The Tiniest of Foes

 Our bodies seem to be battle grounds. One one side we have our immune system and associated allies and on the other, organisms that are out to get us. I can't imagine there is any intent on their part to do us harm but harm they do. I suppose it's a fight for resources: We have substances we have garnered from our environment, using effort and biological processes and they, the pathogens, want some of that but we are are their environment and it's the easiest way to get what they want.

For four days now, something has been troubling my digestive system. I will spare you the unpleasant details but suffice to say it is not a pleasant way to lose three kilos. Any attempt at eating causes abdominal pain and the symphony of hydraulic special effects from my middle is quite a conversation piece. Whether it was the ill advised fast-food "Louisiana-style" Chicken Sandwich I had in Oxford at the weekend, some detritus flung from the undergrowth by my strimmer into my face or merely a transmissible virus I picked up at a dance I really couldn't say. But I feel bloody awful and the probability is that this is caused by some organism I almost certainly couldn't even see with the naked eye. A number of them, even combined into some kind of community large enough to pass the threshold of infection in my seemingly poorly-defended constitution would still be too small to see without a microscope. Is this not humbling? Our hubris would have us think ourselves so adept at mastery of our environment but, as recent years show, some agent so tiny it requires optical instruments only readily available in a laboratory in order to see it can evade our control and render us miserable or even dead if we are unlucky.

I am not that unfortunate (at least, I hope I won't be. It's been four days and my recovery is open to interpretation). I suspect in a day or two I will be right as rain - an oddly topical and puzzling simile given recent weather where the rain has been decidedly not right by dint of its extraordinary abundance. 

So, thanks to Mr Van Leeuwenhoek and his marvelous invention, we are now able to know the nature of our adversaries when previously we blamed our physical ailments on "bad air", evils spirits, imbalances of the humours or witches. And now we know: In cases such as this, check the hygiene rating before you buy. Or wear a full-face visor when you strim. Tiny enemies lurk unseen everywhere.

Whoosh! goes the feather Duster!

It's an itchy-scratchy kind of feeling; A sense that some of those mental rooms that haven't been visited for a while need the doors and windows thrown open and the cobwebs brushing from the ceiling. It's always strange to me that spiders collude with dust to create those grey, insubstantial threads. These wraithlike strings hang down sometimes almost to your head if a feather duster or vacuum cleaner is not regularly applied. The shame of noticing a ceiling-spanning filament becoming an almost diaphanous grey fabric across to corners of your rooms is almost painful. It's enough to prompt imagined excuses to judgmental observers who, looking up from the coffee I might have made them, frown in disapproval at the neglect this house is subject to. How does this happen in such an unobserved way? I didn't see any spiders? And if they were there, how did particles of what, presumably, used to be myself and my clothing, end up becoming so ubiquitously incorporated, even in regularly frequented rooms?

And so it is with the mind. Why write? Well, it's the entry into the unused space; The visiting of a forgotten spare room, the brandishing of the wand of the Dyson. It's the waving of a cane coated with chicken feathers across an expanse of magnolia emulsion paint to reveal the feelings of immense relief and virtue. Well, I hope the rooms of the mind are a little more flamboyant than Pantone 7499C. I think I'd like to imagine my mental environment with a bit more vibrancy than that. Purples perhaps, or on an sunny day, primrose walls with eggshell-blue picture rails. Well, I don't have to look at it all the time, do I? It's a spare room, after all!

Alas, right now, the doors are shut and the curtains are drawn so the decor is all rather irrelevant. I have no requirement to enter. Other rooms require my attention more urgently, even if they are boring to occupy. Even so... As I type, I feel the light creeping in. The act of accessing this webpage was the tentative opening of the door. The first typed phrase became the throwing open of the curtains and, well, it's quite hard to see what colours the walls are under all this dust but I think I like the results. It's vaguely familiar and there are interesting objects in here I had completely forgotten about. The mundane can eat up so much of you.

Reaching up with a brush, it seems clear that the cobwebs are easily cleared. It's a trivial task in fact. A vague wave and order is restored. And so it is with the mind. It doesn't take much to banish the accumulations of quotidian grime and the layers of dust. It just has to occur to you to do it. And as with the physical chore of going around the house, just looking up and sweeping away the signs of neglect, so it is with the upkeep of the intellect. So many other commitments make demands upon our attention. The quote for Mrs. D's hedge-cutting, the seed order for my sessions at a local school for the learning disabled, paying the parking ticket I picked up last week. It all takes time and mental energy. Not to mention the actual physical fatigue a manual job produces. Carrying heavy pots and landscape sleepers up and down steps for hours and digging numerous holes for plants does rather take it out of you. Sitting writing is far less appealing than a crafty snooze in the armchair after a day's work.

But oh, how shiny the surfaces are when the detritus is banished! How light and airy and accessible it becomes! All I had to do was spend some time on it. It's not really an indulgence. It's actually essential maintenance.

Yes, this is something that needs to be regularly undertaken, even if triviality results. I feel better already!

Mortality and Hoarding

Today I am the same age to the day as my father was when he died. It's a sobering milestone and one which causes me great reflection. Whilst he was an alcoholic who hastened his end considerably through his illness and I am not, this strange mark upon the timeline of my life must by its very nature bring with it thoughts of mortality. Tomorrow, I will be older than he ever was. I'm not sure of the significance of this day.

Ok, I had my Memento mori eleven years ago when my brain went pop whilst dancing. But I was in my forties and this seemed like an unanticipated black swan event rather than part of the inexorable temporal process towards my natural end.

All of this is very depressing, I am sure. But I choose to eschew that view and instead examine a thought that springs naturally from a realisation of mortality: Where did all this stuff come from? And what should be done with it?

I don't own much. My car is elderly though still solidly functional. I have no jewels, no art, no baubles of any kind. My television is a cast off, probably state-of-the-art in 2008 and possibly the best I have ever owned or will ever own. I have a few tools which are good quality but worn out through many years of faithful service. Nobody wishing to rob my house would find much of value. I am, as far as lifestyle goes, not a materialist (though ironically, philosophically that is a close approximation to my view of existence).

But in the event of my death, what a mammoth task it would be to dispose of it all! The jars of assorted screws, bolts, small useful-looking squares of plywood and cedar planks. Boxes of springs, electrical wire of every gauge, old chair legs of exotic tropical hardwood. The list is endless. I may yet find a use for them, or perhaps they will languish, offering promise of a solution to an as-yet unencountered practical problem until my offspring tentatively enter my garage with a sigh and heads shaken in disbelief on some future day I will not see.

The inner debate rages: "You need to get rid of all this crap. You're never going to use it and one day, possibly soon, the kids are going to have to deal with this chaos!" and then "But only last week, I patched up my water butt with that piece of 9mm marine ply I have kept since I cut it off the bath panel in my first house thirty-mumble years ago!" 

So, I think it's going to have go. I may have thirty years. Or I may suffer another bleed in my overly fragile cerebral blood vessels and drop dead at the counter in Tesco. But opportunities for utilising a 4mm x 50mm strip of larch will probably diminish as time and inclination trickles away.

So, can I interest anyone in 120 pieces of fine sapele, 50mm x 30mm by assorted lengths from 120mm to 150mm? Or perhaps I'll glue them into a block and make another table. No you won't Pete. You know you won't. 

Perhaps, just these though. Yes, I'll keep them. Just in case. I blame you Dad. You young bastard.

I tried, I really did.

 It's too difficult. The news is too awful. There is too much tragedy and pain in the world. The awful weight of suffering renders any attempt at triviality, well, trivial. All the words that do come are just full of darkness. As the storm rages outside and the trees thrash in immobile torment, I am looking for some light and not really finding any. So, I am paralysed into mute submission.

This one weird trick will stop your brain turning to jelly

Where did all the words go? All the superlatives have been worn wafer thin with over use and full scale deflection has been repeatedly achieved. Current events send the needle whanging vigorously to the end stop of the meter, past the red and round the pin at the end of the scale. The world is in a state and no mistake. I choose to opt for understatement. Please refer to my second sentence above. It's all that is left. And we shall not fix it here, even were it fixable. No, we shall acknowledge the abundant awfulness and concede that further handwringing is unhelpful in the grand scheme of things. Elsewhere, we shall do what we can, but here, no solutions are to be attempted or even discussed.

And so what do we do here? We write words. Powerful things words. They can slap with stinging impact, jolt like a crash landing or caress like a lovers touch.

Or, as seems to be the case of late, I find they can elude, hiding behind the static and confusion that communication can often engender. Why, the other day, grasping for the phrase "tea towel" I resorted to "wipey thing for plates". How does one forget the phrase "tea towel"? But I did. Tragedy comes in many forms. Partly perhaps this is the result of my own particular cognitive challenges. There were bound to be some. But I don't have to accept them without a fight.

But this unreliability of our internal dictionaries should not deter us from trying  should it! Those neural paths across the landscape of our vocabulary if not regularly trodden become obscured by undergrowth. Our daily dialogues begin to be constructed clumsily from easily accessible but inaccurate nouns and adjectives; Words that merely suffice and yet do not accurately describe. The use of the exact word is a small triumph that leaves satisfaction in its wake. A cobbled-together approximation leaves a kind of existential unease even if meaning has been adequately conveyed

I have nothing to say but this really: Use it or lose it.  Really, it is as simple as that.

So, freely I fling words on to this page: Hyposthesis! Innate! Limpid! Picaresque! Ossified!

There! I feel better already.

Please note: There is no imperative to ready anything I write here. I am under no illusion any of it has significance beyond allowing the caged greyhound of my brain some escape to race unfettered upon the heathland of language. Significance or clarity of concept might occasionally emerge but it will have been largely accidental and incidental to the purpose of the exercise.

Well, that's  a start. I feel better already. Perhaps I'll try to do some more tomorrow. I think it's due to rain so I won't have much on. See you then maybe.

The return of the Ravens

Tuesday's project is beautiful. It sits high on a hill on one side a valley in the Cotswolds. It was a pub garden covered in brambles and buddleia, untouched for decades. With the volunteers and my direction it is being transformed into a terraced garden to communally grow fruit and vegetables. We are very proud of what we have achieved here but it is an ongoing project and will be more beautiful still as time goes by and the planting takes off. This is one of three projects I coordinate but by far the most joyful to spend time in.

The view is breathtaking, the major road at the bottom of the hill being obscured both visually and audibly by the trees that line either side. A vineyard is visible which wasn't there when I first lived near here as a boy. It seems oddly exotic to think of all the new vineyards on south-facing slopes around here. I know the monks of medieval times grew grapes for wine. Monks do seem to have a penchant for alcohol. Some of the world's most highly regarded alcoholic drinks were originally produced by monasteries. Their abandoned terraces are visible in some quite unexpected places nearby. Names such as "Vineyard lane" which I often walked along to school hint at a viticultural past. Of course names are just names and whilst saying the words "Vineyard lane", people only ever thought about the place. Nobody ever stopped to think of the meaning of the syllables and their implication that once there had actually been a vineyard there. Names are funny like that: Divorced from the meaning of their component words. I mean, who ever thinks about the origin of the word "cupboard" from an etymological perspective?

So, the vineyards are returning as the average yearly temperature increases. And increasing it is. An old gardener long past retirement age but still cutting grass told me that forty years ago when he started he would cease mowing in mid September and resume at the beginning of March. Now he mows almost to December and starts mid February. That's a personal observation on a changing climate which as a relative newcomer was not a perspective I would have gained personally. But there is it is from one who has experienced the change in seasons.

Today, as I looked over the rolling hills at Postman Pat's tiny red van, very far away, climbing the steep hill to the top of the common on the opposite hill, a commotion caught my attention in the sky overhead. Two crows were mobbing a raven in an attempt to drive it away. Though the shape is superficially similar, a raven is a much bigger bird and its call much lower in pitch. Also, its tail is a different shape, forming more of a rounded fan then the straighter edged tail of its corvid relatives.

The raven didn't seem unduly perturbed but was still forced to perform occasional avian shrugs as a crow flew at a wing or plummeted down at it from above. They obviously were not too happy to see their cousin. Eventually the three of them disappeared from view with the shrieking still echoing off the roofs of nearby cottages.

When I was a boy, I never saw ravens. I once glimpsed one on a mountain in wales and this was a cause to remove my binoculars from their case and watch awhile. It was picking at a carcass of some dead animal and seemed not the slightest bit concerned at my presence. But it was a moment deserving of that kind of hushed reverence one feels is deserved in the presence of a natural phenomenon. But I never saw one of them near home, though it was and remains rural.

And then one day, i was cycling down by the Severn and I heard a distinctive caw, perhaps an octave lower than a crow's call. And there, on a dungheap were two ravens, possibly Huginn and Muninn. Who knows? I was pretty thrilled to see them and suddenly my immediate vicinity seemed more exotic.

And now I see ravens quite often. Red Kites too, where once you had to venture to obscure valleys in Mid wales to view them at special feeding site. This must surely be some kind of progress? With all the changes to the natural world and the erosion of diversity, at least this seems a positive development. Dare I hope...? I'm not sure.

And the Machine Grinds into Motion again.

 And so I sit me down to write. Gosh! It's been ages, hasn't it! So much has happened! This is strange though: Where once a computer keyboard was the landscape of much of my life, now I am very rare visitor to it. When I think of the tens of hours per week I used to sit and tap away, it seems incongruous for it to now be such an unfamiliar activity. I spent this morning directing volunteers in planting a greengage tree and spreading compost on raised beds on the side of damp windswept hill: As far away, perhaps from the artificiality of the plastic office and online world as it is possible to be.

But I have been alarmed of late to note the decline in the availability of words to me. The regular beating-of-the-bounds of my vocabulary allowed a fluency which I have noticed is slipping away. The observational skills I used to spot noteworthy events and behaviours have waned. Life is merely pragmatic these days. Indeed, writing this is actually much harder than I expected because, well, I never write any more. 

And so, here, for my own benefit, is a small foray into the once-familiar but now foreign territory of attempting to be articulate. It's not for you, you understand,. It's for me. I compel nobody to read this and perhaps nobody will. And that is ok. The possibility that someone might helps aspire to clarity and discipline. But really, I just need the exercise if I am to be honest. What do I write about? I don't know. It doesn't matter really. As long as words are chosen, written down and are subsequently coherent, the purpose will have been served. It seems a shame to have the ability to compose a cogent sentence and not to at least try to do so. Previously, in my Old Life it was necessary to communicate clearly in order to earn a crust, but not now. Nobody needs my words now. 

I suppose, in order to regain some kind of verbal fitness, practice must be undertaken. Hence here I am, with nothing of substance to say, other than "I need to say something so here are some words". The house is a tip, the rain is coming through my roof and there are still some big pans which need washing up from yesterday's dinner. But this can all wait. Verbal composition is self-care (though so is cleaning the kitchen so as not to be unhygienic), just like exercise or eating your greens. There are things we must do for our own good. I seem to be discovering this is one of them.

Not only that, it is an enriching exercise to portray the seemingly mundane in  everyday life. One watches more closely and with a different frame of mind if something profound might be described. It makes you look at things in a different way. I envy those people who can look upon an ordinary scene with an artist's eye and capture it in a painting or photograph such that it makes you stop and look deeper at something. Words can do that too.

Therefore, with creaking reluctance, I shift my brain into a mode it had almost forgotten and I force words out of my mind, through these keys and on to a screen. Ye gods! But I am so out of shape! Time to try to put that right.