The Problem With Imagination.

I went into my bathroom tonight and was suddenly beset by a vivid flash of imagination. Something was in my house and approaching me – something which the most extremely speculative reasoning couldn’t possibly account for; something which clearly had no right to be there. It was surprisingly scary, especially since it allowed the possibility of a repeat encounter.

I considered whether I should write it down as a piece of fiction since it had a commendable hint of Murakami about it. But you see, all the scary stuff I wrote during my period of writing scary stuff never scared me. Why would it? My imagination was, after all, just having fun. This wasn’t fun, so I probably won’t.

Serving the Cruelty Gene.

My YouTube’s recommendations have suddenly started to include videos of people being ‘eaten alive’ by predatory animals. Needless to say I haven’t watched any of them, but it raises certain questions:

1. What kind of human being wants to watch a video of anything, especially a fellow human, undergoing the horror of being eaten alive?

2. Are these videos real or AI-generated? If they’re real, who is filming them and how? I think AI generation is most likely.

3. Why is YouTube recommending these travesties of decency to me? The only animal videos I watch are the occasional animal rescue ones if they look genuine, and that doesn’t amount to very many. And I never watch videos of people being forced to suffer in any way, so what is going on with YouTube’s algorithms?

4. Have we reached the point at which a public and highly profitable platform is allowing the production of fake and extremely nasty material clearly aimed at perverted minds, and claiming that it’s real? If these things can be allowed to exist, shouldn’t they be restricted to the dark web which, apparently, thrives on the darkest side of human nature?

I suppose the opportunity to watch this kind of thing is the modern alternative for those who used to shake with excitement at the prospect of watching some poor soul being burned alive at the stake. Will the human race ever aspire to its potential, I wonder?

Re-Posting to Fill a Gap.

Yesterday I thought of two blog posts which I intended to write up on the morrow. But now the morrow is here I can’t remember what they were about, so I can’t.

Nil desperandum, however. Something I was musing on earlier reminded me of an old ditty I posted to this blog many years ago. Though short, it’s one of the very few I might almost grace with term ‘poem’ (but only just.) The muse, incidentally, centred around growing up in an industrial area surrounded by a hundred thousand chimneys belching soot into the air (day and night during the winter.) The ditty (almost poem) never had a title, so I’ll give it one now. It’s called On Seeing a Chinese Lady Looking Wan in February.

Should I compare thee to a smoggy day in old Beijing

Where ne’er a merry roundelay is heard

 

For not a bird will deign to sing

To woo his mate with lovelorn din

 

But coughs instead

(In Mandarin)

And now I’m in the mood I think I’ll re-post the other ditty-which-comes-close-to-being-called-a-poem. This one doesn’t have a title either because I was never able to think of one. I still can’t.

Is there something afoot Mistress Bella la Belle

Are you going away in the morning

Will you leave the home shore without saying farewell

While the dew is still sweet at the dawning

 

As I’m settled in sleep and the sun tolls a knell

Will I heed not the want of a warning

And whene’er you return will the spectre re-tell

Of the day you set sail in the morning

If I said that this is about Egypt you’d call me puddled, wouldn’t you? (At least you would if you came from my bit of industrial England.) In that case I won’t bother.

And it might be considered notable that the last time I made thirty or more posts in one month was 2½ half years ago. Make of it what you will.

More Post Truth Blues.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to make a series of posts on YouTube Tasters I Refuse to Click On. You know, things like: ‘She died and went to heaven. She met Jesus there who told her…’ Nobody would click on something as absurdly fake and manipulative as that, would they? Apparently they do, in their tens or even hundreds of thousands, and my faith in my fellow humans sinks a little lower every time. Anyway, I never seem to get around to making a list to compile in a blog post, so I thought I’d pick out one to make a general point.

This evening I came across a taster about the mysterious circumstances around the death of Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve heard the story from several sources, but a quick glance at the thumbnail told me something was off. It has a picture of a dark sky over an American-style, high rise cityscape, but the most prominent feature is a picture of an ageing Nikola Tesla. Why Tesla? Where’s the connection? As far as history recalls, there’s no connection whatsoever between the two. They weren’t even contemporary, Poe having died five years before Tesla was born.

So was the uploader so ignorant that he didn’t know the difference between a famous writer of gothic stories and a ground-breaking scientist? Or was he simply using a well known image to encourage other ignorant people to click on the video, which is fraudulent? This happens with images of Carl Jung a lot. ‘What Carl Jung said about…’ Rubbish. And there was a trend at one time for uploading songs credited to Enya, when nothing about the writing or performance had anything to do with Enya. People pointed it out in the comments, but the fake credit stayed.

So here’s the real question:

If Google wants to own and run YouTube for the purpose of making huge amounts of money, why do they abdicate the responsibility to exercise some control over the veracity of the information?  We all know the answer to that one, of course. Truth doesn’t matter any longer, only money does. You can tell as many lies as you want to invent, and peddle as much garbage as you can find, and it’s wholly acceptable as long as it’s making money.

There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t. ~ Margaret Thatcher.

So what do we do about this lamentable trend? Decline to watch any more YouTube? I think I might, but that would be a shame because there are genuine people out there making a living out of it at a time when the jobs market is faltering. And it’s obvious from the production values that most of them put a lot of effort into it. And some of them are genuinely informative and/or entertaining. (Try Hilary Layne’s channel for a good example.) Besides which, the protest of one little man like me wouldn’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy and dishonest world. We would have to do it in our hundreds of thousands. And what about the rest of the media world? They’re all becoming just as bad.

I’m sorry to say this – truly I am – but I think America largely took us down this road. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,’ said the Great God Money. And so they don’t. (Hilary Lane is American, by the way. At least I think she is. I suppose she could be Canadian. We Europeans get easily confused by North American accents.)

Opposite Poles.

I was engaged in my regular people watch outside Sainsbury’s today when I saw a young man and woman – around mid to late twenties – walking briskly towards the car park. The woman had jet black hair (a rarity in the UK) cut neatly in a bob style at collar length, but what most caught my eye was lower down. Beneath her midi length skirt she was wearing flat formal shoes and ankle socks. The usual attire for women that age is either shorts or jeans with trainers, and so I decided she was either from another time, another place, or was maybe a little odd. I wanted to make her acquaintance because I like people who are a little odd, but her male companion was thin and wishy-washy with fine, pale blond hair, so I didn’t bother. And she might not have spoken English anyway.

What was even odder, however, was the pair of men standing outside the doors. One was tall, thin, and around thirty. He had very long and heavily permed hair, and was wearing the oddest two piece suit in a random mixture of retrained colours. The top garment was tight and clung to his overly slight frame, and the trousers were heavily flared with tassels up the back. His face carried an overly enthusiastic grin and he was being equally enthusiastically interviewed by a fat, slobbish, middle aged man holding one of those little furry microphones which some YouTubers use. I decided that their brand of oddness was one with which I’m wholly and gratefully unacquainted, and so I gave them a wide berth. Heat and sunshine does bring the strangest of creatures out into public view, doesn’t it?

Recovery: The Garden Diary.

The bats are back. Anyone reading this blog in the old days might remember me waxing eloquent about the bats at twilight. It was the delight of the day to stand among them during their feeding frenzy, but then the long, cold winter of 2012/13 (or whenever it was) decimated their numbers and they’ve never recovered since.

This year they have, and once again I’m able to stand outside on a warm evening being thrilled by a veritable tribe of the little creatures flying rapidly around the house and pirouetting at mesmeric speed. And some of them are bigger than others, so I’m hoping they’re a family and the kids will survive next winter to carry on the tradition. They might even multiply.

There are also very many more butterflies in the garden than there have been in recent years, and even two species I haven’t seen here before. The bees are still a cause for concern, though. There are plenty of bumble bees, but still very few honey bees. I assume it’s why my apple tree has failed to crop for about five years now. And there’s also a dearth of wasps, maybe because the apple tree is failing and wasps seem to be particularly attracted to fruit. Maybe they’ll appear in numbers once the plums begin ripening. It seems odd to most people that I like wasps, and yet I do. They’re good looking and I don’t find them at all threatening as long as I accept their presence with equanimity.

On the Precious and the Perplexing.

The dream I had last night was a vague, misty affair. I was helping somebody do a job with a pile of white plastic pipes which had a bore of about two inches. But I was hesitant because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them, why I was there at all, and I couldn’t properly see the man I was supposed to be helping.

When I woke up I was beset by the fear that if the present drought in the UK continues, the rivers and reservoirs might soon run dry. I imagined the consequences and they became ever more awful until we were all dirty, decrepit, and finally dead so it didn’t matter any more.

And then I remembered that all through my life – even as a young boy – I’ve wondered why we don’t commit resources to the development of desalinisation technology and the provision of infrastructure to distribute purified sea water to where it’s needed. It always struck me that this would be a far more sensible use of resources than going to the moon, keeping huge militaries, killing children in Iranian schools, and producing shiny things to bolster the egos of the dim witted. The confidence we have that the planet will always continue to behave in a manner commensurate with human interest sometimes seems a little risky. And it seems a little odd that while we can develop software capable of doing nearly everything that people used to do, we still can’t develop the means to take salt out of water efficiently.

And then I used a few dozen gallons of precious water to have a shower. I always feel weak and a little ill after a shower, and I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with guilt. They say the INFJ mind works differently than the normal mind. Well, I’ve spent a lifetime being driven into the wilderness, mostly alone, by it, so they’re probably right.

But here’s a little end note: When I was walking up the lane earlier I was passed by a big, articulated box truck. The whole of its back doors was covered by an image of white plastic pipes, seen end on as they were in the dream. And up came that old question about coincidence again.

Getting to Know Me.

There’s an American woman on YouTube who does reaction videos on old British children’s TV shows. Her gravelly voice sounds a bit New York to me, but I’m no expert on American accents (except Deep South, of course; we all know the drawl), but the point is this:

She’s done at least two now on The Magic Roundabout, and it just occurred to me that when I’m in high functioning mode I’m the perfect cocktail of one part Dylan, one part Ermintrude, and one part Dougal. Anyone familiar with the British version of the show (the original was French with the same characters but different stories) will know what I mean. And the main point in saying this is that I think I need a Florence.

(When I’m in low functioning mode I’m pure, unadulterated Eeyore – which I thought was an oxymoron before I learned the true definition of the word. I blame a cousin of mine from whom I first heard it.)

Must stop making Me posts.

Phloxes and Fallacies.

The garden was scented this evening. It’s the first time the garden’s been scented this year, so I tracked down the source. It was the phlox flowers, two clumps of which stand next to the big dogwood shrub. And it was rather pleasant.

‘Excuse me.’

Oh, God, I’m about to be interrupted by one of my lesser known personality variants.

What?

‘You shouldn’t say that.’

Shouldn’t say what?

‘That you like the smell of a scented garden.’

Why not?

‘It’s girly.’

Why is it girly? Why am I allowed to express a liking for the smell of new-mown hay, salt sea air, women’s perfume, and pubs, but not a scented garden?

‘Where was the scent coming from?’

Some flowers.

‘And what colour were they?’

Pink.

‘Well there you are, then. Girly.’

Bugger off.

Now do you see what I have to put up with when my depression is in high functioning mode?

The Peril of Panpsychism.

I was just reading an old post about the night my Spanish guitar went west (or ‘went south’ to the colonials.) I remember the feeling of sorrow I felt at the prospect of casting it into the tip on its way to lie broken and unwanted in some smelly old landfill site somewhere. And on recalling the fact, something crystallised in my mind – something I already realised but hadn’t thought much about before. What I was feeling was guilt, not loss.

I give some credence to the doctrine of panpsychism, you see (consciousness is present in every cell of material – the basis, as I understand it, of the old Sufi saying {originally ancient Indian, apparently}: that God sleeps in the stone, stirs in the plant, dreams in the animal, and wakes in man.)

So that was the real basis of my regret: not so much the sorrow of losing something precious to me, but the worry that I might be hurting its feelings. I feel the same way about most things I discard. It’s one of my oddities.

On Topping Up the Bird Table For the Morning.

Imagine a late afternoon or early evening when the sky is a dull, unremitting grey, interrupted only by the various shades of greyness here and there. The land and all who move upon it take on a torpid and reluctant air, and a mild sense of misery afflicts those sensitive enough to feel the oppression.

And then a break appears in the western sky and a low-hung sun reminds us that he wasn’t gone after all, but merely hiding. The world suddenly explodes in golden brightness, and we mere earthbound creatures are startled by the rapid elevation in our mood.

Don’t you just love that moment?

It didn’t happen this evening. I wished, but the sky stayed grey, a cold wind rose, and light rain began to fall. Shame.

W Again.

2 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

The World is quiet. The Whiskey is mellow. Listenin’ to the Wailin’ Jennys singin’ This is Where.

I love alliteration almost as much as I love good music. Just sayin’.

The Shirley Jackson Mystery.

I’ve had internet problems again today. Twenty minutes of attempted solutions failed to remedy the matter and I thought I was gong to have to engage with the agonising prospect of trying to contact BT again. Fortunately, I restarted the computer as a last resort and the internet came back. Is that encouraging or worrying? I don’t know. In any event, now I can make the post I’ve been wanting to make since yesterday, so here it is:

I want to say a brief word about Shirley Jackson who has become one of my favourite writers. Everything I’ve read about her has been united in seeing her literature as belonging to the mystery/horror genre, and her work routinely described as ‘gothic.’ I’ve even seen her absurdly, in my view, described as 'following in the tradition of Poe', and I don’t for the life of me understand why.

I’ve read five of Jackson’s six novels and greatly enjoyed them. (I didn’t read the first of them because the synopsis suggested it was all about suburban politics, and suburban politics are not my style.) I’ve also read a fairly comprehensive anthology of her short stories. One of her novels, The Haunting of Hill House, is, to my perception, the only one which fits the category universally applied to her. It is unquestionably gothic and fairly well loaded with mystery and horror. But the rest?

There are slight hints of all these appellations in other works, but they are infrequent and often combined with a dry sense of humour, itself a rare component in the horror genre. What I see and relate to in Shirley Jackson are various forms of neurodivergence in female MCs, and especially the sparkles and misapprehensions which ensue when the neurodivergent heroine comes into contact with the world of neuro-normals. It’s all psychological observation related back to the reader in great detail and quite brilliantly. Her plots are pegs on which to hang this observation and there is very little in them which might be described as mysterious, horrific or gothic.

So what on earth is going on here? Is my own neurodivergent tendency shining a light on just one aspect of interest and leaving the rest in darkness? Are all the critics, editors, and bookworms right and am I the one in the wrong? Is that it? I wish I knew. Meanwhile, I’m well into my second reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and getting more from it than I did the first time. Good enough, I suppose.

Being Here.

I stood in the garden this afternoon and looked around at the heavy summer growth. I looked at the trees by the lane, at the fields of high-grown maize across the hedge, and at the high hills beyond the river valley. I looked at the sky, now turned grey after weeks of sunny weather. Two birds flew across it heading north.

I felt a strong sense of being here; nowhere else. It struck me that if I’d made one different decision somewhere back in the sands of my history, I might not be here. I might be somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

The thought has occurred to me before, and I suppose the same thought has occurred to just about everybody at some time. And yet it’s an oddly profound thought, and what was different about today’s example was the intense clarity and strength behind it.

I think I might be turning into one of Shirley Jackson’s neurodivergent heroines.

Missed Opportunities.

I saw a woman I know in Sainsbury’s on Wednesday. It's some years since I last saw her. ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, ‘I didn’t recognise you at first.’ ‘I suppose that’s because I look so much older, is it?’ she replied ruefully. ‘My response was rapid and almost unequivocal: ‘I hadn’t intended to say so, but now you come to mention it…’

The first three sentences are true. The rest amounts to a succession of lies, the fact of which constitutes yet another of life’s multitudinous missed opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Ashbourne was awash with young women in shorts and dogs with wagging tails. What is a chap supposed to do in such circumstances? Which is he supposed to admire first? The dogs won, of course, because you can stroke a dog’s back, pat its head, and tickle its ears without fear of being driven away by men in uniforms and treated badly. Young women are in a different category.

Killing Time.

While I was sans internet I decided to put my enforced idleness to good use by dusting, vacuuming, and generally tidying my living room. It hadn’t been touched, or even used for that matter, for two months or so and I was feeling almost committed to my place in the human environment for once. It took two hours to complete the job, and when I’d finished I was taken aback by the fact that it looked very little different.

In all ways, that is, apart from the lack of spider silk. It had been everywhere – between this and that, underneath every horizontal surface, beside my armchair, behind the big unit thing containing mostly wooden bowls, books, and various expressions of my interest in the worlds beyond the veil, strewn across the ceiling and down the walls… The room was full of the stuff. Being a sensitive soul I made every effort to do no harm to the spiders scuttling hither and thither, but their handiwork had to go.

I realised, of course, that the spiders would not have taken kindly to being so outrageously inconvenienced, and a dream began to form in my mind. I saw an army of Cellar spiders – for such they all were – approaching me with revenge in their eyes and determination in their spindly gait. I knew that their objective would not be to drive me to the burning mill with pitchforks as the local villagers might, but to suck my vital fluids until I breathed my last. The fact that I have no straws of either paper or plastic in the house was no consolation since spiders have their own methods. The sound of gurgles, slurping, and the death rattle filled my mind, and the dank odour of something unrecognised hung in the air.

The Story of the Browser Playing Dead.

On Monday 20^th July – four whole, agonising days ago – my browser had an accident and died of its injuries. No browser, therefore no internet. And so began the job of getting a new browser, the prosecution of which brought me into the frustrating business of trying to deal with BT’s new system of customer contact. It is, as usual, idiotic – or at least disturbingly deficient in thought and consideration – and the only way of dealing with the problem was to report a fault to the wholly automated system.

An engineer turned up the next day and I told him the story, finally asking ‘so how do I get a new browser?’ ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll order one for you.  You might get it tomorrow or at least by the next day. They’re very quick with browsers.’ It arrived today, three days later. I haven’t hooked it up yet so I’m nervous because I have personal experience of new browsers being faulty. I’m currently living on hope as I type this in Word.

And so for four days now I’ve been seeing my desktop image staring back at me from my monitor screen. Usually I see my Hotmail inbox because that’s where I park it when I’m not working. Seeing only my desktop image evoked a cold feeling of desolation and disconnection. It said: Something vital is missing. Are you sure you’re still alive? Are you sure you’re still breathing? Are you sure you’re still functioning? It’s a little like walking into a room and seeing walls normally festooned with pictures now bare of all decoration. The only reminder of more wholesome times are the faint grey rectangles around the edges of where colour and life used to be. I’m sensitive like that. I tried to read instead (Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the second time, and an anthology of shorts by Virginia Woolf for the first.) It helped, but only so much. Mostly I felt too tired to read.

And what all this demonstrated is just how reliant I’ve become on the internet to provide a portal to the outside world. The very few people I know personally are all either disinclined to know me, or too far away to be of help. Being a loner by nature is sometimes inconvenient.

I’m going to attempt to install the new browser now. If you read this you’ll know it worked.

Added Later:

The new browser is installed and working, but here’s what’s interesting:

When I plugged everything in I saw that there was no light on, suggesting that the new bit of kit was faulty, Not so. I looked at the back and discovered an on/off switch, a small, black, circular button all but hidden against the black background. I pressed it and voila: we have light.

I’ve had several browsers over the past sixteen years and none of them had an on/off switch. You just plugged things in and they worked. And bear in mind that the original new browser was fitted up by a BT engineer, not me. So I tried connecting the original, now ‘dead’, browser to the power and it lit up as a functioning browser should. It appears the old lad’s accident didn’t kill it after all, it just switched it off.

So much for the past four days. So much for silly old me. And it’s life and life only.

Incidentally, the two posts above this one were written for the sake of having something to do when I thought I had no internet. Just to avoid any confusion.

Shire Diary July '26.

The barley crop is now all harvested and the stalks bailed up neatly and awaiting collection. The wheat looks just about ready to me, and so the majority of fields will soon be laid to waste and awaiting the muck spreading, the tilling, and the sowing of winter wheat and barley. And so the changing colours of a mostly arable farming area will go through their annual transformation, from gold to brown and back to green. The cycle continues as it has done on these very fields for more than a thousand years.

Several of the fields here are owned by the Church rather than the estate, and on those the crop is maize. Maize is sown later than the cereal crops for harvesting in the autumn or even early winter. It’s growing rapidly through the warm weather, though, and the tallest patch on one side of Church Lane is now up to around seven feet in height and flowering well.

So tall is this forest that the view from Church Lane to the Lady B’s erstwhile abode is now completely blocked. Usually at this time of year the top of the chimney pots and TV aerial are still visible, but not this time. Too tall for a person of my height. People often smile and gaze at the forest of maize, you know. ‘Just like Lord of the Rings,’ they enthuse. Several early scenes in the Jackson film version show the intrepid four hiding and getting into mischief in just such a location.

As for the wild flowers, the persistently warm weather has sent most of them to bed early. There’s a premature brown and shrivelled look about the embankments, the verges, and the hedge bottoms this year. And the elder bushes which showed promise of a fine berry harvest are further casualties. Such berries as a forming are tiny, I suppose for lack of water to plump them.

And here’s the sad story: I’ve mentioned the flock of sheep which now occupies the big sloping field behind my house. I often watch them going about their lives slowly and peacefully, but this morning I saw them being driven en masse down towards the bottom of the field where it abuts Bag Lane. When I walked that way later I saw a large transport vehicle standing by the gate, and presumed that a journey of some sort was imminent.

When I returned from my walk I heard much bleating as I walked up my garden. It was more plaintive than usual; it had a hint of desperation about it. And then I realised that all the bleats were adult ones. No kiddie bleats; no question and answer sessions between mama sheep and baby sheep. The impassioned bleats, it seemed, were the sounds of mother sheep either calling for their now absent kiddies, or simply vocalising a sense of sorrow for their loss.

The final sentence would have sounded like vegetarian propaganda, so I omitted it.

Time and Changes.

For some reason this evening my mind has been filled with recalling people in my past, from friends I had in primary school right up to people I connected with more recently on this blog. I particularly remembered one boy called Howard Graham. I got a little confused sometimes because I had trouble remembering whether his name was Howard Graham or Graham Howard. And it often occurs to me that most of the people I knew as a child are now dead.

*  *  *

And then I took a look at the website for the theatre where I used to work. It had a large picture of the restaurant and I was curious to see how different it looked. For one thing they’ve removed the carpet and installed parquet flooring instead. Why would they do that, I wondered? Well, maybe they had Christmas in mind and considered the practical benefit. During matinees for the Christmas Show the place was invaded by hordes of school kids, and there was always one who treated us to the sight and smell of his or her half digested breakfast steaming on the restaurant floor. I suppose it’s more easily removed from wood than carpet. (And did you know that the smell of vomit can be nullified by pouring tonic water on it?)

*  *  *

After that I wrote my daughter’s birthday card. I hate writing longhand now, you know. I blame the ubiquity of keyboard communication which has greatly reduced the manual coordination required for such a feat. It leaves me full of admiration for those writers of old who constructed significant tomes, mostly using a quill pen and in longhand. And impeccable cursive, to boot.

In the Language of Sheep.

I was outside having a cup of tea in the sunlit garden this afternoon when I heard the deep bleat of an adult sheep the other side of the hedge. It was followed by the higher pitched, juvenile bleat of a lamb nearby. And then the ewe bleated back and the lamb answered again. And so it went on and on for about five minutes until I was quite sure that this was a mother and her kid having a conversation. OK, it might just have been:

‘Where are you?’

Here, mum.

Oh, there you are.

Mum.

‘What?’

I’m here.

‘I know. I can see you.’

Mum.

‘What?’

You’re not looking at me.

‘I don’t need to look at you, dear. I can hear you well enough.’

Mum.

‘What now?’

What are you doing?

‘I’m grazing. What does it look as though I’m doing?’

Oh.

It’s a conversation of sorts, isn’t it? And it might all be in my imagination, and I might be guilty of anthropomorphising a couple of animals, but as long as it makes you smile it doesn’t matter, does it? And the kid reminds of me when I was that age.

A Parking Issue.

When I returned from my walk at lunchtime I was surprised to see the narrow lane beyond my garden lined with parked vehicles for a distance of around 200yds. Evidently there was some sort of end-of-term event going on, and it isn’t unusual to see cars parked on the lane during the progress of such events. But in twenty years I’ve never seen as many as there were today. And the car park was also full, of course.

I’m curious to know the reason for this. Has the school had a major increase in pupils, I wonder? (Have you noticed, by the way, that in the UK we mostly use the term ‘pupils’ for people in primary and secondary education, and reserve the term ‘students’ for those in college and university? Students are young adults, you see.) In any event, it seems to me that the school needs a major extension to its car park.

I was, however, pleased to see that the Lady B’s car was parked with precision in the car park (lording it over a tiny, Mk1 mini, I might add.) But then it always was a feature of the Lady B that she was inclined to park cars with fine precision in car parks. (I love that woman, you know. Sometimes it even hurts a bit.)

And I do realise that this post is boring and of little interest to anyone but me. I just felt like writing something before making lunch, so I did.

A Recommendation in Fruit.

I saw a woman I liked in Ashbourne today. She wasn’t good looking, she wasn’t young, she didn’t have a model girl’s body, and I never spoke to her. And so I asked myself: why do you like that woman? The answer was simple.

She was eating an apple. I realised that a person eating an apple looks wholesome and healthy (just as a person eating a Big Mac looks gross and unfit.) It even suggests honesty, which probably has nothing whatsoever to do with George Washington. It just does for some reason, maybe because there is something sweet and unassuming about the humble apple. No ego, you see.

The fact that the woman looked thoughtful also helped. I’m generally well disposed towards people who think, and I gather the skill is becoming rarer.

Imaginings and Partings.

I saw a woman in the coffee shop today who looked very like my imagined image of the priestess. Same height and build, same approximate age, dark brown hair with a few highlights pulled neatly behind the neck, a discreet but apparently expensive gold bracelet on one wrist, bright and active eyes, no hint of apparent mood which suggested high self-awareness and practiced restraint, and eyes which left no doubt as to her East Asian antecedents. I’d say she was fully in control of her body, her mind, and her space. I doubt the priestess looked like that at the time when several future roads were beckoning in her maiden years, but this one fitted the mature entrepreneurial route perfectly.

I spent some time visually examining everything about her, and yet never once did she notice and stare, or even glance, back. That was where I got the ‘self-awareness and practiced restraint’ from. I wondered whether she might have been the actual priestess making an inquisitive trip to my home territory because she had nothing better to do. I rejected the possibility on the grounds that priestesses never have nothing better to do.

*  *  *

I signed out of my dental practice this morning, even though there are no other NHS practices in the area and I can’t afford private dentistry. It was an uneasy call fraught with attempted explanations and icy tones. And now I wonder whether I’ve been a little rash.I also wonder why I always have to move on even when there's nowhere else to go. I even wonder whether I would have left the much esteemed Lady B behind if she hadn't preempted the possibility.

Care vs Control, and Unrelated Bits.

Tomorrow I intend to scratch my name off my dentist’s panel. As far as I know there isn’t another NHS dentist in Ashbourne, so my future dental prospects will lie at the feet of my good friend, Lady Luck. The cost of private dentistry is so excruciatingly high that availing myself of such a ‘service’ stands not within the prospect of belief. (The greed of good old American-style capitalism, eh? Good old Mrs Thatcher.)

So why have I taken this decision? Well, it’s like this: Over the weekend I’ve received two text messages from the practice, and unlike written communications from other NHS bodies which speak the language of care, the ones from the dentist now speak the language of control: ‘You will!’ Acceptance of control is not in my nature, and though some might find my attitude excessive, I don’t. There’s a principle involved, and principles are very important to me.

This has been coming on ever since the incomparable Ms Medeea left a year or two ago (I suspect for similar reasons.) I felt it with the first appointment I had there after the fateful day. I felt the decline in the atmosphere. They also changed their name from the friendly ‘TLC For Smiles’ to the rather grey ‘Derbyshire Dental.’ I mean to suggest that they should have called it ‘The Vogon Spaceship’ or even ‘Resistance is Useless.’

*  *  *

And another, strictly irrelevant, point occurs to me: History is full of wise people using wise words to offer wise advice. Modern civilisation seems to be mostly run by unwise people telling us that the wise ones were wrong. And most people believe them.

*  *  *

So where do I go from there? Well, I’m often tempted to wonder why so many people allow themselves to be locked into cages of belief rather than striding freely across the airy headland of an open mind.

A Nature Boy's Dichotomy.

I used to think of myself as a true nature boy; a lover of all things natural in the natural world. Now I detect a certain dichotomy in my attitude 

I love the wealth of expression in the natural world; I love the bounty and the beauty; and I love the sense that I feel of the subtle energies of nature because that would seem to be the power behind the form of existence to which we are tied at this level. I’m even accepting of death because death is an integral part of the cyclical process on which all things biological function.

But being an idealist I detest the suffering in nature. And I’m not referring to cruelty. Cruelty is a matter of intent which seems wholly confined to the human animal. I’m referring to the suffering consequent upon predation, accident, and disease.

It came home to me last night when I watched a baby bird suffering, presumably through having fallen from a nest or having made a premature attempt to fly. There was nothing I could do to help, you see, and that added an element of guilt to my horror. I suppose I could have done an Agnes Gray and dropped a large stone on it, but how could I have known that my aim would be perfect, or the instrument of execution sufficiently powerful to despatch the little creature instantaneously? I couldn’t, and so I locked the door and hoped that the suffering would be short-lived.

And that’s why my attitude to nature is dichotomous.

Something Crooked Somewhere.

A few simple questions which might suggest a few obvious answers:

Why has the Jeffrey Epstein affair disappeared from public view? Why is there no high level investigation at work? Why are the world’s media not clamouring to re-open their own investigations? Why have I seen nothing on YouTube amid the pile of supremely unimportant tat that seems to prevail there? (I’m sure a serious video on Jeffrey Epstein would get so many hits that even the ne’er-do-wells in the advertising industry would be slavering uncontrollably. One video I saw questioned the veracity and cause of Epstein’s alleged death, but that’s hardly the point.) Who is keeping the lid tightly closed on this business, and why? And why am I the only person who seems to be asking these questions? I doubt that I am.

Maybe Trump’s juvenile antics and the football world cup are considered more important and there’s no air time or page space left to tackle more mundane matters. Is that it?

Looking For America.

I first heard Simon and Garfunkel’s America when I was in my teens. It remains a favourite, and the line which most piqued my curiosity was ‘… walked off to look for America.’ I wondered what exactly it meant at the time, but I was young then. Much water has flowed the length of the mighty Mississippi-Missouri since my days of callow youth, and now I have a better idea, so please allow me to offer it.

My YouTube recommendations page is loaded with videos which relate, one way or another, to the USA. Being the British version, many of them follow the line: ‘Brits roast American ignorance’ or the more general ‘Britain – or Europe as a whole – is a much better place than America.’ I expect American YouTube followers get fed the opposite story. I think a lot about this, and so I thought I’d write a post about the way the USA tends to be seen by Europeans. It’s a view based on a generalised impression gleaned from conversations, news reports, high profile American activities, and the experiences of a few ex-pat Americans living in Europe.

Let’s start with the recent 250^th anniversary razzmatazz (which was slightly premature given that The Treaty of Paris wasn’t signed until 1783, but let’s not split hairs.) Europeans were naturally unimpressed by this, since most of us can trace our national roots back over a thousand years of unbroken cultural development (and some countries in the Middle East and Asia generally – including Iran – can go much further back than that.) We in England, for example, are more likely to commemorate the Battle of Hastings in 1066 than the generally agreed origin of the English state a century earlier.

And so, notwithstanding its remarkable development over such a short time period, the USA is still a young child in international terms. It might have grown big, rich, and powerful, but it’s still the world’s baby. And let’s be honest and admit that it has often behaved in a manner entirely commensurate with the fact. Trump’s presidency is probably the most obvious example, but there have been others. This means that there is a tendency among Europeans, and probably an even a greater one among Asians, to view the USA as being still a work in progress, and that it will probably remain so for a long time to come. This is why Europeans get slightly miffed when US Presidents swagger around the globe in the arrogant belief that they have ultimate authority on all issues worldwide, from nuclear development in Iran to a referee’s decision on a football pitch.

And then there’s another point which might best be illustrated by comparing the USA with China. They’re approximately the same size geographically, but China has a much bigger population and is far more diverse in terms of languages and ethnic groups. And yet China is still unquestionably China, with all the perception of homogeneity due to a single state. And it’s very ancient.

The federal system in the USA, on the other hand, leads to a vague sense that homogeneity is at least partially absent. Each state operates within many of its own rules, guards its boundaries assiduously, and sometimes comes into conflict with the central power in DC. There’s a fractured feel about it, as though the mortar in the walls of the country hasn’t quite set firm yet and is still moving around. And maybe this is the cause of one of my long-held suspicions – that there is a hidden undercurrent of insecurity lurking in the American mindset, which is possibly the reason for the almost manic emphasis on patriotism, the requirement for children to take the oath of allegiance every day, the flying of flags on every street corner, and the slightly absurd notion of ‘un-American activities.’

So is it all bad? Is this just me sounding off against the damn Yankees? No, of course not. I repeat what I’ve said before on this blog: Some of the finest people I have ever known – people of intelligence, principle, erudition, compassion, good sense, generosity, and wholesome friendliness – have been Americans. And I might add that much of the anti-American sentiment doing the rounds of the globe at the moment is directed mainly at Trump and what he’s made of America and its reputation, not a wholesale condemnation of individual Americans.

And yet, you know, I’m tempted to think – and this might be wholly speculative and based on false impressions – that the high spot of American culture came at the end of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th. I imagine a time based on the homesteader mentality, the understanding that there were things of value bigger than the individual, the resilience and energy, the development of new musical forms with the coming of jazz and blues, the creation of a new art form with the emergence of cinema, and maybe even a noticeable level of self-deprecation. It’s an inspirational picture.

But that was before the oligarchs of Big Capitalism persuaded the nation to install consumption and lifestyle obsession as the new king, to worship money as the only true god, and to brag loudly about their wealth-conferred status. And yet it’s clear that there are still plenty of Americans who understand that there are principles and ideals bigger than the individual or their personal fortune. That’s why this post is about America, not Americans.

I hope it doesn’t cause offence. It wasn’t meant to.

Early Morning School Work.

I was standing by my bathroom window in the early hours of this morning regarding the third quarter moon hanging bright in the clear eastern sky. I saw the winking wing lights of a commercial aircraft encroaching into my view from the right, evidently outbound from East Midlands Airport and flying north-west, probably to Belfast. The plane approached the moon, crossed it, and then continued its flight to Northern Ireland.

My first thought was that the passengers would have watched the moon coming towards them until it was alongside, and then slipping away behind as the plane continued its journey. I quickly realised that I was wrong; the moon would have appeared more or less perpendicular to their view through the window all the way from the airport to their destination. So then I set about working out why, and realised that it’s a simple matter of the function of arc.

The distance between East Midlands Airport and Belfast is a tiny fraction of the distance between the moon and the plane, which means that the arc described on the line of travel would be extremely slim. The angle between the two, therefore, would hardly change in such a short distance, and so the moon would appear to the passengers to be in more or less the same place. It’s simply a matter of geometrical relativity.

And so, having demonstrated to myself that my mind still functions moderately well after two double scotches and in a state of fatigue, I continued to bed with an almost satisfied air.

A Rarity Among the Habits of JJ.

I spoke to another Shire resident this evening for something like an hour. (My lack of association with Shire residents must surely be the stuff of legend by now. Ten minutes is usually the maximum I can tolerate, and even then only if it serves the cause of politeness.) And what’s really odd is that I initiated the conversation for reasons which would be improper to reveal. Rest assured, however, that they were entirely pure, proper, and in accordance with my INFJ personality type.

My only error was that I failed to ask the lady’s name (and she mine), but maybe that won’t matter. Maybe I will never speak to her again. It will all depend on whether my gut instinct convinces me that it will be to her benefit. (I have been known to be wrong in such matters.)

A Poetic Note on the Pronoun Divide.

I’m not even an occasional reader of poetry, much less an avid one, and yet I do respond strongly to the power and richness of words. And sometimes a particular line from a poem strikes me as having a quality of subtle but profound knowing wrapped up in a few brief, perfectly chosen words (which I suppose is what good poetry is all about.) Such a one is Emily Dickinson’s

 

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me

I think about it often, and it struck me recently that the line might be frowned upon these days by those who regard the recognition of gender as a sure and certain ticket to perdition’s flame. They would insist that it must be:

Because I could not stop for Death

They kindly stopped for me

It doesn’t take much poetic nous – nor even recognition of the power and richness of words – to know what dreadful carnage the use of the plural pronoun would wreak upon such a notable creation.

Celebrity and Armageddon.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I think it reasonable that the BBC World News front page should lead with a subject which intelligent consensus would agree as being of reasonable magnitude. So what did the BBC World News lead with today?

The wedding of Taylor Swift.

I think I’m right in presuming that Taylor Swift is some kind of celebrity, and that’s my point. No intelligent consensus regards celebrities as being of any greater importance than the rest of us; they just happen to be watched by a lot of people when they’re doing their job.

And so today’s headline gave a further boost to my increasing conviction that the world really is growing dumber and dumber (as do a lot of people, it seems). A sense is growing in me that in the not-too-distant future, the mass of humanity will shrink like the big bang going backwards and result in a takeover by more intelligent robots, or expand with irresistible force as several billion people suddenly wake up.

A Wordsmith's Concerns.

I was walking through Ashbourne last Wednesday when a sudden thought entered my head. It ran: ‘The prim young girls in pretty clothes (and not so very much of those…)

Aha, I thought, a new ditty is offering itself for an airing on my blog. But then I realised that ‘much’ should be ‘many’ which ruined the metre, and so fearing for my reputation as a competent user of words I consigned the fledgling ditty to the gutter in close proximity to a discarded coke can. I think it might have been the close proximity of the town library which influenced my decision.

Cryptid Imagination.

Sometimes when look out of my bathroom window at the rising field beyond my garden hedge, I see a humanoid shape striding along the ridge from left to right. I can tell from the height of the tree branches, the hedgerows, and my occasional sightings of dog walkers tracing the same route, that the figure is around 8ft tall. And its appearance is fuzzy as though its body is covered in dense brown hair.

I have no doubt that it’s a sasquatch, and that pleases me because I like sasquatches. I even leave an apple in the wood at the top of the lane sometimes, just in case there’s one keeping itself carefully hidden up there. I’ve heard they have a fondness for apples.

And I suspect that the various chemicals to which the bathroom plays host combine to cause the mind to see favoured pictures where there are none.

Too Tired to Think of a Title.

This was Zoe’s song back in those distant days when she still thought me worthy of a few sparkler showers:

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves

Among the fields of barley.

~ Sting. Fields of Barley

And so I thought about the phrase ‘west wind’ and naturally wondered – as is my wont – why that wind and not another. It didn’t take long to come up with a reason.

We recognise four cardinal winds and each of them is imbued with its own reputation. The south wind represents heat; the north wind is associated with frigidity; the east wind we think of as sharp and unfriendly; the west wind, however, says ‘mellow.’ This is not always true because it depends on the position of the weather system and other considerations, but as a generalisation it’s what we’ve got. And so the west wind is the least likely to be threatening and also has the benefit of alliteration to commend it to the lyrical mindset.

*  *  *

Talking of words, I sometimes watch a YouTube channel by a woman called Hilary Layne. She’s a writer who uses a simple ‘talking heads’ approach and covers notable literary works and their relevance to modern culture. Last night’s offering took what she considers the three primary works which most describe the causes and effects which produce a move towards dystopia: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Brave New World, and 1984.

She suggested that modern societies – at least those which follow the ‘western’ model – are becoming so replete with bland conformity to the exclusion of higher values that an increasing number of people are blind to anything which is bigger than them. It caused me to think seriously about the assertion, which very few YouTube channels do. But then I decided that I’m more interested in a different scale of things. My main preoccupation now is not to look for things which are bigger than me, but levels of reality which are bigger than the one in which my mortal body functions. So I decided that dystopia probably doesn’t matter very much after all.