Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

I found a photograph of mine on eBay last night. It had been used for a postcard, was second hand, and was priced at £5.99. Underneath it said by Beazley. How on earth did I get to be that valuable?

 

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I met an attractive young lady in the village this morning. As far as I know she's lived here all her life, but the last time I saw her was several years ago and she was but a teenager and therefore of no consequence. She's still of no consequence, and shall I tell you why? It's like this:

Imagine you're hungry but there's no food anywhere except a tray of doughy bread waiting to be baked. Only there's no fuel to start a fire to heat the oven to bake the bread. That's what it's like.

 

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I have an invader in the house and it's troubling me a lot because a hatred of anything or anyone invading my private space is one of my most potent neuroses. I was first made aware of it when I was about eight and it's never eased.

The Magic of the Yelp.

I was just listening to a Mediaeval Babes track on YouTube, and at the end of every verse the company of young women did a yelp in concert.

What is it about the yelp that is so invigorating? I suspect it's a sensual thing, but maybe I shouldn't go further. It's just that men can't do it.

On History and Frustration.

All my life I've had a keen interest in history, mainly English history simply because I happen to be English. And there are several people who stand out in the annals of England and particularly dominate my interest. One of the foremost is Aetheflaed, Lady of the Mercians, and here's the problem.

 

We know her heritage; she was the daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex. We know she married the King (or possibly overlord) of Mercia, and we know that together they re-conquered a great deal of the land which had been captured by the Danish Great Army. We know that after her husband became incapacitated for some reason and eventually died, Aethelflaed carried on alone and became the great warrior queen of the early Middle Ages. We know that the Danes who still controlled Jorvik -- roughly the modern county of Yorkshire -- submitted to her without a fight. And we know that by the time she died aged 48, two thirds of the land we now call England was back under English control and the base was established for the final conquest and establishment of the England we know today.

But it's no enough. It tells us where she came from and what she did, but it doesn't tell us who she was. I want to see her and look into her eyes. I want to hear her voice and watch her bearing as she walks. I want to know what moved her, what angered her, what comforted her. I want to get a sense of her dedication, her intelligence, her courage, her inner strength. I want to know whether she was ever afraid. I want know how she reacted to, and dealt with, the powerful people in her own circle who objected to her leadership simply because she was a woman. I even want to know where she thought the dead go.

And I can't know any of this because nobody wrote objective biographies of strong women in those days. Such accounts as were written were written entirely by men, and concentrated on deeds, not character. That gives me a frustrating gap that I can never fill.

Today's Profile.

Today had a distinct pattern to it. It started with rain and then dried up early to leave a fine and sunny day, and the same could be said of my personal fortunes.

They began badly with a crotchety and confused computer and a pestering text message from a contractor. I was in a bad mood when I went to Ashbourne to be skewered with needles in preparation for the flu and Covid season, but matters improved as the weather did. For a start, I learned something interesting: flu jabs are painful but Covid jabs aren't. I questioned the nurse about it and she confirmed that it's a well known fact.

And then the young woman in the coffee shop was friendly towards me which she usually isn't, and a delightful lady dog was desperate to be my friend while she was pining for her human who'd gone into Sainsbury's, and then I helped another delightful dog find her tennis ball when it had rolled away and she couldn't find it. On the way back I chatted to the Pakistani taxi driver and discovered that he has good qualities above and beyond the average. Four positive things in one day, eh? How often does that happen?

But tonight produced a mystery. I had a little something to send to the priestess, even though we're no longer engaged in correspondence, and had bought a proper little parcel box from the stationers to do the deed. I searched out her company's address in London since I have no other address for her, and had to do a little digging in order to get it. The search of company records indicated that she has now moved to the USA, California to be precise. What a strange thing for a priestess to do. Maybe she isn't a priestess any more. Is she not aware that the black cloud of Trump is still oppressing the nation? How sad.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Media Technology.

Every day when I load YouTube I'm presented with a very large number of channels making obviously false claims, offering obviously fake facts, or indulging in clickbait tasters which are ludicrously sensationalised through the use of outrageous exaggeration. And although I don't use social media platforms myself, I gather it to be a known fact that such platforms are the main route by which disinformation and misinformation are circulated to a gullible public.

And so I wonder whether any academic has yet conducted a formal study and produced concrete evidence to show the extent to which modern technology has made the world a more dishonest place. I've no idea how the methodology could be structured, but it seems like an interesting challenge.

The Eternal Panacea,

I'm depressed every morning when I wake up, but last night I had a disturbing dream about my ex-wife and woke up with an extra bucketful. The result was that I felt a little more than depressed; I felt crushed.

And then I went for my late morning walk and saw a middle aged woman coming up the lane with a cocker spaniel on a lead. I've seen them a few times in recent weeks and have always exchanged a one-word greeting as we passed. I did the same today, but on the way back I passed them again. Twice in one day suggested a message from the universe that I should request the pleasure of meeting the cocker spaniel. The woman concurred, and the little lady dog looked very eager, and so make friends we did.

Subsequent conversation revealed that the woman was the mother of one of the people who have moved into a house at the bottom of the lane, and she said that she was perfectly willing to let the dog make friends with people but warned that she was very active and therefore likely to jump up and dirty people's clothes.

'I don't mind as long as you don't jump up,' I replied. No I didn't. That was a lie. What I actually said was: 'I'll wipe off.' I mean, where does a bit of mud on your raincoat stand in comparison with the good offices of a dog? No comparison, is there? And then I felt considerably lighter.

Because that's what dogs do, isn't it? They add energy and light to your spirit so that being alive on this benighted planet doesn't seem so bad after all. At least, that's the effect they have on me.

The Stranger at the Front.

I've always had difficulty accepting that the face I see in the mirror and in photographs is actually my face. It doesn't look like the face I see when I imagine myself (which I do quite a lot because I'm always standing apart and watching myself, but always from behind or above so I don't get a direct look at my face.) There's something wrong with it and I've never worked out what it is, although I do sometimes I wonder whether it's a real human face at all.

Leaving such extreme speculation apart, however, it leads to the uncomfortable feeling that whoever sculpted my face was but a learner in the matter of sculpting faces, and either accepted that a poor result was better than no result at all and gave up, or threw away his attempt and replaced it with one he'd found on somebody else's reject pile. Whichever it was, the face I was given doesn't look like me. And it looks ever less like me the older I get.

Nobody ever mentioned the fact.

Another Hole in My Knowledge.

There was a rather horrifying report in the news this morning. It seems there's a wildlife park in Yorkshire where, according to witnesses, a man wearing earphones (though why that fact should be considered significant I don't know) was seen pacing around the tiger enclosure. He then managed to reach the top of the barrier, jumped in, lay down in front of a tiger, and was promptly killed by said animal.

There's something about me which can't take this story -- horrifying though it undoubtedly is -- at face value. I want to know all about this man. I want to know about his childhood, his habits and recreations, whether or not he was a habitual taker of hard drugs, his employment history, his family environment, his current circumstances, and whatever else there is to know.

I need to understand him, you see. I need to find the reason why he did it because his mind was clearly working along lines I haven't encountered before. There are gaps in my understanding of human nature, and this is a big one.

Another Note on the Persephone Effect.

The professionals who make their living from gardeners and gardening are wont to encourage the setting of late-blooming flowers which 'add autumn colour' to the garden. I was looking at some sedums and anemones in my own garden today and realised why I'm uncomfortable seeing flowers in the autumn. It comes down to what belongs and what doesn't. 

 

For me, flowers belong in the spring and summer when the temperature is rising, the days are lengthening, and the sun is reaching full power. It's the 'up' half of the year when optimism is in the air, and flowers are a delightful part of the picture.

Autumn, on the other hand, is the early part of the 'down' half of the year. The temperature is falling, the days are shortening, and the sun is losing its potency. Optimism is being replaced by pessimism as we layer up our clothing for the time when cold will be the new normal, the trees will become skeletal, and darkness will fill two thirds of the diurnal round. At east that's how the seasons and senses work for me. Flowers seem incongruous in that scenario, and that's why I'm uncomfortable with seeing them at this time of year.

This principle doesn't apply, of course, to the warm colours in the natural landscape. The masses of red and gold to be seen in the retiring tree canopies is the colour of decay, and that's perfectly appropriate in the down half of the year.

('You're strange,' I hear heading my way. So should I now consider the difference between being strange and being unconventional? Don't thinks so. Don't care.)

Seeing My Reflection in a Woman Long Dead.

I regret that I'm going to allow myself to become irritatingly repetitive by returning yet again to my current idee fixe: the personality of Virginia Woolf as evidenced by her writing. I crave pardon for that, but I wish I could persuade every reader of this blog (and I suspect there are a few) to read her short story The Introduction. I can't, of course, but let me begin at the beginning.

Some Buddhist traditions offer a simple account of the nature of humankind. They say we humans are a mixture of the angel and the monkey. Some err on one side and some the other, to varying degrees of course. I agree with it wholeheartedly, and when I express my dissatisfaction with the human condition I'm frequently told: 'You have to take the good with the bad. See one and ignore the other.' I find it a shallow viewpoint and my reply is always the same: 'If someone laced your cocktail with a spoonful of engine oil, could you taste the liquor and ignore the oil?'

This is the essence of The Introduction, expressed and explained through the meeting of Lily Everit and Mr Brinsley. She wishes to engage with him until she sees him callously pull the wings off a fly. He becomes the oil in the cocktail and her faith in the greatness of human endeavour falls in an instant. 

She is writing my nature for me, but more passionately, more painfully, more skillfully, and more completely. I found her writing hard to negotiate initially, but persevered because I felt I should. Now I respect and adore the woman. I feel at the moment that she and I might be identical twins because most of what she writes echoes my own nature.

 

Maybe one day I will encounter something which questions that adoration. If so, I'll deal with it when I get there.