Birds Behaving Oddly.

Over the past few weeks I’ve developed the habit of going for an evening stroll timed to bring me back just as the twilight is beginning to deepen. Once I get back I top up the various bird feeders so that there’s breakfast waiting for them when they get up, which is a damn sight earlier than I do.

During the process of conducting this duty (I tend to regard my routines as matters of duty, especially when there are other little lives involved) I’ve noticed over the past few nights that there’s been a robin standing in the same spot on the lawn in front of my house. It watches me until I’ve gone to the back of the house, and then hops over to get a drink from one of the water bowls. It’s becoming a nightly routine which fits perfectly with mine. You wouldn’t think that birds would be creatures of routine, would you?

And then there are the pheasants. Remember me mentioning a few nights ago that I’d witnessed the unprecedented sight of five cock birds flying together over the garden? Today they were actually in the garden, foraging in a tightly knit group under one of the bird tables. I’ve occasionally seen as many as three in the garden, but they’ve always been widely separated. To see five all together – shoulder to shoulder, as it were – is something else I’ve never seen before in the sixteen years I’ve lived here. (And one of them was an unusually large bird with a white crown. Is that significant? I’ve no idea.)

I gather there are those who say that birds bring us messages. Whether that’s true I wouldn’t know, but I’ve had several avian firsts this year and I’m beginning to wonder whether they know something we don’t.

September's Final Post (I think.)

I just saved a YouTube video on ‘The spiritual significance of waking up at 3am’ to watch later. I doubt I’ll take it very seriously, and it’s probably pointless in my case anyway because it’s usually close to 3 o’clock when I go to bed. But does that mean I’m being denied something of spiritual significance?

The thing is, you see, that because I go to bed so late I usually wake up (unless there’s a reason to set the alarm) somewhere around 10am. This morning, however, I woke up and looked at the clock to find that it was 11.20. Imagine that. And I recall that the same thing happened a few months ago. It would appear, therefore, that if I’m to receive my due share of spiritual goodies, I need to find a video on ‘The spiritual significance of waking up at 11.20am.’

Thank heaven I’ve finally found something silly to say before September bites the dust.

To the Coming Month.

In approximately two hours it will be October. Goldener Oktober. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. The Shire suffused with the sights and scents of decay. The spectre of winter’s abyss filling the horizon. The prospect of health issues being made more manifest through feeling continually cold.

(I have a new one now, by the way, or rather a recurrence of an old one. The infected toe I had a few years ago is back and it’s giving me a bit of gyp.)

I seem to recall writing something like this last year. Sorry about that, but there is one positive to be taken from it all. I’ve observed that the twin phenomena of cold and health issues form an alliance greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, the symptoms of both become more noticeable. I’ve long suspected that the purpose of life is probably to learn things for future reference, so I suppose I should be gleefully lapping it all up.

On Simulations and Simple Minds.

Today has been a bad one on several fronts. I suppose it had to be in order to balance yesterday’s good one, because that’s how life is. And talking of how life is, I came across an interesting theory last night. I daresay many people will have encountered it already and I’m just running late as usual, but I’ll offer it for the sake of those who haven’t.

When computer games were first invented they were simple affairs consisting of symbols which moved around the screen at the will of the gamer. Since then they have become very much more sophisticated constructions in which real-looking characters operate within a real-looking environment, but they’re still only simulations.

It is now being speculated that with the development of AI, the characters in these simulations will eventually develop a level of sentience which will grow into advanced intelligence as we understand the term. And over a long period of time – maybe even billions of years – they will reach the point where they will be able to create further simulations of their own. The first generation of simulation dwellers will, of course, be convinced that their version of reality is the true one, and the alternative version they’ve created is an artificial one which only ‘exists’ within a machine.

I’m sure it must be obvious where this is going. How do we know that our version of reality is the true one, and that we’re not just one of many progressive simulations? Several spiritual traditions have been telling us for thousands of years that the reality in which we think we’re living is actually an illusion. How do we know they were wrong?

*  *  *

So, let’s go back to the idea that this world really is real, and consider the question of tonight’s celebration in Red Square, Moscow following Putin’s declaration of annexation. It seems to have been a packed event with thousands of people joyously waving Russian flags and chanting ‘Russia! Russia!’ (Or whatever the Russian word for Russia is.)

This is interesting because I wonder what we should make of it. My instinct suggests that either Putin managed to engineer the whole thing in order to dupe the world into thinking he’s hugely popular with the Russian people, or that a large majority of Russians really are as brutal and bestial as western propaganda told us they were during the Cold War. Off hand I can’t think of any other realistic explanation (except, perhaps, that it’s a simple case of mass hysteria driven by nationalistic stupidity), so I think I’ll take refuge in the possibility that life really is just an illusion after all.

On Fowl and Finding Out.

I decided to take a small detour on my walk today, to visit the old stone bridge over the river which is the boundary between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. I wanted to see how much the level had been affected by the warm, dry spring and summer we had this year, and found it to be in fine fettle and pretty much the same as the last time I went there. (Even the mill race about 200yds on the Derbyshire side had running water in it which quite surprised me.)

But before I reached the bridge I heard the sound of a duck quacking to my left, and peered through a gap in the trees and shrubs which line the road at that point. I saw that just beyond the bank of trees lay a large, still pool on which ducks were swimming peacefully while one of their number was preening itself on a rock jutting out of the water. But of course, much as I like ducks, it wasn’t the birds which captured my attention; it was the pool.

It lay in a depression surrounded on all sides by mature trees and had a small island in the middle. Such places draw me to them as a bee is drawn to a flower and set my imagination running. I find them dripping with enchantment; they carry the promise of magic and mystery; they might be the portal between this world and some other. This is the domain of the Lady of the Lake, and the Lady of the Lake has been the figurehead at the forefront of my imagination since childhood. In my one and only novel, a goddess masquerading as the child Annie appears in just such a place to take the protagonist on a journey through time and alternate dimensions.

And yet I’ve lived here for more than sixteen years and didn’t even know it existed. I half imagine I could go there again and find that it doesn’t. I’m even tempted to wonder whether an esteemed lady from a higher plane encouraged a duck to quack today in order to show me something special.

Am I now being unconscionably fanciful? Maybe, but the predilection to be fanciful is driven by imagination, and imagination is surely one of the most rewarding of human faculties.

*  *  *

On a more prosaic note, I had another first today. I saw five cock pheasants flying together over my garden, a sight I’ve never seen before. I sometimes see two or more cock birds walking across the field in close proximity, but pheasants don’t fly all that much and I’ve only ever seen the males fly singly, usually if they’ve been startled or are flying into a tree to roost overnight. A flock of flying pheasants is most unusual, so is this another indicator of change in the offing? I don’t suppose I'll ever find out.

Not a Proper Post.

I haven’t written a post tonight because I received a long email. I don’t get long emails, so I decided to answer it with a long one back. No offence meant.

Besides, nothing much happened today apart from the fact that the card reader at Sainsbury’s kiosk refused to accept my debit card in payment for something. The same happened about a month ago. All the other card readers in the store accept it, and so do card readers in other stores, but not that one. So I complained to the manager. He insisted that there was nothing wrong with the device – ‘or else I would know about it’ – so I can only assume that it’s taken a dislike to me. Electrical and electronic devices quite often do. Lights sometimes go off when I pass them; my audio system sometimes switches itself on when I’ve been close but haven’t touched it; my computer reads my mood and responds to it. That sort of thing. I assume it must have something to do with my electric personality. Or maybe it’s an INFJ thing.

Meanwhile, I’m a little reluctant to go to bed tonight because last night I was woken up several times by the cold. I didn’t like it much, but at least it was a proper sort of cold – the sort that makes your legs and feet and hands and nose cold. Back in the summer when the weather was warm, I got woken up one night with a different sort of cold. It was inside my chest and there was no way of getting rid of it. I wonder whether that sort of thing means something. Is there a doctor in the house? Or a shaman? Or a medium? Or a psychiatrist?

Two Ladies Decades Apart.

I met the Ukrainian woman again today. I mentioned her in a post last summer, shortly after she’d moved here as a refugee. Today she was coming back from fetching her little girl from school, and was notably different from the last time we met. She was more open and communicative; she even smiled at me. The last time I saw her she looked scared of me. Isn’t that awful?

And I discovered what her daughter is called by the simple expedient of asking her mother. I didn’t ask for the mother’s name because here in the UK it’s considered perfectly proper to ask a parent for the child’s name, but verging on an intrusion of privacy to enquire after the parent’s. I do hope she understood that and wasn’t offended. And of course, I did tell her mine even though I doubt very much she’ll remember it, much less care.

*  *  *

I’m over half way through Maddie’s Field Journals now, and have got to that point where I don’t really want it to end. Tonight’s Dig Day report included the finding of a teapot spout, and it brought back an old memory:

When I was seventeen and going through the flat period between ending school and entering the Britannia Royal Naval College as an officer cadet, I took a temporary job labouring for a pottery company called J&G Meakin. They made tableware, and I spent all day carrying heavy piles of unglazed plates from the conveyor belt and giving them to a fettler (to sand off the mould marks and any rough spots.)

And then I went off to college, and at the start of the second term of cadetship I joined a frigate which was part of the Dartmouth Training Squadron. We headed off on the bonny briny, eventually making landfall a week later at St Johns, Newfoundland. There I was taken in hand (voluntarily, I hasten to add) by a young woman who apparently decided I was worth taking home to meet the family and her sisters. ‘Mom, look what I found. It’s called Jeffrey, it’s a sailor, and it’s come all the way from England. Isn’t it cute?’

(I don’t remember what she actually said, but it probably wasn’t that. It was a long time ago.)

Anyway, the point is that the family immediately invited me to dinner, an offer I was delighted to accept so that I could show the colonials how to use table utensils properly – you know, knife in one hand, fork in the other, this finger goes here, the thumb is kept out of sight under there, the fork must be held with the pointy bits facing down, the elbows should be kept close to the chest… That sort of thing (and more.)

But when I’d finished my meal I did something which even colonials might have considered disreputable. I turned the plate over to look at the back stamp, and guess where it had been made. J&G Meakin. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ I said. ‘I just spent six weeks working in the very factory where your dinner service was made.’

I don’t recall any of them replying because I doubt they found it quite as interesting as I did, but the daughter did give me a goodnight kiss when she drove me back to the ship so she couldn’t have been all that embarrassed. And the family took me on a trip in their big Yankee sedan to their holiday cottage at the coast the following day.

I wanted to marry their daughter, you know, because impetuosity has always been one of my most risk-inducing traits. I never did. And I can never decide whether memories actually matter.

Variations on the Theme of Cold.

September hasn’t really felt like September this year. There have been too many days stuck in a cold airflow and too many nights with condensation on the upstairs windows. When I went for my evening stroll today – mainly to see how the hedge trimmers were getting on because one of them waved to me from the cab of his tractor earlier – I got caught in a sudden flurry of strong wind and cold rain. It didn’t feel much like a typical September evening.

And do you know what I really dislike about sitting in front of a computer in a cold house?  It’s the constant awareness of cold air on the inside of my nose (because my mouth happens to be closed and there’s only one other way to breathe. And if I didn’t breathe I’d be dead and then I’d be even colder, especially if I was lying on a cold slab in a cold room and nobody ever offered me a hot drink or a bowl of porridge. And I think I’m probably the only person in the world who finds that funny, so I think I’ll shut up and finish my coffee. It stopped being hot ten minutes ago.)

Spotting the Sigma Sheep.

When I went into my bathroom this morning, I looked out of the window at the rising ground behind my house and saw eight sheep walking in line astern down the middle of the field. (Yes, I am one of those strange people who count everything.) ‘Here comes the Clanton gang,’ I thought, much impressed at such drollness so early in the morning. And when the sheep at the front changed course to head towards the trees in the bottom corner of the field, the rest dutifully followed.

But then there was another one about fifty yards behind, seemingly uninterested in its fellow ovines and more inclined to be taking a solitary and relaxing walk on a relatively fine morning in early autumn.

‘Aha, I thought, an INFJ sheep. Welcome, brother.’

(Of course, it might simply have been the one the flock rejected, but that would be sad so I chose not to countenance the idea.)

Not Quite Absolute Zero.

I’m growing tired of sitting in front of the computer for several hours in my unheated house. My body core feels relatively comfortable with four layers on – which is the important bit – but my nose, hands, legs and feet are uncomfortably chilled.

I tell myself that Captain Scott must have been colder than me when he was trying to beat that bounder Amundsen to the South Pole. And I don’t suppose Shackleton was breaking a sweat when his ship got stuck in pack ice while trying to find the north-west passage. And a bunch of mad people went skinny dipping in the cold North Sea today. And then there was that night when I lived in another country cottage many moons ago. My wife and I came home from work during a massive blizzard to find the water pipes frozen, so there was no hot drink to be had until I’d borrowed a fan heater from the neighbour. There was ice in the toilet and bathtub, and when my wife went to bed with a glass of water, ice formed on it within half an hour. It isn’t that cold here at the moment, but it is September and there’s no heating on in the house so it still feels colder than I like to feel.

The thing is, you see, I made a rule for myself by way of managing the insane rise in the price of electricity. ‘You will not use electrical heating appliances until 1^st October,’ I told myself. I’m the first to balk at orders given by other people, but I’m a stickler for obeying my own. So here I am writing another boring blog post with cold fingers.

And while I was sitting here silently bemoaning my cold fingers, nose, legs and feet, the term ‘absolute zero’ occurred to me. This is the point, out there in the cosmos, at which cold is at its maximum. Except it isn’t really because cold doesn’t exist as an objective phenomenon, but is simply a term we use to express a perceived lack of acceptable heat. And so absolute zero is actually a point at which there is no heat whatsoever. It seemed strange to me that heat could be finite in that way, but apparently it is so I must be wrong. It happens.

And after I’d considered the concept of absolute zero, the phrase ‘a damson in distress’ kept running through my head, probably because I have an abiding fondness for malapropisms, and a chap needs something in which to take refuge (which I originally mis-typed as ‘refuse’) when he’s feeling cold and irritated.