Choosing One's Reading Matter.

In the Virginia Woolf story I was reading tonight she frequently uses the phrase 'the contagion of the world's slow stain.' I felt truly ashamed because it revealed the uncomfortable fact that if one is going to presume to read Virginia Woolf, one should at least be sufficiently erudite as to recognise her references. A trip to Google had to be made to hide the slow stain of my own ignorance. Apparently it's a line from a poem by Shelly in memorium to the recently deceased John Keats, and refers to him now being free of the slings and arrows of mortal life. I should have guessed, shouldn't I?

And then I saw something quite startling when I loaded YouTube. There was a video in the recommendations claiming that a lot of young people no longer read all the text in books. They only read the conversations because, they say, description is so boring. I suspect many of them might go the way of John Keats if they tried to read dear Virginia. I clicked on the video in hope of leaning more and thereby finding something worthy in the state of being old. It wouldn't play.

Today's Numbingly Fascinating Notes.

1. We now have a new village mailbox after four weeks without one. It's a brand new one, too, featuring a modern fascia with CR (Charles Rex) instead of the old ER (Elizabeth Regina) as the last one was. It's odd to have a mail service in Britain which is now fully privatised but still called Royal Mail. You wouldn't think so from the way they act sometimes.

 

2. After two days of activity it appears the electrical engineers have now got the telecomms cabinet back on the main. Hopefully we won't have any more -- almost daily -- 10 minute internet drops while the temporary battery was being changed, or much longer ones when the battery ran flat.

3. The pain at the base of my fingers on left hand is back when I put any stress on them. This is inconvenient when you're doing garden work with tools. Ever the martyr to the cause, I still managed two hours today and wore myself out in the process. (That's a slight exaggeration, but not by much.)

4. I encountered two strangers and a dog in Bag Lane today. One of the humans was a middle aged woman who said 'hello' with a vocal nuance which I found quite unable to read. The other was a girl of around late teens who scowled at me and said nothing. She was the one leading the dog, and the dog being a young and rather delightful Cocker Spaniel, I naturally wanted to ask 'may I make friends with your dog?' (By an interesting coincidence, they were precisely the first words I ever said to the Lady B back when the world was young.) The scowl was fierce enough to preclude such intimacy, however, so I walked on.

5. Lydia waved to me today.

And that's about it. Bye.

An Unlikely Theory.

I have a new theory. It's pretty implausible, but here goes.

I've always wondered, you see, why the Japanese attacked the USA at Pearl Harbour. I can understand their interest in conquering Asia, but why the US? Now I'm led to suspect that the British and Russians raided their respective piggy banks and paid the Japanese to do it, thus encouraging the damn Yankees to come over here and do their bit to help us spike Mr Hitler's guns. No doubt a historian would tell me something completely different, but history is forever changing so who knows?

I said it was implausible, didn't I? I like implausible theories.

Being Annoyed by an Obvious Error

Today is the autumnal equinox. To be precise, it occurred at six minutes past midnight this morning, and I'm reminded of an error I've encountered recently from several people claiming expertise in the matter of folklore and the old ways. They've pointed out that Halloween on 31st October is the beginning of the Gaelic season of Samhain, and is therefore 'the start of the darkest half of the year.' No it isn't.

Half a year is six months, and so the darkest half of the year runs from the autumnal equinox in September to the vernal equinox in March. Today is the start of the darkest half of the year. To say that Halloween is the start of the darkest quarter of the year would be more or less accurate, or it would be acceptable to say that it's the start of the darkest part of the year because 'part' is open ended. To use the word 'half' is simply wrong.

Maybe I'm being picky, but words matter to me, especially when they're coming from self-proclaimed experts.

On Mr Green and Me.

I just watched a YouTube video well worth watching. It was a documentary telling the full story of that most enigmatic of rock guitarists, Peter Green, the founder of Fleetwood Mac in its first incarnation. It's here if you want to watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMohqVHNCZ8

 

What left me somewhat enthralled by the whole sad story was the likeness between Mr Green and me in the matter of his nature and approach to life as a human being. I could say 'There but for the grace of God could have gone I' but I was fortunate in having guitar skills limited to strumming and ripple picking over a very short range of keys. My public performances were restricted to my post-school social group and a wild rabbit sitting in my garden one day, and they were limited to mostly Bob Dylan covers. I think I should be feeling grateful.

A Sort of Serendipity

 Somebody loves you deeply but they're staying away from you. Here's why...

So says the taster on the YouTube video. It's dominated, as is often the case, by a large picture of Carl Jung who you can rest assured is in no way relevant to what the uploader wants you to read. And of course, you scoff at the whole silly business. YouTube, and life in general, is overflowing with that sort of nonsense.

Ah, but is it nonsense you wonder? You can be quite certain that the video is pure click bait and watching it would be a really silly thing to do. But suppose the taster is a message sent by some spiritual agency because they feel you ought to know an intriguing and important secret? Who could the sender be, you ask yourself, and who the lover? And when you do that you come up with a surprising number of possibilities.

And then you repair to the kitchen to prepare your dinner, amused by the mind's little follies but pleased to have something about which to make a blog post and make the statistics flow nicely.

Mourning the Maize.

I stood out for about fifteen minutes in the growing gloom of a September twilight tonight, watching the harvester and trailers harvesting the maize crop in the field opposite my house. I find watching the process most interesting, but it's tinged with a hint of regret because the sight of a seven-foot-tall forest of maize  is a little spectacular. Mel found it fascinating because it reminded her of the early scenes of Lord of the Rings where it played host to much mischief by the young male characters. Maize is also typically garnered in the autumn, so the harvest is another marker telling us that the summer is definitely over.

For the first ten years of my living here, that field was pasture land on which the farmer's herd of heifers spent the spring, summer, and early autumn, occasionally calling to the young bulls in another field on the opposite side of the lane. But it had been ploughland before then, as evidenced by the clear ridge and furrow pattern on the ground dating at least to mediaeval times. No doubt they would have grown various beans and brassicas back then because the British climate wasn't warm enough for maize. In fact, maize didn't become a major agricultural crop in Britain until the 1970s. Not many people know that (at least I didn't, so I choose to believe that not many other people did either.)

My Captive Audience.

I was walking along Meadow Lane today when I spotted a herd of about twenty young bulls in in a field. I stopped to watch them for a few minutes, and when I did they all came dashing up the field and crowded around the gate to give me their full attention. They didn't want me to touch them, but they did jostle for position to get as close to me as possible. They seemed to want me to talk to them, and so that's what I did.

So why do they do that, because today wasn't the first time that's happened? Well, I've heard that pre-verbal creatures -- human babies and animals -- can sense the energies we give off, and on that basis decide whether to voluntarily associate with us. And in particular, non-predatory animals are more likely to gravitate towards humans in whom they sense non-predatory energies, which I presume would include me. That's rather heartening, isn't it? And maybe that's why the squirrels are coming closer.

But there's a sad side. Animals are my only friends these days, but that's not the sad bit. What's sad is that I don't want to get too close to a herd of young bulls because I know what's going to happen to them a couple of years down the line.

Idiot!

I was just reading through some old posts which visitors have accessed when I came across one entitled The Story of the Browser Playing Dead. A sense of dread came falling -- dark, damp, and desperate -- from the ceiling. It wasn't the browser I was talking about; it was the router. Browsers are software. They don't have hidden on/off switches, but routers do.

Now, Blogger isn't quite as sophisticated as Word; it doesn't have a search and replace facility which allows you to change every example of a misused word very easily and quickly. And so I had to set about editing the post manually, replacing every 'browser' with 'router.' There were twelve of them including the post title. I chose to blame the heatwave we were having at the time of posting.

Killing the Original American Dream.

The news from the USA is getting sillier and sillier. Trump's banning of CNN and like-minded channels from the White House is the latest example. He says it's because CNN and their ilk purvey fake news and spread lies. And Fox and Trump don't?

We all know by now that journalism in the US is more about taking sides and purveying propaganda than it is about impartially reporting facts, and that's not so bad as long as people understand the fact and both sides are represented. But now Trump wants the peddling of disinformation and misinformation to be restricted to the right of the political spectrum, while keeping the left quiet and setting himself up as King of the USA and Bretwalda of the western world.

Isn't that what the War of Independence was about? And isn't that central to why Americans are Americans?