Two Astronomical Notes.

I've often thought it must be interesting to live on the equator and have only two seasons -- summer and spring/autumn -- instead of four as the rest of us get. Although I suppose you could argue that they do have a short summer and a short autumn but they would be effectively identical.

 

And only tonight I became aware of the fact that the point of sunrise at the summer solstice is diametrically opposite the point of sunset at the winter solstice. And now I'm trying to work out a reason to find such knowledge useful.

What's In a Given Name?

As a boy I never liked my forename. I always thought the name Jeffrey -- or even its more traditional form, Geoffrey -- sounded weak. When a nurse at the hospital asked for my preferred name so she could write it on the white board behind my bed, I suggested Buggerlugs. She declined and wrote nothing in the end, which is how I became a nameless bed dweller which did little for my ego. But to continue:

I don't see why I should regard Jeffrey as weak because it has perfectly reasonable antecedents. According to my research it's a branch of the German name Gottfried, which became Godfrey in England and Geoffroi in France. And the father of the English king Henry II -- the first king of the Angevin dynasty -- was a French nobleman called Geoffroi d'Anjou, which is how I've always assumed it came to England as Geoffrey. So if the name came from a nobleman, and considering the fact that mediaeval noblemen were generally violent thugs, there seems little reason to consider it weak. But I still do.

And incidentally, my full name at birth was Jeffrey Godwin, which is interesting because both names translate roughly to something like 'friend of God.' I suspect some mischievous influencer up in the rarefied realm was having a joke.

In any event, tonight I decided -- for the first time in my life -- that I would like to be called Stig.

A New Experience.

I just had a strange and unnerving experience, but to begin at the beginning:

I was woken early this morning by the builder racketing about on the roof. I had transport booked to do the grocery shop so I got up and started the day. Tonight the lack of sleep made me tired, and so I laid my head on the desk and fell asleep.

When I woke up my mood had taken a journey to an unfamiliar depth which is difficult to describe but I'll give it a go. I felt alone, cold, and depressed. Nothing new there -- I'm quite familiar with that one -- but there was something else which I can only describe as feeling as though I was on the edge of literal lifelessness. I don't remember ever having gone quite that far down before, and the word 'wretched' does it scant justice.

And so I sat at my desk with the thermometer falling for about an hour until I decided something had to be done. I loaded YouTube and watched a video made by a Norwegian explorer in which he goes into the Paris catacombs with a guide. It was surprisingly scary because the catacombs are unlit, labyrinthine, flooded in parts, and much of it is un-mapped. The scariness was enough to banish the feeling of near-lifelessness and I made a cup of hot coffee.  Salvation of sorts, I suppose.

No doubt somebody will know just what chemical which should be plentiful in my brain is sadly lacking, and probably tell me that I must eat a guava fruit every day. Or maybe give up the scotch and eat lemons instead. Fine, but I think I'd rather be alone, cold, and depressed. And I'm only making this post because my new-found vigour told me I should DO something. So now I have. Bye for now.

Feeling Unwelcome.

I mentioned in a recent post that my bedroom doesn't feel welcoming any more. I noticed tonight that the house itself doesn't feel welcoming either. I get the impression that I'm living in an alien space which is sentient and doesn't want me here. In short, it doesn't feel like home. Why should that be, I ask myself?

Well, the simple and rational explanation is that at this time of year my house feels cold and damp. The fact that it feels cold is because it is cold, and that's because heat is expensive and I'm not rich. But it isn't actually damp. The humidity indicator in my office is giving me 40% which is nicely in the middle of the acceptable range for a domestic dwelling. I think the damp feeling is purely psychological because the sensation of dampness naturally holds court in the mind with the feeling of coldness.

So is it all a product of my imagination? Maybe, probably, but who knows? All I know is that I feel unwanted here, and the feeling is the main thing, isn't it? At least it is to me. At the same time, I mentioned in an earlier post that I suspect that this house has some darkness in its history, so maybe there's some residual energy thing going on.

 

And by the way, I am aware that I'm privileged to have a roof over my head at all in this imperfect world. And so I am.

Am I boring you?

Gloom and Other Thoughts.

The Shire wasn't it's usual self today. I expect it was feeling poorly due to a turn in the weather. After weeks of cool, but dry and bright, conditions following the long warm summer, today brought a change from major to minor. The sky was unremittingly dark and heavy, suffocating the land and all who moved upon it. Showers of light rain dampened the roads and left the trees and hedgerows dripping with unaccustomed wetness, and my shuddering thoughts went back to that favourite line of mine from Tennyson: The wan day went glooming down in wet and weariness. The lunchtime walk usually lifts my spirits, but not today.

 

*  *  *

I was pleased to read that the citizens of Alberta have voted not to secede from Canada. Canadians are generally a pretty canny crowd, so it was no surprise. And it reminded me of being asked a question on a TV quiz show once: 'What is the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta?' Although it must have been around thirty years since I'd learned about the geography of Canada in high school, my memory did me proud. 'Edmonton,' I replied. Correct. I searched the eyes of my fellow competitors for signs of reluctant admiration, but sadly found none.

 

*  *  *

The Lady B said to me in a blog comment many years ago: 'I thought you had forgotten about me.' Well, I'm often struck by the thought that I would like to talk to said Lady at least once more before I take the big leap, just so that I can tell her, in all honesty, that never does a day go by but that think of her. Never. She has no reason to care one way or the other now, of course, but I occasionally listen to Loreena McKennitt's song The Never Ending Road -- as I did today -- and it always reminds me of her. Sometimes it even encourages a mysterious attack of dampness to gather around my eyeballs. I've no idea what it is.

Dealing With Weeks.

The builders turned up as promised this morning. They're replacing the roof over the kitchens of our two houses, and there were three vehicles filling most of the space at the bottom of my garden. Then another contractor turned up to check my my CO and smoke detectors. That made four vehicles. 

I have a historic reason for being very touchy about having vehicles at the bottom of my garden, and having been woken up early, the presence of four of them didn't exactly improve my mood. The builder said it should take a week and a half or maybe two weeks to complete the roofing job, but the forecast for the next week is for the weather to turn colder, wetter, and windier, so maybe my dolour will be extended further. 

The man who came to check the detectors kept referring to 'your CO2 detectors.' I had to correct him, didn't I.

'It's just CO.'

'What do you mean?'

'It's a CO detector, not CO2. CO2 is carbon dioxide. The air is full of the stuff. The bad gas is carbon monoxide -- CO.'

'Oh. Well it says CO2 on the box.'

I'll bet it doesn't. But by then I'd realised that I was being one of those jerks we all hate, so I changed the subject.

 

*  *  *

It struck me this morning that the local school has now started its half term holiday week. It gave me a minor shock actually, because I would have sworn they went back after the long summer break only last week. How time does fly when you're ancient as a dodo but not yet quite extinct.

Trump's Brothers Up North.

I was just reading the BBC article about the upcoming independence referendum in Alberta, Canada. It prompted me to say this:

The oil and gas reserves in Alberta belong to Albertans, but only legally. Ethically, oil and gas reserves are planetary resources and don't actually 'belong' to anybody. So when I hear Albertans saying, effectively: 'These reserves belong to us. Never mind the degradation of the environment and the deleterious effect it could have on our children and grandchildren, we want to be richer,' I hear the selfish, money-dominated attitude of a Donald Trump. And that disappoints me.

I also wonder whether Trump would take a personal interest in Alberta seceding from Canada. He might seek to influence the vote should it get that far. And who knows, he might even get that 51st state he's been slavering over since his Greenland failure.

This Band of Brothers.

We've recently been treated to the odd phenomenon of Trump bowing the knee to Putin, and only a week or so earlier he was sucking up to Xi, and now a curious suspicion has entered my head:

 

Given the combined military power of China, Russia, and the USA, could it be that the Big Three are planning to carve up the world between them -- Xi gets South and East Asia, Putin gets Eastern Europe and West Asia, Trump gets Western Europe and South America? Just think: Trump could have all the European historic buildings bulldozed to make way for parking lots, and the Oxbridge universities could become luxury hotels for rich golfers and paedophiles. Such fun.

I think I'm being fanciful, but it would solve Trump's 2028 problem. And maybe there's a shadow puppet master pulling all three strings, the existence of which player has long been forecast by those into dystopian conspiracy theories. Somebody should write a book, don't you think? Only not me because I couldn't be bothered.

Down and Whingey.

I'm having disturbed nights at the moment -- quiet but suspicious noises, unscheduled awakenings, and a feeling that the dark, cold bedroom is now alien territory. The bedroom is no longer the welcoming space that it used to be. 

 

Having risen much earlier than usual this morning, I spent the afternoon doing some quite strenuous gardening work which left me feeling very tired. I still feel very tired, which isn't ideal when the bedroom is no longer the welcoming space that it used to be.

Tomorrow the pestering begins from two separate sources. The first is likely to persist for two weeks, the other I don't know yet.

The latest casualties of my technology breakdowns saga are my grass trimmer and my landline phone. Not many things in my orbit work properly these days, and I do so like things to work properly. When you live out in the countryside and don't have the use of a car, replacing things is rather more difficult than it is if you're mobile. And to add insult to injury, the UK's main retailer of general household goods and equipment -- Argos -- won't allow my computer to access their website to order online. I don't know why and they can't tell me. And I wouldn't have anything to do with Amazon even if everything packed up altogether. Ethical trading is important to me and I doubt Amazon could even spell the word.

I'm giving more thought to discovering the undiscovered country when the time comes for me to turn permanently cold and increasingly smelly (I still retain some semblance of vanity, you see) and become even more useless than I am now. I think I might cope as long as there are plenty of happy dogs, no technology, no East Asian ghosts with long black hair and empty eye sockets, and the Japanese girls all speak English and look like Yui Hasegawa with a pony tail.

So now I'm going to see whether I can stay awake while I read a few pages of Mrs Woolf's writing.

(Might I break the mold and mention that I pleased a YouTuber with a complimentary comment last night? Apparently, I made her day.)

The One Good Result.

I take very little interest in male elite sport these days. It's too dominated by big money, big egos, and a win-at-all costs attitude. It lacks something of the honourable rivalry that it used to have.

 

Not so the women's versions of football and rugby union. They haven't quite got there yet, and so I still have something to watch. And watch I did last night when the England rugby team played Canada in Toronto. Kick off time was 12 midnight British Summer Time, so it suited me to watch the game and go to bed immediately afterwards.

At the start of the match England had gone forty one games unbeaten, with forty wins and one draw. Understandably, they were (and remain) the top ranked team in the world. But last night they lost to the Canadians who scored a try in the last three minutes. I went to bed in a surprisingly grouchy mood and the result was the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning.

So what's the one good result? Well, it means that when we watch an England team play a rugby match now, we can do so with a sense of jeopardy. And that seems to me to be a good thing.