A Whinge and a Wasted Joke.

This being the thirteenth post of the month, what should I write about? Another whinge? OK, another whinge. Today I added two more members of the corporate world to the gathering number who now decline to speak to me. 

 

First we'll  have an update on the local delivery office of Royal Mail. It was confirmed by a post lady I met in the town that her depot no longer takes telephone calls from the general public, in spite of the fact that it exists to serve ... the general public. I already suspected that.

The query I wanted to address concerned the non-delivery of this month's credit card statement from HSBC bank, so I set about trying to contact them. I called the number given on page 2 of last month's statement and set about the task. I was faced with very many hurdles and had to start again very many times, either because their instructions were unclear, or maybe I'd pressed the 8 key on the phone instead of the 9 key and my phone has no backspace to delete it. (It's easily done when you're more than a little stressed.) 

 

The pressing of number keys went on longer than I care to remember. Eventually, however, I reached the final hurdle which promised the prospect of being able to speak to a real human being (although it would probably have been a machine pretending to be human) about the nature of the problem. I was asked by the current machine (probably operating under a John the Baptist delusion) to state the nature of the query, which I did several times in as many different ways as I could think of.  The machine, however, was evidently unacquainted with my all-too-human logic. In the ended I simply said 'I would like to speak to someone.' Ah, now we have a response. I was told to press 1 for this type of query, 2 for that type, or 3 for the third type. None of them was remotely connected with my actual query, and that was the end of the matter. I gave up because there was no other option.

Maybe this accelerating decline in the ability to communicate in the time honoured manner with those who effectively run the cultures of the 'developed' world is happening everywhere. Maybe one day somebody in a position of power and influence will wake up and address the problem. Maybe Excalibur will rise again and King Arthur will return to rid the land of the techno bandits, but I doubt it.

And they weren't quite the end of today's glitches. The transport I had booked to bring me back from the grocery shopping was late turning up and I had frozen stuff in my bag. Hopefully it won't have defrosted enough to make me ill when I come to eat it.

But on a happier note, there's this:

I was going through Sainsbury's checkout when I saw a woman using a self-service till nearby turn and stare at me most pointedly. I questioned whether I recognised her; I didn't. And then she looked away. But then she repeated the long, pointed stare twice more, and my only guess to explain her strange degree of attention was that maybe she'd heard the opening conversation between me and the checkout operator and didn't like it.

'Are you all right for bags,' the operator asked. 'Yes, thanks,' I replied. 'I have two. I'm very well organised. I used to have a third but we got divorced.'

A Matter of Flexibility.

I was reading a short article earlier about a 78-year-old British woman who has lived in Sweden for the past twenty two years. She moved there with her husband, who has since died, and settled there, but now the bureaucrats and the government say she is no longer welcome because the UK is not a member of the European Union. I found my good opinion of Sweden and the Swedes fracturing a little when I read the piece, but I don't suppose I should. Rules are rules, after all, and bureaucrats will be bureaucrats wherever they may be unearthed.

And I think it likely that most Swedes would sympathise with her predicament and want her to be allowed to stay. She has friends there, and activities, and her husband's grave to visit and tend. Even some government ministers are given to expressions of understanding and sympathy, apparently, and are seeking to find a solution in the woman's favour. I have developed the impression that the Swedes are a caring and compassionate people, so maybe they will.

But of course, there remains the the primary argument. How can the the rules be applied to make an exception for one person and not the rest? Where should the line be drawn? The tyranny of the line is, after all, the bureaucrats' principle guide post. How can any system be properly managed without a line to lead the way or place the barrier in the correct position? I occasionally came up against this problem when I was a bureaucrat, and had to rely on ingenuity to make exceptions -- under the radar so to speak -- in deserving cases. (Surprisingly, I always got away with it.)

But maybe the answer in this case is simpler and above board. Why not simply enact a law which states something along the lines of:

If any person has made Sweden their main place of residence and one of their loved ones has died and been buried there, they may be allowed to remain for the purpose of tending their loved one's grave.

 

No doubt they would argue almost interminably about the definition of 'loved one', but with a little goodwill I expect they could manage it.

The Story Not Written.

I was listening to a Loreena McKennitt song on YouTube earlier when a most bittersweet fable began to play before me in realistic detail. It was truly 'bittersweet', being both intensely bitter and intensely sweet at the same time. It seemed to me that I should write it as a short story, but within seconds I decided that I absolutely must not. 

 

I've long suspected that giving expression to stories -- or other creative works -- can have the power to turn fable into fact, and such a fact as this I could not countenance. It would affect others as well as myself, you see. Those who know the great tragedy in the life of Gustav Mahler will know what I mean.

But then the opportunist in me asked: 'How about quoting just the last line in your blog?' That, too, was instantly dismissed because the five words which constituted the last line were the most powerful of all.

A Fault and a Fear.

You know, sometimes I'll be reading an old blog post and discover that I've used a wrong word. My brain's getting tired, you see, and it's a bit embarrassing. Since I can't speak any other language than English (a fact which causes me some consternation, regret, and even guilt occasionally,) I feel I owe it to myself to at least get my own language right. And I imagine some Swede, or Spaniard, or person from South Korea thinking: 'If this dimbo can't even write his own language properly, what's the point of reading anything he writes?' It can be quite chastening.

(It is a fact, of course, that certain good writers (like Virginia Woolf) do sometimes misuse a word deliberately because they feel it serves the sense of what they want to say better than a commonplace uttering which is more technically accurate. Even I've done it, and I'm no more than moderate in the matter of meaningful diction. But I don't make excuses when I've simply used the wrong word because what's the point of lying to yourself?)

 

*  *  *

I fear I might have to argue quite forcibly with a nurse at the GP surgery on Thursday. I don't like that because anyone who has been reading this blog over the past eight years will know that I venerate the nursing profession above all others. I can only hope she'll be one of those rare, hidebound ones who believe with religious zeal in the rightness of rules and resistance is useless. In that case it won't be any different than arguing with the wife.

A Dark Horizon.

I had three phone calls to make today: one to the community transport people, one to a taxi firm, and one to the local mail delivery office to find out whether and when they are likely to replace the village mail box which was trashed by a runaway tractor two weeks ago. That should have taken about ten minutes, right?

Very wrong. Glitch after glitch was the order of the day. I managed the community transport call on the third or fourth attempt. The taxi firm took seven or eight, spread over the day from about twelve o'clock to after five thirty. I needed the delivery office's website to get their phone number, but after struggling through  the slow, crotchety mess of irrelevant pages, no phone number was given. Those three calls or attempted calls effectively wasted the day.

The sad, simple fact is that today's experience was typical of a society cracking at the seams, courtesy of the bureaucracies, the corporate world, and the tech giants placing profit before service. People are becoming superfluous except as a largely invisible cash cow, as is the provision of personal contact while there are machines trained to pretend they're people.

 

And this isn't just one old curmudgeon being reactionary. I'm hearing the same complaint from people of all ages, apart from the very young who haven't known any better. So who should we rely on to correct this deteriorating state of affairs? The politicians? I hardly think so. It's a basic tenet of modern politics that they mustn't interfere with the workings of a free market economy. Mrs Thatcher said so and it became writ in stone. So who else? Nobody, as far as I can see. And as far as I can tell, the people of the Nordic countries are not suffering the same problem, or at least not to the same extent. Could this be because they kept hold of their mixed economies, the system which kept us largely content here before Mrs T cast her dark shadow over the land? The last life satisfaction survey I saw placed the five Nordic countries in the top six spots. The UK languished in 23rd, one behind the USA.

So here's the bottom line:

People reading this blog might suspect I have a death wish. I sort of do for the first hour or two of the day, but not for the rest. But if this situation continues to worsen, as I suspect it probably will, and if there's nobody willing to or capable of changing it, the only way out will be to die. Chilling, isn't it?

AWOL Goats and Other Bits.

I met three goats on the road today. 

 

Sounds like the beginning of a children's story, doesn't it, because unaccompanied goats aren't supposed to be on the road? Maybe I could write such a story, about how an old man meets three goats on a road (whether my three were Billies and whether they were gruff they didn't say) and a conversation ensues, mostly focusing on the fact that goats are not required to submit to formal education, and whether this is deleterious to their future prospects or not. This morning's encounter occasioned no such conversation, of course, but only some 'hellos', much stroking, and a little scratching of ears. And then I found their human to tell her that three of her charges had escaped, and she said 'Again?' It isn't the first time I've noticed that goats are unusually adept at escaping.

Around the corner to the farmhouse near the pub next, there to give much fuss to Molly the Collie, my current favourite dog. She's never pushy, you know. She waits until you call her and then comes to you with much squirming and tail wagging, which is all very splendid.

The oddest encounter came next when I spied a horse tethered to a hedge and grazing the fresh new growth that's appeared on the verges since the rain finally returned. She got much stroking of the neck until a voice with an unfamiliar accent warned me not to do that 'because she bites.' Well, I already had done that so it didn't matter. 

This afternoon I did more gardening than I intended to do. It left me with a stiff neck and feeling wasted.

Over and out.

Considering Wild Beauty.

A writer of travelogues or fiction might describe a landscape as having ‘a wild beauty.’ It’s a reasonable term, being mildly evocative, although rather hackneyed now. But what if the same turn of phrase were used to describe a woman, especially one you might encounter in unusual but entirely apposite circumstances? Would that make it less clichéd and therefore more acceptable?

I met one once, you see, when I was hiking along a path which followed the cliffs rising above the Irish Sea in south-west Wales. I’d been there earlier in the year, in June, when the hot sun shone, the sky was uniformly blue, the sea bluer, the cliff tops festooned with wild thrift so they resembled a cottage garden, and the slithering of adders could be heard as they escaped my approach. But this was not June; this was in the autumn of the year and the view was different. Might I say that it was wilder but not as beautiful?

The sky was as universally grey as it had been blue on the earlier occasion, the sea a nondescript colour approximating to brownish. The breeze was light and cool, the rain moderate, and there was neither a carpet of thrift nor the sound of adders in the now fading wild plants at the edges of the path.

A woman stood before me a little further along the path and remained motionless as I approached. My eyes were naturally fixed on her, since she was superfluous to the view and yet seemed oddly to belong there. The view of her became clearer as the distance lessened: a slim woman of apparently middle age dressed in what looked like a gown of some rough material. Her hair was long, wavy, thick, and appeared untended. Her face, however, was the stuff of which portrait painters might dream – perfectly formed and radiant, as though glowing without being obviously so. The term ‘wild beauty’, for all its commonplace vulgarity, would be entirely appropriate to the lady. And then she spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. I assumed it was Welsh, but before I could apprise her of my ignorance, she said something in English:

‘You are the son of Lotte.’

I said nothing while I considered who Lotte might be. And then she said:

‘Careg Guinion.’

And then she faded and the dream ended.

It happened when I was young man and intrigued me more than a dream has a right to intrigue. I wondered why it was so clear. I wondered how I could know that the name Lotte (I heard Lottie) should be spelled that way. I was unaware of ever having heard the name. I gather the word ‘Careg’ means ‘rock’ or ‘island’ in Welsh. There are several rocky islands so named in that vicinity, but I couldn’t find one that preceded ‘Guinion’ on a map.

It still intrigues all these decades later, so if any Welsh speaker happens to read this post and can offer elucidation, I would be glad to hear it.

A New Song for August.

My walk this morning took me along Church Lane. The wind was stronger than a breeze, but not quite strong enough to be called a gale. (In spite of frequently finding pieces of arboreal debris littering the road surface. I hate seeing bits of tree dying on the cold black tarmac. I'm in the habit of picking them up and putting them onto the verges so they can go back to the land whence they came -- bit like rescuing earthworms, I suppose. Ah, the memories...)

Anyway, as I passed the creepy copse I was intrigued by a strange, consistent hiss coming from somewhere among the trees. I stopped and listened, attempting a solution to an unfamiliar sound. It stopped when the wind died for a few minutes, and then I realised that it was nothing unusual after all. It was but the rubbing together of old, dry leaves, a sound I've noted before as being characteristic of August, but in a new form.

A new song for August, no less. A change of key in the score to herald the movement that is autumn. And maybe nature offering a hint of the impending change in the climate.

More Fragments.

I was thinking deep thoughts about the human condition and the state of being this morning. (I don't know why I do it; I really don't.) I intended to write a blog post around the theme, but it became too deep, too complex, too wordy, and I wasn't in a Virginia Woolf mood, so I decided to stick with the bottom line: 'Why did the Universe decide to place an indivisible fragment of God mind into the body of an animal?'

And then I read a biography of Virginia Woolf and it depressed me.

After that I received my monthly electric bill from those nice people at E.ON, and that drove me to distraction. Not the bill itself, but what happened when I tried to pay it online. I wouldn't dream of relating all the details; suffice it to say that the online method is becoming slower, more crotchety, more irrational, more marketing-oriented, and evermore frustrating with each passing month. I'd like to call them (which isn't exactly easy in itself) and ask: Please may we go back to the old method? You send me a paper bill; I send you a cheque. I doubt it would do any good. The idiocracy is gaining ground everywhere it seems.

What is also likely to drive me to distraction is the whole day 'music festival' at the local pub planned for tomorrow. If I were to mention it to any of the locals I would no doubt be asked: 'Why? Don't you like music?' And then I would have to explain to them that music is closer to my heart than nearly everything else, which is why being forced to listen to music not of my choosing drives me to distraction.

 

This brings me back to what set off this morning's early thought process. It seems that 95% of people are under the misguided impression that 100% of people are basically the same in thought, attitude, and behaviour, with just a few minor differences here and there. What they don't seem to understand is that 5% of people -- and that doesn't include the rare few who are actually psychotic -- are very, very different and have a difficult life because of it. And so they call you a miserable old git and walk away.

A Change of Mind.

I intended to make a post in praise of Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness writing. And then I intended to make a post about the problem of being without the internet for seven days, written in the style of Virginia Woolf (to my eternal shame.) And then I couldn't be bothered because the hour was getting late (which led me to make a connection with Bob Dylan's song All Along the Watchtower, and now I can't get the phrase -- or the song -- out of my head.)

 

Instead I'll just mention that I had two splendid dog fixes today, both with Cocker Spaniels. I'm particularly fond of Cocker Spaniels, and they seem to like me. All except Honourable Sister's one time companion Ivy, that is. She always barked at me, which was unusual and perplexing in equal measure.

And that brings me neatly to the main point of the post -- to repeat with some conviction that if I lived in a world populated exclusively by little girls who want to talk to me about the meaning of life, attractive women who like the way I think, and friendly dogs who want to be my very best friend for ever and ever, I think I would be content. It would, however, cause me to be terribly scared of dying and going to heaven where angels would no doubt patronise me. Hateful.