Unresponsive.

I went for a blood test today and the nurse didn’t find my joke funny. I’ve seen her before and she never does, so I tried my back-up technique: the compliment. I told her that I grade nurses by the amount of pain I don’t experience when they stick needles into me, and that she was top drawer. She didn’t respond to that either.

 

The thing is, you see, when your face has reached that point where even a female orang utan wouldn’t give you a second glance (except to laugh, maybe), all you’ve got left is your sense of humour and your capacity to extend honest compliments. If neither elicits a response, the only course left is to say ‘thank you’ and leave. So that’s what I did. She didn’t turn around or say ‘have a nice day’ or anything. I hope the blood didn’t curdle or I might have to go back. On the way out I saw one of these in the waiting area:

 

 

You know, there really are times when I wonder why I’m still here.

Entering My Third Age.

The situation in Afghanistan is awakening something in me. Though it might be only one of many examples of the weakness inherent in mankind, it seems to be giving genesis to my third age. The first, as a young man, was relatively unmoved by disaster, abuse and injustice. The second was the ability to weep through heightened awareness of it. The third is the capacity to feel physically ill in response.

I feel the need of a companion, but it must be someone who is as lost as I am on the staircase to heaven-knows-where.

Another Little Encounters Post.

I was talking to a woman in Ashbourne today. I felt that my face mask was making communication difficult, so I stood a little further away and removed it. She removed hers, too. I realised later that, at my age, that’s as close as I’m ever going to get to intimacy.

*  *  *

Today I saw:

The local barn owl briefly at twilight, and a pair of willow warblers scratting about for food on the kitchen roof. I haven’t seen the barn owl since last winter, nor the willow warblers for several years.

An old dog standing outside a butcher’s shop, looking eagerly through the open door and wagging his tail. I asked him whether it smelt good in there, but he declined to acknowledge my presence.

Two young girls standing behind me waiting to go into Sainsbury’s. I was busy sanitizing my hands at the time, so I stood aside and said ‘there you go, ladies.’ They both giggled and walked past me. I love moments like that.

A big, burly tyre fitter in the tyre depot (I was having a new one fitted. £54. Jesus!) being nice to an old lady customer. That’s heartening, too, and he was wearing a beanie hat which makes it even more so.

My favourite dentist ever – the splendid Ms Medeea, late of Transylvania. I bumped into her while walking through Ashbourne, and asked whether she’s still working at the practice (I last visited the practice a year and a half ago because the pandemic played havoc with dental appointments, emergencies excepted.) She said she was, but she wasn’t sure for how much longer because certain issues are getting on her nerves. Well, if ever she sets up a practice of her own I want to be the first to know. Being second in the queue would be unconscionable in the matter of remaining under Ms Medeea’s tender ministrations.

*  *  *

Tonight’s twilight was cold and gloomy again. When you’re prey to a depressive tendency, cold and gloomy twilights don’t help.

Seeing the Whole Jigsaw.

At times today the combination of personal woes, world affairs, and the darkness inherent in the human condition produced such a level of intense desperation that all I wanted to do was go to sleep and not wake up again.

I tried to take refuge in the notion that I’m not here to connect, and maybe not even to contribute, but only to observe. I tried to take the Buddhist view that observation must be non-judgemental. I reprised an earlier position of mine that we’re all fundamentally alone, and that our ultimate responsibility is only to our own spiritual evolution.

And then I read several news reports from Afghanistan and my empathic side was brought to its knees with sadness and impotence.

I heard somebody say recently that coming into this life is like being given only a few pieces of a 500 piece jigsaw, and then being expected to know what the whole picture represents. So who will tell me?

Certainly not the diehard atheists; they’re just taking the easy option. Certainly not the religionists; they have too much of the scent of delusion and dependency about them. Certainly not the people who run the world; they’re too driven by ego and the pursuit of self-interest. But I’ve said all this before and the mystery of the finished picture remains elusive.

Maybe one of these days the personal woes will magically disappear, world affairs will take on an optimistic note, and the good people will come to the fore at last. And if I spot a flock of pigs flying westward into the sunset, I might take a break from the jigsaw and start to re-engage with writing silly ditties, flights of amused imagination, and tongue-in-cheek observations of things that don’t matter. Until the next life.

The Dispiriting Nature of Days.

I’ve adopted the habit of taking breakfast in bed a lot lately – just a bowl of cereal and a mug of tea, nothing extravagant. It’s to put off the moment when I have to leave my bed, get dressed, and open the door of my private little cell in order to face the world and another tedious day.

So why are the days so tedious? Well, because they rarely contain anything which isn’t either a chore, a maddening inconvenience, or something about which to be anxious. There’s so little to offer a spark of encouragement because most of what my culture has to offer by way of distraction is, to me, superficial, inconsequential and generally uninteresting. I can be sure now that I’m never likely to meet the person who could make me a baked Alaska, I’m never going to make that trip up the Yangtze because Mr Xi’s policies are making China thoroughly alien territory, and I’m never going to see the aurora because it would be too expensive and too bloody cold.

And yet there is still one thing I would like to do. Do you want to know what it is? It’s to sit down with the Lady B, having no previously prescribed time limit, and ask her some questions. But this is something I cannot look to have for a number of reasons, not least the fact that she has not the slightest desire to accommodate such an event. And there’s an even bigger impediment:

The questions I would like to ask are ones which I have no right to ask, and the answers – whatever they might be – are ones which I have no right to hear. And such an impediment has attained the level of the sacrosanct now. So that’s that.

 

Meanwhile, my growing faculty for empathy is causing me to be very worried about the plight of the poor people of Afghanistan.

The Role of the Seasons.

I came around the corner of my house at 5 o’clock this afternoon and was surprised to see how long my shadow was on the path. I noticed that the heat of the sun on my back was milder, less intimidating, than I’d grown used to of late. And then I felt the cold breeze in my hair and on my ears which picked up the occasional whistle in the trees when the wind strengthened for a moment. It seemed to whisper stridently and insistently: ‘Not long to go now. Autumn is almost here.’

And that’s how life is, of course, pulling you through the seasons year after year, each one startling you slightly because you were just getting used to the previous one. It encourages recollections of a few earlier seasons which were notable enough to remember. There was the long, hot, dry summer in my twenties when standpipes were being erected in the streets in readiness for the cessation of piped water supplies. There was the bitterly cold and snowy winter in my thirties when I had 2ft snowdrifts in the loft, and the water in the bathroom toilet had a layer of ice on it. And there was that spring only fourteen years ago when April was replete with warm sunshine and butterflies, but the summer which followed was largely cold and wet.

But most of the seasons over a lifetime meld into a generality of minor memories. Fishing and snorkelling on holiday, sliding down the browning grass of Tanner’s Bank on the shiny side of a piece of hardboard, waking up one Sunday morning with no school to go to but a snow-buried landscape in which to play, the thrilling sight of a bluebell wood on a school nature walk one sunny April day many faded moons ago.

Now the seasons fly by at a seemingly dizzying speed. They are the means by which we measure the year, and a reminder that the sum of the years is finite for each and every one of us. They are the most potent agents of time which has always lighted we fools the way to dusty death. And however they might change as the reckless, ignorant and selfish human animal unthinkingly abuses nature’s imperatives, they always will be.

Updates.

Two little updates on recent blog posts:

It’s odd, isn’t it, that you can go six months without seeing a familiar number plate, and then you see it twice in the space of two days. It’s that old universe conveying messages again, and I think I know what it means this time. I feel the last verse of Raglan Road coming on. But it’s pleasing that I’m making an enigmatic blog post, having not done so for quite a while. I’ve missed it. It used to be a speciality of mine during the blog’s middle period.

And today I told Mel about the dark haired woman, the all black clothes, the paintbrush and the black Labrador dog. She was quite intrigued, and said she wondered whether this was the person going around painting the black patches on the Friesian cows. I wish I’d thought of that.

In other news, I spent some time today writing quite a long post about a Hopi Indian chief and the subject of spirituality. I felt strongly moved to write it because it seemed important. I got so far and then left it, meaning to finish and post it tonight. When tonight came I’d completely lost interest. Happens all the time.

Black is the Colour.

I’ve lived in the Shire for more than fifteen years now, and yet today I encountered a woman I’ve never seen before. She was rather attractive, too, probably around forty and possessed of dark hair and a youthful figure. I said ‘good morning’ (even though it was actually afternoon) and she said ‘hi’ before smiling at me rather nicely. (She couldn’t have been much over forty because women over forty, especially those who live in posh houses, generally don’t say ‘hi’. They say ‘hello’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘how do you do’ if a reasonable probability of social intercourse appears to be in the offing.) The point is, though, that it seems such a long time since an attractive, dark haired woman said ‘hi’ to me and smiled nicely. Attractive, dark haired women hardly ever speak to me these days, or even acknowledge my presence.

And do you know what this mysterious woman was wearing? All black. And do you know what she was doing? Standing in her garden painting her gate – black. (Which seems rather unusual to a person of my generation. When I was growing up, men generally had sole rights to the paint brushes, while the women prepared dinner and told the children that they mustn’t go anywhere near daddy because they might get black paint on their nice clean clothes and mummy wouldn’t be best pleased at having to get it off again.)

So then I moved onward and upward to the village proper, where I further encountered another woman standing in her garden. No mystery there, though; I’ve had plenty of conversations with her over the years. She’s the one I’ve mentioned before, the one with the big yellow Labrador dog whose desire to befriend me was discouraged on the grounds that it might leap in my direction and pull her over. And there was a Labrador dog standing next to her, only it wasn’t yellow. It was black, which caused me to wonder whether the mystery woman had made the journey onward and upward earlier in order to practice her painting skills on the dog. I didn’t ask.

The Matter of a Car and Personal Evolution.

The most interesting thing that happened today was seeing an unfamiliar car with a familiar number plate. Why is that interesting, you might ask? Well, because the number plate told me who is associated with that car, but the nature of the car itself seemed quite inappropriate to what I thought was the nature of the person I assumed was driving it.

But it didn’t stop there. It never does with me because it raises a question in my mind, and my mind is the sort which has to formulate a theory or argument to address that question. (It’s a curse, I know, but that’s a different subject.) In this case it caused me to ponder the process of personal evolution. My reasoning went as follows:

We all evolve as we go through life, and that evolution is influenced to some extent by factors which are present in our environment, particularly our closest environment which is our home. And one of the major influences comes from the people with whom we share that environment. A process comes into play which we might call the dynamic of consensus, which is constantly questioning and suggesting adjustments to our attitudes, opinions, and general view of life.

It seems to me, therefore, that those of us who live alone have only ourselves as the primary reference point, whereas those who live with others – especially in a strong and intimate relationship like marriage – have other reference points interacting with their own. It’s reasonable to postulate that if we marry a certain person we will evolve differently than if we had married a different person. Such might very well explain the seeming incongruity between the car and the presumed driver, who is a married woman with children. She is probably a very different person now from the one I knew who was unattached. And I might be completely wrong, but I’ll settle with it until a better explanation comes along.

And since the person in question used to be the brightest star in my firmament, it explains why the spotting of the car was today’s most interesting occurrence.(I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that I hardly ever want to get up in the morning.)

An Owl at Twilight.

Today’s twilight treat was the unfamiliar call of an apparently unfamiliar owl. I knew it wasn’t a Barn Owl or a Tawny Owl and curiosity was the order of the moment. 

 

So I looked it up

In my book of birds

 

And the sound

I found 

 

Was precisely what

I’d heard

 

It was, apparently, a Little Owl, which chalks up yet another first to this Year of Firsts.

Another first happened yesterday afternoon when I saw countless sparrows flying over my head en route to the big sycamore tree at the bottom of the garden. It’s common enough to see small groups of sparrows flying together from one hedgerow to another, but this was something completely different. This had the appearance of a mass migration on the scale of the biblical exodus. Where had they come from, I wondered, and where were they going?

Well, actually, I could see where they were going. I’ve already said so, haven’t I? There being no Red Sea in the vicinity, they were heading for the big sycamore tree at the bottom of the garden. By an odd coincidence, it was the very same tree from which I was to hear an unfamiliar owl calling a little over twenty four hours later. I’ve long suspected that there is magic in that tree, and I’m content to admit that I’m ever more given to improbable and unprovable speculations the older I get.

 

*  *  *

I’ve been feeling grouchy and unsettled all day today. I was called out of bed prematurely by the desire to visit the bathroom early this morning. And then I was awoken again a little later, but also prematurely, by noise from the neighbours who rise much earlier than I do. I got up at that point, but still felt the same condition of weariness, depression and general dysfunction as I always feel for about an hour after getting out of bed. Today it lasted all day. It probably explains the mood swings and the writing of poor and pointless blog posts.

And I just ate two rice cakes because one wasn’t enough.