This morning I watched a pair of blackbirds trying to feed from a hanging coconut on the front patio. The coconut has been there for months and all the ungrateful birdlife has ignored it until now when it’s suddenly become very popular. The female blackbird can perch delicately on the metal pole holding it, swing down lightly on her feet and feed with grace and etiquette. However, her spouse is too big and cumbersome for the manoeuvre; he has to cling on with his feet, flapping his wings frenetically in order to maintain some balance, and can just about grab a few titbits before falling off.
That’s how I feel today: approaching my 50th blog, clinging on, trying to grab a few titbits to feed on. I’m trying also to find enough flap in my wings to maintain the precarious balance between on the one hand accurately reflecting the unstable moods, ricocheting between serene contemplation of a wonderful world, and on the other sinking into the realisation of horror and hopelessness. Events sometimes conspire to puncture our buoyancy. So we heard last night from our daughter working in a hospital mental health ward of the trauma and suffering of staff as well as of how easily and dangerously this infection spreads; then I read in Psalm 40 about the miry pit and felt there was no sign yet of being lifted out of it; then I realised, not for the first time, that we have a government I can’t trust to be either competent or to have any humane or worthy motivation. I saw the loathsome Gove on Andrew Marr yesterday, reassuring us that there was only the tiniest chance of our children catching the virus if they went back to school. Ignore the unions and the medical experts and go with Gove? Here is a man with a record of betrayal and self-seeking, muddled ideology, consummate arrogance and cynical opportunism and we are being asked to trust our children’s well-being to him. I’m spinning some pretty vicious comparisons at the moment, for instance with the Ammonite god, Molech, who demanded that children should be made to pass through the fire to satisfy his pride.
Compared with this state of mind studying prepositions with Mollie on-line was little short of hilarious and listening with Sammie to some music and gauging which colours were evoked was very wholesome. He then explained to me how the piano was invented by shoving pins into the rears of different sized pigs and hearing them squeal. He corroborated this theory by showing me an extract from Horrible Histories. How will Gove be represented in the Horrible Histories of the future? With very little further creative effort I would imagine.
Is there hope? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or in my case a nozzle at the end of the 35m hose pipe? Sometimes hopes and dreams come true, delayed on-line orders materialise and at last my new hose-pipe has arrived – at the beginning of the week in which rain is forecast. Sod’s Law again. The same ex cathedra, Law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be changed. (That’s saying the same thing three times – I’m in an over-stating mood it seems). Spend a lot of money on a hose and it will rain; buy a new pair of binoculars to replace the ones I can’t find, and the old ones will turn up.
This morning I got the hose spraying the vegetables at the front and tested to see if passers-by would get soaked. Luckily the first passer-by was Anette and as chance would have it, she remained dry. Now it’s sure to rain. So today is my King Lear Day – angry and vengeful.
...”blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulfurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”
Ah! That feels much better.