Still Mumbling.

For some time now my life has been like one of those winters which drag on and on beyond their usual anticipated demise. Every time an issue gets resolved, another one or two or three come along to take its place. It’s maddening and dispiriting and sometimes I feel one small step from despair. But here’s the interesting thing.

In January I made nine blog posts, which is extremely low for me. That was because my mind was full of dark stuff blocking the desire to think and observe and throw the results out into the ether. But I told this to somebody, somebody whose opinion I respect, and she suggested I should continue making posts for my own sake and maybe even for the sake of a few people out there. And so I did; I made the effort and the result for February has been the highest number in any one month since October 2017 (which was before I learned I had cancer, incidentally.)

So has it done me any good? It’s hard to say. I still wake up every morning feeling anxious, I still go into a depression which eventually lifts just enough to be able to function after a fashion, and I still feel constantly scared of things yet to come which might leave me with a life hardly worth living. The long cold winter shows no sign of easing yet. But at least the practice of writing things down eats up some time and acts as a distraction, and I suppose it’s better to mumble in the wilderness than stay silent in an empty room. So maybe it has been a good thing, and it seems reasonable that I should attempt to continue in similar vein.

As for having any effect whatsoever on anybody who reads this blog, I really have no idea. I’m not even the sort of person to aspire to such a grandiose notion, except in a few isolated cases where some aspect of rightness or wrongness should be patently obvious. There are too many arrogant teachers out there already trying to force others to their way of thinking, and I want no part of such a process. I won’t take it and neither will I hand it out. And I am aware that some of those teachers are far more qualified than I shall ever be, but such is not entirely the point.

And so, in spite of my many known flaws, I expect I’ll continue for a while yet. Take it or leave it as you please. But thanks again to those who do read this blog. It does no harm to know that somebody out there is at least hearing the mumbles.

On Life and Memories.

A week ago I watched Peter O’Toole playing King Priam in the film Troy. Tonight I’m watching him play Henry II in The Lion in Winter, a film made thirty six years earlier. Such an illustration of ageing was made shockingly manifest there.

How the substance of the man grows flaccid and the vitality withers. How the eyes lose their power to shoot arrows and now lie impotent in damp and reddened sockets. How the hair becomes fine silk where once was sturdy cotton. How the voice that roared now echoes from a hollow vessel. And how the ticking of the clock of life grows ever more insistent as we wait for it to stop.

Such is the work of the tyrant Time from whose icy touch no one may hope to be exempted. And still we drag the ghosts of beloved but lifeless memories from their resting place and pretend they matter.

Desisting With Maidens.

I was telling the priestess in an email the other night about two women I met during my travels with a camera. One was a German woman with big hands whose grandfather I was tempted to suspect had been a PE instructor in the Hitler Youth. The other was the lovely Hélène from Le Puy in France who was possessed of the most beguiling Gallic accent. Neither went further than the conversational stage (which disappointed the priestess because she was expecting a good story, at least in the case of Hélène.)

But they weren’t the only ones. There was also Catherine in Toronto who picked me up from my hotel in her black BMW the first morning I was there and took me for breakfast in a posh restaurant. And there was Jeannie in St Johns, Newfoundland, who even took me home to meet her parents. The problem with those two was that they would insist on mentioning their boyfriend, and I took it as a warning to back off. So that’s what I did.

But maybe I got it wrong in the case of Jeannie because her reference to her boyfriend included the fact that he was currently in British Columbia nearly 3,000 miles away. So should I have taken that as indicating a lack of impediment? I’ll never know, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with mysteries which will never be revealed. (Actually, there is. Mysteries which will never be revealed are like sealed bags of something or other which hang on pegs just out of reach even if you stand on a chair because you haven’t got a ladder. But at least you get used to them being there eventually and regard them as complimenting the wallpaper.)

No such area of doubt existed in the case of Catherine, but she did insist on taking me to the airport when I was leaving and most unexpectedly gave me a long and apparently heartfelt hug. Needless to say, I wondered whether I’d misconstrued something and would be forever rueing a missed opportunity. But it is encouraging to reflect on the fact that a gentleman is a gentleman when all’s said and done, and the first instinct of a gentleman must always be ‘if in doubt, back off.’ I was, I’m glad to say, ever a gentleman.

(They were all very attractive, by the way, especially Catherine.)

I haven’t mentioned Ruth in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have I? That’s because the story was a little sad, and I’m not in the mood for sitting on the ground telling sad stories of the deaths of kings or the desisting with maidens.

I’m sure that if I’d had the near-flawless radar that I have now I would have managed the various areas of potential much better. But I didn’t, so that’s that. And they would all still be mere memories of long ago anyway. And now that I look like Gollum’s granddad, memories are all there will ever be.

On Being an INFJ.

I did the Myers-Briggs test recently and discovered that I’m an INFJ. The description matched me very closely so it seems I probably am. And INFJs are quite celebrated, apparently, being the smallest group of all the archetypes and exhibiting radically different views on life and the conduct of life than the vast majority of people. It’s why we’re widely misunderstood.

So has it ever got me anywhere? Well, it’s been responsible for garnering the odd compliment here and there, such as:

You understand me better than anybody else does.

How do you get to the crux of my problem so quickly when it never occurred to me?

You deduce things about me which even I’d never realised, and you’re right.

How do you manage to be so damned honest?

Ethics and altruism are so important to you, aren’t they? Why?

You’re bloody weird.

But has it ever engendered any practical benefit? Has it ever really got me anywhere? Not really. So is it worth being an INFJ? Probably not.

And might I just add that I’m not making this post in order to brag. Not at all. It’s just that it’s dull and wet outdoors yet again, and there’s not much to do in the house, so I’m bored.

A Short Note on Death and Greatness.

I was thinking earlier about the death of the legendary Irish piper, Liam O’Flynn. It occurred to me to wonder whether those who have achieved greatness in their chosen field – and been kept constantly busy in the process – are more troubled by mortality than those of us who only drift through life seeking peace and quiet and the occasional adventure. I wondered whether it is harder for them to tolerate the notion that one day it will all end, at which point they will either cease to exist altogether or at least return to some kind of blank canvas and have to start all over again.

Fearing the Talons.

I made my routine visit to the dentist today. No dramas, just an extended scale and polish. And the lovely Ms Medeea, late of Transylvania, was as lovely as ever. Ah, but here’s the rub when you have a female dentist and a female nurse.

There I was, a mere male of the species, lying supine and helpless while two women with instruments hovered over me like two ravens coveting a dead rabbit. I couldn’t help being struck by the suspicion, however unlikely, that they were about to take revenge for 10,000 years of male domination. And the suspicion was aggravated by the fact that the nurse wasn’t quite as good with the sucky thing as dental nurses usually are, which led me to wonder whether she was falling prey to an unconscious desire to drown me.

I survived. I think.

Demise of an Old Friend.

The high streets in towns large and small throughout the length and breadth of the land are growing thin and weak now. Empty shops are proliferating and there is much talk of the need for intensive care. I find this sad, and one of the saddest aspects of all is the disappearance of the bookshop. Ashbourne used to have two; now it has none.

In the larger town where I grew up there was a larger bookshop, which remained stolidly family-owned as the corporate chains were tightening their pythonesque grip on townscapes everywhere. The shelves were made of dark old oak, and the mildly ornate staircase matched them in wholesome solidity. It creaked slightly and occasionally when submitting to its pedestrian duty, just to remind you that it wasn’t born yesterday. Best of all, it smelt like a bookshop.

I spent a lot of time in there for most of my childhood and much of my adult life, rarely having the money to buy anything but still enthralled by a seemingly endless perusal of the titles and the other worlds they represented. The fact is, I simply liked being there. It’s gone now and been turned into offices.

Nobody ever feels alone in a bookshop, wrote Penelope Fitzgerald. Did anyone ever say that of an office?

Being Pushed to the Limit.

So now a cocktail of technology problems comes along to add their contribution to the health worries, the house issues and the family concerns. I’m getting perilously close to the end of my tether and asking why I’ve suddenly attracted the unwelcome attention of the more vindictive gods.

Technology issues are a double edged sword. First there’s the frustration engendered by the problem itself, and then the already maddening weight grows even greater when you try to get it sorted. And so another question presents itself: how has the unholy alliance of technology and the corporate world been allowed to bring us to such a dysfunctional state? British Telecommunications is the latest body on whom I wish damnation to perdition’s flame, and I dream fondly of the days when all you had to do was call a number and speak to somebody who knew how to help.

Those days seem to have gone, and I see no prospect of them returning. Even in the democratic west where power-obsessed psychopaths are a little less evident, pecuniary interest still holds sway in so many matters which matter. The rich have to get richer while society seethes. Profit is all. Resistance is useless.

And there’s an interesting little side issue in my case. I gather it’s now a well attested fact that stress has a deleterious effect on physical health. The vicious circle is gaining speed.

Connecting.

I just watched the movie Elegy starring Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. It’s about the unconventional but intense love affair between a beautiful young woman and a much older man. Mel lent it to me. She thought I would connect with it; she thought I would like it.

I did connect with it in several ways, though not all. And yet, although I’m no stranger to slow moving, psychology-based stories, I didn’t actually like it. I found it claustrophobic.

And so I’ve spent the last half hour wondering why I found it claustrophobic. Was it the direction, the screenplay, the lighting, the locations? I still don’t know, but I suspect it might have been a ‘there but for the grace of God…’ thing.

*   *   *

Must find Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela on YouTube later. I mentioned it in an email earlier as one of my favourite pieces of classical music. I haven’t heard it in years. It refers to the swan which glides silently over the dark waters which encompass the Isle of the Dead in Finnish mythology. Does that sound more like my kind of thing?

No Bouquets for Plusnet.

I had to call my ISP today (Plusnet, if anybody in the UK is interested) because my internet connection has suddenly become slow.

It didn’t go well. I ended up getting cross and aborting the call, partly because I decline to go through their absurd procedure which I’ve gone through before to no avail, and partly because the boy I spoke to (he didn’t sound old enough to be called a young man) irritated me greatly. When somebody cuts aggressively across what I’m saying and becomes patronising, I get cross.

It isn’t the first time this has happened – with Plusnet and others – and I’m inevitably coming to the view that the level of customer service in the corporate world is declining. In the case of Plusnet I assume it’s because they place too much emphasis on an applicant’s technical training, and too little on his or her ability to treat customers with calmness, helpfulness and respect. (I gather they call it ‘interpersonal skills’ these days.) I have found, however, that young women are much better at this sort of thing than young men, being generally more mature, more understanding, more open-minded, less inclined to aggression, and being possessed of more little grey cells.

Where I go from here I don’t know yet. Maybe the slow connection has something to do with the wind and rain we’ve been having quite a lot of lately, and will right itself eventually. But here’s an amusing irony:

Since I’ve consciously made a point of naming the transgressor in this post, it occurs to me that somebody’s algorithm somewhere will pick it up and start trying to persuade me to take Plusnet as my lawful wedded ISP. It always struck me that there must be something oddly satisfying about standing at the altar and saying ‘no.’

The Woman From the Walsage MkII.

I woke up this morning to discover that last night had been true to February form: heavy rain, lots of it, pools in places where pools are not supposed to be, the food on the bird tables reduced to a squidgy mess, no sign of Noah anywhere, and it was still raining. And I wanted to go to Uttoxeter today as I always do on a Monday. But I realised that the first thing I needed to do was check and clear the nearby road drains if I was to avoid coming back to find myself living on the bank of a fast flowing river. And so I donned a raincoat and wellies and set off to make a start.

I checked the first two going up the lane to find them clear, and then I spotted a female figure, suitably decked out in rain gear, walking down the lane and waving to me. I waved back and thought ‘I wonder who she is.’ We met and she told me that she’d come to clear all the drains in my lane.

‘But who are you?’ I asked.

‘I live in Mill Lane,’ she replied.

Mill Lane? Aha! The penny dropped. Here was the Woman from the Walsage. Not the woman with the dogs who I mentioned in a post several years ago; she’s gone now. This was the latest incarnation.

‘Ah, you must be S’s wife,’ I said with appropriate conviction, by now having realised that asking a neighbour ‘who are you?’ is marginally short of polite.

‘That’s right,’ she said with a smile. (And what a friendly sort of smile it was. One of those smiles which could endear you to a person if you weren’t as suspicious of appearances – and the state of the human race in general – as I am.)

S, incidentally, is a man I’ve spoken to several times since he took up residence here. He happens to have precisely the same name as a very well known snooker player, and so one has to be careful when making reference to S that the subject of snooker is avoided for the duration of the discussion. Failure to follow this simple edict could lead to all manner of misapprehension which might be the first small step to a situation of cataclysmic proportion, but as far as I know it hasn’t happened yet.

So then the Woman from the Walsage began to explain to me how the flow of water on the lane relates to the positioning of the grids.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’ve been doing this job for years.’

She looked suitably abashed, and I realised in an instant that she was not only practical but also perceptive. It’s the kind of thing I notice, you know. I’m even right sometimes.

And then she asked me where the grids were further up the lane because she had evidently realised that the water has been flowing and gathering strength for about half a mile before reaching here. See what I mean? A paragon of impeccable reason, which I greatly respect.

So off she went to finish the job while I took the opportunity to head off to Uttoxeter. And I did get there, and it did stop raining eventually, and I did get back without notable incident, and I did see floods where I’ve never seen floods before, and all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And I decided that I quite like the Woman from the Walsage. If ever I meet her again I might ask her what her name is. And if I'm in a really good mood (which isn't likely) I might even tell her mine.

Noting the Irony.

There’s an advert on my email homepage which carries the message

Find Your Peace of Mind

It struck me as ironic that the primary master of the advertising industry – the corporate world, whose principle objective it is to promote consumption mania – constitutes one of the major causes of people having less peace of mind than they used to have.

The Ruling Class.

I’ve always exhibited a tendency to be sympathetic, sensitive and sentimental, but the older I get the more I’m becoming empathetic. I feel people’s pain and distress increasingly now, so when I read of what’s happening in Brazil with the rainforest and indigenous peoples, or how the Uighur are being treated in China, it all becomes personal.

And then I become painfully aware yet again of how so much of humanity’s business is dictated and controlled by psychopaths for whom humanitarian values hold no meaning. And I wonder what I’m doing in this human body with no power to take the ruling psychopaths and place them far away where they can do no further harm. And that’s depressing.

*  *  *

I read today that 49% of Americans approve of Trump’s presidency. What on earth does that say about America?

Au Revoir, Priestess.

Seems I’ll have to suspend correspondence with the priestess for a little while. She’s currently engaged in the practice of jetting around on business trips, and such a practice does not sit easily with my nature. I say this not by way of judgement, but only by way of awareness of what I’m comfortable with and what I’m not.

People engaged in business trips pale to my perception. They become colourless – mere silent and solitary ghosts shuffling pointlessly through an airless, alternative reality which I can see but have no desire to touch.

I’ve no doubt she’ll be back soon enough, but for now I’ll have to dream and fret alone.

Multiverse Questions.

I’ve read several accounts of instances recalling people undergoing odd experiences which are seemingly inexplicable unless you accept that they’ve switched into a parallel universe. It happens to me occasionally. (It does, really.)

But I always ask the question: what happens to the other version of them which belongs in that universe? Might they meet? And if they did, what would happen?

I think I have the answer now. It isn’t the body that switches, but only the consciousness. Presumably, the two versions do a consciousness swap. Which means that while I’m looking for the button which I know I put there this morning, another version of me is scratching his head and asking ‘What the hell is that button doing there?’

But two questions remain: 1. How do we know when we’re back? 2. Does it matter?

Terrible Troy.

I’m 54 minutes into watching the ‘epic’ movie Troy. The DVD case reports glowing tributes from journalists, but they’re all, as usual, tabloid journalists. Tabloid journalists never were connoisseurs of quality, so here’s my take on it:

The script is hackneyed to a point beyond predictability, being entirely based on a third rate version of grandiosity which is laughable.

The fight scenes are choreographed in a way that is hardly seamless. I grew increasingly credulous at the number of Trojan soldiers who stood there like unschooled extras (which maybe they were) just waiting for the Greek hero to kill them instead of at least trying to do something about it.

The direction might as well have been undertaken by an accountant from Slough. I know that isn’t an objective statement, but it’s how it looked.

The acting, well… The acting. Oh dear. The cream of British and Irish thespian talent strutting around like a bunch of enthusiastic high school kids doing the annual Shakespeare as well as they weren’t really able. Even the likes of Brendan Gleeson – one of my favourite actors – and Brian Cox looked hopelessly out of their depth amid such creative carnage. Only Brad Pitt and Sean Bean kept the walls from collapsing into obscurity.

The costumes were adequate and the scenery was nice.

Will I watch the rest? I don’t know yet, but probably not.

Health Report and Some Speculation.

To those who read last night’s post about the visit to the hospital and might be interested in the outcome, here it is: I got the all clear for now.

And it seems the priestess and I had something in common today because she, too, was due to be subjected to the ministrations of a doctor. And so I wrote to her when I got back and asked ‘How was it for you?’ I naturally hoped that the question wouldn’t be misconstrued and lead to her coming over all faint and needing to lie down in a darkened room with a wetted handkerchief laid over her ivory brow. I doubt it because:

1. She’s Australian by birth and upbringing, and Aussie women are not much given to aping the sensibilities of English roses.

2. She’s ethnically Chinese, and although I’ve never seen her brow, I doubt very much that it would be ivory. I did think of changing it to yellow, but Chinese people don’t generally have yellow skin no matter how perilous they become (not unless they’re jaundiced, of course, and what reason would I have to presume such a condition?) Their skin is more likely to be a sort of dull white, pale tan, or tan-with-a-hint-of-olive. (I imagine it would be possible to obtain an expensive emulsion paint of that particular hue, but I really couldn’t be certain.)

And I just realised that I’ve never seen a Chinese person with freckles.

And I think I’m losing the plot.

Woes.

I have my next post-cancer screening scheduled for tomorrow. The problem with post-cancer screenings is that they bear a disturbing resemblance to the game of Russian roulette, and the potential consequences can be just as serious. Maybe I’ll have something to report tomorrow night.

And today’s dose of wet stuff (it’s become almost unheard of now to go a whole 24  hours without something wet falling from the sky – and usually be blown sideways by at least a gale force wind) was a mixture of rain and hail. The woman I met in the lane while I was out clearing the road drains for about the fifteenth time in six weeks delighted in telling me that the weather forecast for the next few days is really awful. I hoped she’d only been reading the tabloids.

Music for Midnight.

I remember once remarking on the melancholic, midnight sound of the viola. Rarely have I heard it in such fine voice as in this piece called Benedictus by Karl Jenkins. It's hardly surprising that people associate it with funerals, since death is, after all, the peaceful midnight of a life.

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well

~Macbeth on the man he's just murdered

Going Down.

I’m trying so hard to be properly silly again, I really am, but the engine of silliness just won’t fire up. I thought I might get inspiration from watching a few YouTube clips of the delightfully silly Lucy Moran in Twin Peaks, but no. Even the charms of one of my favourite characters from my favourite TV show of all time are falling on stony ground.

Meanwhile, I watched an old movie called Identity tonight. The plot made no sense to me at all, so I read the synopsis on Wiki. I thought some clever person might be able to explain it and salve my frustration. That, too, fell on stony ground, since it only repeated the story of the action I’d just watched on my computer.

So now I’m forced to the unpalatable conclusion that my IQ is riding the elevator to the basement along with my once-buoyant(ish) spirits, and very soon my perceptual faculties will be reduced to a little pool of odourless green slime. And then cleverer people than me will scratch their own heads in bemusement and ask ‘what the hell should we do with it?’

Mixed Fortunes and Foreigners.

Today was one of those days when you begin to take seriously the notion that there’s some sort of superior being controlling your affairs, and today it’s in a particularly vindictive mood. Delays, malfunctions, damage, dire prospects looming large… all of which caused me to forget things which resulted in yet more difficulty. And the weather being cold, dull and depressingly wet didn’t help. I tend to feel more ill than usual on such days.

But there was one compensation: smiley women. Several of them. The best was a woman in Sainsbury’s who declined to stop smiling at me even when I looked away and looked back again. She was middle aged and wearing a long padded coat, jeans turned up at the ankle, and Doc Martin boots, which probably explains everything. And then there was the woman I’ve been seeing frequently for several years and who has never smiled at me before, but did so twice today. I find such behaviour quite inexplicable, but there you are.

On a more serious note, I was surprised to see two women of evident foreign extraction sitting at adjoining tables in the coffee shop. One looked vaguely Levantine and was obviously Muslim because she was wearing a hijab, and the other was Chinese. This is most unusual for Ashbourne because Ashbourne isn’t that sort of town. Ashbourne is a middle class, right-leaning sort of place with an elderly demographic and a tediously white complexion. It’s the sort of place where people worship Edward Elgar for the wrong reason because they can’t see the music for the jingoism. It does have one token black man who I see on average about once every three or four months, but apart from during the tourist season the operative word would be something like ‘pasty.’

And incidentally, neither of the two women-of-evident-foreign-extraction smiled at me, which just goes to show that you can never trust foreigners to behave normally.

Being Inclined to Resist.

As I understand it, one of the central tenets of Taoist philosophy is that you should take the line of least resistance in every situation. There’s even a Tao-inspired video on YouTube entitled Never Resist Anything. Well, this philosophy was coined a very long time ago, and I have to wonder whether it still applies in the modern developed world.

The problem is that the modern developed world is becoming increasingly obsessed with bureaucracy, accountability, legislation, material and pecuniary aspiration, educational achievement, erosion of privacy, objection to free speech, and risk avoidance in every aspect of life. If you never resisted any of these things, you’d end up becoming the sort of brainwashed automaton who thinks that having a new sofa is the true route to happiness, TV adverts are the height of good taste, and nothing counts unless it sells. So do the Taoists think this is a good thing?

(Oh, and as a side issue, the Nazis would be ruling Europe and probably lots of other places as well.)

The Missing Story.

I started watching the film Australia tonight. The presence of aboriginals reminded me of the story of Mrs Buxton’s mother which I thought I’d told on the blog some years ago, but no search term finds it so maybe I didn’t. OK.

*  *  *

Mr and Mrs Buxton were a couple my parents met on holiday in Devon (through me, actually, and my pathetic attempt to use freshwater fishing tackle while fishing off the breakwater at Brixham. Mr Buxton took me under his wing and kitted me out with the sturdier stuff needed for sea fishing. I was ten at the time.)

Mrs Buxton came from Wales and they had her aged mother living with them. Old Mrs whatever-her-name-was came straight out of a black and white silent movie set in the Valleys before coal was discovered there – darkly dressed and darkly visaged, with a face lined like the Taff estuary and supported by legs bowed in a manner long out of fashion by the time I met her. But she was a kind old lady, and when my parents and the Buxtons went for a few drinks in a pub somewhere in the vicinity, she stayed in the car with me (children weren’t allowed in pubs in England in those days) and told me stories of the old times.

One night she recounted her time spent in the Australian outback where she had much contact with the local aboriginals. She said that they had taught her a lot of secrets about the mysteries of life, things about which most people had no knowledge. My interest was piqued immediately, but she said I was too young to understand such matters. If we were to come back to Devon the following year, however, she would tell me then.

Well, we did go back to Devon the following year, and we did arrange to meet up with the Buxtons again, and I was naturally champing at the bit to hear what the old lady had to say. And then I was told that she had died.

Can you imagine the frustration and disappointment I felt? By the age of eleven I was convinced that there was much esoteric knowledge to be learned, and Mrs Buxton’s mother was going to give me a foothold in the mysteries. When I learned that she had died it felt like somebody had cancelled Christmas. And even now, all these decades on, I still think about it and feel that there’s an empty space in my mind which is waiting to be filled.

And then I wonder whether I was not supposed to have that knowledge for some reason. We can never know, can we?

On Storms and an Anglo-Irish Enigma.

We had a weird weather event today. After the relatively short excesses of Storm Desmond yesterday (Desmond? Derek? Something beginning with D) today was mostly calm and mild up until about three o’clock in the afternoon.

I noticed the sky growing black as a coalman’s cap, and then there was the most almighty clap of thunder, the like of which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before, followed by the sudden onrush of storm force winds and driving hail. It lasted about half an hour and then became calm again. Is this something new and a manifestation of climate change, because I don’t remember a winter storm having a postscript like that before?

And talking of storms, I’m not sure I agree with the practice of giving them names. The storms seem to have got worse since they started doing that, and I suspect it’s bolstering their egos and making them try harder to make us miserable just because they can. But if they do have to have names, I think we should pay due regard to the fact that most of them come from the general direction of Ireland and call them things like Brendan and Aisling. The latter would be quite interesting because I doubt that half the English who saw it written down would know how to pronounce it, and those who heard it pronounced wouldn’t know how to spell it.

And talking of Ireland… I read a short biography of Erskine Childers yesterday. He was the man who wrote the early classic spy novel The Riddle of the Sands. He was a most fascinating person. It seems there was very little he didn’t do during his life, and he particularly distinguished himself by starting off as a true British patriot and supporter of empire, and then turned tail, took the side of the Irish independence movement, and ran guns to the IRA on his yacht. And what’s amusingly ironic is that the Irish eventually executed him because he supported the wrong side in their Civil War. And do you know what he did? He insisted on shaking hands with every man in the firing squad. How endearingly British was that?

Wealth and the Ad-Man.

I have a problem with advertising. I hate it, and it's more ubiquitous and pernicious than it's ever been. It strikes me that there is something fatally flawed with the process we have increasingly fostered in developed cultures which might be described as ‘ad-mad.’

But advertising is only the vanguard of a system which so values the concept of wealth. So what is wealth?

It seems that over the past few thousand years, wealth has been defined in one of two ways: the value of possessions or the value of money. But here’s the rub:

Defining wealth by the value of possessions is only any use as long as people want what you’ve got. Defining it by the value of money only works as long as people have faith in a system based on something which doesn’t actually exist.

Doesn’t this lead to the inevitable conclusion that there is something fundamentally absurd and delusory about life in developed cultures?

An Early Lesson.

I was about nine at the time and in primary school. I said something to my teacher and he replied by telling me that I was so sharp I was likely to cut myself. And then he looked away in a dismissive manner.

I remember struggling to discover some semblance of reason in a statement which seemed hopelessly irrational. He was, after all, a teacher and therefore to be taken seriously. But I was of a mind to take things literally in those days; I suppose most nine-year-olds are. Eventually I decided that the teacher was not overly bright, but that he had intended a backhanded compliment. In retrospect, I think I was probably right. And as an added bonus, I learned to understand the nature of sarcasm which came in useful later.

Reaching the South.

I just discovered that my blog had visits today from Alabama and Texas. That surprises me because most of my connections with America have been with New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California. I didn’t know that my blog would be able to cross the Mason-Dixon Line without being either gunned down or clapped in irons by some fire-breathing, fundamentalist preacher. Maybe there’s hope yet for the future of mankind. Or maybe the visitors came from the ranks of the disadvantaged. If so, hello comrade.

Incidentally, did I ever mention that my favourite book as a child was Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I never read it and have no idea what it was about, it’s just that it was a hardback version with a red, shiny cover and I loved holding and looking at it. No academic future for me, then.

Me and My Blog.

There are times when I feel like a car raring to go but the handbrake’s stuck. I want to write a blog post but I can’t think of anything to say.

The night is wild, I’m not in the mood for reading, there’s nothing I want to watch on the TV, I’m fresh out of DVDs, I don't socialise, and I’ve sent an email to the priestess in which I described the state of depression in the form of an allegory. (Which, unsurprisingly, was a little depressing.) I’m also still slightly spooked – and that’s very unusual for me – by Les Dawson’s description of the ghost of Sid James which he saw at the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. And now I want to write a blog post but I can’t think of anything to say.

The process of finding things to say is an interesting one. Sometimes I get frequent glimpses of disparate subjects and they result in a sudden rash of three or four small, unconnected posts in fairly quick succession. At other times I write nothing because my mind is devoid of anything but my issues, my increasing tendency to suffer bouts of anxiety and/or depression, and my dispiriting disappointment at the parlous state of the human condition. And then there are times when I feel compelled to employ different forms of humour, some of which are quite arcane and must be unintelligible to normal people. I read them a few days later and imagine the scratching of heads and people asking ‘Why did he say that? What the hell does it mean?’ I remember the days when I used to write sensible, carefully considered posts on serious issues, but then I grew tired of being earnest and wanted to be silly instead. Unfortunately, I rarely feel silly these days.

I need a spark, but the problem with me is that I naturally aspire to reclusiveness. I need to live alone to maintain my treasured independence, and I find the extended company of the majority of my fellow humans tiresome. But I’m not a complete introvert so I need a certain amount of external stimulus to make me function. Being in touch with the priestess helps, but I feel disinclined to meet her because I don’t relish playing the game of Quasimodo and Esmeralda.

And there’s a problem with sparks: they have to come to me of their own volition. If I seek them out they don’t count. They have to be gifts from the universe because gifts truly mean something, whereas purchases are just purchases and the thrill of acquiring something new wears off very quickly. (I suspect a lot of people haven’t got the hang of that fact yet because the system doesn’t exactly encourage it.) And sparks are about as common as green goldfish at the moment.

So here I am, waiting for midnight so I can have my daily dose of YouTube and whisky before retiring in the sure and certain expectation that I will be miserable when I wake up. Sometimes life’s a pain, but there you are.

Oppposing Ideals.

Referring to the short mantra I posted a couple of nights ago, I just read that the white colour of the ‘Mother of all Buddhas’ symbolises purity, wisdom and truth. That strikes me as a pretty good trinity to which to aspire, but it isn’t easy in a world which strives so hard to turn us on to James Bond, K-Pop, gadget-mania, and the triviality of lifestyle choices.

Jenny's Conk.

I just watched a film starring Jenny Agutter. I could never quite be a fan of Jenny Agutter. She was a good actor and had lovely eyes, a sweet voice, and a compellingly feminine presence, but her nose always irritated me. It formed a barrier which I could never get over. I think they call it retroussé.

  

And I’d like somebody to tell me why I go from being depressed and anxious in the morning, to serious but apathetic during the day, to trivial and silly at night. I suspect that having the curtains closed against the darkness has something to do with the last one. But I did discover this week that I have something fundamental in common with Siddhartha as created by Herman Hesse. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

Nature Being Irrational.

My bird tables attracts both birds and squirrels, and I often see male birds and squirrels chasing females away from the food during winter. But when the breeding period arrives I sometimes see males feeding females while they’re sitting eggs or caring for new-borns. This would suggest that nature only values females during the breeding period.

This seems irrational to me. A male bird or animal can breed with any number of females, whereas the ladies’ capacity to breed is limited by the gestation period. Surely it would make more sense for nature to favour the females all year round, since it’s more important to preserve their numbers. Am I missing something?

Being in a World of One.

When depression deepens and anxiety takes a suffocating grip, it’s interesting to realise that we can never share the resultant feelings with another person and expect emotional rescue. We can talk about them; we can describe them as much as we like and as well as we’re able, but we have to accept that nobody else can truly feel them in the same way. There is some help and a degree of pragmatic understanding available, but in the final analysis the only feelings we can fully know are our own. Or so it seems to me. And if I’m right in this presumption, and if I’m also right when I suggest that perception is the whole of the life experience, it means that we’re all ultimately alone.

Relief and Recollection.

The first of February’s dreaded happenings arrived today. It went better than expected and much relief was felt – so much relief, in fact, that I felt inclined to write something amusing to the blog. Unfortunately, nothing fit to amuse or promote amusement happened.

I did watch a film tonight, though, about a man remembering the events of a childhood summer. I realised through a reference in the script that these kids were exact contemporaries of mine, which explained why the popular music on the soundtrack was so evocative for me. And he had his first girlfriend that summer, just as I did. Mine was called Elaine Bailey. We moved house during the winter and I didn’t see Elaine again until I bumped into her at the factory where I had my first job after leaving school. She just about remembered me, but only just. Life doesn’t always mirror art.

More dreaded happenings to come, so the blog might be a bit sporadic for a while.

An American Story.

I just typed the word ‘vigour’ in an email, and straightway I was reprimanded by Microsoft for spelling it wrong. ‘There’s no ‘u’ in vigor,’ said the American corporate giant. I chose to disagree, but arguing with an American corporate giant is a bit like filling lots of buckets with sea water in Cornwall in the misguided belief that you’re taking some off the damn Yankees. Logic is not promoted by such an act, as outrage is wasted on American corporate giants. It did promote an interesting speculation, however.

It struck me as entirely possible that on 16^th December 1773, a bunch of ragged and utterly disreputable colonials roamed the town of Boston, Mass, confiscating the letter ‘u’ wherever it might be found – on shop signs, letraset sheets, children’s language-learning blocks, and so on – throwing them all into an equally ragged and disreputable sack, adding for ballast the body of a drunken British sailor they’d found lying in an alleyway having choked on his own vomit, and throwing the whole cargo into Boston harbour crying “there ain't no ‘u’ in harbor” as they did so. Up went the cry from the masses: “There ain’t no ‘u’s here. This is Americuh and we don’t damn well like ’em.”

When they were caught in the act by the authorities, and being advised that they’d incorrectly spelt America with a ‘u’, they became highly embarrassed and claimed that what they’d actually thrown into the harbo(u)r was a load of tea because they objected to the fiscal principle of taxation being applied to honest, hard working colonials. And so a legend was born, and wise men wrote of a coming Messiah called Sarah Palin, and France decided to give them a spare statue that they wanted to get rid of because they’d got no space left in Paris, and all was well in the Land of the Free.

The Continuity Curse.

I just watched one of the X-Files movies. There’s a scene in which Mulder walks through a door and a blast of air blows his tie over his shoulder. In the next scene we see him walking along a corridor where the air is notably still, and his tie is hanging properly again. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘he must have put it right.’ Well, that’s what any normal person would do, isn’t it?

Ah, but then we get a wide shot and the tie is over the shoulder again, despite there having been no evidence of another blast of air. And then we see him approach Scully and the tie is back to hanging correctly. ‘Must be the woman’s touch,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe he really is a gentleman after all and finds it distasteful to approach a lady improperly attired.’ But then we get another wide shot of him talking to Scully. The tie? Over the shoulder.

I really wish I didn’t notice things like that.

Postscript

If I've got any sort of a life left, I could do with getting some sort of a life.

Keeping the Brazen at Bay.

It appears I have become perceived as a potential customer by the sex industry. Nearly every day I get junk emails from either ‘adult’ dating sites or some supposed young woman with an almost certainly fictitious name describing her body in great detail and requesting that I pay it attention in ways which I can only regard as questionnable.

Why am I getting them? I’m not aware of any surfing habit which might have put me in the frame. I wonder whether the fact that I occasionally use the term ‘young woman’ on my blog is responsible. Could that be enough to set the sleazy algorithms humming and licking their lips? Or does everybody get them? Are there nonagenarian great-grandmothers in nursing homes being bombarded by men called Pedro who have twenty different words for ‘hard’ and invite the old ladies to use their toothless gums to magnificent effect?

Look, I’m English and a little old fashioned. I’m not merely uninterested in this kind of marketing, I’m even mildly disturbed by it. So when I get these emails I don’t simply delete them, I use the blocking facility to prevent further invasion into my hallowed – and very British – account. But that only blocks one individual source. I imagine there are probably millions of like sources all over the globe because it’s that sort of globe. I wonder whether it would help if I typed…

NO SEX OR DATING ADS

…here. Would that get the nasty little algorithms off my back? Somehow I doubt it.

Eschewing Emma.

Considering how many issues I have pushing me ever deeper into the quicksand at the moment, it might come as something of a surprise that one of my major concerns is the fact that Hermione Granger turned into Emma Watson when filming was over. I think she should have become a nun in a silent order, then I could have worshipped her forever. This says quite a lot about me (should anybody be interested.)

In the Groove.

This is what I sing along to every night after midnight. You might consider giving it a try if you're in the mood for a little mystical peace.

It makes a refreshing change from considering why I like Waiting for Godot so much since it requires no thinking at all, just the contemplative sense that there might be something better out there than Walmart and Walt Disney.

I think I really need to become a full time alcoholic, you know. It's all very well taking solace from White Tara and whisky after midnight, but it's worn off by the morning.

Working Out Godot.

When the theatre where I once worked put on a production of Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot I watched it five times and loved it. It was undoubtedly my favourite of all the productions performed there. The play – and in particular my great fondness for it – has always fascinated me, so tonight I read the terribly academic Wiki article.

It seems that Waiting for Godot has invited countless speculative interpretations down the years, ranging from the existential to the moralistic to the expression of Christian symbolism and many more. This in itself intrigues me because of what it says about the academic need to analyse and label everything. When one of the actors performing one of the roles asked Becket what it was all about, the author simply replied ‘symbiosis.’ When somebody asked me why I liked it so much, all I could come up with was ‘it shows that words can sound wonderful whether they mean anything or not.’ Seems I don’t have an academic mind.

But at least I never echoed the sentiments of many members of the audience when leaving the auditorium: ‘What the hell was that all about?’ That’s because I didn’t need to know.

Staying Alive.

How do you make blog posts when your emotional baseline is the lowest it’s ever been, and the bag of issues is growing so heavy that it’s threatening to pull you under?

I suppose I could mention that Uttoxeter Costa is undergoing something of a refit at the moment, and so today’s coffee break was taken in an environment resembling a building site. And the Costa girl with the fraulein-ish bunches was late arriving. She also didn’t have fraulein-ish bunches, but sideways ponytails instead. And she wasn’t wearing any socks, which I thought a little rash since the day was cold and her trousers ended above her ankles. It occurred to me that generations of wearing skirts and dresses has probably made the female of the species genetically predisposed to have warmer legs than the male.

And the burst of very heavy snow which began when I was shopping in Tesco made the drive home something of a nightmare. It didn’t help that the village school was disgorging its pupils early, just when I needed the relevant space to turn the car around in difficult circumstances. Did I mention that I hate winter?

A Favourable First Impression.

Having been slightly disappointed with Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, I’ve just read the first chapter of his Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul. It’s quite brilliant.

It features an angst-ridden New Yorker who lives in London and is going to Heathrow to catch a flight to Norway. She has a typical New Yorker name which nobody, not even her bank, can spell, and doesn’t really want to be going to Norway anyway to meet a man called Jean-Pierre who probably won’t be there. The practically-minded taxi driver who knows none of this still advises her to go to Tenerife instead.

The other main character is a Norwegian man who is getting very angry at the check in desk because they’re being unreasonable in not letting him on the Norway flight. This is because he has no passport, no ticket, no reservation, and no means of paying for it. And then the check in desk explodes for no apparent reason, but nobody is seriously injured.

Typical Douglas Adams. Happy to carry on reading. Will advise if still happy at the end.

(Whilst reading the aforementioned work, my electricity was briefly interrupted twice. My computer doesn't like that sort of thing, but seems to have survived with little more than a limp. I'm hoping it was the Lady Ciara's way of waving a fond farewell.)

Confronting the Lady Ciara.

Yesterday afternoon I sat comfortably in front of the TV watching Storm Ciara making an utter mockery of the rugby match between Scotland and England up in Edinburgh. I felt sorry for the players, and even sorrier for the spectators. A few hours later the monstrous Lady Ciara made landfall in the Shire. She gathered strength overnight, and this morning proved interesting.

We’ve had a few storm systems invade the Shire in the fourteen years since I came to live here, so I’m no stranger to roaring winds carrying the constant threat of damage and general mayhem. We’ve also had several heavy electrical storms which produced downfalls of Biblical proportions, the blessed water from which sometimes found access to my living room through the ceiling. What I’ve never known during that time was the combination of the two – winds with the power and voice of an express train combined with rain of truly monsoon proportions. It felt apocalyptic; it even felt a little scary.

At 10.34 am the power went off just as I was about to make the day's first cup of tea. I reached for the little camping stove which I keep under the sink. The butane cartridge was empty, so that put paid to any prospect of getting a hot drink. Deciding that I had little course of recreation open to me, I decided to read. I reached for the little camping lamp which I also keep under the sink. Its butane cartridge was empty, too. Knowing that Madame Ciara was ingratiating her unwelcome presence throughout the length and breadth of the UK, I realised that the electric repair men would be uncommonly busy and anticipated a long wait. Prospects looked bleak: no heating, no hot drinks, no cooked food, no internet, no writing blog posts, no reading because it was too dark, no electric blanket at night, and no opening the fridge because the last thing you want to do when the electric is off is let warm air into the cabinet. I anticipated a lunch of a bag of crisps and a couple of biscuits. I didn’t bother to think beyond that.

And then fate smiled. The power was restored a mere hour and a half later. I realised that one of life’s greatest pleasures is to see and hear things which we take for granted, but which have fallen cold, dark and lifeless, suddenly burst into wholesome light and function again. Kudos to the sturdy men (and women if applicable) from Western Power Distribution. Thank you, guys. I decided to have an early lunch sans crisps and biscuits, and threw the fridge door open with great delight and reckless abandon.

After lunch I went to check on the garden, and saw as I did so that the road had become a river again. The grids were all blocked by little dams of arboreal detritus which were sending the water back out into the middle of the road. Well, that at least gave me something useful to do – get out there with the spade and clear the grids so the blessed water could make its way back to its source by the most expedient means possible. The drain water from this part of the Shire makes its way into a deep channel which runs alongside the Lady B’s erstwhile abode and, as far as I know, empties into the river about half a mile across the fields. And so I did. The wind was still booming, but the rain at least was lighter.

A little aside:

I used to worry about the Lady B and her dear Mama and sister during periods of heavy rain. I was concerned that the channel might fill to overflowing and the Shire’s premier family might be swept to an ignominious end somewhere around the confluence of the Rivers Dove and Trent. It never happened.

Nevertheless, it was of particular concern during the record wet summer of 2012, but all was well. The Lady B went to Egypt on holiday that year, and when she returned she was a changed woman. That was when she began to gravitate further and further out to the periphery of my orbit, and eventually disappeared altogether like the smile of Carroll’s cat. Life has an odd way of working out, doesn’t it?

End of aside.

Yes, I know other parts of the world get weather like this, and worse, all the time. But they’re used to it.

Time and Trivia.

Tonight’s area of confusion regards the matter of time. I read somewhere recently that without time we could not exist. This suggests the corollary that time has no meaning but to serve existence. But then a question occurs to me: is time constant or dependent on individual perception? So what does ‘individual’ mean? And in particular, how would the principle apply to non-sentient matter?

I’m sure this was all sorted out by much cleverer minds than mine a very long time ago. I’m just trying to catch up, and currently failing. This in itself is somewhat ironic. And maybe I should stop reading books by Douglas Adams, but it’s heartening to note that his English isn’t quite as good as mine.

I doubt that any of this matters in the final analysis, but when anxiety and depression keep trying to drown you with high waves it’s tempting to grab hold of anything which floats.

I had another of those intriguing days today when strange women kept smiling at me. One of them looked like Desperate Dan’s big sister. And Cakiepop thinks that tipping tea into the ocean is funny.

To Sara.

I’ve been meaning to post this video for a while, expressly for a lady somewhere in America who might like the melancholy meandering of the cello and the sight of a great bear of a fiddler smiling again.

Is it right, I might ask, to direct a blog post at a particular person? I don’t see why not. I’ve done it before and it is my blog. And anybody else, anywhere else, who likes melancholy meanderings and smiling bears is at liberty to watch the video.

A Wordsmith of Sorts.

I just discovered that my last post was my 7,800^th. I calculate this to mean that I have made an average of 2.14 posts per day for the last ten years. So what does that say of me? Certainly not what Hermione said of the Bulgarian wizard, Viktor Krum:

‘What I mean is, he’s not exactly loquacious.’

The fact that many of the posts were complete rubbish may be disregarded.

Cakiepop and the Boston Tea Party.

I watched a video on YouTube recently in which French people were quizzed on their knowledge of America. Most of them did reasonably well, and somebody – a Brit, I’ll be bound – entered a comment which said Americans can’t even find Europe on a map.

In consequence of this, I am now in correspondence with somebody in America – probably young and probably female judging by the tone – called Cakiepop. The last thing she said to me, while bemoaning the lack of British awareness in American schools, was ‘All I remember from my history class is that England taxed our tea so we threw it in the ocean so you must forgive me.’

So here we are again. YouTube drives me mad sometimes with those crass adverts which it insists on throwing uninvited into the middle of a classical piece of music, but just look at the vibrant and brave new world it opens up. Such people it has in it.

Becoming Modernised.

You know, after eighteen years of owning a computer it occurred to me only tonight that I might be able to play CDs through it. I tried it and it worked, it really did.

Well now, there’s a discovery worth making. I always played music through an audio unit, mostly when reading novels of notable gravitas while sitting by the fireside in the winter. I thought that was what you did. And indeed it is, but it never occurred to me that modern times offered alternatives which were available to me, and not just to executive joggers in city parks and kids on rollerblades everywhere else.

This opens up a whole new world for me. Now I can play music when I’m reading in my office (because I don’t have a fireside any more. Well, I do, but I don’t have fires there, which makes it rather more than redundant.)

The only problem with this wonderful new facility is that I have only two CDs and they’re both by the same singer. All my music is on tape and vinyl (most of the tapes having been recorded from library CDs because I could never afford the originals.) I suppose it provides the perfect excuse to spend even more time treading the floors of the charity shops. They have shelf loads of 2nd hand CDs, and I expect I could find something tolerable.

And maybe I should start wearing a woolly hat for my charity shop sojourns, and an old overcoat tied shut with string, and complete the picture with a mangy old dog called Shep. It’s good to look the part when most people of consequence ignore you anyway.

Notes From the Dark Place.

While I was out this morning I thought of something to say on the blog. It was only one sentence, but it was a really good sentence and I was duly proud of myself. The problem is that I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, but I just thought I’d mention it so you know I haven’t been idle.

*  *  *

I might also mention that I realised this morning that my depression has now risen – or fallen, I suppose – to the level of real depression. I decided that it should be incumbent on me to come up with a description of what it’s like and how it may be distinguished from merely feeling down – because that seems to be my primary function in life – and was duly proud of that achievement also. The problem here is that it hasn’t entirely worn off yet and so I can’t be bothered to elucidate further. It did, however, amuse me slightly that I had an email from the priestess only half an hour ago in which she said: ‘I’ve met a Swedish man who is depressed, but he has lovely eyes.’

*  *  *

The only other point of note is that I left a comment on a YouTube video in which I used the phrase ‘emotional chic’ in describing a French woman who was being interviewed in the video. A male of the Gallic species replied ‘What?’ so I explained as briefly as I could why I’d used an unconventional term, it having been an example of taking English outside the box. He replied ‘What?’ again, and so I complimented his own impeccable use of English. He didn’t get the joke.

Declining the Teacher.

I’ll tell you one of the things I’m struggling with at the moment. I had a thought the other day which ran roughly:

‘A truly wise person never tells you how things are; they only find ways of encouraging you to find your own truth for yourself.’

Sounds a bit grand, doesn’t it? I’m not sure that I like grand very much. I never saw myself as a particularly grand sort of person. And it further occurred to me that if I were to say that to somebody, wouldn’t I be guilty of telling them how things are? But then, do I claim to be wise? No I don’t, so I don’t suppose it matters.

But then I thought about all those people of great gravitas who are supposed to be wise, or at least presumed to be so by those who listen to them – people like the Dalai Lama and Ghandi and Ricky Gervais. Wouldn’t I be guilty of insulting the good and the great? I really wouldn’t want to do that.

And the phrase ‘how things are’ is a pretty wide brief. What I had in mind when the thought occurred to me was the meaning of life and those irritating preachers and self-styled gurus who claim to know. But what about lesser matters, like learning to drive a car? The driving instructor has to start off by telling the pupil which pedal makes the car go and which one makes it stop, and that’s telling people how things are. But driving instructors don’t need to be wise, do they? So I don’t suppose that matters either.

And that’s why I’m struggling. I’ll think on, and probably abandon the thought on the grounds that I’ve long considered sound bites of wisdom to be mostly not worth the paper they’re written on. But I still can’t help feeling that the thought has some merit. And I often wonder whether my thoughts are not mine at all, but have been put there by somebody bigger than me. If that is the case, I’m struggling to understand why they would bother.

A Missing Note.

The extremely subdued nature of my mind in January (it still is extremely subdued, but I’m making an effort to extract a bit of life from it) caused me to miss the 10^th anniversary of my blog on 14^th of the month. I had intended to make a post about it on the day because it doesn’t seem anything like ten years since the blogging journey began. And that’s interesting in itself, because when a whole ten years seems so short it adds yet another shift in perception with regard to what future I have left.

A lot has changed during that time – I’ve changed, the Lady B has changed, the fabric of my life has changed, the world has changed, the colour of international politics has changed… How big a list should I try to create? I suppose it does bear repeating that the journey has taught me an awful lot about an awful lot of things, not least being the nature of who I am, or was, or think I might become.

But the priestess is still here, or at least she was last Thursday. That fact is a rare light in a world that has grown increasingly dark.

Replay.

An interesting thought just occurred to me regarding the young woman in the coffee shop who I talked about in the previous post. She reminds me of the girl I spoke to briefly in the fairground at Great Yarmouth when I was fourteen. It struck me that this could provide the perfect introduction:

‘Excuse me, miss, but you remind me of a girl I spoke to briefly in the fairground at Great Yarmouth when I was fourteen. That’s interesting, isn’t it? And by the way, I have to go into hospital for three days shortly and I wonder whether you might consider visiting me.’

And then she could say ‘no’ just like the girl I spoke to briefly in the fairground at Great Yarmouth when I was fourteen.

A Mind in Denial.

The young woman I see every Monday in the coffee shop – the one I mentioned briefly in a recent post because she maintains the unusual habit of staring at me – was there again today. I made a point of sitting outside her line of sight so she couldn’t.

I don’t know why her staring habit should be the cause of any disquiet because she’s uncommonly pretty, wears her naturally blonde and wavy hair pulled sideways into those most fetching fraulein-ish bunches, is bedecked in delightfully dotty and colourful attire, and – most importantly – appears to be wholly authentic. Right up my strangely convoluted street, right? Right. I have considered approaching her and saying ‘Excuse me, miss…’ and then repeating all the stuff I just said, only I don’t because if I did – and notwithstanding the fact that my main area of curiosity is whether her name is Abigail (which it almost certainly isn’t) – I worry that she might consider me an ageing pervert and decline ever to stare at me again. Which would be a shame. And that’s why I sat outside the line of her sight – so I wouldn’t be tempted.

*  *  *

The wind is making a curiously consistent rumbling sound tonight. The wind in these parts doesn’t usually rumble, being more inclined to roar, boom, hiss, moan, or whistle. Its odd rumbling habit caused me to wonder whether it could, in fact, be a commercial airliner en route to East Midlands Airport, but the sound doesn’t rise and fall as the sound of commercial airliners en route to East Midlands Airport usually does. Not unless, that is, the pilot has become confused and is flying around my house in circles, which is most unlikely. I decided to conclude that it probably has something to do with owls.

Leaving Notting Hill.

I saw a DVD of the film Notting Hill in a charity shop last week and decided I ought to buy it because I estimate that I’m one of probably about a hundred people over the age of 12 in the whole of the UK who’s never seen it. I remember it being quite celebrated when it was released twenty years ago. I remember the posters and the people saying oh what a lovely film it is. And I remember feeling vaguely inadequate that I could neither agree nor disagree.

(I also remember a Christmas night I spent among a gathering of actors in a flat in Notting Hill, only a few years before the film was made. I remember being fascinated by the way they conducted themselves, especially upon observing the curiously lurid and sickly energy which seemed to be passing between two male actors, both of whom I knew to be married to women.)

So I bought the DVD and tonight I watched it. Well, part of it at least. After 40 minutes I couldn’t stand any more and switched it off. I thought it remarkably analogous with candyfloss – all sugar and air, no substance whatsoever. Everything about it was at best predictable and at worst weakly overplayed. It must surely stand as the poorest of the simpering and sugar-coated Britpack genre which was making even the commercials look semi-intelligent around that time.

With one exception: Rhys Ifans. He was the only item of substance in the whole dreary affair. Then again, I’ve never yet seen Rhys Ifans be anything less than remarkable. (With one exception; there’s always one exception, isn’t there?) Luna Lovegood’s dad in the Harry Potter series. But that wasn’t his fault; he was simply given nothing to work with. What on earth possessed him to lend his remarkable presence and skills to this pile of insubstantial fluff escapes me. Maybe he’d only read his bits of the script.

A Bit of Synchronicity.

I had a long, late night session with Twin Peaks last night. I’ve said before that it’s probably my all time favourite TV series, and I must have been in just the right mood because I spent over an hour trawling through lots of short clips on YouTube.

(‘The owls are not what they seem,’ said the mysterious giant to Agent Cooper at one point. I thought about my recent encounters with the local barn owl and took solace from the fact that most of them probably are.)

What’s interesting, however, is that when I realised it was well past my bed time, I decided to take my leave of the denizens – variously dotty, deranged, deluded and/or dangerous – of Washington State and take a last look at my Blogger stats. I discovered that I’d received a large number of visits from Russia to individual posts made in 2014, and several of the posts they’d selected were on the subject of Twin Peaks.

Well, I’ve heard it said that examples of such synchronicity are carefully orchestrated by the holders of arcane knowledge to give us signs of some sort or other, only they don’t provide a translation manual to go with them. So what do I do now? Pay more attention to the barn owl? Run away from the barn owl. Throw things at the barn owl? Wait and see? OK, that’s favourite.

Speculating on Winter Blues.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find winter all but intolerable. It isn’t just the obvious dislike of being cold, it’s also the strength and quality of the light. Even when the sun shines and the air is mild, the daylight has a weak, sickly texture to it and the shadows are disturbingly long. And when the wind begins to moan as well, the whole fills me with a sense of desolation. Oh what it is to be an HSP.

I’ve often wondered why winter is such a trial to me. There are those who tell me that it’s simply the lack of vitamin D, but I wonder whether the reason might lie deeper. I was born on the verge of winter at the end of November, and so my emergence from the warm stillness of the womb dropped me straight into the dark, damp, dispiriting outside world of a typical British winter. It was probably a shock to the system.

On the other hand, it might be connected with a recurring childhood dream which I’ve also related on this blog, and which I feel sure stemmed from a pre-natal memory of not wanting to be born. Maybe I knew it was winter outside and didn’t want to give up my warm and cosy environment. But how would I know what winter would be like if I hadn’t been born yet?

Cue another maybe. Maybe the high level of credence I attach to the concept of metempsychosis is not so fanciful after all. Maybe I’d been here before and knew what to expect.

Establishing Priorities.

When I was much younger and still treading my personal path between the tram lines, I wanted what most people wanted – money and the lifestyle accoutrements it provided. But I occasionally heard older people say that money wasn’t the most important thing in life; good health was at the top of the tree. You could get through most difficulties and still enjoy life as long as you had good health.

I took no notice, of course, because good health is something you take for granted when you’re young. You don’t think about it. You walk and run and lift weights freely, and if you do get some minor injury it’s usually easily fixed. You have the confidence to take on difficult physical tasks because strength, energy and a fully functioning body are there to do with as you please. And, more importantly, you have unquestioning faith in your personal future.

In actual fact, for most of my life I never had money because, although I wanted it, I was never driven to chase it. I did modestly well in the material stakes, but that was all. But as I gradually moved further out from the cultural tram lines and the whole lifestyle and material accoutrements imperative became ever less important, one drawback with this evolving attitude was that money – or rather the lack of it – became a big problem. There came a point in 2009 when I saw no way of functioning even at subsistence level for so much as another month.

And then fate took a hand and began to ease the issue gradually over time, and now I’m perfectly comfortable financially. So cue the irony: Now that money is no longer a worry, I have a growing bag of health issues ranging from the ‘be cautious’ to those which compromise my freedom, menace every aspect of my wellbeing, and even threaten the continuation of life itself. And suddenly I know what those older people meant all those years ago.

A Revealing Choice.

I've watched a lot of operatic arias on YouTube in which duets are sung between sopranos and mezzos, and I'm always drawn to the mezzo. I wonder whether it means that I'm in thrall to dark and dominant women.

The following clip is a perfect example, and also illustrates why I wanted to remain a member of the EU. All we get in England are middle aged women singing Jerusalem while stirring jam in the village hall kitchen.