Raining Luck?

For some reason I’ve developed an odd fascination with the old 1930s classic ballad Pennies from Heaven.

 

I’m not quite sure exactly what one is supposed to infer from the enigmatic lyrics, much less why the song has suddenly captured my interest, but you can listen to it here if you like. It’s the original Arthur Tracy version which many consider the best. 

The Bats Came Back.

My garden came alive this evening with the arrival of several bats out a-hunting. They were flying close, too, which is always a thrill. And I was particularly pleased because that sort of thing used to be an almost daily occurrence during the warmer months, but it hasn’t happened for several years.

So to what do I owe this sudden reprise of an old pleasure? I imagine it was because hibernation beckons, and when it’s nearly time to go to sleep for several months, a bat needs to get fat. But why today specifically? Probably the fact that all my hedges received the attention of blade-wielding contractors today, so maybe there were lots of homeless insects about.

Whatever the reason, it was delightful to see them. But apologies to insects everywhere. Life really isn’t fair, is it?

A Reason Never to Go Out.

I had to get my picture taken today in one of those booths with a curtain across so nobody can see you looking stupid. (They should really have a soundproofed door so nobody can hear you scream.) I followed all the prompts, and pressed all the right buttons, and paid the unearthly fee of £8, and tried to look intelligent, and then went outside and waited for my little strip of pictures to appear. Eventually they did, and I soon wished they hadn’t.

I know these booths never take pictures which might be described as flattering, and I know I’m older than the last time I used one, and I know I look like a cross between Quasimodo and Golum these days, but I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw there. ‘Do I really look that terrible?’ I asked myself. ‘Possibly not,’ I answered, ‘but you never know.’

I knocked on the cabinet in hope of being able to complain to the little person with the camera, but nobody appeared. I expect they’ve been told to stay still and very quiet until the disgruntled customer slinks dejectedly away, and that’s what I did eventually.

If I could be certain that nobody ever looks at this blog I might be tempted to post the picture here, but there’s evidence to suggest that about three people still do so they’ll just have to imagine it.

The Matter of What Matters.

Do you know what was the most-read feature on the BBC News website today? This was the news event which attracted more interest than anything else going on in the world.

Forget Putin’s prospective meeting with Xi (which might include how to take over Eurasia and carve it up between them.) Forget Ukrainian advances in the war. Forget the rash of people in Lebanon holding up bank tellers at gunpoint purely to draw their own money out because everybody’s assets have been frozen. Forget the pro-Trump nutcase in America trying to take New Hampshire away from the Democrats. Forget the killer natural disasters happening all over the place. It was none of those. The headline ran:

William and Harry to walk behind coffin

And do you remember the headline: ‘Andrew to take care of corgis’? They didn’t let the subject drop at that, because today we had:

Welsh farmer’s dog sired Queen’s corgi

But best of all was this one:

Stay of execution for palace mice 

Traps to be un-baited until Tuesday

OK, I admit it. I made that one up for the sake of going with the flow. Fits nicely, though, doesn’t it?

Visiting What Isn't There.

The big Queen news today is the matter of the much-vaunted ‘lying in state’ (though in a closed coffin), first in Edinburgh and then in London from tomorrow. Apparently, thousands of people queued all night to file past the casket, and thousands more are expected in London over the next few days.

(This does rather suggest a scenario, doesn’t it? One of the filing-past mourners asks the attendant – I assume there must be some kind of attendant or guard of honour or something – a question:

“’Scuse me, mate.”

“What?”

“How do we know she’s in there?”

“I can assure you, she is.”

“Not proof though, is it? Couldn’t you open it up and let’s have a peek?”

“Move along please.”

But now I’m being flippant, so let’s move on.)

I once saw a TV drama in which a pathologist was taking a group of students through the process of conducting a post mortem (autopsy if you prefer.) The first thing the pathologist said was “You mustn’t think of this as a person. It’s just a body. The person has gone.”

It made sense to me then and it still does. Everything that made the physical manifestation a person is no more. It’s a human body, but not a human being. It’s now a mass of inert biological material beginning the natural process of decay. The person has gone, OK? In this case it certainly isn’t a Queen because you have to be alive to be one of those.

So why are people so keen to file past it, and even go without sleep in order to do so?

I suspect that most of them think it’s because they want to express their sense of mourning for someone who was important to them, even though they’d never met her, were never going to meet her, were certainly never going to visit her on an ad hoc basis to chat about the weather over morning coffee, and she isn’t actually there anyway.

And are they really in mourning? I expect those of a diehard royalist persuasion might be, but I further suspect that most are there for a slightly different reason: they want to be there in order to join with the masses in a kind of inverted celebration of what might be seen as a momentous event in history. It serves the need to belong.

And that’s why I wouldn’t bother.

(It also reminds of that favourite Far Side cartoon in which a man in full climbing gear is descending a hole in the ground. When asked why he’s doing it he replies: “Because it isn’t there.”)

Chalk and Cheese.

Somebody else told me the other day that I looked like Clint Eastwood. Could it be significant that both claimants were female, I wonder? In any event, let’s take a look. This was Clint Eastwood in his prime:

 

 And this was me in mine:

 

 

Where’s the similarity? I never had a hat like that. And besides, I imagine that Clint approves of the swing to the right in Swedish politics, whereas I don’t. (And just as I was beginning to warm to them.)

Overkill.

I just opened the BBC UK News page and counted the number of features it had published. There were twenty four. And then I counted the ones that were about the Queen: twenty one.

So then I looked at the World News site and found it full of reactions around the world to the death of the UK monarch. (There was a bit about Ukraine as well.)

BBC Sports News next. There were reports about weekend sporting fixtures being cancelled because the funeral will be on Monday. I suppose that’s fair enough up to a point, but then we get a piece about the England cricket team’s victory against South Africa today, and the headline is a quotation from the captain: ‘England took inspiration from the Queen.’ Oh right; I bet they did.

I imagine editors cajoling their feature writers: ‘We’ve got to fill the site with more about the Queen but we’re running out of ideas. Give me something new.’ ‘How about the fate of the dogs?’ suggests one enterprising young hack. ‘’The dogs?’ ‘Yeah. She liked corgis, didn’t she?’  ‘Nice one,’ says the editor, much relieved. ‘Find out and write it up.’ And that, no doubt, is how we got the one entitled: ‘Prince Andrew to Take Care of the Corgis.’

The only one of these features I could be bothered to read was the one about several people being arrested for shouting anti-monarchist slogans in public. (The police deemed it a public order offence.) That has to be a bit worrying, doesn’t it? You know, freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully protest in a democracy? I gather one protester was later de-arrested. I didn’t even know that a person could be de-arrested, but apparently the malefactor is now ‘voluntarily assisting officers.’

This country is becoming sillier and sillier.

Connections and Coincidences.

Take a look at the picture posted below. The woman on the right is my mother, the one on the left my Auntie Hilda, my father’s youngest sister. And here’s the story:

They’d known each other as children when they’d lived in the same area and played together. Many years later my mother met my father and only then discovered that Hilda was his sister. A year or so after this picture was taken my parents separated and the two women never met again, but approximately forty years later they both died within forty minutes of each other, one in a hospice in Stoke on Trent and the other in a hospital in Coventry.

Coincidences can occasionally seem somehow meaningful, can’t they?

 

 

*  *  *

And here’s another little coincidence:

Yesterday was a highly stressful one for me, and today I seem to be in the throes of the old Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The sense of inner weakness occasioning both physical and mental dysfunction would be impossible to fully describe, but it’s quite unpleasant. It feels as though the life force is being dangerously stretched and might snap at any moment. And the coincidence is that the performance of my computer accurately reflects the performance of my mind and body. It nearly always does.

On Family and the Importance of Hats.

A very pretty 21-year-old woman said ‘love you’ to me today, which was rather sweet. And the fact that she was one of my granddaughters made it really quite moving. And the other two (I have three, you know) told me several times how glad they were that they had inherited my (slightly unconventional) genes. If I may reprise a sentence which appears about a hundred and fifty times in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: ‘I did not say anything.’

I should mention that I had a visit today from my daughter and three granddaughters. My daughter told me the story of her aunt’s misgivings regarding her marriage way back whenever it was. On the day before the nuptials were to be performed she had communicated her fears to her mother and said that she didn’t think she was able to go through with it, to which her mother replied: ‘You have to. We’ve bought the hats.’

Her aunt and uncle are, incidentally, still married and apparently despise one another.

Staying Put.

It’s often occurred to me throughout my life that we in the UK – and most of the rest of Europe come to that – live a life relatively free of the kind of hazards commonly found in much of the rest of the world.

Take America, for example. I for one cannot imagine how anybody could possibly feel comfortable living in a country which has bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, alligators, tornadoes, hurricanes, active volcanoes, fearsomely cold winters, scorchingly hot summers, American TV, National Guardsmen, and Donald Trump supporters.

And what about Australia? Salt water crocodiles in the billabong, venomous spiders in the shower, Great White sharks in the paddling pools, man-eating ants in the garage, and seemingly the most inept politicians on the planet.

How on earth do they get through life with that lot on the doorstep?