When I raised the blinds this morning it was in time to see a great splodge of purple cloud plunge down into ‘The Dimple’ below us, and then come surging up in what last night’s weather forecast called “winds blustering up to 40 mph”. For a moment leaves and twigs and errant flower pots were flung up into the air and clattered against the house. Then it went quiet and the sun came out. But for that short while I had an apocalyptic vision of a post-Covid dystopia, the wreckage of a civilization like you see when Dr Who lands on an abandoned planet or poor little Lyra ends up in ‘His Dark Materials’. Roofless theatres, cobwebs grown across church doors, crumbling pubs and rats crawling through deserted shopping centres. This was a world in which Crich could be the scene of ‘The Hunger Games’. But as I said, then the sun came out.
At times we can’t, and indeed shouldn’t, deny the desolation, despair and fear. Sometimes hope is a decision we can take and sometimes it isn’t. Maybe we should look to Donald Trump for inspiration – hope despite the total lack of evidence; except he of course can’t accept not having control of his destiny and will try to bludgeon his way through. “He who has the gold makes the rules,” he once tweeted. We have neither the gold nor the bludgeon and will have to look for hope where we can find it, even in the desolation and wreckage. For poetic inspiration recently I’ve been the reading ‘The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump’ (unauthorised) by Rob Sears.
I AM THE MOST FABULOUS WHINER.
I own the largest winery on the east coast
I do whine
We make the finest wine
Because I want to win
And I’m not happy about not winning
And I am a whiner
Many different kinds of wines
And I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win
And I’m going to win.
While sorting through the bridesmaid’s dresses immortalised in my blog of Friday, we found our daughter’s very first baby-grow. Usually such discoveries quite unman me, casting me back into pools of emotion regretted, abandoned, unforgiven and forgiven and forgotten. This time it didn’t because packed into that tiny costume, no bigger than a hand puppet was so much compressed power, potential and hope which, while the baby-grow lay forgotten in the loft was being fully realised.
Yes, after that squall of destruction, havoc and wreckage the sun did come out. So we went out walking in it. There was very little warmth in it, it cast long shadows and the wind was biting. Along the top of the Tors a small company of cows had thoughtfully way-marked the path with such enormous and liquid cow pats that it seemed they had been grazing on a composite of senna pods, prunes and licorice. If we risked lifting our eyes from the path there was a glorious landscape of pale sunshine and racing shadows. From this we can extract our own balance of sunshine and shadow to create some meaning. Cow-pats, sunshine, shadows and Donald Trump be our guide through the terrors of these times.