The Dispiriting Nature of Days.

I’ve adopted the habit of taking breakfast in bed a lot lately – just a bowl of cereal and a mug of tea, nothing extravagant. It’s to put off the moment when I have to leave my bed, get dressed, and open the door of my private little cell in order to face the world and another tedious day.

So why are the days so tedious? Well, because they rarely contain anything which isn’t either a chore, a maddening inconvenience, or something about which to be anxious. There’s so little to offer a spark of encouragement because most of what my culture has to offer by way of distraction is, to me, superficial, inconsequential and generally uninteresting. I can be sure now that I’m never likely to meet the person who could make me a baked Alaska, I’m never going to make that trip up the Yangtze because Mr Xi’s policies are making China thoroughly alien territory, and I’m never going to see the aurora because it would be too expensive and too bloody cold.

And yet there is still one thing I would like to do. Do you want to know what it is? It’s to sit down with the Lady B, having no previously prescribed time limit, and ask her some questions. But this is something I cannot look to have for a number of reasons, not least the fact that she has not the slightest desire to accommodate such an event. And there’s an even bigger impediment:

The questions I would like to ask are ones which I have no right to ask, and the answers – whatever they might be – are ones which I have no right to hear. And such an impediment has attained the level of the sacrosanct now. So that’s that.

 

Meanwhile, my growing faculty for empathy is causing me to be very worried about the plight of the poor people of Afghanistan.