The Matter of the Fine Pheasant.

I seem to have attracted a part-time pet: a cock pheasant possessed of the most unusual plumage I’ve ever seen – lots of silver grey and brindle with chestnut patches on his wings and patterns of black dots and squares which would make excellent curtains if you were into that sort of thing. And what particularly struck me when I first saw him a week or so ago was that he didn’t shy away and regard me suspiciously as the other pheasants do. He walked slowly towards me, seemingly with purpose, until he was a few feet away, and then turned and wandered off in a different direction. I said something like ‘what a splendidly handsome bird you are’ and that was that.

He came into the garden again this evening, but this time approached me almost at a trot and came close enough to reach out and touch if I’d wanted to. (I didn’t for two reasons: 1. I was busy deadheading some daffodils at the time, and 2. I didn’t fancy adding bird flu to the already weighty bag of health issues I’m carrying around at the moment. I’ve become a bit of a wimp in the matter of health issues.) He was persistent, however, pushing his head out every time I snapped a seed off, and it soon dawned on me that he wanted me to give him food.

And so I did. I went and fetched the pot of bird seed and put a handful down on the path, then left him gobbling greedily while I went about my business. When I returned to the scene all the food was gone and so was the pheasant.

The combination of highly unusual plumage and untypical tameness leads me to suspect that my new pet (I’ve decided to call him Oscar) is probably a cross between a wild pheasant and one of those ornamental varieties which I gather fine ladies in country mansions like to have wandering their capacious gardens. If that is the case, it would seem likely that he’s used to being hand fed. Maybe some fine lady somewhere realised that he was a mongrel, and maybe she has an aversion to mongrels because she’s been conditioned by her elevated class to recognise the pre-eminence of racial purity, and maybe she sent him on his way with orders never to darken her peony patch again. (Which is actually a veiled compliment to the dear lady because her husband would probably have shot him and given the body to the cook.)

The only difficulty with this theory is that I’m unaware of any fine ladies living in mansions in the immediate vicinity. The closest thing to a fine lady in these parts is the Lady B’s Dear Mama. She lives in a house about three times the size of mine, but it’s still some way short of a mansion. And besides, she works for a living (or did the last I heard) which proper fine ladies don’t. Their work, if such it can be called, usually amounts to writing a few letters and instructing the serving staff to prepare for the next dinner party.

And so the mystery is unresolved and will probably remain so unless the bird has learned to speak his name and address in case he gets lost. To paraphrase a favourite line from a favourite film: “Where do ’e come from? Where do ’e go?” (The Ghost Train 1941.) But I bet he’ll be back to capitalise on my sentimental nature by further depleting my stock of bird seed. If an explanation should ever come to light, I’ll be sure to post it here.

When a Story Is Just a Story.

I’ve decided that I dislike the concept of metafiction and wish to offer a brief reason by way of justification. But first I’ll copy and paste the Wiki definition of the term for the benefit of those who are ignorant of its meaning (as I was until recently. Who was it who said: ‘an ignoramus is a person who doesn’t know something you didn’t know until ten minutes ago’? Or words to that effect.)

Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts.^[1] Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.

So why do I dislike it? Well, it goes something like this:

It seems to me that metafiction is a step along the road of that process whereby academics refuse to accept that a cigar can ever be just a cigar, and so exercise their minds and mouths in gainful employment constructing fanciful notions of what it must represent. All manner of things are subject to this process, none more so than literature because literature is one of those pursuits which are lauded as pillars of what we like to term ‘civilisation’ (and, ironically or fortuitously or inevitably according to your own judgement, academics themselves are also products of the same societal perception.) If that’s how you like to view the matter of literature, then the concept of metafiction is fine. But I don’t.

To me, the cover of a book containing a fictional story is the gateway to an alternate reality, and when I engage with the contents I’m pitched into it. It might well be identical in every respect to my experience of everyday reality, but it isn’t the same one that my body is occupying back in the armchair. It’s why I so like fiction which constructs a strong sense of place because the more it does that, the more the alternate reality becomes believably real and the concomitant experiences all the stronger. And so for me, good fiction amounts to an escape into a world which mirrors aspects of everyday reality and helps me to make sense of things which I might otherwise miss. If I’m to be constantly reminded that this is just a story, an artificial construction, then the value of the story is debased.

So that’s my objection for what it’s worth. And I still wish I could find something funny to say, but I can’t because nothing funny happened today and I still don’t feel entirely well. (But it might be worth mentioning that I saw my angel in the shoe shop again this morning and she still recognises me. She has a relaxed and taciturn manner and appears wholly secure in the fact. I like that.)

On Oddities and a Ditty Failure.

Having been engaged in a particularly long phone call this evening, I had to go out after dark to top up the feed tables for the early rising birdies. Before I did so, however, I made sure that the curtains were closed because I’ve developed a new oddity. I dislike looking back into my house from the dark outside because I fear I might see something in there that I really don’t want to see! This would appear to indicate that I’ve added being fanciful and neurotic to the growing list of undesirable traits.

In consequence of this, it occurs to me that my personality has so many odd angles that if I were a rough diamond freshly hewn from the primeval rock, I would be considered unworkable and cast aside.

And this morning I saw a cow resting by a farm gate. When I approached he didn’t shy away as cows usually do, but remained placid while I stroked his nose and scratched his ears. This reminds me of another little oddity: I hate the thought of having any part of my body – even my ears – scratched by any fingernails other than my own. I’m not at all sure of where, when or why this negative sensibility achieved genesis, but it belongs in the general category of pollution aversion.

*  *  *

A rare event occurred yesterday: the beginnings of a new ditty dropped into my head and asked to be developed. It began:

My name is Svetlana

I’ve lost my banana

And now I don’t know what to do

I really did try to develop it, I did, but it kept sliding into murky places so I stopped.

Jabbering for the Sake of It.

I’m fresh out of words again. I feel there’s a limit to how much a chap can wax eloquent about the delightful newness of spring and the pleasure to be had from the first of the year’s balmy twilights. Further, I doubt anyone domiciled beyond a mile radius of my house would be interested in the fact that somebody has put the village hall cloak right. And I think I’ve vomited enough bile around the Ukraine crisis to last at least a few days, although there’s plenty more I could say if I thought it would immobilise the Russian tanks.

A little aside, however:

I was reading about Alexander Borodin today, marvelling at his multi-faceted talent in being a leading doctor and chemist whilst also writing some of the world’s loveliest melodies. It led me to wonder how a culture which can produce the likes of Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and the rest – not to mention the great literary talent for which Russia is justly famous – could still end up being led by the likes of Stalin and Putin. But to continue...

I wonder whether I should mention the young woman I encountered on my walk today, replete with the prettiest of pony tails and riding a handsome brute of a horse along Church Lane. She told me that my personality, intelligence and sense of humour were so impressive that she wanted to stay close to me, on a strictly platonic basis of course, for as long as I have left. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it because I made it all up. (Although there is such a young woman who seems content to stop and talk to me. I even have a question of an equine nature to put to her if ever our paths cross again. And let’s face it, you’ve got to have a dream – if you don’t have a dream – how you gonna have a dream come true? So it might be worth mentioning that I saw two bats flying in tandem a couple of nights ago. I always worry about how many of them will re-appear after the winter, so maybe it was an omen.)

Over and out.

Mother Russia and the Matter of Growth.

I often ask myself why I get so hot under the collar about the war in Ukraine. It’s partly the obvious reaction of an empath to the suffering of the innocent, as it is in other conflicts, but it goes a little deeper than that.

I find it greatly disheartening that people like Putin – and others – can still wield power in the affairs of the world. After at least 100,000 years of being on this planet, the human race still refuses to grow up. Too many people still allow themselves to be swayed by emotive rhetoric which rants wildly on feeble matters like patriotism and the scourge of traitors, while failing to see through it all and ask the obvious question: if being a traitor matters so much, who is the real traitor here?

Under Putin, Mother Russia has become a dishevelled and dark hearted old hag sitting in her hut on chicken’s legs. She has become Baba Jaga, largely isolated from the affairs of the world and reviled by most of its inhabitants. Only other tyrants in other states still regard Mother Russia as a sister. (Baba Jaga had sisters, too.) And this is my own rhetoric, I know, but at least it’s honestly intentioned. That’s the difference.

And so I continue to wonder whether the human race will ever grow up, and I wonder whether it isn’t supposed to. Maybe the ways of the world are supposed to be like this in order to teach the more enlightened a few lessons they need to learn in order to progress. How can I know?

Meanwhile, the innocent continue to suffer and the tyrant continues to persuade the feeble minded of his rightness. Mother Russia continues to wallow in the darkness of her deep forest, and that disappoints me because I’d allowed myself to believe that the Cold War was over and we could now be good neighbours at last. And I’m aware that nothing I say is going to make a blind bit of difference, but I felt like saying it anyway. (And this post was made as an alternative to the one I was going to make about how weak and feeble I've become, in both mind and body, and why I find this lamentable state of affairs a matter of concern.)

An April Rhapsody.

This evening’s twilight finally gave me a taste of April as it should be – dull and damp, but mild and with hardly a breath of breeze.

There’s actually no such thing as a perfect April, of course, but it’s how I remember it from back in the day when I was a rookie photographer honing my observation of the seasons and the natural world. It was the month when I most enjoyed taking my dog for rambles along the lanes, across the fields and through the newly greening woods.

I was living in another village then, about twenty miles from here, and there was a tree-fringed hollow in one of the fields where I used to sit among the wild primroses while dear Em ran off her boundless energy to her heart’s content. In fact, I can honestly say that I’d never really noticed primroses before, nor their association with the quiet splendour of mid-spring as long as the weather gods are feeling benevolent. I set one of my stories in that very place, and in this very month, and with characters based on people I knew well there. It’s called The Gypsy Rover if anyone should care to read it, but be warned: The dénouement is as enigmatic as April is; it’s for the reader to play god and determine the solution.

So this evening I went out and stood at the edge of my little porch, there to luxuriate in the heady atmosphere as the gloaming gathered. To smell the earth and feel the touch of dampness on my face; to see the near-glowing greens at their greenest; to drink in the sense that here, to my perception, is the closest we come to a deeper meaning of life.

Paying Up Front.

My new health issue is keeping me in a state of discomfort tonight, as it does much of the time. I suppose I should see a doctor about it (not that it’s easy to actually see a doctor during these troubled times), but I’m tired of the attention of clinicians, tired of investigations and procedures, tired of waiting for results, tired of the hassle involved with attending the Royal Derby Hospital, tired of being told I mustn’t drive for a month, and tired of people trying to coerce me into taking yet more medications. I’m holding to the view at the moment that when you get older your body starts falling apart and that’s just how it is. I’m the biggest fan of the NHS because they saved my life four years ago, but I’d much rather its bountiful ministrations were heaped on other people while I was able to stay under the radar.

And I’ve had a frustrating, stressful day today, courtesy of E.ON Next (my energy supplier) and Epson (the manufacturer of my printer.) I think I’ve made it quite clear that I’m no friend of the denizens of the corporate world these days. I understand why they try to force you into doing things their way – although I greatly dislike it and fight against it as much as possible – but what I don’t understand is how, given the wealth, technical expertise and university degrees at their disposal, they manage to be so dysfunctional.

And now I’m whingeing again. I dislike myself when I whinge, but yesterday’s niceness reversed its polarity today. I suppose it’s just an example of having to pay for everything you get, and maybe instant karma is better than building up a debit balance.

The Power of a Smile.

Six weeks ago I wrote a post called An Angel in a Shoe Shop, which related the sense of connection I felt with the woman who served me. Today I went into the same store and was served by another, younger, woman who was also a model of everything a first rate shop assistant is supposed to be (a faculty now somewhat rare, I’m sad to say.)

During the process of conducting business – a rather inflated expression considering the fact that I was only buying a £1.99 shoe horn – the subject of the previous post appeared and smiled at me. Nothing significant there, you might say; ah, but there was. It was the kind of smile that surprised me. It was a smile of recognition, and had a genuinely ‘it’s nice to see you again’ look about it.

I’m not used to that sort of smile. I’ve always thought of myself as being too innocuous to be memorable on such short an acquaintance. How many customers, I ask myself, must she have encountered over the past six weeks? Why would she remember me, much less be apparently pleased to see me again?

And yet it seems she did, and it was of substantial significance to me, and so the angel in the shoe shop reprised her elevated role and sent me on my way considerably lighter of heart. It also afforded me a nice little lesson which I should have learned a long time ago:

A genuine smile is worth a thousand complimentary words, just as a false smile is one of the ugliest features in the human spectrum. I’ve learned to tell the difference, much to my edification.

The Coldness of the Lambs.

Newborn lambs are such delicate little creatures until their legs grow sturdy and their fleece develops. This morning I saw two of them in a field, resting and apparently sleeping in the cold wind while their mother grazed nearby. Their tiny faces looked pinched in resignation. My own body was perfectly warm in my super winter walking coat, but my mind felt their coldness and sank into a bleak place.

On Seasonal Firsts and Startling Epiphanies.

I saw the first lambs of the season yesterday, and today there was another first – the first blooming of the wild garlic on the embankments in Bag Lane. (That’s the sunken lane I’ve talked about before on the blog, probably the best example of a classic English sunken lane I’ve ever seen. Sunken lanes feature in Lord of the Rings, you know. They do.) The point about the garlic flowers, however, is that they’re about a month ahead of their time. The broom bush in my garden is the same. That’s almost in full flower, and both are usually one of the highlights of May. The hawthorn flowers, on the other hand, are showing no inclination to be so precocious. I suspect they fear getting beaten up by their blackthorn cousins if they were.

But the real epiphany came when I was giving the lawn its first mow of the season this afternoon. I was a bit wary of doing it because one of my cocktail of health issues makes any sort of strenuous work uncomfortable, and my lawn has a slope up which the mower has to be pushed. And so it was at the start, but as I went on it became easier. I got to a point where I felt a sudden upwelling of appreciation that I was able to mow my lawn without significant distress, and that was a new one on me. We take such things for granted, don’t we? The lawn needs mowing so you go and mow it. You always have, so there was never any reason to appreciate the fact that it was possible. I enjoyed the feeling and put a little tick in the am I growing up yet box.

I remember seeing a character in a film once luxuriating in the fact that she was alive, and at the time I thought it odd. Being alive is something else we take for granted because we have no conscious experience of not being alive in a physical body. But there was a day shortly after the operation to remove a cancerous kidney four years ago when I learned that particular lesson in abundance. I went for a walk on a warm, calm, sunny day in May. The leaves in wood and hedgerow were fresh and bright green, the woodland floor was delightfully dappled as it is in late spring, the year’s new crops were growing strongly, a profound sense of peace hung in the balmy air, and I stood entranced at seeing the whole thing afresh. I could almost hear the music of Vaughan Williams playing in my head and wondered why I’d never seen it quite like that before.

So there, maybe, is a lesson to bring into the next life: don’t wait until you’re ageing and have a cocktail of health issues before appreciating the value of being young, strong, healthy and alive. Luxuriate in the blessing while you’ve got it.