The Nearly Winter Whinge.

It's the coldest night since spring in dear old Blighty, and so tonight I'm feeling the first intimations that it's that time of year again. 

 

A time of rubbing thighs rapidly in the hope of achieving an effect which will last more than a few seconds, which it never does. A time of calculating how much it would cost to turn on supplementary heat for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes to raise the room temperature a few tenths of a degree for maybe an hour. A time of snuffling, and feeling a level of tiredness which seems heavier when you're cold. A time of being uncomfortably aware of the animals out in much lower temperatures through long dark nights. A time of wondering how I managed the cold when I was younger, fitter, and stronger, and living in houses as inadequately heated as this one.

I'm whingeing like a flaccid wet wipe, aren't I? That's because I'm a natural whinger. I'm not actually as miserable as I probably sound. And, as ever, I'm fully aware that there are millions of people around the world who are experiencing far colder conditions than I am. Some of them are even being washed away by floods or adversely affected by other natural disasters. And so I realise that I'm not so badly off at all, really.

But I still dislike feeling cold. And I wanted to write a post and couldn't think of anything else to write about.

(And on a wholly unrelated note, I wonder why cats and birds flee at the merest hint of my presence, while dogs greet me enthusiastically. I'm tempted to think that cats and birds have some unusual inner sense which tells them something about me of which I'm unaware.)

An Odd Source of Benefit.

I thought my old computer had finally given up the ghost this morning. When I first load the browser, the home page opens two tabs - my Hotmail inbox and my blog. This morning it would only load the blog.

 

I tried re-loading the browser. No good. I tried re-starting the computer. Still no good. It kept coming back to the same trouble loading this site message. I tried loading other regular sites and they all worked just fine, and so I wondered... I loaded the BBC News site, and leading both the national and world pages was the case of Microsoft's worldwide crash. Relief all round. And that made me question my attitude to something.

The last I heard, Microsoft were saying that their systems hadn't been hacked; the breakdown was entirely due to them failing under pressure. But the question arose anyway. We're led to believe that the big internet hackers (not scammers, you understand, they're different, at least usually they are) are among the world's major criminals. And I believed it, but now I see them differently. Now I see them as agents pointing the world to its big mistake: 

 

Over the last few decades -- since the invention of the microchip, I suppose -- all major institutions from governments to the corporate world have been rushing headlong into building almost total reliance on computer technology, thereby generating greater wealth through needing fewer staff, and reducing person to person contact generally. And all this while microchip technology is still in its relative infancy and not yet adequately reliable. I feel that, along with wars and environmental catastrophes, the requirement to acquire, keep upgraded, and rely on electronic machines is a major source of stress worldwide. And that, I feel -- maybe a little perversely -- is what the hackers are pointing out to us. I doubt it will make any difference.

An Acceptable Reason to Be Sorrowful.

I was reminded by a video tonight of one of my life's greatest sorrows. Want to know what it is? I never had a close-up-and-personal relationship with a dancer. Someone said to me once: 'Dancers have the best legs'. and you know -- or should do -- what a fan I am of ladies' legs. 

 

I knew a dancer once who performed the close up shots of Kermit's legs in that version of A Christmas Carol. She had lovely legs, but she wasn't free at the time and neither was I. And it might be purely coincidental that she indicated no interest in me whatsoever anyway. Or it might not. And that's life.

Still Fed Up.

The last few posts have had an undercurrent of melancholic introspection and I could do with changing tack. 

 

The problem is that there's no new tack to engage with because I'm going through a phase of having to deal with delays, dysfunction, breakdowns, communication problems, and so on nearly every single day. Today I was subjected to two serious attempts at scams. One was avoided with reasonable ease, but the other nearly got me because of a coincidence which caused me to trust the scammer. It would have cost me a lot of money, but fortunately the day was saved by a series of emails and phone calls which gave me the truth of the matter. It seems to me that one of the benefits of this mad rush into microchip technology is that it leaves us open to the liars, the cheats, and the thieves of the world. Never in my lifetime have we had to watch our backs at every mouse click as much as we do now. And the obtrusive nature of having builders working in the confined space around my house doesn't help, and neither does the prospect of more disturbance in the near future, and neither does the onset of Samhain which is always the most difficult time of year for me. It's all becoming a bit too much.

And so there's no humour or insightful rambling to put out at the moment, but at least there were two brief breaks in the cloud this morning:

1. The Lady B is up to to her London buses trick again (you wait for an hour and then three turn up at the same time.) I see nothing of her for months, and then her car passes me in the lane five times in about seven days. I don't get the chance to talk to her, of course, as I've wanted to do for the past nine years, but I receive her polite wave with gratitude as she sails serenely by. (And that isn't a case of passive aggression, by the way, it's true.)

2. The big young Labrador who lives in the village assaulted me with much affection at lunchtime. Did I mention how much I love dogs?

 

Maybe a better version of me will emerge tomorrow, or maybe it will have to wait until February. But I hope nobody tells me 'you need to do this' or 'you have to do that', as someone did today. I've been keeping my own counsel all my life no matter what mood I was in, and being told 'you need to...' or 'you have to...' makes me very narky. 

La Mer In Memoriam.

The sea has always played a substantial part in the living of my life. As a young child there was no more satisfying way of escaping the grime of an industrial city than to be taken to the seaside. 

 

I suppose that's true of most children, but when I grew a little older I took to donning mask, flippers, and snorkel and spending long periods watching the crabs and flatfish flapping and scuttling along the sea bed on their way to heaven knows where. Occasionally I would swim around a rocky headland if there was one in evidence, and find a sea cave in which to sit until I became too cold and headed back to the sunlight and the shore. During the four years in which we went on holiday to Devon I spent every evening fishing from the breakwater at Brixham. When I took my first holiday without my parents I got swept out to sea by an unfriendly current and it took all the strength and determination of a fit and strong 15-year-old to make it back to the beach. I could sit for hours on a sea cliff somewhere, watching ships of all kinds making their anonymous way into or out of the western approaches (and what a thrilling sense those two simple words evoke.) At the tender age of 17 I was fortunate enough to cross the Atlantic in a Royal Navy frigate and experience first hand the power of a force 11 storm and the effect it had on a puny vessel. Much later I was again fortunate to live in a small cottage in a wild part of the Northumberland coast, a mere hundred yards from a beach fringed by sand dunes.  I made a point of going to the shoreline every morning just to pay my respects to the spirit of the ocean. And that was the epilogue to my connection with the sea.

I calculated this evening that its thirty four years since I've seen the sea, and again I realised just how quickly time flies past you while you're busy observing life and trying to ascertain whether life is all there is.

Closing the Book.

I haven't had my usual session with dear Virginia tonight because I've been regaling my imaginary friend with stories of my failures with women between the ages of 21 and 45. It seems that failures make much more interesting and amusing stories than successes, and I suppose that's why we Brits -- and the Irish too, I do believe -- like to recount our failures and even take a kind of perverse pride in them. They usually cause our audience to either gasp or laugh, you see, and what better denouement could possibly be wished?

And after the euphoria of failure died down I was reminded again of how the unfortunate conjunction of rake, romantic, and Romantic in my nature always guaranteed failure, one way or another, eventually.

Now all I want is my sunshine back, but she's too busy and is evidently disinclined to shine on me anyway. And so I must accept that my book of female failures is finished for this lifetime. No epilogue to finish with, and given my age it's perfectly acceptable that so it should be. Both successes and failures (which Mr Kipling described as 'those two imposters') were a mixture of fun and pain anyway, so that's one roller coaster I no longer have to ride.

A Fishy Question.

Tonight's miniature offering from dear Virginia is called The Watering Place and treats the reader to her observations of seaside towns -- their character and the nature of those who visit them. She remarks on the fact that seaside towns always smell of fish, and that took me back to my boyhood when our annual holidays always included trips to seaside towns which did, indeed, smell of fish. And they were always fresh fish brought ashore from the trawlers.

I asked myself whether I liked or disliked the pervasive smell of fresh fish as a boy, and came to the conclusion that neither was the case. The smell was simply a characteristic of the environment and was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

And so I further asked myself how I would feel about it now, since the last time I visited a fishy-smelling seaside town I wasn't an ethical vegetarian. As a boy I paid scant attention to the fact that these innocent creatures had been wrenched from their natural environment and dragged into one hostile to their very existence, and had probably been unceremoniously gutted before their inevitable termination spared them the suffering along the way. Would I now, with my latter day sensibilities, feel uneasy about the smell of fresh fish?

The surprising answer was: probably not. I suspect the odour of fresh fish would probably awaken fond childhood memories, and that such memories would probably mask my current concerns. I felt guilty about that, but decided I needn't because it is all a mater of timing and growing, and my new concern would make no difference anyway.

Autumnal.

Autumn days vary so; today was the cool, still, misty sort. Air touching skin with finger-tingling dampness. Sounds entirely absent. Trees in erratic states of dress: some bare, some partially so, some covered but looking ragged nonetheless. Harlequin-inspired leaves of brown and gold and ancient green; falling, twisting, drifting, aping the style of summer butterflies but with one difference: the leaves were travelling in one direction only. Much like us. 

Today I learned what entropy means.

Words and Wants.

I keep on hearing the phrase 'deep and meaningful.' They fall naturally together, don't they, so much so that they're almost synonymous. In fact, they're not, so every time I hear it I catch myself and ask: 'What does 'meaningful' actually mean?' And that sounds counterproductive, and so I change it to: Define the world 'meaningful' without reusing the word you're trying to define. You can't, for example, say that the definition of 'meaningful' is 'that which has the quality of meaning' because it's simply repeating the very word you're trying to understand. It won't do. First you have to define the noun 'meaning', and to do that you have to define the verb 'to mean.' It isn't as easy as it sounds. I've been struggling with it for years and don't seem to be any nearer a solution.

The adjective 'real' is another one. There are even members of the mainstream scientific community who are now questioning whether our perception of the physical environment is real, and whether the environment itself is real and not some arbitrary construction of an unfathomable universe or other power. But what does 'real' actually mean?

I'm beginning to think that if the human race were fully evolved, we wouldn't use language at all. We would rely totally on abstract faculties like intuition, telepathy, and strong senses, although I suspect some elements of science fiction have already done that one.

And now I'm bored thinking about it all.

 

*  *  *

Do you know what I would really like? Someone physically close with whom I could sit and talk, and who understood me. I expect we'd have deep and meaningful conversations, but I think the hope for that is gone for this lifetime.

 

*  *  *

The other thing I would really like is a slice of toast and jam because I had only a bowl of home made soup and an olive roll for dinner and I'm feeling peckish. That one I can manage. (And now I'm curious to know whether Americans use the word 'peckish'). Look out you single slice of bread left in the bread wrapper.

When Thoughts Lie Dormant.

I feel very flat for some reason this evening, sunken into a state somewhere between ennui and moderate melancholy. I've been sitting here in front of my computer trying to think of something interesting to think about, and I can't. The only thing of note that strikes me is a certain irony: when you can't think of anything interesting to think about, there's no point in trying to write anything apart from a simple statement that you can't think of anything to think about. So now you know. Life really does seem to be ridiculously pointless sometimes.