New 'hoss'

Just been down the path to the river to see if that foal that I mentioned a couple of days ago was around tonight. Well, there she was OK, but sadly not at the bottom of the meadow by the path where I could have got some lovely portrait pictures. No, this equine family were all happy grazing at the far end of the field, so I just had to make do with some 'distant scenes' presented here. Better luck later in the week maybe.


So here she is. Scrutinising the pictures she does seem to be a 'she' doesn't she? But clearly a mare of independent spirit. That is hardly a surprise being brought up in the kind of 'big country' landscapes we enjoy around here. These North Pennine meadows look at their best at this time of the year - usually around 20 species of wild flowers and especially - as you can see - buttercups.


Little horses of course - like lambs and young rabbits - love to try out these 'VTOL' ('vertical take-off and landing') jumps. Here we go - how high can I fly?? Me? On a good day around 10 centimetres.


And just as I was about to head off mother and daughter both came over to the stable. Took no notice of me at all, I think they probably knew that it was nearly feeding time and were looking for some oats from the farmer. It must be a big responsibility to own and look after a horse. A veritable army of cats and dogs have looked for 'TLC' from me over the years but I was never responsible for caring for a horse. There is always a first time.

Shop work.

These last two days I have been very busy managing the shop on my own up at the railway. To be honest ten hours continuous work each day has made me pretty tired, I'm not used to going at it like this without a break. But it has been fun, and probably establishes a pattern for me at weekends which will extend over the next month or two. Better get used to it.

It isn't like working in a 'normal shop' - perhaps a little more like working in a bar in some ways. Some shoppers - the ladies - are usually simply after the chutney or the crystal ware, and the kids are after the 'Thomas the Tank Engine' goodies. But the railway enthusiasts who arrive want to talk, they want to ask questions and also show off a little of their own knowledge of the history of the line.

So this work is turning me into a bit of a raconteur, I am getting quite skilled at providing anecdotes and information. And it is interesting to see the different ways in which they absorb and respond to this - always different somehow. But more of that another time, tonight I need a bath, a read and sleep!

New foal

Doesn't that always happen. It was grey and windy when I took my teatime hike today so I didn't bother to take my camera with me. And then there in the small meadow on the left where the footpath heads down to the river was a young foal in the company of its parents. They were all happily grazing away with their backs to the wind.

It explained a lot - a local farmer and his brother have been toiling away for a fortnight working on the fencing in the evenings. I was rather puzzled as to what they were doing because there is a substantial if rather dilapidated stock-proof stone wall along that stretch already and there was no obvious reason to be carefully building a wooden post and wire fence just behind it. Now I can see why - to keep a clueless young foal safe from injury.

Very pretty, a light brown coat with a white 'blaze' on the forehead. Maybe two or three weeks old, must have been born at the start of the month. Cheeky little blighter stared at me as I headed down the path. I'll try and post a picture tomorrow.

The sight reminded me of a chilly but bright morning driving to work across Cefn Cribbwr Common down in Glamorgan maybe 35 years ago. Probably early March and around seven -the frost was just lifting but the sun was up. And then suddenly about 30 yards away on the right a hill pony mare was lying down on the grass giving birth to a foal. I pulled over and waited in the car in case there was any problem but the birth was almost complete and needed no support from me. Both mare and foal were up on their feet within a few minutes, extraordinary. First the mother and then the foal, still steaming with the wetness and the warmth of the after-birth on the frosty morning air as it wobbled on its legs for the very first time and the mother licked it clean.

'May' in flower

This week the hawthorn trees around here have been at their best and I took my camera down to the big meadow below Stenkrith and on Tuesday got some nice pictures despite the gale blowing everything around. Actually I think the common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) in northern England is often just as beautiful as the cherry blossoms in April in Japan - it is just that we don't make such a 'big production' about it.

The best blooms tend to be on the oldest trees and the alternative English name is 'May' or 'Mayflower' although now it at its best in the last week of the month and the first week of June, This of course is because of the famous 'eleven days' that were taken out of our British version of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 - suddenly the 'May' was blooming eleven days later.

When I was a kid we used to get sent out to pick the 'haws' - the red hawthorn berries - from the hedgerows in September. In those postwar years they had some factory, somewhere, that extracted the cordial from them

Two boys and a 'Boxer'

Something made me a bit sad the other day. I was heading off down to the river on my teatime walk when I spotted two boys around nine or ten years old with a large 'Boxer' dog in front of me. Then, just as I was closing the gap on them this rather elderly looking canine took a big - and very loose - dump on the road just next to the wheel of a shiny 4x4 at the side of the lane.

Consternation. The lads looked all around and then saw me bearing down on them. No doubt that they were counting on their canine amigo to make it down to the woods before this kind of stuff happened. What nine-year-old is going to pick up that kind of a runny mess even if they do have a 'poop' bag in their pocket? You would have needed a pail of water.

Anyway one of them said very apologetically and perhaps a tad craftily "Sorry Mister we haven't got a bag!" Of course I just muttered something like "That's alright sonny, they have to do it somewhere" and strode by. I could almost hear the sigh of relief.

Did they think I looked like a magistrate or plain clothes policeman or something? "There's far too much of this kind of thing happening! Don't you know that this is a very serious offence with a maximum penalty of £1000 with up to six months imprisonment for any subsequent conviction!" There they were doing the dog a favour and then this turns up out of the blue. Or out of the dog I guess.

It was the look of fear on their faces that made me sad. When I was nine years old and I took the dog to the woods the dog just did it and nobody cared less. How did we become such an unforgiving 'puritan' society? Of course it isn't good to leave your dog's crap around for others to step in but why do we have such an urge to literally criminalise it all. I know all about toxocariasis and the rest of it but what sort of world have we created when nine year old dog walkers think that you might turn them in?

Tribalism, insight.

A couple of things happened to me today that reminded me of Henri Bergson's book "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion". You couldn't say that either of them was in any way 'important' but they did seem to have 'significance' - like looking into a Bruegel painting.

On the way to the supermarket I nodded to the local vicar striding down the street hand in hand with his son. Later I was involved in a meeting across the Internet concerned with the administration of some temple business.

Yes, nothing 'special'. Just the mundane 'form' that the spiritual is haltingly expressed in. I can't recall any of the detail of Bergson's argument and it wasn't his most penetrating book. But it is subtle. The underlying argument is that there are two quite different sources of moral and religious 'behaviour' - polar opposites. One the one had a kind of exclusive cultural tribalism that is evident throughout the history of all the world's great religions and on the other the influence in the saha world of people with genuine and profound moral and spiritual insight.

Sometimes the 'forms' of religious institutions can seem prosaic, even jarring. Weakness abounds, all our feet seem to be made of clay. The contrast between postmodern Western societies and other vigorous cultures looms like a chasm, irascible humanists and atheists cheerfully mock the 'sky fairy' beliefs of others apparently completely ignorant of the consequences.

This question of 'tribalism' vs. 'insight' - are they conflicting opposites? Does the latter slowly ameliorate the former, modify behaviour? Or is this the image of the roots of the lotus growing deep into the mud and ooze of our monkey behaviour before blossoming in the sunlight? Dunno.

Stormy day today ...

Stormy day today ... great! A real downpour in the morning an then at dinner time it dried up and the sun came out and the wind REALLY got up

"If the wind is before the rain,
Soon you may make sail again;
If the rain is before the wind
All your sheets and topsails mind ..."

So they used to say in the days of sailing ships. If you want me to bore you with the meteorology behind this folk wisdom drop me an e-mail sometime! But it is true, you always get the best gales after heavy rain.

I am trying to get in some serious walking to build up my health at the moment so I braved the cold gales this evening to do my usual 'small circuit'. I cross the river here and head around by the pasture and woodland paths to pick up the big meadow at the south end of town.

But tonight a few minutes after this we got hit by a terrific squall of hailstones blowing in over the Howgill Fells and I had to dive for cover under a hedge with three shivering sheep and a large shivering buck rabbit for company. It didn't last long and it was fun just sitting there admiring the bluebells and breathing in the scent of sheep and wet wild garlic.

Evening out

Went into Kendal last night to go to a fund-raising concert. It was fun, and especially one duo who were both superb singers and very entertaining too. "Tongue Tide" - I hope that I get to hear them againsoon and hopefully when Edera is over here during the summer.

I can't put my finger on it but somehow, knowing only two other people, I felt hopelessly out of place at this particular 'do'. A very provincial English crowd , lots of nice folk there and of course everybody knew, if not everybody else, then at least a fair cross section of the rest of the gathering. Much smiling and greeting, pastel colours, cups of herbal tea and chocolate cake. I am not always a natural 'mixer' and it was the kind of event where it was easy to remain at the back of the room which is just what I did and where in fact I did have an old and close friend to chat away with.

Part of all this for sure was that I have become much more used to socialising in a Japanese crowd rather than an English one but what is the difference? It isn't that people are any more or less sociable, more that in subtle ways conversations are somehow rather more inclusive. In most respects the stereotype of 'groupism' really is just that but there is is surely often more of a tendency to embrace the presence of others at any social gathering than there now seems to me to be here.

I'll have to think about it. This contrast in social relationships is certainly going to be much more a part of my life in future.

Persistence

A really nice surprise today. Heard a tap at my front door this afternoon and went to check it out and there was someone there that I hadn't seen since my grandfather's funeral back in 1987. As a child she was a friend of his when he still lived in these parts and someone that he was very fond of. I was meaning to look her up last summer but somehow time flew by. I'm really glad to be back in touch with her again now and I'm looking forward to her coming around to tea when Edera arrives here next month.

Thinking about it afterwards it was interesting that I recognised her immediately as soon as I opened the door - in fact recognised the back of her head because she was headed out of the gate with her dog thinking that I wasn't around.

I notice this so often with people that I haven't seen for a long time - despite the usual effects of ageing how little people might 'really' change in 20 or 30 or even 40 years. You come face to face with them again and so little has altered, not just in appearance but in so many aspects of character too. We may be best represented as a combination and dissolution of skhandas - nothing 'permanent' there, only conditions and outcomes - but in truth these things persist strongly and reinforce particular sets of inter-relationships for a long time. Thoughts and feelings too. It isn't that nothing changes, everything does. But there is a powerful persistence there too. This also extends to thoughts and feelings, a kind stream of constancy that runs through a whole lifetime or lifetimes.'The moving finger writes' ... and yet nothing is ever erased from the record.

Someone told me once of a guy in his sixties punching a former maths teacher in his eighties at a school re-union because after forty years he still felt so angry about the sarcasm the teacher had used on him in class. I can believe it.

One May Morning

Travelling up from Lancaster tonight I was listening to a conservation programme about a woodland in Essex and it reminded me of a teenage adventure that I hadn't thought about in years.

Some lovely May morning when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen and lived in Ifield in Sussex I just couldn't stay in bed and so I was up about four and headed out for the woods. Beautiful day! And nobody else awake! That early morning was very still and within a few minutes I had already spotted a dog fox trotting in the sunshine across a field next to the lane.

Within a few minutes I was deep into the woods - a glade in a dense oak coppice. I'm not even sure if I could find it now but in these woods are some derelict seventeenth century 'hammer ponds' that were once used to drive bellows and hammers to forge iron using charcoal. And in one of those pond glades I managed to stalk two roe deer for maybe an hour.

It was just luck that I was down wind of course. And eventually they spotted me and bolted. I'll aways remember the sheer excitement of that second as they bolted and they and I crashed through the willow undergrowth. It must have been just how medieval villagers felt when they poached in the Lord's desmesne on similar mornings long ago.

Cat and Dolphin

Of course any reader of 'Little House' knows that I'm a complete sucker for anything to do with cats and I was really fascinated by someting I saw recently on the internet - a cat and a dolphin having a bit of a 'love in'.

You can find it here. It looks like these two have been friends all their lives.

No need for comment really. Cats are so cool eh? And dolphins too of course. But if I had to choose which of them I wanted curled on my knee in front of a warm fire in winter as I sat reading a good book it would be the feline.

Half-Baked History

I seem to have spent the whole day watching the Queen laying wreaths and planting trees during her state visit to Ireland. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration, the 'box' has been turned off a lot of the time while I've been working here on the table. But when it has been on there seems to have been a constant procession of BBC and RTE presenters presenting half-baked synopses of alleged 'history' while our monarch wields her spade in some Dublin park.

Who is this 'Queen of England' that the Irish commentators love to talk about as some kind of a third party abstraction? The last REALLY English monarch we can point to was Richard III. He lost his throne at Bosworth Field in 1485. After that we had the Welsh Tudors followed by the Scottish Stuarts and then Dutch William of Orange followed by an endless procession of Germans Hanoverians some of which couldn't even speak English. After Victoria came Edward VII who was of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. It was only during the First World War - in fact after the Irish had cleared off and founded their own state good luck to them - that the penny dropped with our Royal Family that it might be a good idea to change their Teutonic name to something a tad more English like "Windsor". "Where the soup comes from", as Oscar Wilde once remarked.

And we learn today that the President of Ireland has a UK Passport because she was born in County Tyrone. In addition to her Irish one of course. Gordon Bennett.

Freedom from Anxiety

At some stage during my studies someone said to me "read Ernest Becker's 'The Birth and Death of Meaning'" and I dutifully wrote it down and did get around to buying a copy but I'm afraid that it just lain on a shelf since. Never mind, my nose is well into it now. It is an truly exceptional 'read'. Published fifty years ago it offers what the author describes as an interdisciplinary perspective on 'the problem of man' . Certainly it pulls in much more of thinkers like Freud than I have seriously taken a look at before. One way or another it lands squarely on issues that have come up for me from quite a different direction for years.

One of the topics he explores in detail is the relationship between Freud's concept of 'ego' and anxiety. His argument goes that our 'ego' grows and gains power by putting anxiety under its control. It identifies what 'anxiety' is for the organism and then chooses to avoid it by building defences that handle it. We experience small doses of anxiety and these then 'vaccinate' us by producing defences that function like antibodies in our subconscious minds. Defence mechanisms such as denial - 'this isn't happening to me'; projection - 'that person thinking these awful thoughts is not me' and repression - 'that did not occur'.
But this 'freedom from anxiety' is bought at a high price, the restriction and avoidance of experience. Our lives become skewed to avoid anxiety by limiting action, we can't "just do it" any more, our ego staves off anxiety only by putting layer after layer of restriction on the way in we have capacity perceive and understand.

"Unwanted" Posters

Local elections were on when we were down in Hiroshima at the beginning of last month. I have written here not long ago how deeply I dislike the indiscriminate use of load speaker vans over the weeks before elections in Japan. But here is an aspect that certainly most British voters would find strange and any Frenchman I'm sure would find positively bizarre.

About three weeks before the event the local city election office puts up these white plywood hoardings all around the place and, as you can see on the right, they are all carefully cataloged and "The Rules" are carefully explained to us by officialdom. Then each candidate can put up ONE poster in the middle of a space. It is intended to avoid unsightly (and untidy!) fly-posting and it does, nobody would dream of misbehaving and pasting posters to the wall of some underpass or actually putting up TWO posters. That would be a serious loss of face eh? Can you imagine some French communist party worker doing this in a seedy suburb of Lille or Marseilles? Ha! Ha! Ha!

Looking at thousands of these posters over the years has given me some deep and depressing insights into the nature of illusions associated with politics. Look at this crowd eh? Same smiles, same "determination to clean up politics" and "represent the interests of their constituents". Laugh! I split my sides! If I was an artist this would be the first picture in my little Hogarthian gallery of images collected under the theme of "The Politician's Progress: Going to Hell in a Handcart in Six Simple Steps". Different Worlds, Same Lies. Once you have seen a thousand posters like this who could possibly have any faith in political process any more? It has to be a triumph of hope over experience even to hang on to your breakfast. A kind of a gallery of the "unwanted", people the Sheriff definitely isn't looking for.

I know, I know, you are going to tell me that someone has to do it and there has to be a mechanism for choosing and that at least some people do a modestly good job. It is just seeing it all in one place, like having sixteen spoons of sugar dumped in your tea.

And maybe the most depressing aspect of all in Japan is that nobody would EVER dream of defacing one of these posters with even a small moustache

The Big Show

Down to Harrogate today for a 'boys day out' with Pete at the Model Engineering Show. I have a bit of a soft spot for this event at the Yorkshire Show Ground because the first time I ever went there it was with my dad in 2004. But in the intervening years it has got a lot bigger, busier and - more expensive.

In general we are not an attractive breed we model engineering workshop denizens. About 98% male, 90% over 50, 85% bald and 100% obsessive, tribal, overweight and boring I guess. I couldn't help looking around the crowd and thinking "I'm not sure I like these people much, and I really one of them? But I guess I am!

There's an interesting trajectory that I notice around this scene. Thirty years ago it was a 'can do' pastime where people used ingenuity to engineer quite cheaply and cheerfully. But over the years it has got to be big money, lots of men with large pension pots and ambitions to tackle ever more expensive and sophisticated projects.

But now that tide is running out a bit, people aren't as rich as they were three or four years ago, we are slowly and inch by inch headed back towards 'making do' again.

Somehow I never got on very well in male society, I don't have the urge to exercise power, worry about the 'rules' and 'points of order'. I was never going to be chairman or president of anything. Also my workshop standards are a bit shoddy and I can't stick to one thing for more than five minutes. Apart from this I'm OK though.

Moon Viewing

Down the river again this evening with only 'blackies' for company clucking in the undergrowth. It was late already, three parts dusk, one of those chilly damp May evenings with a haze of insects out over the black water. Quiet, very quiet

The half moon was almost due south and also high in the sky. At the end of one reach of the river, if I clambered down the bank, I could just see it reflected in the rippling water. First a luminous strand of cloud lower in rather 'brittle' tinted cerulean space and then if you looked deeper just beyond the pebbles and duck grass ... half of a moon. This is really to be absorbed - looking in detail.

Maybe our association with places central to our sense of identity - 'home' - is so powerful because it is such an immediate, close encounter, a coming face to face with 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. Somewhere the hard distinctions between 'our certain selves' and spaces we consider at the deepest level as 'where we are from' evaporate. If every aspect of a place, the moods of the climate and light and the touch of the wind on your face are utterly familiar then we don't focus so much on any boundary between self and other. There is no hard attachment to an objective view, we are content to just be there, absorb it and let it absorb us. Form in this case touches our skin, offers visual impressions, senses of odour, the interpenetration with sound and there is a flowing in and out.

No wonder our sense of 'belonging to home' is so powerful. It arises exactly in those dimensions in which we have the capacity to let go for a while.

Country sounds

Somehow my energy is still low this week, but at least I am getting myself out for short walks in the afternoon. These are usually not ambitious, maybe just along the pretty stretch of the River Eden behind the town where there are a couple of nice benches to sit on. You can enjoy the sunshine there and the sound of the river partly hidden by a screen of young willows. An occasional excited canine splashes by.

Interesting how different country places are so characterised by different mixtures of bird songs and also how 'seasonal' these sound contexts are. Before I came away from Japan the 'urugisu' - the 'Japanese Bush Warblers' were already well into their distinctive spring repertoires. Sometimes these birds are called 'hanami-dori' ('Spring Flower-Viewing Bird') or 'kyo-yomi-dori' ('Sutra-Reading Bird'). On hot May days I can lie on the tatami and listen to them through our paper screens.

Along the river here the most characteristic sounds are of thrushes and blackbirds, always rooting around in the leaf mould under the shrubbery along by the pebble shore. The thrush especially by day and the blackbird either in the last light of evening or in the damp grey shadows of earliest dawn

Pour le Continent

Sorting through some old magazines this morning I came across this image. I'm not so much intending to bore you with the 'hardware' shown here - the locomotive is Southern Railway Urie 'King Arthur Class' No. 765 'Sir Gareth' built in 1925 - but the context is interesting. The year is 1927 and this is is Dover West Docks, and 'Sir Gareth' is about to depart for London Victoria - another boat load of passengers arrived from France.

Who could afford to travel abroad back then? Certainly none of my forbears - not unless the ride was in a cattle wagon carrying a rifle and backpack. Today if you want to go to France or Belgium you go to St. Pancras Station in London and catch the 'Eurostar' and you can in in Brussels and indeed almost into Paris in the time it would have taken 'Sir Gareth' to haul you to Dover 80 years ago. But now most of our foreign travel is done through dingy and stressful airport lounges with endless security checks.

In 1927 unless you were making a long sea voyage from Liverpool or Southampton most foreign travel began at London's Victoria Station from where you caught the boat train for Dover or perhaps Newhaven. I rememeber it still being like this as late as the early 1960's when the relaxed way to head for the 'continent' was to take the 'Golden Arrow' by day or the 'Night Ferry' by night and take a leisurely six or eight hours to get there.

There was always something a oddly international about the platforms at Victoria, a reminder that some of these trains even found their way right onto the ferries with freight and passengers. Nowhere else would you ever see for example the blue and gold coaches of the 'Wagon Lits' Company. I once asked a ticket inspector if I could go onto the platform to take a picture and he looked shocked and muttered "If I let you on there sonny you would be in France already!".

Foreign really was 'foreign' in those pre European Union days and there wasn't much of it to Encounter in England. Hard to imagine now how Victoria could even have been so exotic.

Dreams and Premonitions

It would be interesting to check amongst your friends and see just how many people had experienced what you could call a 'deja vu' moment related to dreaming. Dreaming is far from being consistent within the flow of experience and awareness is certainly far from being consistent too. So perhaps there is no transparent measure to be made around things that you seem to dream about first and then experience afterwards. But there is certainly some element of precognition or premonition possible there, even if it is circumstantial.

It is a matter of record in our family, for example, that my grandfather wrote to me a few days before my daughter Julia was born and said "Dreamed that the new baby was born last night and it is a girl - and she had red hair!" Of course whether such things are premonition or random circumstance is something else.

I went through a period like this in my early 20's. Changes to the entire geography of my life were reflected in dreams of almost Gothic psychic intensity which took place in a landscape of castles and islands that would have done justice to a Tolkien novel. But what was disturbing was that cause and effect began to be blurred, I got so that I was unsure whether these dreams were the cause or effect of 'real' changes.

Similar stuff has been coming up recently too, only dimly perceived but creating an uncertainty as to whether I dreamed about it or it happened first. Nothing serious, more like pages of a book falling open on your lap. The experience of other friends around my age suggests that the early sixties might be a fruitful time for dreaming like this.

Measuring bodies

Remembering my 'big boned' Cumbrian ladies in the pharmacy yesterday has had me thinking about the wider aspect of 'ethnicity' within the British population. By 'ethnicity' I am not thinking of the changes that have taken place here due to immigration within the last sixty years but rather the evidence in the characteristics of the population of much earlier migrations and movements of people.

I was always very curious as a student about the variety apparent within the physical characteristics of the English population but back in the 1950's and 1960's it seemed never to be seriously studied. Even in those much less 'politically correct' days the fascination of eugenics for the Nazi movement in the 1920's and 1930's had made this an area that most scientists were content to tiptoe around. It has probably only got worse.

And yet there ARE significant physical differences between local populations within the UK. It was obvious to me as a curious teenager and it is even more noticeable to me now when I land back here from Japan. On average for example people from Cumbria are significantly bigger and blonder than, say, people from east Kent. And that must be because one group has largely Norwegian ancestors and the others are descended from Jutes. Until the last century these gene pools were not much mixed; most people lived and married in the areas of Britain that they were born in.

I must take a good look at this area again and see if there is any active research. My bones tell me that there may not be, that it will be an academically unacceptable zone, but we'll see. You can analyse dialect and the way people speak - which amounts to the same thing - as much as you like. But the measurement of bodies is a whole other matter.

Personal purchase

"Troubles ..." - as I never miss an opportunity to remind people -"...never come as single spies but in battalions". And that has certainly been the case this week. I'm falling to bits, every time I turn around something else doesn't work. Recently I've been getting depressed at just how much like my grandfather I have gotten to look but to be honest after three days of high fever since Tuesday I look even older than my grandfather used to. After the 'Listerine' on Wednesday and the antibiotics yesterday today I was so badly constipated that my teeth rattled at every stumbling footfall.

Inevitably the 'Green Tree Pharmacy' was full of three very large ladies who surely groomed 'hosses' in their leisure hours chatting with their chums in white coats behind the counter. It fell silent in there as I entered and they all looked suspiciously at the weedy stranger that had just ridden into town. Too late to ask to speak to a male assistant and anyway they don't have one so I took my courage in both hands, sneezed once and said in a loud and croaky voice "can I have some suppositories please?" You could have heard a pin drop. I felt like Oliver Twist.

But fair do's, that shop assistant was a cool customer! A 'professional'. Quick as a flash she came back "Certainly Sir! Are they for an adult or a child?" Now isn't that 'style'? I did my best to look hesitant, as if in doubt, trying to remember. "Um ... for an adult please"

And then after she had rummaged around for ten minutes under the counter ("Have you seen the price list Edna?") and decided that the 'big ones' were £3.35 for sixteen (and who the heck needs sixteen eh? there are always people worse off than you are ...) I was all set to make my escape.

I did wonder if I had the courage to exploit this 'third party' technique to the ultimate, perhaps with an outrageous "Oh! And a packet of those lime green ribbed condoms for my cousin Ivor, he wears the large ones" but of course I'm not THAT foolhardy. Usually.

Under the weather

Not like me to miss posting on 'Little House' three days in a row. I was no sooner airborne from Narita on Monday than I started sneezing, and by the time I arrived at Heathrow the cough, sore throat and and 'snuffles' had all arrived too. Luckily I made it back here before the fever really took hold but basically I've just been completely laid up now for two days, scarcely the energy to get downstairs to make a cup of tea. Luckily though I got out to the surgery to get some antibiotics for my chestiness. If I hadn't done that then bronchial asthma would surely have set in by now too. All I have here now is a nasty cold coupled with severe jet-lag, but it is enough.

I always notice in periods like this how much my brain feels as if it has been reduced to scrambled eggs. Vocabulary slips away and the ability to concentrate and think sequentially evaporates. It doesn't take much to undermine conventional mental processes and that illusion of 'having a grip'. It is that Freudian distinction between 'I' and 'me' I suppose, all the 'I' functions become undermined as your capacity to concentrate is lost due to fever and with it goes the possibility of keeping a short leash on anxiety, you just have to sit there with who you are and feel rough.

I could have guessed that this would happen now, I seem to have had three months of continuous worry and anxiety and it weakens the body in a hundred different ways. You can keep a kind of a grip on it for a while but all those cracks and crevices let in a virus sooner or later, usually just when you thought that you had got past the worst of it.