On Catherines, Names and Sundry Rubbish.

I was thinking earlier about the woman who stopped my way on the blasted heath yesterday evening (at twilight, note, although I doubt she was a witch because she didn’t have a beard and therefore bore no physical resemblance to Macbeth’s little crew of horrors, bent as they were upon persuading him onto the road to perdition’s flame. The burning mill is but a bagatelle in comparison. Don’t I talk rubbish sometimes?)

Anyway, the purpose of the post is simply to say that Catherine is a good name. It’s one of those names that are so much better than their diminutives. (I could go on to talk about dear Zoe’s insistence on calling me Jeffrey at this point, but I won’t.) Cathy is pleasant and girlish enough, but it lacks the substance, strength and gravitas of its parent. Cath is, in my opinion, simply unpleasant.

Catherine is elegant and enduring. It speaks of equanimity, intelligence, candour, reliability and good sense. If you were experiencing a crisis, you would expect a Catherine to calmly pull you through it. And Henry VIII must have liked the name because he married three of them and only executed one.

I’m listening to Julie Fowlis again, only a different album this time. And I’m feeling slightly nauseous on account of having just eaten an overripe banana. I thought it would be a healthier alternative to a pack of Jacob’s Mini Cheddars (Ploughman’s Cheshire Cheese flavour.) I’ll know better next time.

But back to the name game. I have to repeat something I’ve said several times on this blog: no woman’s name quite approaches Abigail for sheer pulling power. I don’t know what it is about that name, but it gets to me, you know? It does. Maybe it was Abigail who pulled me from a burning mill just in the nick of time during the course of a past life. Or maybe she was the only one who didn’t hit me when I was in the asylum.

And now I’m talking rubbish again, so I’m going to re-boot the computer because it gets cranky if I give it too much to do. But not before finishing Julie’s song set (I’d prefer it if she were called Aisling, but you can’t have everything, can you?)

Seeing a Small Bit of the Big Picture.

I had to walk down to the post box in Bag Lane today, and on the way back I saw a boy of around fifteen walking towards me. He held his head down and looked surly, so I watched him as he approached and continued looking at him as the distance closed. He half turned his head at one point, but didn’t make eye contact. And so I continued to watch him, and at the last minute he looked sideways back at me. I said ‘hello’, whereupon he uttered two vaguely nasal sounds which defied any attempt at translation into intelligible English.

This might provide one small paragraph in a social novel of 100,000 words, and it struck me that while the big events of the day make the headlines and create the noise, the intrigue, the horror, the anger, the indignation, the fear, the hope, and even occasionally the pleasure, it’s little episodes like this that weave the multifarious threads of life’s tapestry for most of us. It’s what the god of small things trades in, and most writers do so admire the god of small things.

Meeting Little Nell.

I had a most remarkable encounter this evening (at twilight, of course; nearly everything of note that happens to me these days happens at twilight. I suspect the universe is trying to tell me something.) Actually it would be more accurate to say that I had two remarkable encounters, so let’s deal with the more substantial one first (the mysterious one can take its place in some low-lit recess wherein family heirlooms stand impassively and mysteries generally belong.)

I met little Nell. She leapt at me lovingly, lolloping with great gusto and licking whichever bit of me was closest like I was the best ice cream to be had in this world or any other. At a mere seven months old, she was the very essence of what every young lady has the right to be: uninhibited, unwary of the stranger, possessed of boundless affection and trust, and unrestrained in her determination to bestow upon any grateful recipient the loveliness of her presence. I was the grateful recipient, and the reader will no doubt already have surmised that little Nell was a dog.

And so she was, a chocolate brown Cocker/Springer Spaniel cross, longer in body than a typical Cocker but not as heavily built as a Springer. It occurred to me that she will grow a little bigger than a Cocker, and that the day might come when I shall no longer occupy the role of the neighbourhood ice cream, but instead be seen as a fit subject to be carried like a juicy bone and buried in whatever spot happens to be available in the garden. Would I mind that? Erm… probably. For the time being, however, I’m more than happy to be lovingly accosted and licked half to death.

So what of the mysterious half of this twilit encounter?

Well, little Nell was accompanied by a second young lady – of the human variety this time – called Catherine. No mystery there, you might say, but…

Readers of longstanding will be aware that I do not have the nature of a little Nell. I don’t connect with strangers at all, let alone freely, unless they feel right. Catherine felt right; that’s the mystery. And so I opened up almost without constraint, knowing full well – and being quite unconcerned – that yet another resident of the Shire will now be aware of the Nutcase Who Lives Near the School. It occurs to me to wonder whether she has a pitchfork, and so will be suitably equipped to join the madding crowd when they drive me to the burning mill.

I expect the event will take place at twilight, since nearly everything of note that happens to me happens at twilight. (Yes, I know I already said that. It’s a literary device.) It’s a fact, you see, that burning brands look more dramatic and decorous in the darkening air, and gleaming tines on pitchforks look all the more theatrical when raised against a grey and glowering sky. If you’re destined to be a manufactured monster, you might as well be an entertaining one. And I wonder whether little Nell will trot along for the fun and wag her tail enthusiastically when the floorboards collapse.

Charm.

I just read a comment on an old post of mine. It came from a woman of whom I grew unaccountably fond, even though I never met her. It said ‘You could charm the horns off a rampaging rhino, Jeff.’

Well now, what is one to make of that? It seems to me that there are two kinds of charm: there’s the honest, natural, candid sort which slips out without artifice. And then there’s the other kind: the manufactured, disingenuous, slimy sort consciously designed to achieve some sort of nefarious end.

So if I am, or was, charming, to which sort may I honestly lay claim? How would I know? Could my Irish ancestry provide a clue? And does it matter anyway, since whatever charm I might or might not have possessed hitched a ride with the poor old diseased kidney three years ago and disappeared into whatever receptacle is the last resting place of diseased kidneys.

And a few too many birthdays haven’t helped… Bye for now.

The Power of Music.

Now that the days are growing shorter I need more indoor evening diversions than I did during the long, light days of May, June and July. Unfortunately, I have little to keep me occupied. No DVDs, nothing on the TV, no emails to write, and YouTube doesn’t get its slot until after midnight for reasons already explained. So tonight I decided to listen to an old favourite album of music from Julie Fowlis, Uam, which I gather is Scots Gaelic and means ‘from me to you.’

As soon as the first bar came through the headphones I was transported back ten years, back to the winter of 2011 when I spent every night sitting by the fireside with this album while reading The Mists of Avalon. It was a book I lived rather than merely read, and Uam is so indelibly associated with it that they might be conjoined twins.

And so the memory of those days sweeps over me like the incoming tide, but the experience doesn’t stop at mere simpering and ultimately pointless nostalgia. It promotes reflection on the intervening years. I question the similarities and differences between who I was then and who I am now. Am I better or worse or just different? How do my respective circumstances compare? And what of the people who were in my orbit back then, and who have now nearly all gone without the benefit of replacement? How did my life path guide me onto that ‘quiet street where old ghosts meet’ to quote Mr Kavanagh? And there was the blissful ignorance of the dam of health issues that was to break over me exactly seven years later and which are now dominating my life.

These and more reflections full of sound and feeling, signifying nothing. And all from a few bars of Julie Fowlis’s music. And will any of it inform or affect what length of road I still have to walk? Almost certainly not.

Unusually for me, I’m posting this raw – no editing – while I’m still listening to the music.

A Haunting Issue.

It might have been noted that I’m becoming increasingly interested in the possibility of being a ghost after I die and engaging in a bit of haunting here and there. But, as with all high minded ideals, I foresee a problem: I’m basically a well-meaning and sentimental old soul who would be most reluctant to frighten or otherwise distress the kind of person I would be likely to want to haunt. So how do I get over the objection?

The problem is, you see, that you don’t have to appear at the foot of somebody’s bed looking wan, waxy and wasted in the darkness of the early hours, intoning in a wavering or gravelly voice: ‘I’m so, so cold; may I stand beside you for a moment to feel again the warmth of a living body?’ to be frightening. You could sit in the corner of the garden in the sunshine, waving and smiling in a friendly manner, and you’d still be frightening. It’s a sad, and maybe even irrational, fact that the evident presence – whether visual, aural or even olfactory – of someone you know to be deceased is frightening by default.

The Lady B once said to me, a very long time ago before she acquired a husband and children and stopped acknowledging my earthly presence (except with a wave or a smile if circumstances happened to be favourable): ‘Please don’t haunt me, Jeff. That would creep me out.’ I did attempt to reassure her that I would do so in a friendly and non-frightening way, to which she might have replied: ‘There’s no such thing as a friendly and non-frightening way, Jeff. The evident presence of someone I know to be deceased is frightening by default.’ (Only Lady Bs don’t say that kind of thing. They say ‘Please don’t haunt me anyway. That would creep me out.’) But, whatever… In the event, I never got a reply so I can only assume that her objection remained intact. I suppose I could sit unseen in the kitchen, tapping my fingers silently on the table while observing such domestic pleasantries as happened to be available, but it wouldn’t do. There would be something unsatisfactorily unilateral about it and I think I would find it most frustrating. There’s really no point in haunting somebody unless you can be sure they know they’re being haunted. So back we go to square one.

This remains an unresolved problem, and I suspect that so it will always remain as long as I continue to wake up in the morning to drag my corporeal form through yet another day. I can only hope that somebody with more experience in that kind of thing will be around to give me a few tips when the time comes, but how can I know? Is anybody listening? Is there anybody there? One knock for yes and two for no.

This brain of mine is in a wandering mood. Soon be time for bed.

Rising Above the Affliction.

The health issues are dominating my days even more than usual at the moment, leading to discomfort, dysfunction and a modicum of dismay. They were but one part of today’s troubles.

But I did order another Shirley Jackson book this evening (when I’d finished closing all those irritating little boxes which eBay keeps throwing at you to try and get you to join their club.) I’m becoming quite the fan of Shirley Jackson. She’s most perceptive in a weird sort of way, and that suits me nicely.

But now I’m tired of writing blog posts, munching on various comestibles, and trying to find a comfortable position in my computer chair because parts of me hurt. Soon be time for my nightly scotch and YouTube. I’ve started putting deliberately provocative comments on YouTube videos just to see whether the new, improved me handles being trolled in a more equanimous way than it used to.

A Note on Honourable Sister.

I encountered several members of the D clan today, that’s the clan of which the Lady B is the most notable member. (Actually it’s complicated because she has her own clan now in addition to her hereditary one, but let’s not split hairs.)

She wasn’t in attendance today, but Honourable Sister and her canine companion were, and Honourable Sister smiled at me as she usually does. (I think I might have scowled in return. I can’t help it, you know, I really can’t.) But here’s the thing about HS: she gives of her smiles freely, but not her words. She’s never shown the slightest inclination to engage with me in conversation, and that’s a shame because she’s mysterious; and mysteries are both fascinating and frustrating; and if that’s how life has to be, that’s how life has to be.

There’s no reason to doubt that I shall go to my grave without ever having had a conversation with Honourable Sister, and so the question arises: should I haunt her by invisibly playing catch with her dog on summer days when the thunder is rolling around the heavens and a storm is in the air? Maybe not. How fortunate it is that I don’t bear grudges. (But I might just whisper a quiet ‘hello’ when she’s alone and reading a book by the fireside one cold winter’s night. I’ll be curious to see whether she smiles at that.)

Replacing Religion.

Today has been a bad day in so many ways. It seems I must have offended the gods today, so multifarious have been the misfortunes, and I’m led to wonder whether it all stemmed from a thought I had this morning. It wasn’t an entirely new thought, but it seemed to crystallise more than usual. At the risk of offending the gods further, I’ll spell it out.

It seemed to me that there is a pressing need for the human race to divest itself of religion. All religions are effectively speculative, and they do so lend themselves to a fractured mess of traditions and sects and traditions within sects. In consequence, they are one of the most potently divisive influences on the human race. They produce conflict; and conflict produces a host of evils including abuse, cruelty, power mania, enslavement, the letting of blood and the taking of lives. The situation in Afghanistan is the latest sad example, but it’s been going on for thousands of years.

I know I’m not the first person to say this, but I’ve noticed that most proponents of the idea are engaged in promoting atheism. I’m not. It’s apparent that we in the ‘developed’ world have largely consigned religion to a peripheral accessory, but what we’ve replaced it with won’t do. The new quasi religion has only brought us more insubstantial, less mysterious, more readily accessible gods like money, status, the promotion of ego, and lifestyle obsession. It’s all too plastic, too superficial; it struts its stuff loudly in the empty environs of the lower mind, but totally fails to recognise and nurture the inner being.

So while I advocate the dismissal of religion, I feel that we need to replace it with a more universal and inclusive form of spirituality, beginning with an acknowledgement of our connectedness to nature, and then proceeding to an individual search for the meaning of life and the nature of what lies beyond material existence.

Many people are now doing this – me included – but the movement is shackled by the religious zealots who are working hard to keep the human race bound in the chains of one tradition or another. ‘You must do as we say,’ they intone gravely. ‘We are right and everyone else is wrong. If you stray from our path you will eventually go to our version of God and be punished horribly. We might even hasten the process by dispatching your physical body.’

And so, while I have the deepest, most heartfelt sympathy for the poor people of Afghanistan, I suggest that the bigger picture – the real war, if you like – is with the religions which promote the divisions for dark-hearted people to use to their advantage. It’s a sad aspect of human nature that people will always seek reasons to come into conflict, but remove religion and a major window of opportunity will be closed.

Changing Horses.

I just had a reply to one of my YouTube comments. It was the sort of reply which causes my Gregory House side to leap frantically up and down begging for permission to fire off an apposite response. These days I can’t allow it, of course, because while dear old Greg will wander around in the fog after he’s dead, wondering why he can still think even when he can’t see anything, I’ll be basking in the divine light where wood nymphs frolic and the dietary cholesterol in ice cream doesn’t matter any more.