Seeing Spectres in a Wet Twilight.

Darkness fell early this dreary twilight. When I went out to manage the bird feeders before retiring and locking up, the western sky which should have been red from the setting sun was but a mass of dark mist rendering the skyline invisible. And the rain which had been falling relentlessly since early afternoon continued its mindless pattering on the hood of my raincoat.

It took my mind back to one of my more favoured short stories, The Passenger, in which the protagonist sets off in just such conditions to drive through the wilder parts of northern Scotland en route to Ullapool. On the way he encounters the mysterious young woman dressed only in a white shift, at which point his paranormal adventure begins.

Fortunately, there were no young women in white shifts walking up my lane in need of rescue. I think I would have noticed, gloom or no gloom. And hopefully I shall be spared the experience of having a sopping wet wraith appear in my bed at dead of night.

It could just as easily have taken me back to the old comedy classic, Oh Mr Porter, and the eponymous gentleman’s similarly rain-sodden arrival at the remote rural railway station at Buggleskelly in Ireland having just been told the legend of the phantom miller who haunts the station and haunts the hill and the land that lies between.

Imagination can be such fun when the dull air drips and the dark sky drops and the day goes glooming down in wet and weariness.

The True Cleverness of Women.

I saw a middle aged woman and a young woman in Ashbourne today, both peering into a pram containing a newborn baby. (I sneaked a quick peek as I walked past.) It struck me yet again that women have one undeniable basis for claiming superiority over men: they can build new human beings and we can’t. I never cease to be in awe of the magic contained in that fact.

It never occurred to me, you know, before the Lady B gave birth to her first child a little over five years ago. I can’t help thinking it must mean something, but I don’t know what.

On Being Lifted and Dropped.

The Lady Fu has been very much on the ball over the past week, introducing me to a whole Gaggle of Gorgeous Girlies and thereby keeping my spirits a little more buoyant than they mostly have been for the past (pick a number) years. (None of them were actually girls in the strictest sense I might add, being all over the age of majority. But not by much, and my fondness for alliteration declines to be denied.)

Yesterday I had my Ms Medeea fix, and today it was the turn of a young Arab woman called something beginning with F. I keep thinking Fatima, but I’m sure that’s no more right than the misguided notion that all Australian women are called Sheila. I think it might have been Farah, but anyway…

Her job was to take the latest phial of blood from my reluctant arm, but first we played the game of guessing where she came from. I tried Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco… ‘Cold. Go further east.’ OK. Saudi Arabia. ‘Close.’ Iraq? ‘Nope: Palestine.’ So then we talked about Palestine, how difficult the Arabic language is to learn, and how lucky we Brits are in not having to learn anybody else’s language because nearly everybody else speaks ours. (I suppose I should say a reluctant ‘thank you’ to America for giving the world a language that is close enough to English that we generally have little trouble understanding it.)

And then she asked me whether I liked to be warned before she put the needle in. Now, in all the years of having blood tests, vaccinations, and cannulas thrust into various parts of my arm, nobody has ever asked me that before. I brushed it nonchalantly aside, of course, because I still retain the merest smidgeon of pride in what little is left of my masculinity. And you know what? I never even felt the needle go in. That was another first. I assumed that Arabic women must be expert in the business of sticking sharp things into people, and speculated that it might derive from the near-legendary reputation of Damascus steel.

(But now I’m being silly. And it’s all in the game.)

*  *  *

Shortly after I got back I received an email from E.ON, my energy supplier, which knocked me off the top step and back to the basement as missives from E.ON usually do. Normal service was resumed with another reminder that our increasingly divided and dysfunctional society is being ever more controlled by an unholy alliance of politicians and the corporate world. I think I might have said that before, but since I’m now awash with glumness again I thought it worth repeating.

Balancing the Benefit.

I went for my dental appointment with the incomparable Ms Medeea Popei today and realised that visits to her presence amount to my 6-monthly ‘Medeea fix.’ (You know me and my need for dog fixes. This is a new one.) I get called in by the nurse who asks ‘how are you today?’ and I reply grumpily ‘no comment.’ But when I walk into Ms M’s den the calm, caring energies are almost palpable. I willingly submit my supine form to her questions, conversation, advice, and physical attention with the scrapy thing, and come out feeling a whole lot lighter. Whoever would have thought it?

And now I’m the beneficiary of two new groups of best buddies. They consist of two small herds of bullocks resident in two of the fields up the lane. Whenever I walk past they rush to the gate and look at me imploringly until I go and talk to them and scratch a few ears. Cows like having their ears scratched. They throw their heads around in joyful abandon – the force of which makes you realise just how much damage they could do to you if they took it into their heads to be aggressive. But they’re not aggressive with me, and I take great pleasure in the feeling that maybe I’m making the daily lot of a few young cows just that little bit more tolerable.

So is it all a sort of balancing act? I like to think so.

Deriding Delilah.

The song Delilah, made famous by Tom Jones, is the subject of some dispute at the moment. For some reason unknown to me (but probably to do with Tom Jones being a Welshman) it’s become the anthem of Welsh rugby union, being frequently rendered by the crowd and visiting entertainers alike. But now those who run matters pertaining to Welsh rugby matches have told the entertainers that they must no longer include the song in their repertoire because it’s about violence by a man against a woman. And so I asked myself whether that is a justifiable reason to ban a song.

It is, indeed, a song about a man murdering his partner on discovering her infidelity, but that’s only the surface of the story. Go a little deeper and it becomes obvious that the song is really about a man driven to a state of insanity by infidelity and subsequent mockery. In a French court such an act would undoubtedly be deemed a crime of passion and treated differently than an act of violence not so engendered. And even in an English court the reason behind the act would be offered in mitigation on the grounds of temporary insanity. The song does, after all, include the line: ‘forgive me Delilah, I just couldn’t take any more.’ In short, it would be reasonable to assert that the song is about a temporary, though extreme, burst of mental ill health.

So what’s my verdict on the matter? My own personal jury is still out because I find violence committed by men against women utterly deplorable. It’s why I couldn’t watch the much-vaunted drama Game of Thrones beyond the first episode, however good it might be as a dramatic work.

But that’s a matter personal to me. The history of highly-regarded drama, fiction, and folk tales contains many examples of men committing violent acts against women. So should we bowdlerise Shakespeare and the Greek myths? Even the hard line members of the liberal alter-establishment are not suggesting we should, so what makes this song suitable for different treatment?

I don’t think anything does unless you count that brand of snobbery which ring-fences all aspects of high cultural tradition while deriding popular genres, and I don’t think such is the case here. I think it’s another example of needing to keep a careful eye on pendulums which swing too far.

On Tesco's Tipsy Till (with quotes.)

It is happening again

~ Twin Peaks 1990

 

Everything is broken

~ JJ Beazley 2023

I went into Tesco today to buy a few oddments, and as I had a lot of loose change in my pocket I decided to pay by cash. I waited for a Cash and Card till to be free and went about my business.

The bill was £10.80, so I loaded 80p worth of loose change into the machine and waited for confirmation (supermarket tills are notoriously slow at simple addition.) And then I placed a £10 note into the requisite slot – which the machine accepted – and waited for confirmation again. The machine remained silent and inscrutable, save for a message on the screen which read:

£10 still to pay

(~ Self service till Tesco 2023)

I waited a while longer, but in vain. It asked me whether I wished to continue. I pressed ‘Yes.’ And then it asked me again (and again.) Eventually it switched its red light on and an assistant came bustling over. I explained the situation to her, carefully maintaining a calm countenance in an effort to reassure her that I was not a shoplifter and really had given the machine a £10 note.

She took out a bundle of keys, opened the door of the recalcitrant piece of technology, and proceeded to extract a pot with a yellow lid. She seemed to be expecting to find a £10 note trapped in it, but the pot was empty.

The manager had to be sent for

He came and he said ‘what’s to do?’

~ Albert and the Lion 1932

The assistant explained to me that access to the deeper recesses would be necessary, and that such access required a magic key, a key so important that only the manager is allowed possession of it. The minutes ticked by as I waited. It’s what minutes usually do, and so I steeled myself to be patient. Eventually the manager arrived clutching the magic key, and he was not a he but a she.

She proceeded to dismantle various items of the machine’s intestines, but remained silent. I mentioned that I was becoming a little frustrated by the fact that everything seems to be broken these days. No reply. I suggested that the machine might have been on the gin again. Still no reply. She opened a different pot containing lots of banknotes, the top one of which was probably mine because it had a light crease down the middle where it had been folded in my pocket. She remained not only silent, but as inscrutable as the machine.

She faffed and firked with the machine’s innards. She pressed button after button on the screen. She began to frown and look bewildered. Eventually she took out a note and coins to the value of £10.80 and instructed the lackey to put my shopping through another till. Said lackey emptied my bag and scanned the contents through a different, and presumably stone cold sober, machine, and replaced the items in my bag. (I was a little concerned that my bag was of the Sainsbury’s variety, not Tesco. I asked her whether she was afraid of developing a rash if she touched it. She smiled and said something unintelligible and then the matter was concluded. She handed me the bag of shopping and a receipt which I presumed amounted to permission to leave the store.

She speaks!

~ Bride of Frankenstein 1935

I touched the manager’s arm and said ‘thank you for your efforts’ just because I’m nice like that. ‘You’re welcome,’ she replied. She might have said ‘sorry about the trouble; thank you for your patience’ (because the whole episode had taken around 15 constantly ticking minutes), but she didn’t. This is the corporate world we’re dealing with, so maybe that’s not so surprising.

I walked out of the store half expecting to be apprehended by security, but there was no security visible. I expect it’s an economy measure. Or maybe the payroll program is broken and he’s got another job which pays cash. Who can tell?

Mostly Good.

I received an email this morning which contained a hint that the matter which has been bringing me so low lately might be about to improve. Early days, though. It’s a wait and see situation.

And then my morning walk treated me to a most unusual number of encounters: three young – or youngish – women, a splendid chestnut gelding, and two dogs which approached me to pay their respects without need of invitation. Needless to say I spent the rest of the walk in a state of disorientation. It seems the Lady Fu was in a particularly benevolent mood today. (She’s the one who occasionally treats me to random encounters with young women, dogs, and horses. I suspect she’s an intern in the pantheon of benevolent Chinese goddesses.)

This afternoon I received a telephone call from another young woman – a lady from Donegal who is one of the Senior Urology Nurses at the Royal Derby. She’d called to tell me that the CT scans I had a couple of weeks ago were ‘perfect’ (her term.) I like the word ‘perfect.’ So now it appears I will probably have to trudge through another winter, like it or not, but it’s still good to be told that my torso is perfect.

But then another encounter left me fairly convinced that a perceived connection I’ve been harbouring for many a long year has been unilaterally dismissed. I bear no ill will. Life moves on. (But it did hurt just a little.)

And what about the strange cat which loomed out of the heavy growth in the glooming garden at twilight yesterday? It was a most handsome creature – mostly white with a few tortoiseshell patches. It stood and stared at me for a few seconds, and then did what cats always do: turned tail and ran away at high speed. It seems that dogs and horses like me but cats don’t. I have no idea why.

My writing style is lacking fluidity lately. That’s a shame because I’m the sort who considers style to be at least as important as content, maybe even more so. Robert Louis Stevenson showed me that thirty years ago. Not giving up yet.

On Low Mood and Brexit's Revenge.

I was going to write a post about why I, a nature lover, lean towards disagreeing with the current trend for re-wilding, at least insofar as it relates to Europe. But I’m not in the mood for being serious, and when I’m not in the mood I write badly, as evidenced by recent posts.

The problem is that nothing amusing, surreal, exciting, or mysterious has happened lately, so where do I go to satisfy the monomania?

The weather, I suppose. It’s what the British famously do: when we’ve got nothing else to say we talk about the weather, so…

The weather today was a creature of manic mood swings, from warm, dry, sunny, and calm, to thunder, lightning, strong winds, and torrential rain. And they were getting all mixed up as though confusion reigned in heaven and earth. (And down here on earth I even saw a neighbour washing his car while thunder boomed, lightning flashed, and rain poured down in biblical quantities. I thought it a little odd, but then I realised it was his wife’s car, so maybe she had threatened dire consequences if the vehicle wasn’t shining by 1 o’clock.)

It’s also a fact that the temperature has been unusually low by the standards normally expected of July, at least in the middle of England where I live it has. And yet, ironically, it appears that our storms and rain are consequent upon the frightful heatwave they’re suffering in central and southern Europe. I expect it’s yet another side effect of Brexit (which I voted against, you might remember.) As for the twilight, well… Today’s twilight did full justice to Tennyson’s famous words relating to the last days of Camelot (which I quote in full instead of the shortened version I usually quote):

The wan day went glooming down in wet and weariness

I suspect Alfred Lord Tennyson was as much affected by climatic conditions as I am, but we don’t appear to have much else in common. I live in a small house which leaks; he lived in several big ones which probably didn’t.

On Hollywood and Questionable Priorities.

The BBC World News website carries stories of various kinds from around the globe. Today’s headline – and it’s been there all day – is about the strike by Hollywood actors and staff writers. So the question has to be asked: why is this threat to the big studios in Hollywood today’s biggest international news item?

I suppose it’s because Hollywood is the world capital of cinematic entertainment. (Some people try to claim it’s an arm of the arts establishment, but I don’t believe it for a second. It’s about making mega bucks through the medium of entertainment.)

So let’s consider what entertainment is about. It’s about lifestyle, pure and simple. And I’ve long been concerned that life in the free market west has become so dominated by lifestyle that it stands above many of the more fundamental aspects of life in the matter of priority. It’s one of the major factors in keeping a tiny number of mega rich people mega rich, and mega rich people are highly influential when it comes to the promotion of priorities.

And that, I suggest, is why the strike is perceived as being of such importance. Hollywood is a major player in the dissemination of entertainment, and its tentacles spread far and wide throughout the world. By contrast, and for example, the food emergency in Kenya is of relatively little importance to a world obsessed with lifestyle. Am I wrong in finding that a little sad?

On Bad Days and Curses.

What a day of days today was. The morning was liberally filled with one sort of malfunction after another – corporate systems, the computer, the printer, and the mobile phone. I spent so much time trudging through it all to sort out a nagging problem with my energy supplier (as usual) that I was over an hour late going for my routine lunchtime walk, taken in a state of mind wholly unsuitable for the enjoyment of the bucolic idyll.

But at least the lateness proved serendipitous. It placed me in just the right place to be passed by the Lady B’s car, and this time I could be sure it was her. The vehicle and sun were in just the right relative positions to see the driver clearly and enable recognition. The wave was no mystery this time, and the accompanying smile went a little way to improving my mood.

Until, that is, I got home and found a worrying email from my daughter. The parlous nature of the day was not be denied, it seemed, and it was followed by much difficulty with the book-keeping work I’d set myself to do in the afternoon. And then my internet dropped out. I reset the router to get it back, and then my browser crashed. Friday 13^th has never caused me any difficulty, but today was Thursday 13^th and I wondered whether the old superstition has been getting it wrong all these centuries.

This evening I went for a late walk armed with raw carrot for Millie the Horse. She was in the middle of the field and therefore unreachable (for reason previously explained.) But on the way back I was the grateful beneficiary of a second smile and wave, this time from the Lady B’s dear mama. She slowed as she passed me as usual, and I began to wonder why she does that even when the carriageway is easily wide enough to accommodate a vehicle and pedestrian in perfect safety. I came up with three theories:

1) She is naturally careful for safety’s sake, even when it isn’t necessary.

2) It’s a conscious or unconscious instinct when she’s passing a person she knows.

3) She fears that if she takes a hand off the wheel to wave, the car might take it in its head to become uncontrollable and disaster might ensue.

I decided that 1) is the most likely and 3) the most absurd. But if all those clever scientists can’t even be sure whether or not anything came before the Big Bang, what hope is there that one common mortal can know the mind of another?

*  *  *

Through all of today’s issues I made occasional forays onto the BBC News website, and sank even lower when confronted with the parlous state of the human condition. I saw the never ending procession of murderers, abusers, psychopaths, and the dispiriting panoply of presidents, potentates, and politicians who are so easily moved to take the life of innocents with a perfunctory wave of their blood-ridden hands.

I was thinking about it as I was walking along Meadow Lane (having just remarked to myself that the barley on a field running down to the river was ready for harvesting), when an inner voice accosted me:

‘But surely,’ said the still, small voice, ‘you must allow for the fact that there are many good people in this world – kind, humanitarian, altruistic people who truly want to make the world better.’

‘I know,’ I replied, but let’s put it this way: If you go into a pub and order a pint of beer, it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll get a pint glass of nothing but beer. If instead you’re given a glass consisting of half beer and half engine oil, you would discard it in disgust because the oil would pollute the beer and render it undrinkable. That’s the problem. Goodness should be the universal condition, but the bad people pollute it and render it unpalatable.’

‘You’re just a hopeless idealist,’ offered the still, small voice.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘It’s one of the worst of my curses.’