So Why Beltane?

Another year, another Beltane. Beltane began at 8.22 this evening here in the UK, and I lit my fire at about 8.30.

I was concerned that I might have to forego it this year, at least until tomorrow, because it came on to rain at eight o’clock and fires don’t light easily outdoors in the rain. But no, the rain stopped in time and the whole thing passed off well. And it struck me while tending the fire that even if my wishes had been thwarted, the rain would have been the greatest blessing Beltane could have bestowed.

Up until this past week the weather had been less than kind to the trees and growing things. We’d had several weeks of clear skies, bright sunshine, many freezing nights, and a generally cold airflow. The result was parched earth, young crops turning brown, and leaves shrivelling in the garden. And then we had a short period of rain followed by several showery days. Today we had the most showers of any day so far.

The result has been a marked change in the look and feel of garden and landscape alike. The new leaves appear to glow, and at the risk of sounding fanciful I have to say that everything rooted in the earth looks so much happier. And when I see the trees and growing things looking happier, I feel happier. While it might be overstating the case to say that I feel connected with nature, I certainly feel closer to it. But maybe the two things are actually the same, and that gives the clue as to why I have a fire at Beltane every year. It’s simply a matter of celebrating the richness and fecundity of nature and the cosmic forces which sustain life.

When people routinely and universally – at least in much of the world – celebrate Christmas, they’re celebrating the birth 2,000 years ago of a preacher about whom we know very little. Whatever Jesus actually said, whatever the root of his teaching really was (but which I suspect was misunderstood), and whatever the adherents of a religion founded in his name choose to believe, Jesus is a remote figure. Nature isn’t. Nature is what we’re all an individualised part of at this level of reality. Without it, we couldn’t be here. It seems to me, therefore, that Beltane is the best thing I could choose to celebrate.

Envying Shirley.

The postman brought me a present today – my second novel by Shirley Jackson. This one is called We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

 

Consensus would apparently have it that it’s her best, and it was recommended to me by Mrs Nancy K of upstate New York. Thank you, Nancy (and I would be grateful if somebody would tell me whether ‘upstate’ should take an uppercase U when it’s part of the name of a region. My instinct suggests that it shouldn’t, but my instinct is based on the UK model and the American model might be different.) But back to the book:

I’ve only read the first few pages so far (because I spent some time counting the words on one page in order to calculate the word count of the whole book, the reason for which I needn’t go into) and I have a problem. My problem is that I get it too well. I understand the nuances; I see and feel the character of Mary Katherine Blackwood – presumably the main protagonist; I recognise the subtle undercurrent of dry humour. And then I begin to feel a mild and pointless sense of regret that I never wrote something like this. My fiction was always presented in the form of rich, descriptive, but conventional prose. My first aim was always to establish a sense of place, my second to emulate the tonal balance and flow of traditional English literature. The plot came third – and plot surely has its place – but there was never anything oddball about it. Shirley Jackson does oddball quite delightfully, and I’m a little envious. My blog occasionally slips into oddball mode (in fact, I’m reasonably sure that people reading it sometimes do so with a questioning frown and a shake of the head) but my fiction never did.

So is my sense of regret justified? Clearly not. We all have to have our own style and our own voice. Just because I can do oddball when the mood takes me doesn’t mean I was somehow deficient by not using it in my fiction. Somebody once said that if there’s one thread running through my stories, it is the normalising of the paranormal. It would be hard to imagine how oddball diversions would have accorded with such a process. And maybe Shirley Jackson knew more oddball people than I have; maybe she was more oddball than me; maybe the drawing of psychological aspects of character was more important to her. And the universal consensus would obviously hold that she was a better writer anyway.

That’s all fine. We use such talents as we have to the best of our ability, and the rest is the road not travelled. No such thing, so no regrets.

A Minor Apology.

I was intending to write a post tonight – or to be more precise, I was intending to make every effort to think of something to write a post about. (It would probably have been about how the blackthorn blossom has proliferated this year – great chunks of white splendour in field and hedgerow all over the Shire and beyond. I’ve lived here for fifteen years and never knew we had so much blackthorn. Now I’m becoming excited at the prospect of the hawthorn following suit next month. Small minds, and all that…)

In the event, I never got around to it because I was sidetracked into replying to an email from the priestess. Priorities are, after all, priorities.

I suppose I could briefly mention that a very small Chinese woman smiled at me in Sainsbury’s today. I like it when small Chinese women smile at me. It makes me feel that maybe I matter after all.

And the fullish moon tonight is one of those spooky yellow ones. It’s hanging low in the sky and peeking furtively through the branches of the tree at the back of my house. I never know whether to trust spooky yellow moons which peer furtively through tree branches. They have an aura of conspiracy about them.

But now I've arrived at that time of night when YouTube and a couple of barley juice nightcaps send me to bed better equipped to face the prospect of waking to another day. Maybe I’ll manage a proper post tomorrow if my spirit is still in the material world. (I’ve already listened to that one on YouTube. It takes me back to a time when photography was my monomania and I spent the wee small hours developing and printing pictures, accompanied by the likes of The Police, Bruce Springsteen, Wings and the Moody Blues, instead of sitting in front of a computer spouting mostly rubbish. I had a wife and a dog back then, and the days were fuller.)

Ads By Contrast.

The extent to which I dislike adverts must have become the stuff of legend on this blog by now, but here’s something interesting: I often watch a Chinese shuffle dance video on YouTube which is always followed by a Chinese ad, and not only do I find it bearable but actually like it. I’m sure the appeal has something to do with different cultural imperatives and the fact that I don’t know a word of Mandarin, but it’s still a nice surprise.

*  *  *

In stark contrast, there’s an ad for BMW which frequently appears on my Outlook email page. I can’t post it because there’s no option to copy and save the picture, but it’s easily described:

Two BMWs stand on the gravelly foreshore of a placid lake, and beyond the lake are statuesque mountains. I’ve no doubt that the message you’re supposed to take is that the car is the means by which you access a place of beauty, and is, therefore, an integral part of the experience. And the fact that there are two vehicles implies the likelihood of a romantic tryst to add further appeal.

What I see is a beautiful landscape polluted by the incongruous presence of two ugly metal boxes on wheels. And sanity re-asserts itself.

On Life and New Things.

I was going to make an extended post tonight around the question of ‘do people change?’ I got to musing about it when I heard Gregory House – or it might have been James Wilson – say ‘people don’t change.’ I told myself to think about it and subsequently came up with my version of the answer, and here it is:

Forty two. (Sorry, force of habit.)

Yes and no. It depends on the nature of the change and the agent that’s driving it. And that’s all I’m prepared to say because I’m not in the mood for extended rationale (and what the blip would I know anyway?)

Instead, I thought I might mention the fact that I bought two very stylish mugs today. (They really are very stylish, the sort you might find in some terribly urbane bistro in one of those smarty-pants cities where they have terribly urbane bistros.) I also started using my swish new electric kettle – only a Russell Hobbs, but it’s still swish and new and it wasn’t cheap.

Now, the first of these new diversions suggests I’m rather more sophisticated than I thought I was; that’s just about bearable. The second, however, might or might not reveal that I belong to this culture more than I thought I did, because the buying of swish new kettles which aren’t cheap is central to the ethos of a consumption-obsessed mentality which regards such practice as a defining marker of civilisation. That would worry me, but I only bought it because the switch was going wonky on the old one. So maybe I’m OK after all.

But here’s the irony: When I came to use one of my very stylish new mugs, the unconventional nature of its relative dimensions meant that my reading glasses steamed up when I blew on the hot beverage. Life will insist on playing practical jokes on you, won’t it, just when you’re trying your best to be neither more nor less than who you are.

More Sackcloth and Ashes.

I often watch or read things which cause me to re-appraise my perception of life. Tonight was no exception, but now I realise that the new leaf will soon whither and crumble to dust as leaves are wont to do. Tomorrow I shall go back to being the same old intelligent but confused jerk who never got to grips with life because he was too busy watching other people screwing it up.

(Do you want to know why I regard the priestess so highly? It’s because I’ve never known anybody get it so right the way she does. I feel much respect and fondness for the tryers of this world, but she doesn’t even seem to need to try.)

Contrasting Encounters of the Feminine Kind.

I went for a Covid injection today (which should surely be styled anti-Covid injection, but let’s not be picky) and what a lot of fun it was.

At every stage of the procedure I was attended to, spoken nicely to, asked questions of, and skewered painlessly by a whole battery of young women sporting various forms of medical-style livery, including my very own favourite: scrubs. The most notable of them was wearing a set in a fetching shade of light claret, and if there’s one thing that makes a trip to a hospital worth the effort, it’s a nicely constructed young nursing type clad in light claret scrubs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that scrubs are so damn sexy that I wonder why young women don't go to nightclubs in them. They’d never be short of a date, especially if they were light claret ones. What made the day all the more worthwhile, however, was being able to indulge in lots of (inoffensive) banter with my favourite form of human.

(It might surprise you to know that I’m quite good at banter when the mood takes me. It’s my third best skill after writing and annoying people.)

*  *  *

But the banter didn’t start there; it started earlier when I was out for a walk. As I was coming close to my house I saw approaching me a group of five middle aged women, not wearing scrubs but proper, scruffy walking gear. The leader smiled at me and offered a hearty ‘good morning.’ ‘Oh my giddy aunt,’ I found myself replying, ‘a veritable monstrous regiment of women. How exciting.’

A panic attack soon followed. It occurred to me that they might have been out on a lunchtime ramble from some nearby feminist convention. ‘They might be about to start steaming’, I thought, ‘and giving off noxious fumes. They might start hurling acorns at me, causing me to seek refuge in an adjacent hedge which will be very prickly and therefore injurious to my bodily condition.’

But the goddess smiled on me, and the five women merely laughed. So that was today’s lesson learned: If you encounter five middle aged women perambulating the countryside in walking gear, don’t mention the suffragettes. I did, but I think I got away with it.

*  *  *

The one regrettable part of the day was failing to wave or even smile at the Lady B’s Honourable Sister when she drove past me in the lane. I simply didn’t realise who it was because I haven’t yet got used to the fact that she’s the one who drives the white Volvo. I was really quite mortified, I can tell you, and nearly twelve hours later I still haven’t got over it. I’m hoping that scotch and sleep will assist me in the effort.

Dreaming.

It must be well known to everyone by now that I dream of the Lady B often, but last night I had the strangest Lady B dream ever. The Lady B wasn’t in it; it was totally dominated by her Dear Mama and Honourable Sister.

We walked in their garden, which had assumed the grandeur of a classic English Country House garden – massive, and replete with walls and fences and trees and a lake. I have no recollection whatsoever of what we talked about, but at least I felt welcome, the significance of which is probably obvious to everybody but me.

Be it known that I miss the Lady B greatly. My walks around the Shire lack sunshine now. And just when I’ve had a haircut for the first time in four months…

Not a Bargain.

Today I finally found a company who can supply me with a new blade for my lawnmower. I’ve been trying to find one since last summer. You wouldn’t expect it to be so hard to find a new blade for a lawnmower, would you, but when the machine is a basic model and ten years old, it is.

I was pleased, as you might expect, but with one reservation. I bought the current blade five years ago. It cost £9.99. Given the current rate of inflation I was expecting today’s equivalent to be around £12, but my little order cost £16.49. So does somebody not know what ‘inflation’ means, or is their arithmetical acumen a little suspect?

First Steps in Discovering Romania.

It’s interesting to note how Romania’s star has been rising in my life over the past few years. Up until about five years ago my image of Romania was the one donated to us west Europeans by Bram Stoker. Swarthy men shuffled furtively around seeking an opportunity to slit your throat for the gaining of your gold wedding ring, ravening wolves haunted the forests and byways seeking the opportunity to tear the same throat for the sake of filling their hungry maws, old women in shawls watched you from the shadows through acquisitive eyes set in bloated, leathery faces, and young women – if ever they came into the picture – auditioned to become undead girlies so they could drink the blood of children.

I exaggerate, of course, but not quite as much as you might think. And now I have to wonder why it never registered with me that sweet little Nadia Comănechi was Romanian…

All that changed when the splendid Medeea Popei became my dentist. And then there was the woman I encountered in an Ashbourne coffee shop, and the woman who worked on the tills in a Uttoxeter discount store, and the nurse who came to perform my preliminaries while I was prostrate in the A&E department of the Royal Derby Hospital. All friendly, smiley, chatty and light of demeanour, with not a hint of sharp knives, long teeth, leathery skin or ill intent in sight. And all Romanian.

Fast forward to the YouTube videos of people performing the Jerusalema dance challenge in Romanian cities and the Romanian countryside, and there I saw a level of sophistication, fine design, prettiness and good vibrations easily the match of my own little corner of Europe. Their bears are rather nice, too, as evidenced by this picture taken in the Carpathians:

 

 

Today I received a reply to one of my YouTube comments from a woman called Elena. It said ‘Agree 100%’ – in Romanian. And the world turns…