On Visits and Verisimilitude

According to Blogger stats, the number of page views this blog has received since it began running nearly fourteen years ago passed 400,000 today. Is that a lot? I don’t know; I expect celebrity bloggers get more ‘hits’ than that every day. But who’s counting since all I’m really doing is talking to myself silently? At the moment it’s being kept alive by somebody from Singapore, or more likely two people, one using an iPhone and the other an Android. I’m curious to know who they are, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out. (Occasionally I entertain the notion that it might be the Tan twins – those two lovely ladies, Su-Min and Su-Hui, who featured on the blog some years ago making fine music on the guzheng and ruan. Ever fanciful, you see, and such is the stuff of which dreams are made.)

*  *  *

I did some more autumn work in the garden today, and it struck me – as it nearly always does – that all gardening jobs take approximately twice as long as I’d expected them to take. I give myself an hour to do a job, and then come back into the house two hours later feeling a sense that an unwarranted amount of that mysterious thing we call time has slipped away unnoticed on the creamy wake of the ship of life. And then I feel cheated.

Talking of work, I read something by a Taoist once in which he said that work is the fundamental point of being alive. Nothing else matters according to him. The business of making things, changing things, organising things, facilitating things, serving various needs, and so on and so forth, is what we’re here for, and it’s work to which we must give overriding priority. It doesn’t matter what the work is as long as it’s work. (On the other hand, the celebrated philosopher Albert Camus opined –as far as I understand it – that life has no meaning or purpose whatsoever so it doesn’t matter what you do or whether you do anything at all. Then again, the Taoist had a long tradition behind him, whereas Albert was just this random Frenchman, you know?)

And this reminds me of an elderly farmer we have living in the Shire – a true son of the soil and the most conservatively-minded person I’ve ever known. He declines to accept that anything ever changes and is most insistent that neither should it. When we had the heat wave in July ’22 during which parts of the UK hit 40°C for the first time on record, he stopped his car one day and asked me whether I was enjoying the heat. I replied something to the effect that it was a bit more than we’re used and he replied: ‘No, not at all. We had a hot summer in 1959.’ He flatly refuses to accept that climate change is even happening, much less that human activity is in any way responsible.

But then I remember him telling me once of the instruction he gave to his kids when they were young: ‘I don’t care what you do, as long as you do something.’ I always assumed it to be an example of thinly veiled invective against anyone who, for whatever reason, accepts welfare payments. Now I’m tempted to wonder whether he’s actually a closet Taoist.