Summer Evening Scribbles

I am sitting at the top patio of my garden in the dark. I know this picture is of the garden in the daylight, but the one I took of it in darkness was rather lacking in visual information. "Top Patio" makes it sound grand: The garden is really only 45 feet square. Originally on a thirty degree angle, Mrs E designed it cleverly such that it is now on five levels. I am at the penultimate level, shaded from the freshening wind by the  black bamboo on one side and hawthorn and hornbeam hedge on the other. The sultry heat which we had for a few rare and precious days has departed and though I enjoyed the novelty, this is far more comfortable.
It is quite dark now and I have a fairly rubbish wind-up lantern with which to see the keyboard by. (I can sort-of touch type but the variety of keyboards I use, their haptic differences and the relative placings of special characters necessitate me being able to see the keys)
In the hedge behind me is some insistent and occasionally indignant rustling. I would like to think it is tiny people who live in the base of the hedge and it was accepted in more superstitious times that hedges were impenetrable places which harboured spirits (indeed, I believe the words "hag" and hedge have similar origins). Sometimes when I work from home, I feel as if strange eyes are regarding me with amusement at the folly of my arcane daily transactions. When I look, perhaps I see a movement. Or perhaps it is just a blackbird or wren darting for cover.

Tonight, I was startled by the sound of something scrambling under the fence. Scratching and snuffling, a hedgehog squeezed under and proceeded to nuzzle around myopically for slugs in the leaf litter. So much life goes on around us without our knowing. A toad is waddling under a ledge of marjoram, frogs croak in the pond. And normally, I am indoors oblivious to this other world.

But tonight, I am out here in the dark, with a pint of Bath Ales' finest brown English beer. Actually, I just quaffed the last half inch from my glass and it causes me to muse on something that has been bothering me for a while: Enjoyment. Pleasure. Experience in general perhaps ?

I enjoyed the beer. I enjoyed the pouring of it, the settling of the bubbles into a creamy head, and of course the drinking of it.  I enjoyed the feeling of having three quarters of it remaining as I drank it. And I enjoyed savouring the last mouthful.
And now it is gone. I have the memory of its enjoyment. It's a good memory. I shall, as with many other good memories, revisit it. Beer does leave one with a wonderful sense of having consumed something so very satisfying and it made me ponder for a while upon what precisely I enjoyed about its consumption.

So, this brings me on to what I refer in my head to the "choc ice" question, which popped into my head yesterday as I ate a magnum double choc caramel Mrs E had thoughtfully bought for me:

If I have a choc ice, and you have a choc ice, and I eat mine in half the time you do, who, ten minutes later can deem that they had the most pleasure?
Or if one day I eat it in a minute and another I eat it in three, how can I know which of the two, from the vantage point of now, in the relative future gave me most pleasure? In both cases, I will have had the enjoyment of eating a choc ice. Did it matter if I ate it fast or slowly?

Ok, I suspect the answer is irrelevant anyway, but it gives me pause for thought each time I tear open the packet of a choc ice. How best to enjoy it for posterity. Or now.
In general, it seems most pleasures are best savoured. This gives a longer "now" in which the sensations can be enjoyed, But the subjective memory of a now that lasted three minutes is much the same as one that lasted a minute. Isn't it?

It seems a silly way to waste mental energy I know. But it has implications. So many pleasures are to to be had and how best are we to enjoy them? Long savoured or merely a quickie?

Beats me. Anyway I need another pint. And the insects are biting me so I am going inside. Goodnight everyone!

Going back Somewhere

Hi. I haven't written anything for a while. Sometimes the mind languishes in the mental doldrums where inspiration is totally absent for long periods. I thought this was just me, but I read some comments elsewhere that lead me to think it is cyclic and that other people are currently experiencing the same thing.
So I decided to drag myself out of the stupor and see if my fingers might loosen up and assist my brain in doing the same. Well, we'll judge how well that went later, perhaps.

Last week, we went on holiday. Holidays are a difficult conundrum currently. Once, little ones ere content to sit on a beach, even unseasonal weather, and dig holes in the sand all day; making sandcastles and damming up those little streams one always finds on beaches.
Now at 19 and 17, requirements are different and finding something we all might like is pretty much impossible. So, we booked a house in Portland and threw the invitation out to our offspring, who enthusiastically accepted.

I didn't feel able to cope with anything more exotic than Weymouth. My mental stamina is almost back to what it was, but I confess, my brain is not (yet?) what it was before recent events took their toll. I feel less clever than before and have less clarity of thought when complex information needs interpreting. So a quiet week in Dorset with no intellectual demands was just the tonic I needed.
There were some places I wanted to visit, specifically too.

In 1969, my father got his two children up early. Then Mum, dad and kids, stopping only to bundle grandparents into the old banger that tenuously maintained reliable motive power, all headed noisily to Durdledoor on the Dorset coast. I don't why he chose that spot. He isn't here to ask now.

I remember it was early, even by the standards of a four year old who was always up with the dawn. It was, to my now responsible eye, brave of my father to to think we might travel all that distance in a car of such unreliability with kids and parents. The roads are winding and hilly and I am amazed the car managed the journey without dying in a cloud of smoke and steam. Perhaps, my father, a mere twenty two years old at that time, had the confidence and optimism of youth on his side. But a Morris Oxford that had seen much better days was a worthy chariot as far as we were all concerned, even if the rear footwells were always full of water on rainy days, slopping from one side to the other as we went around corners so we had to keep our feet on the dog-eared leather seats from which the springs protruded.

But it got us there, and on a warm summer morning in August 1969, we found ourselves hopping barefoot over the sharp pebbles of this beautiful beach, a magical feeling I can recall to this day.
My dad had recently got his HGV licence and, as was his wont, had purloined several lorry inner tubes. Inflated, they were tremendous fun to mess about on in the sea. I still remember my grandfather's bum poking up through the hole in the middle after a particularly spirited wave caused him to capsize. A good day was had by all and in the warm familial glow of children oblivious to political undercurrents, we nodded off on the grandparents as we made the 100 mile journey home.

So, last week, being somewhat near to Durdledoor, I decided I had to see the place again. Forty years later, I stood by its iconic arch looking out at the steeply shelving sea, and I tried to connect to the small boy who had sat, examining each rock hopefully for fossils and being disappointed not to find any.
But he wasn't there. His tracks had been obscured.

My hope had been that I would somehow be transported back to the place and the time, with all the associated memories and feelings flooding back. I had thought the sight of the arch, the beach, the cliffs would cause the sudden confluence of memories overlaid upon the sight before me, coming into focus like a picture you might see on one of those victorian stereoscopes one requires sort-of-binoculars to view.
But I wasn't transported. I remember I was there. But I don't remember being there.
I confess, I was disappointed. There was no leaping-to-mind at the prompting of the scenery of memories; what we ate, what we did that day or my grandfather's face (though the aforementioned upturned arse in a truck inner tube is still visible in my mind's eye, which is some consolation, I suppose).

But the scenery was still stunning and the weather held. So, I gazed through the arch at a small boat sailing by - the epitome of freedom somehow as one stands by a shore looking out into an element which is not our own.
Then I returned to the present day and suggested we find somewhere for lunch. Nostalgia is all very well, but apetite usually prevails.