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.

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.

A Little Folk Song Mystery.

For two days now I've had the aeons-old Devonshire folk song Widecombe Fair going through my head on a never-ending loop. It's one of the best known of British folk songs; I'm fairly sure I was first exposed to it in primary school. 

 

Has nobody noticed that it ends with the death of a horse through callous mistreatment? So why is it so popular? Why is it taught to school children? Do people think that working a horse to death is funny or something? And why has it been going round and round in my head for two days?

The Virginia Obsession.

I wish I could get out of this daily need to say something new about Virginia Woolf's writing, but the problem is this:

It took me quite some time to get used to her. Virginia Woolf writes differently than any other of the notable writers I've read, so much so that it's a bit like learning to comprehend a different dialect of your native language. It takes a while for the fog to slowly dissipate, but when the dialect crystalizes into intelligible speech, the effect is captivating. At least to me it is.

It's her mind, you see. It's so vast that it seems almost as if the world simply isn't big enough to accommodate it. The world of bishops and barristers, builders and bus drivers, Bentleys and Bugattis, festering hovels and fine houses, farmers' fields and flash floods (where am I supposed to stop?) is inadequate for a massively perceptive intellect which spots every nuance in the world of an urbane woman and leaves you with the feeling that there's plenty more but the story had to end somewhere. And her endings, when she finally releases the tether, are unbearably perfect. As someone who once thought himself a passable writer, I'm truly envious. I've enjoyed and appreciated the skill of plenty of writers, but I've never envied one before.

I'm even tempted to wonder whether she wasn't human at all, but a member of some superior species spending a mere fifty years of life observing reality at the base level and describing it to those capable of understanding. And just in case I'm giving a false impression here, let me say that she is often dismissive of base reality, but never arrogant. In fact, arrogance seems to be one of the states of mind she most derided.

There might be more to come.

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?

 

*  *  *

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.

 

*  *  *

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 and about prominent 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 of such a study 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.