The NYE Post, For What It's Worth

This being New Year’s Eve 2022, I naturally feel that I should be making an end of year post. Well, the division of time into years is purely arbitrary with no cosmic significance, but that’s how we humans like to do things so let’s pretend that a calendar year is in some way significant.

The spirit is willing, I think, but where to start and what to say? Let’s keep it short because I’m not didactic by nature and I can’t be bothered to spend all night typing, especially since I know that nothing I say will make any difference.

On a global scale, 2022 has been troublesome, with the war in Ukraine and social upheaval in Iran, Afghanistan, China, and parts of South America. From America we continue to hear the drip, drip, drip of Trump’s inane babbling. Systems are breaking or broken everywhere, including in the UK where the NHS – the cornerstone of good governance and the welfare state for more than seventy years – is under serious threat of collapse. I look around and see politicians following their personal and ideological agendas while the voices of ordinary people are raised in complaint and calls for help and for change.

There is, of course, very much more that could be said, but that will have to do for now. I suppose I should add, however, that no talk of 2022 would be sufficient without noting that nature has become even more insistent in reminding us that we take it for granted at our peril.

So what of my personal affairs? 2022 was notable for all the firsts that came along and which were noted on this blog. It was a year in which I grew closer to my small family, but also saw several stars in the firmament overhead disappear. It seems that’s just the way of things for me and always has been; close family ties and bright but distant stars never did sit easily together in my life.

As for life itself, I’m still observing that one and suppose I might describe the current view as coherently as I’m able. It’s undergone a shift this year as the heart issue has begun to make its presence felt more routinely. The road ahead has assumed the appearance of a narrowing ledge with a steep drop into the abyss on either side. I walk it not knowing whether some small slip will take me down into whatever the abyss holds, but there’s nothing to do but keep tramping on for as long as the ledge holds firm.

And that’s about it. I expect I’ll be back tomorrow and I hope I’ll have something lighter to say. In the meantime, to those who go into 2023 optimistically, I wish that it shouldn’t disappoint. Thanks for your quiet company through a year that’s nearly over. And may we all please spare a thought for those living under repressive regimes everywhere (although I feel an instinctive sense that there are more repressive regimes than we care to admit.)

Not a Prophecy.

 The current ad on my email home page is from UNICEF, and carries the tag line:

Help save a child’s life today

To most of us there are few, if any, greater achievements in this mortal realm than saving a child’s life. But when the issue is reduced to a tag line on an advert it slips into the mind briefly and then slips straight out again because it’s just a slogan on an advert, and adverts are so annoyingly ubiquitous as to be supremely ignorable.

There’s something wrong here, so what is it?

Well, I’m coming to the view that all the charity in the world – for all that it’s worthy and well meant and still worth contributing to – is not ultimately going to make the world a better place. It will help in certain situations, while others crop up elsewhere to perpetuate the endless pressure.

It seems to me that what’s needed is a radical change in the way the world functions. The people in charge who are driven by greed, power mania and inflated ego need to be swept away and a fresh start made based on humanitarian and inclusive values. And the only way I can see that happening is the arrival of some sort of cataclysmic event.

I’ve heard it said often that every culture in the world, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, has its myth of a huge, destructive flood somewhere back in distant history. Maybe it’s time for another one. But wouldn’t it be nice if a less devastating way could be found?

The Recluse After Nightfall.

Do you want to know why I didn’t make a blog post last night? I make most of my posts at night because that’s when I’m usually in the mood, but the long December evenings are proving a little troublesome at the moment.

The days are the same as they’ve been for these many years – walks, shopping , housework, gardening, paperwork, showers, cooking – you know, the normal sort of things which normally occupy the waking moments of normal, well-balanced recluses. But then the darkness falls, the curtains get closed, the meal gets eaten, the dishes get washed, the floor gets its daily vacuum, and I settle down to the fun time.

It starts with an episode of Buffy. I’m now into the final season and it’s becoming unremittingly dark, dangerous and debilitating. Then it’s onto the latest section of the movie Remains of the Day based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Like all Ishiguro’s works – at least the three I’m familiar with – it explores the tragedy of unrealised potential which evokes a frustrating sense of the downbeat and the agonising question of what might have been. Eventually it’s all change again when I invoke the spirit of YouTube and watch a 50-minute episode of Jeeves and Wooster, in which a group of feckless and hopelessly incompetent rich young things become embroiled in romantic and other difficulties which have to be resolved by the erudite and resourceful Jeeves the butler. (Those familiar with The Admirable Crichton will get the general picture.) Fun at last, but frothy fun in stark contrast with what has gone before.

Honestly, I don’t know what world I’m living in at the moment, so how on earth can I apply myself to its issues, injustices and idiosyncrasies?

I think I need a night nurse, but how do I go about acquiring one of those? All the average recluse is likely to attract is a visit from some wandering succubus which would be both unwelcome and ultimately pointless given my lamentable physical condition.

Roll on the balmy summer evenings, I say, when I can replace all this with tea and biscuits on the terrace. If I’m still here, that is.

Heart Matters.

I was thinking about my under-performing left ventricle tonight. It occurred to me that I’ve had my heart broken a few times on the rocky road of life, but it’s never been clinically recognised before.

Maybe that Indian woman some stranger wrote about on my blog in the early hours of this morning will approach me in Sainsbury’s tomorrow. Maybe she will hold me with the chilling and hypnotic stare of a Bengal Tiger and either make me whole or finish me off. In twenty years of shopping in Ashbourne I’ve never seen an Indian woman, but we do have an Indian restaurant and there’s always a first time for everything…

I really don’t know where I get them from, you know, I really don’t. Boredom I expect.

A Prospective Connection.

The universe – or some agent thereof – sent me the most transparent message ever tonight (through my computer, of course, because the universe is sufficiently attuned to my nature to know that my computer is the very best medium for sending messages to one such as me.) It said that I should cultivate a strong connection with an Indian woman.

But of course, it must be the right Indian woman. I regret to suspect that not all Indian women would be fit for purpose, and the matter of how to engage with this task was not made clear. A dating ad would be both sordid and tragically inappropriate, and so further assistance is most devoutly to be wished.

I have the distinct feeling that I will read this post tomorrow and wonder who wrote it.

Failing Amelia.

Back in the days when I worked at the theatre, my manager was a woman who had a young child called Amelia. On one occasion the two of them were sitting in the bar area and I went over and joined them. I talked to Amelia and frowned about something jokingly, but Amelia was evidently a sensitive child and didn’t get the joke. She stood up, pushed her chair to one side and backed away from me looking scared.

I was horrified at my error, of course. I wouldn’t deliberately scare a child if my life depended on it, but all efforts to placate the little girl failed. Eventually the two of them moved to the Czech Republic where her mother came from and I never saw Amelia again. Her mother and I still keep in touch occasionally, however, and today I received an email from her. It included the sentence: ‘Amelia is now nineteen and driving.’

Oh my, there’s that egg timer again. There’s the boat of life taking whatever detours it likes, but always heading downstream. The image of a little blonde girl now has to be re-imagined as a young woman behind the wheel of a car.

I feel a sense of having been denied something. I believe I could have been a good friend to Amelia because I understand sensitivity and would have known how to be careful. But the moving finger has written and moved on, and now I want to know whether the young woman continues to be sensitive as the child was, and whether she still regards me as an ogre.

A Tiny Self-Indulgence.

If I were young again and gave genesis to three daughters, what would I call them?

Simple: Abigail, Emily, Aisling (and Isabella if a fourth came along unexpectedly.)

Abi, Em, Ash, and Bella. I feel there’s a story of some consequence hiding in those four names somewhere, though I doubt it will ever see the light of day. But at least now you know.

On Dark Shops and Dastardly Deceit.

One of the pages on this morning’s BBC News website carried a warning from the motoring organisations. They were wont to advise people venturing out to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales that they should be prepared for heavy traffic congestion because retail outlets would be very busy today.

I decided to pay a rare second visit of the week to Ashbourne, my local town, partly to join in with the merry throng for a change and partly to visit Costa Coffee again. Although once a regular, I hadn’t been into dear old Costa since the beginning of lockdown and had fallen out of the habit. I felt in need of some self-administered tlc and thought that a medium Americano in convivial surroundings might do the trick. (I did say that there wasn’t much out there to interest me, didn’t I?)

Ashbourne was closed.

The retail park with its big national names was all boarded up and padlocked. The shops in the town centre were shrouded in darkness and deathly quiet. Even the filling station was closed, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen on a Boxing Day before.  It reminded me that Ashbourne is a very traditional sort of place. It’s the sort of place which tends to regard rightness as a function of tradition rather than rational consideration.

But I spotted to my delight that Costa Coffee was the one establishment open in the high street, and so I went in. The queue of people stretched from the service area at the back almost to the front door and most of the tables were occupied, so I turned around and came back out again. I dislike crowded places, you see, preferring quiet corners in the vicinity of windows so I can watch the body language of passers by

And then I discovered one other establishment open as usual – the town centre’s only discount store operating under the name The Yorkshire Trading Company. Every window was plastered with big notices proclaiming:

Everything

Must

Go

75% Off

It surprised me greatly because that’s the language of a business about to fold and needing to dispose of its stock quickly, and this store has only been open for a couple of months. I decided to go in and peruse the massive reductions on offer. I found only one small product lightly discounted. All the others, as far as I could tell, were priced normally. The notices were clearly a dishonest ruse to attract footfall, and there, I thought, lies another casualty of today’s post-truth society.

Remembering San Francisco.

For some reason tonight I felt moved to hear again the old Scott McKenzie pop classic San Francisco, and so I found it on YouTube and watched the video. It’s here and less than three minutes long.

 

 

It seems almost inconceivable in these dark times that once there were thousands of young people coming together in harmony, and all they wanted was peace and love and the freedom to dance gaily in the sunshine. But America wasn’t ready for it. The world wasn’t ready for it; and the all-powerful god of pecuniary principle – for which read ‘the system’ – wouldn’t tolerate it. And so it fell by the wayside never to be seen again.

It seems achingly poignant that the Vietnam War with all its darkest of horrors was happening at the same time. So what does it say of the human condition that we don’t have love-ins any more, but we do still have wars. 

Considering the Real Root of Life.

During my research into the Brontës a few years ago I came across something interesting. When Emily was desperately unhappy in a job she had as a teacher at a private school, Charlotte became so worried that her sister might die that she travelled to the school and brought her home.

Nowadays we would regard Charlotte’s fear as silly, superstitious even. We would consider it preposterous that someone might die just because they were unhappy in their job, for these are more rational times firmly embedded in the bedrock of advanced scientific knowledge.

Science tells us now that the three cornerstones of life are the physical attributes of heartbeat, respiration, and brain function. Take those three away and the person is dead. But there are others, like me, who suspect that there’s a fourth player in the process, something vague, immeasurable, indefinable, yet vital, which we might call ‘the life force.’ And when I read of cases in which the three commonly recognised life signs are absent and yet the patient recovers and comes back to life, I tend to the suspicion that they didn’t come back to life at all. I suspect that the life force never left and so they never died.

If that’s correct, then maybe Charlotte was justified in her concern. I’m sure the Victorians knew about the trinity of heartbeat, respiration and brain function, but also recognised the existence of the life force. For all the massive advances in scientific knowledge over the past couple of centuries, maybe science has been so enslaved to an exclusively physical rationale that important factors lying outside its physical remit have been unfairly dismissed.

And the reason why this has come more to my notice lately is that I’m beginning to feel that my own life force is growing weak. If that is the case, it would be helpful to find the means by which it might be re-energised. Otherwise, I suppose I must resign myself to the tyrant time and await its will with patience.

And I do accept that this whole post might be a load of nonsense.