Expect the unexpected.
The obvious truth of the seemingly obvious cliche revealed itself again today, when I genuinely didn't expect it. If I had known in advance how bad it got for around five hours I would have panicked, which, of course, would have been worse than useless. As it was I had no choice but to grin and bear it which I just about managed to do. I think.
Checked my phone for the overnight footy results on waking at 5.55 am, and the world came alive with light, a burden lifted. But where do Liverpool fans disappear to when you spend the day looking for them to taunt? - that's what I'd like to know.
By the way, Gentle Reader, I know you're thinking: This old man only posts about the beautiful game when it goes well for his team. And you're right. Utterly childish - so, deal with it.
It's good to be busy, I said just now to the Missus, but perhaps not quite as busy as this.
I enjoyed the first half of Ken Follett's A Column of Fire more than I did the second. Don't get me wrong, it's a good read from start to finish, keeping up pace and energy, but I couldn't quite buy into the main characters' close involvement in just about every key event of Elizabeth's reign, and the treatment of the gunpowder plot in the final segment struck me as a coincidence too far. But a great way for a young reader to get acquainted with the period.
Funnily enough the Parisian segments struck me as having some of the raw power of The Pillars of the Earth. The chapter on the St Bartholomew's Day massacre generated a real sense of dread - and dreadful loss. I suppose not knowing all that much about the episode was helpful in my case. For some reason I kept having flashbacks to a very early episode of Doctor Who which had a considerable effect on my younger self. Strong stuff for an eight-year-old. The BBC didn't hold back in those days.
We found ourselves late this evening in one of those slightly upmarket coffeeshops characteristic of the times in which we live. The sort of place one tends to take for granted, yet which would have seemed exotic in the extreme when I was a callow youth. I'm told it opens for a full twenty-four hours a day - which, even today, seems a touch exotic. Just round the corner from this hostelry was a large supermarket, which we popped into before heading home, just to check-out the bananas. Closing time was a more-than-reasonable 11.00 pm. Again, unimaginable in days of yore.
In the event we gave the bananas a miss since they weren't up to expectations, and drove home from the north of the island in a comfortable twenty-five minutes or so on the excellent highway.
This all sounds a bit like an advertisement for this Far Place, and in a small way it is. It's useful to remind oneself occasionally of how much can be available to us simply by the good luck of being in the right place at the right time.
It's Maureen's birthday today. Not sure how much that will mean to her, given her current circumstances. Hope she's achieving some decent quality of life in the home and is longer retreating into the solving emptiness she's seemed to look for in recent years.
It occurs to me that we actually got on very well as brother & sister, and rather took that for granted. Those days seem a long way off.
I'm into one of those phases when I'm not really interested in listening to much else than Messiaen. This came upon me over the weekend when I gave a spin to Des Canyons Aux Etoiles and realised just how much I loved the piece, possibly even more than the Turangalila Symphony. It was the humour of the music that got to me, something I've never quite taken in before. The bursts of birdsongs are often funny in a kind of charming, Disneyesque manner. At least, that is, to this listener. Since I don't quite know what the standard response is meant to be, I'm sort of inventing my own.
I remember reading Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey in one of Jack Connelly's lessons and feeling the impact of But hearing oftentimes / The still sad music of humanity. Suddenly I understood why Jack thought of WW as a genius. Odd to think that even at a callow 17 years old I thought myself capable of hearing that music.
Heard it again today. And thought of myself, Peter, Simon and Sam the dog walking in the great poet's steps in the Wye Valley, in another life.
A funny sort of day. For the most part it went well for me, though I needed to deal with a sore back. Even then it was just sore, which is a lot, lot better than painful, and easy to live with. Yet somehow it felt like a sad day. Not my sadness, exactly, but my dispiriting awareness of the sadness of others.
Case in point, a devastating report on Sky News in the early evening about the dire state of hospitals for children in Afghanistan. Trying to count one's own many blessings in the shadow of such truth just feels monumentally selfish. This is territory that goes beyond words. They don't just fail; they become obtrusively irrelevant.
Have been enjoying reading Ken Follett's A Column of Fire and will be continuing to do so, since I'm only just over the half-way mark. Well-crafted story-telling with some genuine insights into life in Elizabethan times. Having said that, it lacks the almost mythic power of The Pillars of the Earth. There were moments when the earlier novel transcended craft but it would have been foolish to have expected that level of inspiration to be replicated, and I didn't. But I did expect a good tale, and definitely got that - in fact, several neatly inter-woven stories.
And another thing I like about Follett: he does decency so well. Sometimes it's nice to know whose side you should be on.
