Being Here.

I stood in the garden this afternoon and looked around at the heavy summer growth. I looked at the trees by the lane, at the fields of high-grown maize across the hedge, and at the high hills beyond the river valley. I looked at the sky, now turned grey after weeks of sunny weather. Two birds flew across it heading north.

I felt a strong sense of being here; nowhere else. It struck me that if I’d made one different decision somewhere back in the sands of my history, I might not be here. I might be somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

The thought has occurred to me before, and I suppose the same thought has occurred to just about everybody at some time. And yet it’s an oddly profound thought, and what was different about today’s example was the intense clarity and strength behind it.

I think I might be turning into one of Shirley Jackson’s neurodivergent heroines.

Missed Opportunities.

I saw a woman I know in Sainsbury’s on Wednesday. It's some years since I last saw her. ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, ‘I didn’t recognise you at first.’ ‘I suppose that’s because I look so much older, is it?’ she replied ruefully. ‘My response was rapid and almost unequivocal: ‘I hadn’t intended to say so, but now you come to mention it…’

The first three sentences are true. The rest amounts to a succession of lies, the fact of which constitutes yet another of life’s multitudinous missed opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Ashbourne was awash with young women in shorts and dogs with wagging tails. What is a chap supposed to do in such circumstances? Which is he supposed to admire first? The dogs won, of course, because you can stroke a dog’s back, pat its head, and tickle its ears without fear of being driven away by men in uniforms and treated badly. Young women are in a different category.

Killing Time.

While I was sans internet I decided to put my enforced idleness to good use by dusting, vacuuming, and generally tidying my living room. It hadn’t been touched, or even used for that matter, for two months or so and I was feeling almost committed to my place in the human environment for a change. It took two hours to complete the job, and when I’d finished I was taken aback by the fact that it looked very little different.

In all ways, that is, apart from the lack of spider silk. It had been everywhere – between this and that, underneath every horizontal surface, beside my armchair, behind the big unit thing containing mostly wooden bowls, books, and various expressions of my interest in the worlds beyond the veil, strewn across the ceiling and down the walls… The room was full of the stuff. Being a sensitive soul I made every effort to do no harm to the spiders scuttling hither and thither, but their handiwork had to go.

I realised, of course, that the spiders would not have taken kindly to being so outrageously inconvenienced, and a dream began to form in my mind. I saw an army of Cellar spiders – for such they all were – approaching me with revenge in their eyes and determination in their spindly gait. I knew that their objective would not be to drive me to the burning mill with pitchforks as the local villagers might, but to suck my vital fluids until I breathed my last. The fact that I have no straws of either paper or plastic in the house was no consolation since spiders have their own methods. The sound of gurgles, slurping, and the death rattle filled my mind, and the dank odour of something unrecognised hung in the air.

The Story of the Browser Playing Dead.

On Monday 20^th July – four whole, agonising days ago – my browser had an accident and died of its injuries. No browser, therefore no internet. And so began the job of getting a new browser, the prosecution of which brought me into the frustrating business of trying to deal with BT’s new system of customer contact. It is, as usual, idiotic – or at least disturbingly deficient in thought and consideration – and the only way of dealing with the problem was to report a fault to the wholly automated system.

An engineer turned up the next day and I told him the story, finally asking ‘so how do I get a new browser?’ ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll order one for you.  You might get it tomorrow or at least by the next day. They’re very quick with browsers.’ It arrived today, three days later. I haven’t hooked it up yet so I’m nervous because I have personal experience of new browsers being faulty. I’m currently living on hope as I type this in Word.

And so for four days now I’ve been seeing my desktop image staring back at me from my monitor screen. Usually I see my Hotmail inbox because that’s where I park it when I’m not working. Seeing only my desktop image evoked a cold feeling of desolation and disconnection. It said: Something vital is missing. Are you sure you’re still alive? Are you sure you’re still breathing? Are you sure you’re still functioning? It’s a little like walking into a room and seeing walls normally festooned with pictures now bare of all decoration. The only reminder of more wholesome times are the faint grey rectangles around the edges of where colour and life used to be. I’m sensitive like that. I tried to read instead (Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the second time, and an anthology of shorts by Virginia Woolf for the first.) It helped, but only so much. Mostly I felt too tired to read.

And what all this demonstrated is just how reliant I’ve become on the internet to provide a portal to the outside world. The very few people I know personally are all either disinclined to know me, or too far away to be of help. Being a loner by nature is sometimes inconvenient.

I’m going to attempt to install the new browser now. If you read this you’ll know it worked.

Added Later:

The new browser is installed and working, but here’s what’s interesting:

When I plugged everything in I saw that there was no light on, suggesting that the new bit of kit was faulty, Not so. I looked at the back and discovered an on/off switch, a small, black, circular button all but hidden against the black background. I pressed it and voila: we have light.

I’ve had several browsers over the past sixteen years and none of them had an on/off switch. You just plugged things in and they worked. And bear in mind that the original new browser was fitted up by a BT engineer, not me. So I tried connecting the original, now ‘dead’, browser to the power and it lit up as a functioning browser should. It appears the old lad’s accident didn’t kill it after all, it just switched it off.

So much for the past four days. So much for silly old me. And it’s life and life only.

Incidentally, the two posts above this one were written for the sake of having something to do when I thought I had no internet. Just to avoid any confusion.

Shire Diary July '26.

The barley crop is now all harvested and the stalks bailed up neatly and awaiting collection. The wheat looks just about ready to me, and so the majority of fields will soon be laid to waste and awaiting the muck spreading, the tilling, and the sowing of winter wheat and barley. And so the changing colours of a mostly arable farming area will go through their annual transformation, from gold to brown and back to green. The cycle continues as it has done on these very fields for more than a thousand years.

Several of the fields here are owned by the Church rather than the estate, and on those the crop is maize. Maize is sown later than the cereal crops for harvesting in the autumn or even early winter. It’s growing rapidly through the warm weather, though, and the tallest patch on one side of Church Lane is now up to around seven feet in height and flowering well.

So tall is this forest that the view from Church Lane to the Lady B’s erstwhile abode is now completely blocked. Usually at this time of year the top of the chimney pots and TV aerial are still visible, but not this time. Too tall for a person of my height. People often smile and gaze at the forest of maize, you know. ‘Just like Lord of the Rings,’ they enthuse. Several early scenes in the Jackson film version show the intrepid four hiding and getting into mischief in just such a location.

As for the wild flowers, the persistently warm weather has sent most of them to bed early. There’s a premature brown and shrivelled look about the embankments, the verges, and the hedge bottoms this year. And the elder bushes which showed promise of a fine berry harvest are further casualties. Such berries as a forming are tiny, I suppose for lack of water to plump them.

And here’s the sad story: I’ve mentioned the flock of sheep which now occupies the big sloping field behind my house. I often watch them going about their lives slowly and peacefully, but this morning I saw them being driven en masse down towards the bottom of the field where it abuts Bag Lane. When I walked that way later I saw a large transport vehicle standing by the gate, and presumed that a journey of some sort was imminent.

When I returned from my walk I heard much bleating as I walked up my garden. It was more plaintive than usual; it had a hint of desperation about it. And then I realised that all the bleats were adult ones. No kiddie bleats; no question and answer sessions between mama sheep and baby sheep. The impassioned bleats, it seemed, were the sounds of mother sheep either calling for their now absent kiddies, or simply vocalising a sense of sorrow for their loss.

The final sentence would have sounded like vegetarian propaganda, so I omitted it.

Time and Changes.

For some reason this evening my mind has been filled with recalling people in my past, from friends I had in primary school right up to people I connected with more recently on this blog. I particularly remembered one boy called Howard Graham. I got a little confused sometimes because I had trouble remembering whether his name was Howard Graham or Graham Howard. And it often occurs to me that most of the people I knew as a child are now dead.

*  *  *

And then I took a look at the website for the theatre where I used to work. It had a large picture of the restaurant and I was curious to see how different it looked. For one thing they’ve removed the carpet and installed parquet flooring instead. Why would they do that, I wondered? Well, maybe they had Christmas in mind and considered the practical benefit. During matinees for the Christmas Show the place was invaded by hordes of school kids, and there was always one who treated us to the sight and smell of his or her half digested breakfast steaming on the restaurant floor. I suppose it’s more easily removed from wood than carpet. (And did you know that the smell of vomit can be nullified by pouring tonic water on it?)

*  *  *

After that I wrote my daughter’s birthday card. I hate writing longhand now, you know. I blame the ubiquity of keyboard communication which has greatly reduced the manual coordination required for such a feat. It leaves me full of admiration for those writers of old who constructed significant tomes, mostly using a quill pen and in longhand. And impeccable cursive, to boot.

In the Language of Sheep.

I was outside having a cup of tea in the sunlit garden this afternoon when I heard the deep bleat of an adult sheep the other side of the hedge. It was followed by the higher pitched, juvenile bleat of a lamb nearby. And then the ewe bleated back and the lamb answered again. And so it went on and on for about five minutes until I was quite sure that this was a mother and her kid having a conversation. OK, it might just have been:

‘Where are you?’

Here, mum.

Oh, there you are.

Mum.

‘What?’

I’m here.

‘I know. I can see you.’

Mum.

‘What?’

You’re not looking at me.

‘I don’t need to look at you, dear. I can hear you well enough.’

Mum.

‘What now?’

What are you doing?

‘I’m grazing. What does it look as though I’m doing?’

Oh.

It’s a conversation of sorts, isn’t it? And it might all be in my imagination, and I might be guilty of anthropomorphising a couple of animals, but as long as it makes you smile it doesn’t matter, does it? And the kid reminds of me when I was that age.

A Parking Issue.

When I returned from my walk at lunchtime I was surprised to see the narrow lane beyond my garden lined with parked vehicles for a distance of around 200yds. Evidently there was some sort of end-of-term event going on, and it isn’t unusual to see cars parked on the lane during the progress of such events. But in twenty years I’ve never seen as many as there were today. And the car park was also full, of course.

I’m curious to know the reason for this. Has the school had a major increase in pupils, I wonder? (Have you noticed, by the way, that in the UK we mostly use the term ‘pupils’ for people in primary and secondary education, and reserve the term ‘students’ for those in college and university? Students are young adults, you see.) In any event, it seems to me that the school needs a major extension to its car park.

I was, however, pleased to see that the Lady B’s car was parked with precision in the car park (lording it over a tiny, Mk1 mini, I might add.) But then it always was a feature of the Lady B that she was inclined to park cars with fine precision in car parks. (I love that woman, you know. Sometimes it even hurts a bit.)

And I do realise that this post is boring and of little interest to anyone but me. I just felt like writing something before making lunch, so I did.

A Recommendation in Fruit.

I saw a woman I liked in Ashbourne today. She wasn’t good looking, she wasn’t young, she didn’t have a model girl’s body, and I never spoke to her. And so I asked myself: why do you like that woman? The answer was simple.

She was eating an apple. I realised that a person eating an apple looks wholesome and healthy (just as a person eating a Big Mac looks gross and unfit.) It even suggests honesty, which probably has nothing whatsoever to do with George Washington. It just does for some reason, maybe because there is something sweet and unassuming about the humble apple. No ego, you see.

The fact that the woman looked thoughtful also helped. I’m generally well disposed towards people who think, and I gather the skill is becoming rarer.

Imaginings and Partings.

I saw a woman in the coffee shop today who looked very like my imagined image of the priestess. Same height and build, same approximate age, dark brown hair with a few highlights pulled neatly behind the neck, a discreet but apparently expensive gold bracelet on one wrist, bright and active eyes, no hint of apparent mood which suggested high self-awareness and practiced restraint, and eyes which left no doubt as to her East Asian antecedents. I’d say she was fully in control of her body, her mind, and her space. I doubt the priestess looked like that at the time when several future roads were beckoning in her maiden years, but this one fitted the mature entrepreneurial route perfectly.

I spent some time visually examining everything about her, and yet never once did she notice and stare, or even glance, back. That was where I got the ‘self-awareness and practiced restraint’ from. I wondered whether she might have been the actual priestess making an inquisitive trip to my home territory because she had nothing better to do. I rejected the possibility on the grounds that priestesses never have nothing better to do.

*  *  *

I signed out of my dental practice this morning, even though there are no other NHS practices in the area and I can’t afford private dentistry. It was an uneasy call fraught with attempted explanations and icy tones. And now I wonder whether I’ve been a little rash.I also wonder why I always have to move on even when there's nowhere else to go. I even wonder whether I would have left the much esteemed Lady B behind if she hadn't preempted the possibility.