Saturday 31 December 2011

Uses for animal entrails



For 7% of my life I've been a Ford Cougar driver. Well not exclusively I have driven a considerable amount of other vehicles in the 7% period of Cougar ownership, often for many miles and in other countries. Anyway I'm now not sure what to do next, how likely am I to stretch that unexpected 7% up and into double figures? I suppose I could by simply doing nothing and working out some rough calculations. I check my red top horoscopes, flayed animal entrails, tea leaf markings and Autotrader pages but the bright light of imparted wisdom still fails to shine on me.

Life makes sense



She was thinking of it as now (well not today because it was in the past right now) and how it had been the best day of her life. A simple, an easy and a best ever day. No love, no romance, no flowers, no proper sunshine, singsongs or chattering but just the best day. A day spent on her own, on her own terms, in her her own time. In fact it was less than a day because that was the way it worked out. Less than a day, mere hours and still the best day of her life. Not even twelve hours come to think of it, just a perfect flurry of the preening and pictures, reflections and glimpses squashed up like a crazy slide show and compressed into a wonderful presentation, only for her eyes. So short, so long, so parallel to everything and yet so out of step. Metaphysically magical. She stopped and caught that thought, the best thing ever but somehow short (in time) but so deep in experience. Really all the measures we use here are wrong. Stupid priests, scientists and explorers who fail to catch the reality of reality. We see through the wrong end of some cosmic telescope, trained on silly and unimportant things that we have been badly educated to value, all magnified by a cruel emphasis on time. But take that time element out and just see things for what they are, running, crawling, lumbering along and onwards outside of time's boundary. What a strange and open freedom that is. Life makes more sense, eternity is far less of a pressure to plan to fill and all lifetimes however rich or barren are removed from disappointment. Time is over. “Now”, she said to herself, “I can relax and simply await that next moment.”

Friday 23 December 2011

Happy Christmas and don't drink...


...and drive, well not very much anyway, a better Christmas for all concerned will be the likely result. Currently I've been driving on the opposite side of the road and not in a Cougar, that won't last however because in a few days I won't be here in sunny/cloudy/warm/nice Portugal, I'll be back in the UK. Anyway if you've stumbled upon this, fair enough, seasons greetings to you and I'll try to do better next year.

Sunday 11 December 2011

Watching TV

Sometimes I'll watch a film or a football match on TV not because I'm particularly interested in it but because I know that my son is watching it and he's not here. Maybe that seems like an odd thing to do, maybe it is, it just feels good. TV pulls things apart, corrupts and makes folks lazy or so they say, at other times it also makes you feel less alone.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

Moonlight

After we had eaten the pheasant the farmer's wife wife produced a warm, home baked sponge that was topped with fresh peaches, sliced and juicy. It was a glowing, delicious moment and none of us could believe our luck. Here we were, rescued from the wilderness and now dining in some style. Our fatigue, minor injuries and the disappointment of our failure to find the passage was temporarily suspended. I sat back in the old wooden Captain's chair and couldn't help but grin across the table at my fellow travellers. The farmer's wife then began to clear the table, we all began to help, chatting, laughing and satisfied.

There was a full moon that night and I glanced out of the dining room window. I could see right across the fields and there in the near distance I could now make out a figure, it looked like the farmer. The moonlight was picking him out like a searchlight, he was standing over something, a shape on the ground. As my eyes grew accustomed to the scene and distance it became clear that he was bending down examining the carcass of a red deer.