A Little Tale of Rescue and Rumination.

This blog has been a bit introspective and philosophical lately; it’s even come close to being earnest on occasion, heaven forbid. So I thought I’d lighten up with today’s little tale of rescuing a damsel in distress.

She was a bee. (How do I know the bee was female? Because she was a worker honey bee and all worker honey bees are female – or so they say.) Anyway…

I was strolling at a leisurely pace down Green Lane on the far side of the Shire when I passed the house where the owners leave a bowl of water out for the benefit of passing dogs. Now, it is a little known fact that while bowls of water might benefit passing dogs, they can be hazardous to passing bees. I looked down into this particular bowl and saw a little bee floundering on her back on the surface of the water. Her legs were going in all directions and I decided that she was neither dancing nor training for the village bee swimming gala. She was genuinely in distress.

OK, little lady, it’s your lucky day. I put my forefinger into the water and flipped her onto her front (well, her underneath I suppose, she being a bee an’ all.) I did this not because front crawl, breast stroke and butterfly are easier to perform than backstroke, but so that I could then present the same finger for her to crawl onto, which she did. She was then placed carefully onto a nearby leaf where I watched her preening and drying herself in the sunshine for quite some time.

She never said ‘thank you.’ She didn’t, but I decided to trust the old maxim that virtue is its own reward and chose not to be offended. (I did, however, question whether rescuing a bee could truly be called virtuous. I decided that it could, since the sun was shining and that’s always a good sign.)

Epilogue

I had a terrible thought. Suppose she’d stung me? If she’d done that she would have died a death rather more dreadful than expiry by drowning, and how would I have felt then? What price misplaced virtue? I should have used a leaf to lift her out, shouldn’t I? I expect bees are more trusting of leaves than they are of humans, and would be less likely to sting them.

Whew! Lesson learned for next time.

Primeval Genius.

I suppose it must be a reasonable assumption that musical traditions developed around the world quite independently of each other a very long time ago. Do you realise what that means?

It means that way back in our primeval past – probably during an era which we associate with grunters, cave dwellers and wearers of animal hide sweatshirts – there arose a bunch of geniuses who recognised that if you put sounds of different pitch together in the right relationship it produces something which is not only pleasant but also capable of making people feel different.

That’s quite a feat, and we don’t even know their names.

Lady B and the HSP.

The ghost of the Lady Bella continues to haunt me day and night. She fills my sleep with disturbing dreams. She shows me waking visions of events unseen by my physical eyes, visions which arrest my breathing and force me to change the record before I suffocate. She taunts me with recollections of fleeting but precious moments pregnant with real or imagined significance. She is quietly insistent, and her quietness was always what made her irresistible. Her human alter-ego has now decamped to somewhere far off, like Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse or maybe the edge of space and time, but her ghost remains close and visits frequently.

My Ego tells me that there is no such thing as the ghost of the Lady B; she is merely a figment of a fevered and delusional imagination. She is largely, he says, a symptom of the curse allegedly attributable to the HSP gene which conveys to the recipient the twin qualities of hyper-awareness and torrid emotional response. It’s just part of my general strangeness and will go of its own accord eventually. I’ve been hearing such reassurance for some years now, and the issue continues to get worse.

Maybe that’s why my Super Ego steps in and overrules his junior, advising him that reality is rarely that straightforward. He tells me to ignore the rationalist who would insist that the haunting is a simple product of some mental abnormality for which a pill may be prescribed to facilitate exorcism. He suggests that there really is some mysterious connection at work of a type unknown to rationalists and scientists, and that it’s more a matter of managing it than curing it. Being an HSP is not the cause, but the means by which I am made aware of it.

So to whose advice should I attach most credence? Well, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that for all the disturbance she causes me – sometime reaching a debilitating level – I quite like being haunted by the Lady B. She adds colour to a grey world, and that can’t be a wholly bad thing.

Musing in the Shire.

I noticed that the thistles in Church Lane have gone to seed now. I think of the ubiquitous thistle not as the marker of the turning season, but as the harbinger. The neighbouring willowherb is still very much in the pink to remind us that the summer is not yet fully run.

On the other side of the hedgerow the wheat is uniformly gold and waiting only for a run of dry days and the harvest, while the tufted maize cobs in another field are plumping nicely. And the hedgerow itself is replete with fattening green berries hanging proudly off the elder bushes.

In a few weeks time the same berries will be black as coal. The willowherb will have turned to wool, the wheat fields will be empty of all but harsh stubble, and the corn cobs will be a thing of memory. And then the marker will be laid out for all to see.

In one way I find the cycle of the seasons rich and reassuring, but in another way they proclaim the twin troubles which haunt the musing mind: the grumbling issues of corporeality and mortality. And that is why I never come close to accepting that what I see and what I hear and what I feel and what I taste and what I smell, and even what I sense, is the whole substance of reality and my place in it.

And I fondly hope that the Lady B’s ghost reads this; it’s the sort of thing which I used to so like saying to her. No doubt such a hope is forlorn.

Progressing to the Artificial.

I’ve realised that the only part of me which I fully accept (even though I know there’s room for improvement) is my higher mind: the Super Ego in Freudian terms. I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the Ego and I dislike the Id quite profoundly. (My new moniker for the US Pres, by the way, is 'Donald the Iddite.')

So now I’m thinking that I should really be one of those beings who used to crop up in Star Trek­ – the ones composed entirely of mental energy and floated around in the ether communicating telepathically. I’m also thinking along the lines of: ‘Since we think of ourselves as being so technologically advanced, why don’t we set about designing plastic bodies which don’t excrete anything, and to which, therefore, participles like ‘running’ and ‘dripping’ never apply. And then there would be the minor matter of finding a way to transfer our higher minds into them, an exercise which might prove a little more difficult. Assistance from gods or aliens (assuming they’re different) might be needed with that one.

And that brings me back to words again, and another one which I find distasteful: ‘stain.’ Stains trouble me, and therefore so does the word. Oddly, however, I find the word ‘blot’ not only acceptable but quite characterful. I suspect it’s because ‘blot’ is associated with ink and the endeavour to transcribe the workings of the higher mind into communicable form.

(And need I add that my Ego occasionally whispers a question to the Super Ego: ‘Have you considered the possibility that you might – only might, I hasten to add – be mentally ill?’ ‘Of course,’ replies SE. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’)

Absences and Oddities.

Today was notable for the absence of things. The woman I usually talk to in Sainsbury’s wasn’t at work today. Neither was the woman I usually talk to in the coffee shop. No dogs befriended me and no babies stared menacingly at me from the safety of buggies (they frequently do, you know. I scowl back manfully but they always win.) And despite the twilight being warm and a little wet, there wasn’t a single slug or snail to be seen anywhere.

Still, the bats flew closer than usual this evening and there was a lone moth feeding on some pink flowers in my garden. I’m rather fond of those flowers even though I’m not the biggest fan of pink. I don’t know what they’re called but they smell nice. Smell matters a lot to me, you see. Smell is one of those sensory experiences – like the sound of music – which can send my mood plummeting or soaring depending on whether it’s bad or good.

(Sudden thought:

I bet I said that about the odd girl or two when I was a teenager.

‘Hey, who’s that floozy you’ve been hanging about with?’

‘Dunno, mate; don’t know her name. But she smells nice.’

Only kidding. Never in my life have I ever hung about with a woman whose name I didn’t know. Erm… apart from that strange woman reclining on a huge bed in a room above an Italian restaurant in Soho once. But everybody in the room was weird – except me – and I don’t recall any of them smelling of anything except something resembling bonfires.)

The big news today, however, was that I found exactly the pair of jeans I’ve been seeking for months. They were in a charity shop priced at £9.99. They were brand new – with all the labels still attached – were originally from M&S, and their proper price was £39.50. I also nearly bought a bed head from another charity shop (because I haven’t had a bed head for twenty seven years) but realised it wouldn’t fit in the car.

And that brings me back to a favourite subject. When I was a kid I had a wooden bed head. It smelt so nice that I used to sniff and sniff and sniff it, and then I used to chew it. (Except at Easter and Christmas when I ate chocolate in bed instead.)

Variation on a Pet Gripe.

I wrote a post recently about the current habit of spelling “you’re” as “your.” Tonight – for the first time ever – I read a comment on YouTube in which somebody spelled “your” as “you’re.” I replied “Thanks for the novelty.”

A Muse on Names.

I’ve heard it said that some Native North American Indian tribes used the practice of calling their babies after the first thing the mother saw after giving birth. So it might be Running Elk, Swooping Eagle, Leaping Salmon, Defecating Bear, that sort of thing. If such had been the practice at my birth, I wouldn’t have been given the utterly prosaic name Jeffrey. I would have been called Singing Bird, because my mother said the first thing she saw after I was born was a blackbird singing on the sill outside the window.

But times have changed. Nowadays there would be only two names available to new mothers.

‘And what’s your name, little chap?’

‘People With Funny Hats And Pieces Of Cloth Covering Their Noses And Mouths, Miss.’

Thank you. And what’s your name, little girl?’

‘Machine With Moving Green Zig-Zaggy Lines, Miss.’

I suppose the odd exception might come along in those cases where the sprog insists on coming into the world on the back seat of a car before they make it to the hospital. He or she could be called Policeman Wiping The Sweat Off His Brow, but they would be a rarity. Are we going in the right direction?

Preferences.

During my childhood my mother said to me several times that she liked the idea of me growing up to become a doctor. When I was around fourteen, however, and expressed the desire to extend my education, go to university, and enter a profession, she became much more cautious and said that I would be much better off going to a local factory to do an apprenticeship. ‘You’re never out of a job if you’ve got a trade,’ she said. I tried to explain that I didn’t want a job, I wanted a life, but the attitude of a cautious mother is a difficult draft animal to shift.

Maybe she didn’t think of doctoring as a profession; maybe she thought you just grew up to be one. I wouldn’t know, and in the end I didn’t do either (not unless you regard being a deviant riding a rollercoaster as some sort of profession, which I don’t suppose you do.)

And I would never have made the grade as a doctor anyway because I really don’t like bodies very much. I read somewhere once that a body is a thin membrane of skin containing a bag of filth, and that’s pretty much how I see it. Especially when it comes to excretions. Oh my giddy aunt, the excretions! Be they planned or unplanned, voluntary or involuntary, healthy or unhealthy, any hint of excretions in the vicinity has my consciousness screaming to escape the body it’s trapped in. Doctors deal in excretions. Not for me.

And that reminds me that the word ‘diarrhoea’ is the most difficult word in the English language to remember how to spell. I haven’t got there yet; I had to use the spell checker to write it in this post. Not that I have much occasion to write it generally, of course, but writing fiction can sometimes lead you to the sort of places you’d rather avoid. I remember the word being used once in Satre’s novel The Age of Reason. It’s my most abiding memory of the book. Descriptions of the Parisian landscape and the man who was going to drown his cats in the Seine (but didn’t) take second place.

This evening I spent ages watching two moths feeding on the sweet pea flowers. Wholesome fare. No excretions, just hints of Titania and her entourage. It was twilight, of course…

Very Briefly.

I don’t think I want to talk much about today’s two episodes of note: the lost cat and the conversation with a gorilla.

The lost cat incident ended satisfactorily, the only injury being some scratches to my arm. The gorilla was a different matter.

He was a big, burly clod of a bailiff from some debt collection agency (the debt in question being nothing to do with me, I hasten to add.) The circumstances led us into a confrontational situation and the conversation became heated. He was pushy and insufferably impertinent; I accused him of behaving ultra vires. I also told him that much of what he was saying was bullshit. And then he left.

End of story. End of blogging for today.