall, slender and elegant. The women were tall, slender and elegant. And then I saw a short, thick-set woman with a broad head walking her two bulldogs down the lane. Seems to be true what they say about people and their choice of animal companions.

I asked myself whether I had a favourite breed of dog these days. I couldn’t think of one. It used to be the Border Collie and I used to have a Border Collie. Seems I was a Border Collie type back then, and she was one of the biggest lights of my life. But now? No idea.

I wonder whether this indicates that I’ve lost my sense of personal identity since I can’t think of a dog to represent me in the table of equivalents. Probably not; it probably indicates what I already know. Dogs belong with people and I don’t.

Two people told me, in quite different circumstances, that my totem animal is the bear. That sounds about right, especially the grizzly bear. Bears don’t belong with people either.

Reading the Birds' Behaviour.

I said earlier that I had nothing to post about tonight. Well, I just remembered something.

Every evening this week, just as the gloaming is beginning to gather, I’ve seen a very large flock of jackdaws – maybe a hundred or more – fly across my house from west to east. Many of them settle in the trees in the back field while others fly around in circles, and then they all fly back again and disappear into the distance. I’ve never seen that in the fourteen years I’ve lived here, and I don’t know why they’ve suddenly started doing it.

And tonight there was another first – several small flocks of gulls flying north in a chevron pattern as though they think they’re migrating geese.

So what on earth is going on here? Is it something to do with climate change, or what?

There are those who believe that birds act as messengers to us humans. There are others who say that this is mere superstition arising from the fact that birds can fly, and were therefore seen – in the minds of our ignorant and superstitious ancestors – as being privy to arcane knowledge stored in the heavenly realm.

I’m naturally given to accepting the latter, as any modern human would. But I can’t know, can I? Maybe there’s more to birds than meets the eye, in which case I wish they’d be a little more transparent in their mode of communication.

Finding the Opportunity to Praise.

Since I can’t think of anything to post about tonight, I thought I’d copy something I wrote in an email by way of trying to help somebody feel better about herself:

I admit that I don’t know you perfectly. Nobody could, much less somebody who has never met you, never looked into your eyes, never observed how you smile or what kind of tears you shed. But I can say after more than ten years of close correspondence that I’ve never seen any bad in you. I’ve never seen any trace of vindictiveness, vengefulness, cruelty, nor even harshness, and your lack of any judgemental faculty is unique in my experience. You’ve always struck me as a person of light who loves to spread light to others. Even when your actions have seemed selfish, they’ve always been at least ameliorated if not wholly excused by the sort of vulnerability we must all be allowed if we’re to be human.

And I meant every word of it, so here’s the good bit. To a misanthropic old curmudgeon like me, it really makes me feel good to be able to say such a thing honestly. And it should go without saying that I would never say such a thing dishonestly.

Thank Heaven...

I was listening to a piece of music on YouTube tonight which was accompanied by paintings of little girls looking adorably little girlish, and I found myself wondering whether it’s a shame that little girls have to grow up and become women. I’m sure it isn’t, but it does raise a point.

Little girls are relatively simple. All you have to do is take care of them, give them everything they want, and make damn sure nothing ever gets close enough to threaten them. Even their occasional tantrums are cute.

And then they grow into young women. At that point they draw you inexorably towards them with emotional magnets – against which resistance is useless – while scattering the path along which you’re forced to walk with broken glass.

And now I’m wondering whether that makes me a misogynist. I’m quite sure it doesn’t because most of my heroes are women. But it does make life complicated.

Thoughts on the Wobble Room.

Anybody who’s been reading this blog for any length of time will know that the Royal Derby Hospital has become a reluctant second home to me over the past 2½ years. They will also know that the commonly used superlatives do scant justice to my feelings for the nursing staff there. I love them to bits, I really do.

Today the lovely RDH nurses were given a little feature on the national BBC News website. It talked about their setting up of a ‘wobble room’ – a room in the hospital reserved for the clinical staff where they can go and have a cry when things become just too much, before pulling themselves together and carrying on. And there’s a board in there on which they can write about ‘what I’m going to do when all this is over.’ One said ‘have the best party ever.’ Another wrote ‘hug my mum.’ Both so very human, so simple, so unprepossessing, and yet so touching.

I know they’ve been under intense pressure for the past eight months, and I know that eight months is a long time to hold yourself together under the weight of such pressure. That’s why, on reading about the wobble room, I wanted to go in there and ask them:

‘How do you do it? How do you continue to smile calmly when dealing with patients day after day, week after week, month after dispiriting month, some of whom must drive you to distraction occasionally? Why is nothing ever too much trouble for you? How do you continue to be everybody’s surrogate mother without complaint?’

And this is the National Health Service I’m talking about, so we patients don’t even have to pay for such care and dedication. We just turn up at the appointed time, lie back and wait to be cared for by caring people. The nurses, for their part, are public servants who get paid a modest salary for doing a job like everybody else. The NHS might not offer the opulence and frills of a privatised service, but the people who work there get the job done because they’re up to it. Do we deserve it? I hope some of us do.

Educating Rupert.

My walk today took in another part of the Shire to which my steps have been a stranger for the past year and a half – a little (and relatively little known) copse which has an enchanted pool in it. (To most people it would be seen as a depression in the ground which fills with water for most of the year, but it’s an enchanted pool to me because I haven’t yet stopped trying to live my life like Rupert Bear. I still entertain the suspicion that I would gain access to a mysterious other world if only I had the courage to jump into it.)

And therein I found another change from the good old days – two notices pinned to trees which say: Private Land. No public right of way. You wouldn’t think there’d be so many changes in a mere year and a half, would you? And all of them, so far, being deleterious.

But a little way further on – just as I was communing with my favourite copper beech tree in Church Lane – a woman walked past and engaged me in conversation. Noticing the slight hint of something vaguely Germanic in her accent, I asked her:

‘Where are you from? Are you German?’

‘No,’ she answered, ‘Nordic.’

‘From Norway?’ I continued (because in Britain we generally associate the adjective ‘Nordic’ with Norway, preferring ‘Scandinavian’ for the other parts.)

‘No, Sweden.’

‘So why Nordic and not Swedish?’

‘Because I’m part Swedish and part Finnish.’

Ah, right. So that led the conversation into the subject of Finland, and I mentioned a young Finnish woman I once met who was physically striking because of her near-white hair and extremely pale blue eyes.

‘She was probably Karelian,’ said the Nordic woman.

I pretended to understand, of course, because that’s what people who’ve never grown out of Rupert Bear do, but I didn’t really. My only experience of ‘Karelian’ came from the piece by Sibelius entitled The Karelia Suite. I didn’t even know it was a place. I looked it up when I got back and discovered that it’s a region in the north of the Northern Lands which stretches from Finland across Sweden to the north of Norway.

So there you are: walking can be educational as well as healthy. Point taken; lesson learned.

 

My mentor. He always managed to get home

in time for tea, a fact of which I greatly approve

Inviting the Butterfly Effect.

Tonight’s visitor to my kitchen floor is a woodlouse. I first saw it wandering aimlessly around just as the beetle was a couple of nights ago, only the woodlouse appeared to be drunk. It was definitely unsteady on its feet and I had the impression that it was dying. It’s still there now, immobile, so it probably was.

And there was a moth on the roof of my car this afternoon. It, too, was immobile, but moved just a little when I touched it. The air temperature being a little low by the standards to which I assumed a moth of that sort would normally be accustomed, I felt a pang of pity for the poor little thing and wondered whether I should intervene in its destiny.

I considered, as one does, the possibility of unforeseeable ramifications when taking a hand in the workings of fate – whether it is better to intervene, or to pass on and allow fate, or nature, or whatever forces order the course of natural affairs to have their way.

My habitual compassion – which might alternatively be termed sentimentality – finally settled the matter. I picked it up carefully and placed it at the bottom of a pile of garden cuttings which are already beginning to compost down. I reasoned (if that’s the appropriate word) that if the moth was going to die, it would be more comfortable doing so in a warm place. The moth crawled into the pile and the deed was done. And now I live with the possibility that I might have been complicit in engendering the rise of a devastating typhoon somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean. The question of karmic balancing hardly bears the weight of consideration.