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.

Loneliness and Connection.

I sometimes feel lonely, you know, and it always surprises me when I do. It surprises me because I've always been a loner to some extent, and the older I get the more entrenched it becomes. Even in my young days when I took part in group activities -- the wolf cubs, the Boys Brigade, a class of 30 or so at school, sports teams, an office full of people -- I always wanted to do my own thing in my own way. When I played sport I was never a team player. I played it because I enjoyed playing it; and I played it to the best of my ability purely for my own sake. I found those pep talks given by the captain at half time pointless and irritating because pep talks didn't apply to me. And it's a solid fact that I wouldn't want to live any other way than alone. Having my private space invaded by other people is seriously deleterious to my mood. It's happening at the moment with the builders, and an email I received this morning indicates that I will have to suffer it again soon in a different way. Hideous. So why should I feel lonely sometimes?

Well, I gather that some clever psychologist has spent a lot of hours studying the phenomenon of loneliness and has concluded that it has little to do with how many people we have around us, but is more about how connected we feel to other people generally. That's the point at which it becomes complicated because the term 'connected' can be interpreted more than one way. And yet it might give a clue to my dilemma. 

Sometimes when I'm walking around the lanes or through a wood I feel a subtle sense of being in some way out of step. I try to analyse it and the first word that comes to mind is 'disconnected.' I admit to feeling a slight sense of connection to the trees and animals, but no real connection with those I pass on the lane or those who pass me in cars (with maybe one exception, but that's an unwonted complication to this little ramble.) Fortunately, I'm well practiced in appearing mostly normal in situations where such an appearance is required, so I don't get driven away and incarcerated in some institution for those with mental conditions beginning with 'dissociative...' At least not yet.

 

But maybe it's part of the reason why I've been obsessively interested in mortality for so long. I'm seeking to know whether, when I take the last train out, I can have confidence in the fact that its destination will be a place with which I can feel some sense of connection.

A Literary Hobby.

Some people collect stamps. Some other people used to collect small, thematic cards given free in cigarette packets in the days when cigarette packets were respectable. Not unsurprisingly, they were known collectively as 'cigarette cards.' I remember them (just.) I used to collect thematic cards -- I recall flags of the world and football players being favourite -- which came with bubble gum packs (I think.) And there are some people even today who collect fine paintings or objets d'art, but I was never one of those. Peasant upbringing, you see.

Now I collect words and phrases I find in books, mostly fiction, and think of them occasionally for no particular reason. I believe the first one I put into the collection was one I read as a youngster: Damned with faint praise. And then there was Zoe's An object of faded regard. I remember both of them quite often, and there are others. Today's precious little find comes from Virginia Woolf's short story: The Shooting Party.

...memory is a light that dances in the mind when the reality is buried.