The Loner Thing.

There are times when I want to declare some of the stranger things about me on this blog, but I hesitate because I know there might be repercussions. People are wont to misunderstand the stranger aspects of a strange person. They pass what you say through the filter of limited personal experience and come up with all sorts of misguided notions, and then they judge you. And, as I’m frequently led to point out, you never know who might pick up your blog one day and read it.

But does it matter whether I’m judged or not? I don’t suppose it does, really, not unless the person doing the judging happens to be somebody whose opinion of me matters, and there are very few of those. Besides, I don’t even know for certain whether anybody ever reads this blog. Nobody ever leaves comments to establish the fact. Several stats trackers tell me that it’s visited on a daily basis, but I’ve long since stopped trusting stats trackers. So why don’t I try one and see whether it hurts? OK, here’s goes:

I have a curiously vehement aversion to the term ‘you two.’

My mother would occasionally use it if I was talking to my brother about something. ‘I’ll leave you two to work it out,’ she would say as she walked off to make a pot of tea. My reaction was not dissimilar to having a noxious chemical poured down my throat. I felt more than insulted; I felt violated.

What is this ‘you two’? I wanted to ask her in a tone of extreme indignation. There is no ‘us two.’ There is him and there is me. Why do you insult me by forcing my hand into the hand of another? By what right do you presume to connect me intimately with another person by employing the unifying phrase ‘you two’? I don’t do connections, mother. I cannot be part of any union. It isn’t who I am.

I never did say that, of course, because she wouldn’t have understood. I merely writhed and grimaced inside. And it isn’t entirely true either. There have been, and still are, a tiny number of very special people with whom I have felt a connection. But the last bit is true. I cannot and never will be part of any union. It’s why I was never married even though I went through a ceremony. It’s why I came back from a minor surgical procedure on a cold November night with the anaesthetic wearing off and there was nobody to make me a cup of tea or warm the house. It’s the loner thing, and I expect it to remain so for whatever length of life I have left. I’ve undergone many changes during my life – some of them profound and far reaching – but the loner thing had the first stirrings of its genesis in early childhood and has grown stronger as the years have passed.

And that, it seems reasonable to assume, is why I feel so uncomfortable with the phrase ‘you two.’ Sometimes I wish it were different because very occasionally I feel the chill sting of loneliness. But it doesn’t happen often enough to be a problem. And at times I get frustrated when some of the tiny number of perceived connections go apparently unreciprocated, but I’ve learned to accept the objects of that perception for who they are.

So there; that didn’t hurt a bit, did it? And I don’t suppose it was very interesting either. Sorry to anybody who might happen to visit.

Shades of Amazing.

Ever since I discovered many years ago that the mediaeval French poet, Chretien de Troyes, was the one who introduced the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot (or Lancelot du Lac) into the Arthurian canon, I’ve wanted to know how to pronounce his name.

Well, now I’ve discovered a YouTube clip in which a French woman tells me. And you know what? It’s had 5,500 views. You mean there are 5,500 people who want to know how to pronounce Chretien de Troyes? Isn’t that amazing?

And you also know what? (Does that make grammatical sense?) I’ve been pronouncing it correctly all these years. Isn’t that also amazing? (And don’t French women have amazing voices?)

Seeing the Photo Opportunity.

There’s a line in Christmas song which I had as a kid. It runs:

...the secret of Christmas
Is not the things you do at Christmastime

But the Christmas things you do all year through

I think the sentiment is worth bearing in mind when viewing pictures of Donald Trump showing America and the world how much he cares for the benighted folks of Texas and Louisiana. There’s been one up on the BBC news pages all day, but I decided not to soil the pages of my blog with it.

Losing Lisa.

I read another of my old stories tonight, A Fairytale in Philadelphia. It took me back to a time when I still had aspirations, a time before the view in the mirror cleared and I had to accept that I was no longer 32. But it was heartening to discover that I could make a passable attempt at being some sort of a writer back then.

And it was also interesting to realise that I had taken Louise’s advice. No doubt the real Lisa has learned her lessons in her own time and I am properly far and away. There is a bittersweetness about such recollections, but I can take heart from the fact that there are erstwhile dental nurses of ¼-Greek extraction prepared to massage my ego by remembering who I am. I just have to hope that I don’t get carried away and forget that I’m not 32 any more.

Exploring DOL.

I see from my Blogger stats that my post Dolorous Day continues to be read, or at least accessed, quite frequently And every time I do I’m struck by the same thought. I imagine there might be people around the globe to whom the world ‘dolorous’ is unfamiliar, and who might mistakenly assume that the post is about somebody called Dolores Day. And then they might go searching Google to find out whether Doris had a sister.

Oh, well. If Sir Lancelot could have his Dolorous Gard, at least I’m in esteemed company in reporting that my days are persistently dolorous these days as the doldrums continue to weigh heavy.

(It’s also an odd coincidence that the letters DOL have come to have some little significance for me, but you wouldn’t want to know about that.)

On Summer and Temporality.

There’s an hour left of August. According to the British Met Office, summer ends at midnight tonight.

Why are summers so short these days? When I was a boy summer began at Easter which was always (if my memory serves me right, and I don’t suppose it does) warm, calm, sunny and pregnant with optimism. And it went on until the mists and crumbling leaves of autumn told me it was over and Christmas was approaching.

Summer seemed like a six month business back then, and six months seemed like half a lifetime to a young child. And now summer comes and goes in the time it takes a wind-blown apple to fall back to the very earth which gave it genesis. Or so it seems, and as I keep on saying: ‘perception is the whole of the life experience.’

On Nature and Artifice.

Somebody said to me today that she loves gardening because ‘it brings me closer to the earth, closer to nature.’ I can see the point up to a point, but only as far as it goes. It seems to me that gardening is fundamentally an artifice; it’s another example of our need to tame nature, to bring it to heel. Is that because we retain a race memory of being frightened of nature and the horrors it can visit upon us? Do we create gardens in order to manicure it, to pretty it up, so that we can pretend to be getting close to it when what we’re actually doing is forcing it to be pleasant and non-threatening?

This is a difficult concept to argue because gardens are beautiful things, and the perception of beauty is an abstract faculty which resides in the higher mind. What’s more, it’s probably a particularly human faculty, part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. So is the beautifying of nature a natural process in itself which has its place among all the other natural processes?

For my own part I regard my garden as my sacred space. I love the look of it, I love the atmosphere of it, I love sensing the growth imperative; I even have a sense of ‘relationship’ with individual plants and trees and want to understand their needs so that I can better care for them.

And yet I dislike gardening. I dislike all that mowing and trimming and weeding and digging. I feel that a nettle has as much right to its life as a prize rose, and I don’t see what right I have to go around making hedges tidy and rectilinear when they want to be raggedy. That creates a certain conflict, but it’s what I have to do if I want the beauty of a garden.

I confess to not fully understanding this conflict yet. I wonder whether I simply don’t feel entirely comfortable with being on this earth. Maybe I don’t really want to be close to it; maybe I want to be somewhere more rarefied where beauty comes naturally without having to force something to produce it artificially.

Voice Appeal.

Voices can be such a powerful attractant, can’t they? The tone, the accent, the modulation… I swear that even a female warthog could come close to being attractive given the right voice. Unfortunately, the only female warthog I know is not so blessed.

(French, Slavic, cultured English, New England USA, and Aussie are my favourites, by the way, just in case you're interested.)

More Excuses.

No post yesterday, and going a day without making a post troubles me. I feel I’m abdicating my duty to myself in some strange way. So what about today?

Should I talk about the lovely little dog I met in the pet shop? She wasn’t for sale or anything as tawdry as that; she was a 7-month-old little lady mongrel from a rescue centre who had managed to acquire two excellent humans, both of whom were clearly devoted to her. Well, that’s about the whole of the story, really, except to say that when I wished her a long and happy life it did occur to me to wonder how devastated the two excellent humans might be when it’s baby’s time to leave them.

Should I talk about seeing the girl from Ipanema in Ashbourne Co-op? Better not.

Should I talk about why the difficulties being experienced by a troubled person should be viewed in terms of the person, not the perceived degree of difficulty as recorded on the tram line scale? Too long and too serious for a person afflicted with chronic apathy.

For that’s the way of things at the moment: apathy, anxiety, and mild depression rule and I’m not managing to shake them off. I could offer several reasons in my defence (of varying degrees of difficulty as recorded on said tram line scale) but I think the core of it lies with a simple fact:

I’m continually conscious of there being a big empty hole somewhere inside of me that needs filling with something, but I don’t know what. None of the standard solutions fit the bill. I think it might have something to do with having so far failed in a lifetime (to date) of searching for the Grail. And I don’t know whether it even exists.

Life at Pace.

I was sitting on a wall today watching an elderly man cross the pedestrianised High Street in Uttoxeter. He was walking at an estimated speed of around half a mile an hour. There was another elderly man approaching from his left on a motorised scooter which was doing an estimated quarter of a mile an hour. There being around thirty yards of distance between them, I judged there was little danger of a catastrophic collision.

The elderly man on foot evidently thought otherwise because he stopped and waited. And waited, and waited… Eventually the motor scooter crawled slowly by and the man on foot continued his perambulation, even though his elderly wife was still trailing in his wake and hadn’t yet caught up with him.

If that had been a Monty Python sketch or scene from Father Ted it would have been funny. And even in real life it was funny, but there was also a touch of pathos mixed in with the humour.