The Matter of What Matters and Some Firsts.

I was walking around the lanes this morning seeing the occasional individual or couple cheerily going about their business with an evident sense of purpose, and down dropped the same question that such a sight always evokes: does any of it matter? At that point my mind split, as it always splits, into the two conflicting factions: one insisting that none of it matters while the other insists that all of it does. The war goes on.

Ironically, my own sense of purpose raised its profile after lunch when I decided to weed and dig one of the vegetable plots at the bottom of the garden. The ageing body with a heart issue finds such activity both tiresome and tiring these days, especially since I don’t even know whether any of it matters or not. But irony will be irony and convention will be convention, so get on with it I did. It was the first of this year’s crop of heavier garden jobs, and I’m not looking forward to any of them.

The big thrill of today, however, was seeing two bats hunting around the house at twilight. My love of the twilight bats has been remarked many times on the blog down the years, and although I’ve never kept a diary of firsts, I’m fairly sure that I’ve never seen them come out of hibernation as early as 5^th March before. And it was particularly noteworthy that there were two of them because it meant that the summer will probably bestow the added pleasure of seeing little kiddie bats following their parents to learn the game. 

Whether that matters in the greater scheme of things I don’t know, but it matters to me and that will do.