Times and Places.

I read today of Trump’s ongoing attempt to militarise American society in furtherance of his personal agendas. It’s the turn of Portland, OR this time, and as usual is accompanied by the most hilarious tirade of patently absurd and transparent rhetoric from the would-be dictator and his entourage of simpering minions. I wonder whether anybody has yet warned Trump to beware the Ides of March. 

*  *  *

A woman I encountered in the lane this morning told me that I shouldn’t be concerned about what is happening around the world because we live in a comfortable corner of the English countryside and the world’s troubles needn’t concern us. No world view there, then. I wonder whether she knows where Portland, OR is, and whether she realises that the state of American politics has tentacles capable of reaching even the most unlikely places around the globe.

*  *  *

On a parochial and much friendlier note, I gather those in control of our little corner of England have decided to include a splashpool in Ashbourne town centre as part of the refurbishment work. (I assume a splashpool is what we called a paddling pool back in the day when life was simpler – a shallow water amenity where children can paddle and splash each other with much glee in warm summer weather.) The work is due to be finished in November. Good timing, eh?

Life and Death in Ashbourne.

The local council (or it might be the county council or possibly the Highways Agency) are being creative at the moment with the layout of roads and pavements in Ashbourne. Ever since March (I think) there has been a plethora of heavy plastic barriers re-directing both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in furtherance of street refurbishment work. It changes nearly every week and resembles Hampton Court maze, and is due to carry on until November. It keeps the mind occupied because nearly every week it’s necessary to find a new way to get from A to B. I suppose it’s good for those who like to have their mind occupied. Mine’s dangerously overflowing as it is.

*  *  *

I was in a charity shop today and an attractive young blonde woman kept shooting meaningful glances in my direction. Since I could think of no credible reason why she would do that, I chose to presume it was because she was not wearing a bra and had very little fabric covering the essentials. I only glanced once, you see (and very briefly, honest) but maybe it was enough for her to express the slightest hint of triumphalism in her Gen Z eyes. Maybe boomers are fair game for zoomers now that there’s a prevailing sense that the world doesn’t have much longer to survive in its present form.

*  *  *

The sad but interesting sight was that of a dead hen pheasant lying on a pavement adjacent to a piece of road which is now open to traffic. ‘Maybe she didn’t know that the road now carries traffic and got hit by a car,’ you might suggest. Well, she was unmarked but definitely dead, so she probably had been hit by a vehicle. But there’s still a mystery. I’ve been shopping in Ashbourne for twenty three years and I’ve never seen a pheasant there before. Towns don’t have pheasants. They have pigeons, sparrows, and a few ducks on the river. Pheasants are birds of the woods and fields because their very existence is largely dependant on serving the recreational needs of country gentlemen and ladies who like to shoot things. Maybe that’s precisely what this little lady was trying to escape, only to get despatched by a speeding Volvo instead. Life can be like that.

Dispirited and Disappointed.

The Autumnal equinox passed at 6.19pm this evening, which means that for the next six months we will have less daylight than we had today. I find that dispiriting, and yet still I wouldn’t want to live in Florida.

*  *  *

I watched a video on YouTube last night – just for fun you understand – in which a nice young lady sought to encourage in me the belief that I’m not a normal human being at all, but a Pleiadian star seed. They’re really nice people, you know, the Pleiadians, full of love and light and taking human incarnation solely to help us raise our consciousness.

The problem is that the Pleiades form a small constellation up and to the right of Orion, and Orion’s belt points the way. When I was in the habit of taking night walks some years ago, it was Orion which most fascinated me and at which I spent most time staring. And yet I never looked up and to the right. You’d think I would, wouldn’t you, if my home planet was a mere flick of the eyes away. Besides, Pleiadians are supposed to be tall and blond, which I’m not, so I didn’t take it too seriously.

The Question of Hate and Criminality.

I had an email this morning from Avaaz, the campaigning organisation, asking me to sign a petition. It concerned an incident in Australia recently when a bunch of white men went to an aboriginal sacred area and beat local tribes people – including women – with iron bars while shouting ‘white power.’

Some of the perpetrators have, apparently, been identified and charged with assault, but Avaaz say this isn’t enough. They say that it should be treated as a hate crime, the implication being that a crime driven by hate carries – or at least permits – a stronger punishment than the same crime committed without such motivation. And so I considered the rationale of such a position.

Hate is an emotional feature residing in the mind, and I have to consider the logic of criminalising a mental faculty. It seems absurd to do so because we are surely all free to hate just as we are free to love, daydream, become excited, or whatever. Hate is, I concede, a negative emotion, but it’s still firmly settled in the human consciousness and is never likely to go away. To criminalise an action makes sense because actions have physical consequences, but to augment the action by reference to the motivation makes the motivation itself a crime, and that surely brings us into the area of thought policing.

There are politicians on this planet who I hate (even though the spiritual gurus tell me I shouldn’t), but as long as I commit no action such as hitting Mr Ben-Gvir with an iron bar, I have committed no crime. And it seems ironic that the Avaaz worker who wrote the email probably hates the yobs who committed that horrible crime, and probably also hates the concept of thought police.

An Old Trick.

I was reading today about the laws being enacted in California in response to Trump’s anti-immigration tactics. Foremost was the banning of law enforcement personnel and I.C.E. officials from wearing face masks – which they do, presumably, to hide their identity.

Remember the days of the old westerns when it was the bad guys who wore handkerchiefs over their faces? This isn’t making America great again; this is making American culture increasingly sinister. Surely there are enough intelligent Americans to see where this is taking them.

When I said in a post a long time ago that Trump might lead the way to a second American civil war, it was a tongue-in-cheek remark. Now I’m not so sure. And maybe Trump knows it, too. Maybe that’s why he’s pre-empting the situation by militarising the cities.

Over on this side of the pond, Starmer and his so-called Labour Party are now planning to make the carrying of identity cards obligatory for everybody. He says it will make life easier and safer.

Well of course he does. That’s what they always say when there’s a perceived need to make the populace acquiescent. True dictators only have to say the word to have their orders obeyed without question, but dear old Blighty still likes to think of itself as a free country. And so, if the government wants to erode liberties and send the sheep securely into the pen, it helps to persuade people that it’s for their benefit.

Fallen Seeds and Fake Stats.

One of the things which bother me at this time of year is the sight of hundreds of acorns lying idle and forlorn across the tarmac road surfaces. I love oak trees, you see. Their size and often-idiosyncratic shape make them probably the most characterful of all the native British trees, and their leaves are also particularly good looking. Seeing them scattered and crushed by the wheels of vehicles, never to grow into sturdy oaks, irritates me. 

*  *  *

According to Blogger stats I reached a milestone this morning: the number of page views to this blog achieved the dizzying height of a million. I would consider this a notable achievement if I believed it, but since I don’t I won’t.

*  *  *

And guess what I did this morning. I rescued an earthworm struggling across the road. If only the Lady B knew how hard old habits die. It was raining at the time but I still watched the worm for a long time to study how they move. It's nearly always the little things in this questionable thing we call existence which I find most fascinating.

Pitying America.

Trump has just concluded his state visit to the UK, and while he was here he recommended to Starmer, our Prime Minister, that he should use the military to stop the influx of migrants. Trump doesn’t get it, does he?

For something like 200 years there’s been an inviolate understanding in the UK that the military is there for one purpose only: to protect the country against an armed adversary. It has no role to play in social and civilian matters; that’s the job of the law enforcement agencies.

But Trump does so love the military. He used it in several major cities recently to address the problems of crime and – heaven help us – homelessness. This must have, and certainly should have, worried a lot of Americans because the free use of military power in civilian matters is a mark of the true dictator. And now he wants to refuse licences to media outlets which disagree with him. This is truly chilling because a man who relies on the military to enforce his will, and who openly silences his detractors, is the very embodiment of Orwell’s Big Brother.

When Trump won the 2024 election I said on this blog that the man who had been little more than a laughable buffoon the first time around would become bolder the second time. And so he has, and his boldness is increasing as he shows his true muddy colours. It seems abundantly clear that America needs to divest itself of Donald Trump, but how to do that without an election, because any means which are not clearly democratic would run counter to the reason for doing it? I don’t know the answer to that, and I certainly don’t envy those better Americans who have to live with the worry of having Trump remain in office.

And of course, the real uncertainty hinges on what will happen when the next election comes around. Can we reasonably expect Trump to accept the end of his tenure gracefully? It’s going to be interesting, and I do hope that Europe manages to distance itself from American influence in the meantime.

Connecting With the Energy.

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that there’s usually a day in September when I go for a walk and feel that there’s something missing. I’ve always suspected that I was sensing the earth energies – or whatever you want to call nature’s driving force – falling dormant, and that this is the true start of autumn. That day was yesterday.

This morning my walk took me to the top of the lane where I saw a large number of swallows three days ago, hunting in their inimitable fashion over a field at the side of the road. That’s where I mostly see them, but this morning there were none. I looked in all directions but failed to see a single bird, and I assumed that they’d left us and begun their long journey back to South Africa. It saddened me a little because the day was bright and calm and the warmest day for several weeks. And then I made the tentative connection:

Am I right when I seem to sense the fall in the earth energies, and do birds feel the same thing? Is that how the swallows know it’s time to start the return trip?

I can’t know for sure, of course, but it’s good to think that for all I’ve lost interest in what modern western culture has to offer with its gadgets and its choices and its multi-media entertainment, coming to feel a subtle, quiet sense from the heart of nature is a whole lot more valuable.

Blacker Than the Blackest Night.

There are several videos on YouTube claiming that we are going to experience three days of intense darkness on 22^nd, 23^rd, and 24^th of this month. The darkness is going to be so deep, apparently, that it will be impossible to see anything at all, and the only thing which will alleviate it will be blessed candles. They say it’s God’s punishment for not paying Him enough attention.

The people making these videos are so earnest that I’ll be very disappointed if it doesn’t happen. I mean, YouTube is usually so reliable, isn’t it?

An Adage and an Achievement.

The bats and swallows are still with us in the Shire. I saw a bat flying around the house this evening and the air was thick with swallows at the top of my lane two days ago. So if the bats and swallows are still here, does it mean that summer hasn’t ended yet?

Not according to my house it doesn’t. It’s been uncomfortably cold for two weeks now and it’s woken me up feeling chilled at night. If I weren’t such a miser (or a person of relatively meagre means) I would have switched my storage heaters on. But I am, so I haven’t. And it does give me a chance to coin a new adage.

We have one in Britain (and I expect others have it too) which runs: One swallow does not a summer make. Now I’m adding the corollary: A flock of swallows does not an autumn deny. You wouldn’t think I’d still be undiscovered at my age, would you?

 

*  *  *

 

Today I did 2½ unbroken hours of strimming and hedge trimming work in the garden. I think that’s the first time I’ve done 2½ hours manual labour without a break since the kidney operation seven years ago. And all I had to pay for it was two hours of backache.

(And did you notice that every word of the title begins with A, and so does 'alliteration'? How clever is that?)

Pennies From Heaven.

The weather was wet in Ashbourne this morning, and as I walked among the throng of shoppers I noticed that very few of them had umbrellas. Hoods and wetted hair were the order of the day; umbrellas were a rarity. (I’m a hoods man myself.)

Later I was sheltering underneath the overhang of a shop roof, puffing gently on a roly and watching the common horde traipsing their anonymous and mostly silent ways across the sodden roads and footpaths, when I noticed a youngish and comely woman approaching. She was using an umbrella, a red and white one, and as she came close I remarked that it was good to see an umbrella in use because so few people carry them these days.

I expected her to respond with the usual brand of polite indifference which people commonly employ when accosted by a complete stranger with nothing notable to say. She didn’t. Instead she smiled and stopped, and then we had a quiet and most amicable conversation around the subject of habits and dress styles and the requirements of different locations. There were no awkward pauses because just before one might have ensued she said ‘goodbye’ and walked on. Perfect timing, just as you would expect from a benevolent and omniscient universe.

It reminded me of being taken to the dentist as a child. When the ordeal was over my mother would take me to the Woolworth’s store and buy me a little gift so as to sweeten the pill in the final act. And so, it seems, does fate occasionally.

The Wrong Way to Judge a Book.

The following conversation took place yesterday. The opening line came from the farmer out with his tractor trimming the hedgerows in my part of the Shire:

‘You look well this year.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. I meant to tell you that the other day. For the last couple of years you’ve looked a bit peaky, but you look much better this year.’

So there you have it; time seems to be going backwards for me. If only I felt better.

The man who said it is in his fifties and the very embodiment of bucolic stock – heavy-set, ruddy faced, hands like hams, strong local accent – a veritable bull of a man from whom you would expect great physical strength and practical acumen, but probably little advanced erudition.

And then the conversation turned to subject of mortality and finished with me quoting a line from Shakespeare: Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

At that the floodgates opened and he waxed eloquent about how much he loved Shakespeare because every situation you might encounter in life is contained therein.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how deceptive appearances can be and that still waters often run deeper than you expect. And the old adage that a book should never be judged by its cover was given a fresh airing.

YouTube and the Fakery Phenomenon.

I’m becoming very disappointed with YouTube lately. What started as an interesting little platform for people to ‘broadcast themselves’ (as YouTube itself styled the process) has become a veritable cornucopia of all human life (plus aliens, cutesy animals, robots, and AI generally.)

All for the good you might say, but there’s a problem. The parasites are breeding so fast that the platform is now awash with an infestation of click bait opportunists. Those of us who are a bit savvy in the matter of human nature and modes of communication soon learn to spot them. They show pictures of the great and good on their thumbnails – Carl Jung is a favourite – to lead the unwary into the delusion that they are being offered words of formidable sagacity. They make outrageous claims which are so outlandish that you’d have to have an IQ in single figures to take the bait. They hype up the adjectives – ‘terrifying’ is one of the commonest – in the hope that those with an IQ in single figures will leap in to have their education augmented. And no doubt the boys at Google are clapping their hands and salivating copiously because they know that the more hits these channels get, the more billions Google make in the process.

And this is a shame because there are good channels on YouTube; the problem is finding them. I’ve found a few and they are now regulars, but I seem to spend more and more time scrolling down my recommendations and finding little more than click bait rubbish.

This argument applies to more than just YouTube, of course. YouTube is only one leading example of the fakery by which we’re surrounded in the modern world. Meanwhile, the media finds an ever-increasing list of diversions to keep the tramliners distracted. We have endless game shows, lifestyle shows, ‘reality’ shows, shopping channels, soaps, etc, etc, etc. And elite sport is growing at such a rate that you can watch your favourite player or team in some major championship or other nearly every week, comfortably closeted against the fakery and thereby failing to notice the absurdity of it all and the slow slide towards a totalitarian future. And I used the word 'diversions' earlier, because maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe it’s deliberate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I know nothing, really I don’t. But I’m sure I see a pattern emerging here and I don’t much like it.

Whistling Down the Aliens.

The atmospheric electrical activity we had today wasn’t quite a full blown thunderstorm, but it was unusual. The lightning wasn’t the usual bright flash behind cloud cover (sheet lightning), nor the vertical fork lightning of the sort which breaks off tree branches and fries people. It was a thin horizontal strip covering about 5-7 degrees of arc in the eastern sky.

The thunder was unusual, too. It wasn’t as sharp as it normally is, but it was louder, deeper, and rumbled much longer than it usually does. And it spooked me, just as it did the last time I heard the same thing when I was a young child. I was immediately moved to wonder whether it was 31/ATLAS sending out a message that its arrival was imminent.

For those who don’t know, 31/ATLAS is a mysterious chunk of rock – or maybe it’s made of something else – which was originally thought to be just another comet, but which has taken to doing things which comets never do. Even some scientists are now saying ‘it can’t be a comet so it must be an alien spacecraft’ and this had led to four different conclusions by the hungry-for-hits YouTubers down here at grass roots level.

Some believe the scientists have got it wrong and it really is just another comet, some believe that it’s an unmanned alien craft come to give us some sort of a message, a third group is warning us that we are about to be invaded by an alien army (the ‘rock’ is seven miles long, apparently), and a fourth group is claiming that it contains a consortium of different species of alien who are on a mission to raise the consciousness of the human race.

I favour the latter, and I’ll tell you why:

According to Google stats, the page views to this blog have gone ballistic over the last year and are continuing to rise. This month has already set an all time record and we’re not half way through it yet. I chose not to believe it, of course, because it simply isn’t credible. Unless…

… unless there’s a race of superior beings on a planet several light years distant who are addicted to my ramblings for some odd reason. And maybe they’ve come to the conclusion – on the basis of my blog – that the little planet at the bottom of the Milky Way is having its affairs directed by a bunch psychopaths and imbeciles and it’s about time they came and sorted it out.

If that is the case, I could face the falling of the final curtain in the knowledge that my stay here mattered in some small way after all. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Sightings and the Simian Predilection.

When I was a mere slip of a 17-year-old I took a temporary job as a warehouseman and shelf filler in a supermarket. One of my young colleagues was persuaded into a dalliance with one of the girls working there, and one night they went out together and ended up at his place.

‘How was it?’ I asked the next morning.

‘Horrible.’

‘Horrible? Why?’

‘Er jumped on me like a bloody monkey and wouldn’t let go. I had to push her off the bed eventually.’

I sympathised actually because I had noticed that the girl in question had probably the worst teeth I’d ever seen. There was a lot of black visible, and I remember wondering why she hadn’t engaged the services of a dentist with a lot of spare time on his hands.

And there was another girl working there who took a shine to me. Her teeth were fine, but she had red blotches on various parts of her skin which I found disconcerting. I still took her out one night, but maintained sufficient distance as to obviate any possibility of a simian predilection becoming manifest. And then I joined the navy.

My time before the mast was relatively brief, but it did lead to very pleasant encounters with Jeannie in St Johns, Newfoundland, and Ruth in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Both had perfect teeth and neither showed the slightest inclination to engage in monkey malpractice.

*  *  *

And talking of encounters, I had three rare ones this week – the Lady B driving past me in her car, the incomparable Ms Medeea shopping in Sainsbury’s, and two stoats crossing the tarmac in Church Lane. It must be nearly twenty years since I last saw a stoat in these parts. And there’s a huge spider currently standing on the carpet outside my bedroom door. Despite its overall size, its head isn’t quite big enough to assess the state of its teeth.

*  *  *

Some good news today though: it seems I’m to keep the car for a while longer after all. Considering the fact that the nearest town – and therefore the nearest supermarket, the nearest doctor’s, the nearest dentist, and the nearest municipal tip – is over seven miles away, and the nearest hospital twenty miles away, being without a car would be inconvenient.

About Bed and Alarm Calls.

I have to be somewhere at a certain time tomorrow, and so I have to set the alarm tonight and get up to its call in the morning. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: I hate being woken up by an alarm.

It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t take kindly to the regime at Dartmouth College when I was in the navy. After a physically and mentally exhausting day I would settle into bed at 10 o’clock and the room lights would go out. Sleep came quickly, but just as I was dreaming of the green, green grass of home, the full range of ceiling lights would destroy the sanctity of blessed darkness, a very loud and strident bell would shatter the peace, and I would have twenty minutes to get up, get dressed, perform a few simple ablutions, and then be at the parade ground, a classroom, or the gym in a fully functioning condition. It was 6am. Hateful.

It seems to me that a bed is like the womb: a sanctuary of calmness and warmth, isolated from a world which is often dirty and decrepit, unkind and uncomfortable, cold and callous. In the womb you have only yourself and your thoughts to take trouble over, and so it is with bed. I seem to recall Flann O’Brien’s MC saying something similar in At Swim-Two-Birds. And it’s no surprise that babies cry heartily when they take the dreaded drop.

I think my newly discovered PDA might be playing some sort of a role in this. If so, it’s been with me since childhood because I remember the joy I felt at the prospect of Saturday mornings and the school holidays when the decision to rise was entirely mine. And the reference to Flann O’Brien might suggest that this is another echo of my distant Irish lineage.

Age-Old Trickery.

There’s an ad in the sidebar of my Hotmail home page which says:

 

Boots Shoppers Are

Switching to

This Age

Reviving…

(I should add that Boots is a leading British retailer of mostly over-the-counter remedies and cosmetics.)

It purports to come from Skincare Magazine and includes a before and after photograph of the same woman. There’s a least thirty years between them and it’s obviously nonsense.

We all know it’s nonsense, don’t we? We all know that it’s done using lighting, facial expressions, hair condition, subtle changes in background colour, and mostly by the judicious use of computer software. (It used to be airbrushing but it’s even easier now once you’re familiar with the technology.)

This before-and-after ploy has been around for longer than I can remember. It was common when I was a boy, and I believed it then because scepticism is a faculty which grows with age and experience. I can’t imagine it fooling anyone over the age of majority now, and certainly not the older people at whom it is presumably aimed.

What really surprises me, though, is that we have an organisation in the UK called the Advertising Standards Authority whose job it is to prevent advertising which is clearly dishonest. Well, this ad for the skin care product is clearly fraudulent, and fraud is surely a form of dishonesty. So why are these ads allowed to continue online? And since we’re all aware of the trickery involved, why do companies continue to pursue the practice. Or are there more people dumb enough to fall for it than I thought possible?

(I can't post the photograph because Google have changed their conditions and crossed a red line. Sorry.)

Smelling Something Rotten.

I think it reasonable to suggest that the majority world opinion on the issue of Gaza is firmly behind the Palestinians. I think it also reasonable to suggest that the majority of world opinion regards Israel’s actions as being much less about a war against Hamas and much more about taking vicious reprisals against the innocent, a process in which revenge and land-grabbing is of greater value than the lives and limbs of women and children. And I further think it reasonable to suggest that Israel is currently regarded as the world’s foremost pariah state – even more than Russia because at least Ukraine is able to fight back. Even the senior politicians in Europe are vehement in their criticism of the Israeli hard liners and are planning to recognise Palestinian statehood, and this includes the UK government.

And yet hundreds of people in Britain – many of them elderly – are being arrested for holding a peaceful protest in support of the group known as Palestine Action. You may remember from an earlier post that this was the group that was proscribed under anti-terrorism legislation because a few people broke into an RAF base and sprayed some red paint on an aircraft. That, according to our addle-headed government, was an act of terrorism. (Erm… oh no it is wasn’t. Terrorism is something like the bombing of the King David hotel by Israeli hardliners in 1946 which killed 91 people and injured a further 46. That’s terrorism.)

And what I find really interesting is that the British police are constantly complaining that they have insufficient officers. They say it’s why they can’t afford to investigate minor crimes. And yet a whole army of them turn out to arrest hundreds of old folks for taking part in a peaceful demonstration.

There’s something rotten in the state of Britain these days under the apparently inept leadership of Keir Starmer. He seems to be holding the door open for a bunch of upstart wannabees calling themselves Reform UK to possibly win the next General Election. Their leader is little Nigel Farage who would become Prime Minister in that eventuality. If that happens we really will be in a Trump MkII situation. (Little Nigel even thinks he’s Trump’s best friend, God help us.)

Not Guilty.

There was a typically petite Chinese woman stacking shelves in one of the charity shops in Uttoxeter today. Her hair was tied back, but that didn’t hide the fact that it was long, jet black, luxuriant, and shimmering. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

She noticed me casting long gazes in her direction, smiled and said ‘Hello. Are you all right?’ What could I do but speak the truth?

‘I find Chinese women’s hair fascinating,’ I said.

The smile faded and was replaced by a look of mild suspicion. Again, what could I do but speak the truth?

‘It’s so lovely,’ I continued.

The smile returned – with the teeth this time.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, and then turned and walked away.

Was that creepy? No, of course not. For a start it was simply a statement of truth. Besides, she was neither particularly young nor particularly pretty, and so I had no reason to play the ageing Lothario role. And that’s my best attempt at gaining absolution.

It was raining heavily at the time.

The Ludicrous and the Lyrical.

I watched a YouTube video recently which contained what is probably the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard on YouTube. It was a travelogue about Japan, and contained the statement: ‘Being on the edge of the Eurasian continent, Japan is one of the first countries on earth to experience the sunrise.’ I suspect the write either died suddenly or was kidnapped by aliens or something before he could finish the sentence with ‘on New Year’s Day.’

Conversely, I listened to an old Irish air on another video which the uploader claimed was 1,000 years old. It’s both beautiful and heart-wrenching and can be heard here. (Google won’t let me add fancy things like pictures unless I agree to terms which I find unpalatable.) The line which particularly struck me was this:

No chain, no crown could ever keep

The love I sow, the loss I reap

So now I’m wondering whether my habit of converting most experiences to metaphors derives from my Irish heritage.

Two Latest Possibilities and Two Short Notes.

The one I like: The whole universe is inside my consciousness. Or, to put it another way, my consciousness is larger than the whole universe. This is true of all of us, and our fundamental error lies in failing to realise that we are perceiving reality through an almost infinitesimally narrow angle.

The one I don’t like: I am alone in the universe. There is something comforting in the notion of individuality, even though it’s probably an illusion. I don’t want to give that one up yet.

Still searching.

*  *  *

The onset of twilight is happening earlier and becoming duller as the power of the sun wanes. (Or so it seems to an apparent individual.) I feel the shade of S.A.D. creeping closer.

The Shetland pony which lives in a field down by the river came and greeted me today for the first time ever. The poor little chap always looks sad to me, but Shetland ponies usually do.

Lunar Ambivalence.

When I was writing When the Waves Call I discovered that the harvest moon mostly occurs in September, but not always. The harvest moon – at least according to my informant – is the one which occurs closest to the autumnal equinox.

Accordingly, I just checked the date of this September’s full moon and it’s on 7^th. I then did a quick calculation (or as quick as my ageing and increasingly flaccid brain will allow) and worked out that the time between the September full moon and the equinox is about the same as from the equinox to the October full moon. This year’s harvest moon might, therefore, be in October.

Don’t you learn interesting things reading this blog? I hope you’re grateful. (And it might all be wrong, of course.)