The Perils of Home Cooking.

I feel a little ill tonight. I seem to have developed an adverse reaction to my home made soup.

How does one possibly develop an adverse reaction to home made soup? Home made soup is not only the real article, it’s also very cheap. This is unfair.

Mother Russia's Meteorite.

I watched a documentary tonight about the meteorite that caused so much damage in Russia a week or so ago. There was lots of video footage of it searing the sky and billowing great clouds of smoke like the 8.27 from Hell to Eternity (or even Omsk to Tomsk, if you prefer.) It must have been one humdinger of a sight.

But then there was a big bang which must have put the wind up the locals a bit, especially the ones training in the judo club, most of whom fell over gracefully.

There were eyewitness accounts from several locals, all of whom save one spoke Russian, so their eyewitness accounting was accompanied by subtitles. The subtitles were poor; evidently the subtitler wasn’t as good at interpreting Russian as we who pay a TV licence fee have a right to expect, since there were lots of gaps in the intelligible words, all filled with groups of unintelligible characters like ‘S***!’ and ‘F***!’

There were, however, enough intelligible words to get the gist of the general feeling, only it wasn’t quite the gist I was expecting. What I was expecting were statements such as:

‘I thought it was an earthquake,’ or

‘I was hoping it would land on Putin’s house,’ or even

‘That was one humdinger of a sight.’

What one woman actually said was ‘I thought the war had started.’

War? What war? Are the Russian people still possessed of the notion that American ICBMs are about to fill the sky and set the Apocalypse in motion, just as we in western Europe did a couple of decades ago? (Only we thought it would be Russian ICBMs, of course.)

Come on, Russia, don’t you know it’s the year 18 PRD? (Post-Riverdance. The Russian routine was the best in the whole show.)

Russia, we like you now. You have beautiful women, superb dancers, and footballers who play for Fulham. We didn’t send the meteorite, OK?

Soul Music.

No, not that kind of soul music, but this:

I’ve said before that my taste in music used to be almost entirely dominated by classical, but that I’ve largely lost my interest in it now. I was thinking more about it today when I had a classical music radio station playing in the background while I was doing some work, and I think what it comes down to is this:

What we term ‘classical’ had its genesis in mediaeval sacred music; and then court music became popular during the Renaissance, then the Baroque period was born, then the Classical period, then the Romantic period, then the Modern period. I know that’s a little over-simplified, but it’ll do for the sake of making a point.

My point is that early sacred music had what I would regard as ‘soul,’ a quality that was subsequently subordinated to the drive for self-conscious cleverness, the growth of grand architecture, and an increasing predilection for virtuoso playing. I’m not saying that any of these things are inherently wrong, just that they don’t accord with the relationship I have with music. I know I must be seen as a bit of a Phillistine when I say that I can't stand Mozart or Beethoven, for example.

And then, as the Romantic period was moving into the Modern, along came the French Impressionists and English Late Romantics, and ‘classical’ music got its soul back. That’s why those two forms are the only ones I consistently enjoy these days. (There are exceptions, as you’d expect.) And I do realise that this is a highly subjective view, and one with which I wouldn’t expect general agreement.

Watching the Moon Die.

There’s a waning moon looking through my office window. She’s the colour of golden syrup turned sugary, and is sitting flaccid and forlorn in a most unaccustomed and uncomfortable position a little way above the horizon. It seems she hasn’t the strength to climb higher. She’s a dying moon; her light is fading; she has only a week to live. She’ll rise again to watch the owl hunt and hear the fox bark, but for now…

Seeing Stars.

I saw what I think was the biggest meteor I’ve ever seen tonight. It appeared roughly over the pub, and went pouf more or less over Miss Sarah’s house. Shooting stars used to fill me with foreboding when I was a kid, because somebody told me they were bad omens. I believed what people told me in those days…

What I want to know, though, is why the constellations appear slightly further across the sky at the same time on successive nights. I assume it must be because the angle of view changes as the earth follows its orbit around the sun. But you’d think that the diameter of the earth’s orbit would be quite small when compared with the distance from here to the constellations, wouldn’t you, and therefore wouldn’t make that much difference? Well, I would. So I want somebody to explain it to me. Please queue this side of the sign.

Being Gonwid.

I’d like to point out that, as autobiographical as Gonwid is, I’m not aware of having had any flatulence problem as a young cub. That was put in simply to make a point, the point being that I do have vague recollections of my parents and other adults using me as bait to get laughs occasionally. The thing that made me growl loudest, however, was being tickled. I found it a gross violation of personal space and it made me very angry.

He’s an interesting point, though. I’ve been reading about Carl Jung, and it seems he has something enlightening to say about my difficulties in maintaining close relationships with my parents and the women I’ve lived with. They simply didn’t live up to the archetypes I had stored in my unconscious, apparently. It was all about my standards being too high. Oh good; that’s OK, then.

Eating Out.

I was just researching something on Google, and came across several references to restaurants. It got me thinking (doesn’t everything?)

The appeal of restaurants is a mystery to me. I don’t do restaurants for three reasons:

1) It strikes me as weird in the extreme to pay somebody a large sum of money to prepare food for me, when I’m perfectly capable of preparing it for myself at a fraction of the cost.

2) I don’t remember ever having had anything in a restaurant that I liked more than what I prepare at home.

3) Unless you inspect the establishment’s kitchen, you haven’t a clue what you’re getting or in what conditions it’s been cooked.

No thanks; I’ll stick with what I know and like, and save the money. The culture, of course, tells me that I’m missing out on one of life’s most engaging experiences. Oh, well…

Gonwid: the Prequel.

Just in case Gonwid the Bear should find himself the subject of another allegorical anecdote one of these days, I thought I might say something about his early life to flesh out his character a little.

As a very young cub, Gonwid had a noted propensity for flatulence, and his parents used it to raise their stock with the other bears in the valley. They would take little Gonwid a-visiting, saying ‘Meet our one cub gasworks. We call him Gonwid the Wind.’ The other bears would chortle heartily. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ they would exclaim. ‘Like that. Gonwid the Wind. Nice one.’ And, having attained the enviable position of Valley Comedians, even if only briefly, the parents would bask in the warm light of social approbation.

Gonwid, however, was already possessed of a virulent – and sometimes violent –dislike of mockery, and responded to his parents’ habit of climbing socially at his expense by developing a precociously deep growl that was wondrous to behold. He also disowned and abandoned them as soon as he was old enough to realise that men with murderous metal tubes were usually American tourists, and rebelled against all convention by living alone in the hills, becoming vegetarian, and making friends with unlikely creatures such as caterpillars instead of other bears.

And this is why Gonwid now has a reputation for grumpiness and well practiced avoidance of his own kind, although he is much given to expressing random acts of kindness to children and the rest of the animal kingdom, rarely having to try too hard since such acts are fundamental to his nature. His only regret at having turned vegetarian is that his conscience won’t allow him to eat American tourists bearing murderous metal tubes, but this is just one of many complications that provide him with an endless stock of things about which to grumble endlessly.

Walter Mitty Revisited.

At times during my life I’ve encountered people who’ve needed to seek out or construct alternative realities in which their consciousnesses can function more comfortably. These are people who are drawn to fantasy, the supernatural, and maybe the mystical. And I’ve observed that such people are generally denigrated as being weak – too weak to handle the world of mundane reality. ‘He lives in a dream world,’ people say with a disparaging air.

Well, maybe they’re not weak at all; maybe they’re just different. Maybe they’re HSP types; maybe they have something that the ordinary person doesn’t have. In that case, isn’t it likely that they see and feel the wrongs, the injustices, the things that don’t make sense, more than the ordinary person does? And isn’t that why they need to escape – because it’s the only way of relieving the pressure to which the ordinary person isn’t subjected and so doesn’t understand? Isn’t it why such people often become writers, poets, artists and composers, thereby explaining to themselves and others what the world of mundane reality is about on a deeper level, or where to look for an alternative? Isn’t it why they famously end up living in garrets, and why they often end their lives prematurely, either consciously or through excessive indulgence in the most readily available narcotic?

(Do you know what my latest thing is? I've developed a near-obsession with the need to take food to hungry children. The image of a little girl with an empty bowl and desperate eyes won't leave me alone. And there are plenty of them living in the world of mundane reality.)

As time goes by I’m becoming ever more convinced of the phenomenon known as HSP, since it’s the best explanation I’ve found so far for a life spent needing a constant supply of parachutes. I will say one thing for it, though. It works wonders in developing the capacity for abstract thought.

About Gender.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to post this but I’ve changed my mind. The finale of Boorman’s film Excalibur:

 

 A woman left a comment on the YouTube video. It said ‘The end scene makes men cry and their girlfriends chew another popcorn.’ As far as I’m concerned, she isn’t wrong on the first count – the reclaiming of the sword and the three queens riding shotgun in the barge never fail to stir something in me that might be described as ‘unmanly.’  (If you're a Brit of my generation, that is, who was conditioned to the view that manhood is measured by the stiffness of the upper lip and the firmness of the knees in a tight situation.)

We have a woman’s hand taking back the source of the king’s power, and three queens guarding him from the mortal world. But are they placing him under their wing or under their influence? What does it say about the power of the feminine?

It’s just a film, right? Well, yes; but it’s a film based on a book, and the book was based on a host of myths and legends stretching back into time immemorial, a time when the power of the feminine and its relationship with the power of the masculine was maybe better understood.

I’ve struggled with this for the last two hours. I have a sense that we’re getting it all wrong – chauvinist and feminist both missing the point. But I’ve come to no conclusion and it’s getting late. Time for bed.