Endings And Beginnings

The cat used to leap up onto the window ledge and gaze in at us soulfully until one of us took pity on him and opened front door. He still attempts the leap but now just hits the window and bounces off. I think he's getting fat but Ailz says he weighs the same as he did when we got him- so I suppose old age is catching up with him.

Peter fixed the central heating. The problem was a pump that had stopped pumping. I've put the halogen heaters away and rather miss them. Radiators don't emit a cheery golden glow.

There's a desk diary sitting on the table. A charity sent it out. We have no use for it- and we've tried palming it off on friends and family with no success. Who keeps a desk diary these days? I don't- and haven't for 30 years. And yet I hate to just toss it in the recycling. It feels like that would be churlish, ungrateful, wasteful- all those things...

The media are looking back not only at the year but at the decade. My mother's paper had a special supplement filled with pictures of politicians and celebrities and people suffering in disasters. I have few qualms about throwing that in the recycling box.

Yesterday I picked up a book by Joan Grant- who was famous in her day for remembering and writing about her past lives- and- after reading a chapter or two- ordered three more from eBay. I have little interest in pouring over the events of the immediate past but the events of several thousand years ago? Now that's a different matter...

We should celebrate the New Year at the Solstice. It's when something actually happens. January 1 is just a date chosen at random by some ancient Roman bureaucrat...

Manly But Daft

Talking about knights in armour- as I was the other day, here's Joan Grant; she's discussing the absurdity of the belief- so prevalent in our culture- that there's virtue in physical risk and physical suffering...

"In the twelfth century, I caused a handsome and healthy body of which I was fond to inflict gross discomfort on itself and others by donning armour and jousting with similarly deluded males. Eventually that body died by having a poignard driven through its right eye... an episode I still remember too vividly for comfort."

I had worried that I was being unduly and unfairly scornful of chivalry, but Grant speaks to my self-doubt. That culture- for all that we've romanticised it- was pretty damn silly.

We get one body at a time. It's our vehicle for living. There no greater value in hazarding it by pushing it to its limits and beyond than there would be in misusing and jeopardising any other instrument on which we depend.

I've always known this- at least at a subconscious level. It's one of the things that informs my lifelong avoidance of "manly" sports. Where's the sense in making yourself the target of a guy who's lobbing a hard spherical object at 100mph, or risking frostbite, exhaustion or a fatal fall to get to the top of a very high rock?



Effigy of Sir Robert de Aspal (d.1337) St Mary and St Lambert, Stonham Aspal, Suffolk.