Perfidious Spring.

The multitudinous snowdrops are sinking back into sleep now ready for their summer rest. The crocuses are following close behind, while the daffodils, primroses, celandines, and hyacinths are stepping forth to take their place. The willows are heavy with catkins and the blackthorns are wearing their purist white coats. Spring is here in the Shire and colour is increasingly in the ascendant.

Today we had cold rain and hail, and tonight is forecast to chill us with 2°C of frost. It all reminds me of another favourite line from Macbeth:

Away, and mock the time with fairest show

False face must hide what the false heart does know

 

(I always thought that catkins were seeds, but only today I discovered they're actually densely packed strands of tiny flowers. Still learning after all these years.)

A View of Orange Skeletons.

I saw a strange sight this afternoon, one that I’ve seen only once before and I think I mentioned it on the blog. It goes like this:

The front of my house faces due west, and the back due east. This afternoon I looked out of the bathroom window which faces east and saw that all the still-naked trees in the hedgerows and on top of the hill had been painted orange.

In order for this to happen there has to be a particular set of circumstances. The atmosphere needs to be clear enough for the setting sun to retain its power, the western sky needs to be clear of clouds, and the atmospheric pressure has to be high enough for the refractive index to take out some of the lower wavelengths, but not too many. If it loses too much of the lower end the sun becomes a blood red disc with little brilliance, when it needs to be dark orange and blazing.

And so it was today. And so I stood enthralled by the sight of gold/green grass and numerous skeletal trees glowing orange. It really felt as though I’d entered a different world.

Then again, I suppose I might have done. Or maybe some farmer with nothing better to occupy his hands had painted them all orange, and then gone round ten minutes later and painted them all black again. You can never be sure, can you?

Still Awaiting the Chariot.

I was reading earlier of a transgender woman who’s in big trouble in Indonesia. She has a TikTok account and was recently trolled by somebody telling her to get her hair cut so she ‘looks more like a man.’ She responded with a video showing her talking to a picture of Jesus and telling him to get his hair cut. A good response, I thought – intelligent, ironic, and amusing. She’s now been found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to 2½ years in jail.

You know, the older I get the more entrenched is my view that the human animal routinely uses its superior intelligence to be the stupidest creature on the plant.

*  *  *

And should I mention the British Labour Party’s latest hobby horse? I should explain for the sake of those who don’t know that the Labour Party has always been – at least since before I was born – the major party on the centre left of British politics. The Labour Party invented the welfare state after WWII, and welfare has always been a cornerstone of its identity. Now the current Labour Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have announced their intention to wage war on welfare. They say the country can’t afford it, and they’re probably right, but only because Mrs Thatcher – a diehard right winger – switched the economic points and established the presumption that a more free market policy was necessary in order to follow the American way. (And oh how Mrs T did love the American way.) Meanwhile, the good old Labour Party, born of the need for a moderately socialist alternative and with the promise always to be its champion, still declines to touch the mega rich. So who do we vote for now?

And, of course, we have Trump stomping around casting the grenades of his crazy trade wars right, left and centre, and threatening to erase Canada from the map so the USA can be bigger.

When, I ask, will my little hill o’beans be allowed to get off this crazy world and see whether the land of the dead makes any more sense?

On Conversations and Countesses.

I had three conversations with denizens of the Shire today: one with a couple who live around the corner, a second with the Lady B’s dear mama, and a third with a donkey in Meadow Lane who brayed at me so loudly that I feared he might wake some of the residents of the churchyard half a mile away. He shut up when I picked him a handful of fresh grass from the verge outside the gate, and that gave me an idea.

I sometimes feel irritated when people stop my way upon the blasted road when all I want to do is keep on walking. Maybe I should hand them some fresh grass from the verge, and then maybe I’ll be able to make my escape while they chew on it.

Dear Mama was outside in the sunshine doing a job in the garden while the painters were busy painting her stucco cottage. I stuck my courage to the sticking place (that’s two references to Macbeth in one post) and asked her the question which has long intrigued me: ‘How do you manage to look younger every time I see you?’

It sounded crass, if not actually creepy, but it’s true that she does and it’s true that it intrigues me, so why not? She smiled (nicely.) And that makes her not only the classiest dame I’ve ever known, but also the only woman of her age I’ve ever encountered and found attractive. If she became invisible when she turned forty – as women are supposed to do – she’s certainly managed to somehow reverse the trend ever since. Maybe she was a Hungarian countess in a previous life (or even two hundred years ago in her present one) and keeps a vat of virgin’s blood in one of her outbuildings (the one next to the dung heap I expect, so people will give the location a wide berth.) And maybe she’ll get chased to the burning mill before I do.

On Smiles and the American Connection.

I was sitting on one of the benches outside Sainsbury’s today (it being a fine and pleasant day, you understand) when I spotted coming towards me a pit bill terrier with a woman in tow. I watched with amusement as the dog insisted on taking his human companion for a ramble among the bank of shrubs lining the walkway at the front of the store. I’m fairly sure she had no choice in the matter, and eventually they both emerged seemingly none the worse for their adventure in the wild woods.

As they came past me I smiled at the dog and the dog smiled back. And then I looked at the human companion and she was smiling at me, too. I pondered the question: ‘should I compare thee to … to… to… a toad with acne?’ It seemed a little unjust since I’m not exactly a Brad Pitt lookalike myself, and a smile is a smile when all’s said and done, and so I smiled back. And I’m only relating this story in this form to attempt some revival of my old blogging habits, and to offer incontrovertible evidence that I really am a most high functioning depressive.

And then the American arrived and sat on the bench next to mine. He, too, had a dog – an overweight beagle. How did I know he was American? I didn’t, but let’s describe him: overweight, baseball cap, shades, and a ZZ Top beard. I considered that he might have been one of that rare breed of Europeans who thinks Trump might be human after all, but there aren’t many of those about and I don’t suppose I shall ever know. His wife came out of the store and she was overweight, too. They walked past me and none of them smiled, not even the dog.

*  *  *

On the subject of the big T, I found this week’s cover of Private Eye magazine even more apt than usual. It showed a photograph of Keir Starmer talking to King Charles, apparently about the upcoming state visit of the leader of the free world (about which there has been much grumbling and petitioning, I might add.) Starmer is saying ‘You should treat him with the courtesy and respect due to a President’ and Charles replies ‘In that case I’ll shout at him and then boot him out.’

And now I’m wondering what precautions the police will take if the Trump drives through London in a motorcade. Will they move among the throng of onlookers suitably equipped with egg detectors?

The Matter of What Matters and Some Firsts.

I was walking around the lanes this morning seeing the occasional individual or couple cheerily going about their business with an evident sense of purpose, and down dropped the same question that such a sight always evokes: does any of it matter? At that point my mind split, as it always splits, into the two conflicting factions: one insisting that none of it matters while the other insists that all of it does. The war goes on.

Ironically, my own sense of purpose raised its profile after lunch when I decided to weed and dig one of the vegetable plots at the bottom of the garden. The ageing body with a heart issue finds such activity both tiresome and tiring these days, especially since I don’t even know whether any of it matters or not. But irony will be irony and convention will be convention, so get on with it I did. It was the first of this year’s crop of heavier garden jobs, and I’m not looking forward to any of them.

The big thrill of today, however, was seeing two bats hunting around the house at twilight. My love of the twilight bats has been remarked many times on the blog down the years, and although I’ve never kept a diary of firsts, I’m fairly sure that I’ve never seen them come out of hibernation as early as 5^th March before. And it was particularly noteworthy that there were two of them because it meant that the summer will probably bestow the added pleasure of seeing little kiddie bats following their parents to learn the game. 

Whether that matters in the greater scheme of things I don’t know, but it matters to me and that will do.

Mixed Up March and an Odd Thought.

The Great British climate is known for its capricious nature, and March is probably the most capricious month of them all. This year she’s wearing her spring outfit so far. The end of February was mild, and the beginning of March is even milder. We’re forecast temperatures rising to 15°C (59°F) this week, which we’d be reasonably content with in early May.

And so the blue tits are paying a lot of attention to their regular nest box behind the kitchen.  The white snowdrops on the fringes of lane, field, and garden are more prolific than usual. The hares are seen in pairs (there I go finding rhymes again.) The wild garlic leaves are well advanced on the high embankments of The Hollow, and the first celandines, daffodils, and even dandelions are casting splashes of golden yellow among the new wild grasses everywhere. And next week winter might re-assert its grip.

*  *  *

Next week I have to go to my home-from-home, the Royal Derby Hospital, for a cardiac MRI scan. Apparently they take longer than most MRI scans, and the pre-procedure dietary disciplines are a little draconian. Every time I go there I look at the bulk of the massive monobloc building and imagine that it’s probably where I’ll take my last breath one day. And do you know what saddens me every time I think that? The fact that the Lady B never visited the inside of my house. She came up the garden path with her mother once, but that was as far as she ever got.

America and a Matter of Balance.

Ever since the end of WWII America has strutted its stuff across the western world, boasting of its power and wealth and influence. It has even promoted the notion that it is ‘the leader of the free world.’

Sounds very paternalistic, doesn’t it? And what do parents do when their ‘children’ are in trouble? They nurture and protect them, because with parental benefits come the concomitant parental responsibilities. It appears Mr Trump doesn’t see things that way. He would prefer to take all the food on the table for himself and elevate a couple of assisting acolytes to the status of wicked uncle.

Just a random thought (which is a little more specific than a ‘random country’) while I’m bored and waiting for dinner time.

(And if I'm to continue pondering the question of balance, I must acknowledge that imperial powers have been wont to take all the goodies for themselves throughout history. That being the case, Mr Trump might be seen as no more than a traditionalist. Humans are what humans do.)

Reminiscing and an Unconnected Question.

Every night, usually starting at around midnight, I set a YouTube mix of favourite music playing and read a bunch of old blog posts. And every time I do, I feel nostalgic for the person I was back then. I miss the humour, the reasoned arguments, the sometimes petty and sometimes profound observations, the reminiscences on old adventures, the tales of girlfriends past, the visits from my quirky friend the llama, the ditties of variable quality, the film and book reviews, and the conversations with so many valued people in the comments section. I want it all back again, but life doesn’t seem to work that way and maybe it’s right that it shouldn’t. And then I go to bed.

*  *  *

I said I was going to cease offering opinions now that the cold water brought on the slowly rising tide of incipient senility is beginning to make its presence felt around my ankles. I did, didn’t I? But maybe I can still ask a question concerning one of the feverish messes that humans are making around the world. It goes like this:

Let’s suppose that the Russians and the Chinese decide to join forces and sweep across the Pacific with a mighty armada of military power. Soon they have complete control of part of America’s western seaboard. Let’s say they’ve taken Washington in the north and California in the south, and America’s own relatively inferior military is unable to move them off it. And then they make an offer:

‘We’ll take a rest for a while as long as you accept that Washington and California now belong to us. If you fail to agree these terms the war will be all your fault because you declined to make peace.’

I wonder how Trump would respond to that.

A Day of Two Halves.

Oh, America! What have you done? The chameleon known as Trump is throwing firecrackers all over the place, isn’t he? I’m sure he’s more than a little deranged, you know. But since I performed badly on my own cognition tests my opinion is no longer valid, so I’ll leave it at that.

His spat with Mr Valensky did give me pause for thought though. I imagined various scenarios growing out of the fact that the fate of the world is currently determined by four major power blocs, and it struck me that if any two of them joined forces an interesting situation might ensue. The possibility of a novel began to take shape, written in retrospect from some sort of dystopian future. It won’t be me who writes it, of course. Too old and mentally challenged, and I expect it’s already been done.

At the other end of the scale, I think the invisible presence of my lovely Lady Fu might have been tagging along on my walk this morning. Who else could have conspired to place three young ladies in my path at different points – one with a cute little girl, one training a ‘bad boy’ horse on a lead rein, and one with a brand new car with no door handles? I learned something interesting from all of them. That was nice.