Walking The Dog

Hope : from Old English hopa:  definition - verb, to express a desire for something; noun, the feeling of desiring something that's not entirely beyond your reach. So ... I hope to see you tomorrow (verb) vs. It is my hope that none of us will be pinged before our holiday (noun). Hope is an essential part of our lives. Without hope, what are we? Who are we? And where are we going?If hope were completely withdrawn from our lives, most of us would be utterly lost. I know I would be. Hope, after all, is the thing ... the essence, if you like ... that drives us. It is the catalyst of ambition and the enabler of dreams. Pliny the Elder said, "Hope is the pillar that holds up the world."  I like that image ... a solid pillar holding up the world ... for us. It is somehow reassuring. But Pliny didn't say solid. The hopeful part of me added that, making it a hopefully solid pillar.  What if the pillar were to get a bit blurred? What if it bowed perhaps and buckled? Is the ...

A frosty morning. An ancient oak. A hint of blue sky. A bit of frozen cobweb. And days lengthening - "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Percy Bysshe Shelley I can't quite believe that I'm here, writing another 'Life in a time of covid-19' blog - the sixteenth. Maybe I'm stuck in a covid loop of covid blogging. Maybe it's time to stop. I like the number seventeen, so maybe there will be a seventeenth, and then something different. For now though - getting back to the sixteenth - what a year we have had. What a time we live in. What ... I stare out of the window ... what ... I massage my shut eyes, smearing my glasses with my fingers ...  what about what comes next? Dare we think of that? Specifically, the what of what comes next. Time will tell. What a cliche! Well, yes, but it's a cliche that is true. Time will, indeed, tell. But the problem is, we want it to tell us now. We want to know. We want to be able to see past the doom-laden news...

What comes next?       What comes next is a question we impatiently ask ourselves throughout our lives. It assists planning. It is the bedrock of ambition. It builds futures. But, right now, what comes next is tinged with more uncertainty and fear than we are used to. In our cosseted, modern lives, those of us who live in stable, Westernised societies, have become lazy in our thinking - we've too often narrowed the focus of what comes next to our own small patch of the planet - ourselves, our families, and our friends and colleagues. Now the focus of what comes next has exploded to encompass the entire planet and all its peoples and ecosystems and political situations. And contemplating this near-incomprehensible what comes next is exhausting. I've been struggling with it for at least two months. Let's face it, I'm not alone - you have too; along with the rest of the population. Of the entire world. I say two months ... but in reality, we have probably been contem...

I have posted an i-phone photograph of the sunrise, on Instagram, every morning, for the past 22 days. And I am exhausted. But not so exhausted that I am tempted to stop. Not yet. Small things give purpose to the day. Particularly, when day after day we are in lockdown and the world looks more different than we could ever have imagined. There is something anchoring in seeing the sunrise. Maybe, it harks back to a deeply-rooted instinct that looks to the sun for reassurance. Maybe, it is my way of finding a constant - if the sun rises then I can too. I can begin my day. The coronavirus has altered the world we live in, but the earth hasn't changed. Or has it? Arguably, the earth has changed - Across the industrialised world, industry has shut down and commuting to work has all but ceased. As a result, pollution levels have collapsed. The WHO estimates that the smog caused by air pollution kills over 1.5 million people a year in India. Now the air is so clear that the H...

Crime drama usually has that pivotal scene where a witness is asked to recount what they saw. For the reader or television viewer this is an expected and hotly anticipated part of the story - the part where the detective will hopefully discover some small nugget upon which the investigation will turn. The unfolding story hinges entirely upon an accurate recall of what was seen. Skilled storytellers, who understand human psychology, will show how tortuous this recall can be. Ask yourself what colour of shirt and tie, or dress, the newsreader on television last night was wearing - you watched him or her speaking, between newsreels, for the half an hour or so of the programme. How accurately do you recall - not what he or she said - but exactly how they looked? When the police ask, 'What was the suspect wearing?' they don't expect their witnesses to give accurate answers 100% of the time. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable; in cases that were overturned after DNA e...

It feels like we are stuck in the opening credits of a disaster movie. But this is a cinema we cannot leave. And there are too many directors trying to tell us - the extras - what to do. So we stop listening and follow each other. And as the cameras roll, the dystopian world of the film descends into chaos and panic. The problem is this film is real. So what are our options? Well, it appears that a lot of people have selected option 1. The panic option. The option driven by an escalating drip drip of confused and contradicting information. The rabbit hole we hurtle down in a frenzy of wide-eyed suffocating fear as we search and search and search for information on the internet; read terrifying tweets and skip the too doom-laden headlines that we see, but are too scared to open. Some have selected option 2. The it-won't-happen-to-me option. The we-suddenly-find-ourselves-on-a-paid-and-mortgage-free-holiday option. The scientists-are-jargon-spouting-nerds option. The irrespon...

"To think is easy. To act is hard."                                                     Goethe Never were words more true - think about it. I think about the things I want to do; thinking about them is easy. Getting down to doing them is so hard that most of them go un-done. And little wants and wishes pile on top of last year's wants and wishes and the big wants balance precariously on the top of the heap, for a while propped-up by to-do lists and well intentioned plans but too soon they too are replaced or forgotten and sink into the bog of lost dreams. But these are small, personal things. And small personal inactions. What of the bigger things that we think about? We can all think about the big things such as world politics and economics. We can all worry about them. But to act on our thoughts? That can be hard. It risks taking us beyond...

Half-way into January. A small step into a new year. And I am another year older. How did this happen? I could answer part of that by reminding myself that as I was born in January and have just had a birthday I am a year older. But half-way into January (over half-way now - several days have passed since I started this blog) and a small step into a New Year; how did these happen? Time doesn’t stand still. I've said that before. In November's blog. I called it out as a cliche then too. It is. But if cliches can be good and I think this is a good one. Time is animated. Time moves. I wittered on about this at length. In November. Two months ago. Two months filled with frantic present hunting; over-eating; over-spending; under-sleeping; and wrapping (always late on Christmas eve - so late that I risk Father Christmas finding me sitting on the floor surrounded by paper and string - the sellotape always runs out at about 11.57pm on Christmas Eve, doesn't it? - hot chocolate in...

If I put my hand up, if I try to have my say, will anybody listen?  If I tread softly in a wood of silver trees and whisper susurrations; snippets sparsely spoken from my soul - my supplications rising in the warming breeze, will my words rustle any of the paper leaves and stop them falling? Falling, f  a   l     l      i       n        g falling to our precious fragile earth. Fragile is our world. Fragile our grasp of what - it - is. One world. Precious. And us, just, holding on, mere atoms in a surging sea of selfish, greedy strife. Fragile is our hold, our will, our voice. Our life. To right a wrong with words is right. To hit back with fury risks a monster roused. Stirred to act; tit for tat. Tit for tat. Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Think on that. If I put up my hand and cry. And cry. Will it stay the will of leaders who capitulate and bluster and risk throwing o...

Snoring. Snoring - go on; say 'snoring.' And again. And again. Play with the word; roll it around your mouth - sno-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-rrrr-ring. Try it again. I defy you to do this without a tiny twitch appearing at the corner of your mouth. A tiny twitch plus a slight wrinkling of the skin at the outer angles of your eyes. Why is snoring funny? Why, for example, did I find it impossible to discuss snoring yesterday without smiling; in a professional situation where smiling was probably inappropriate? Snoring is funny. In the same way that everything about toilets is funny to a seven year old boy. It makes us smile; childishly. It's something only other people do; isn't it? It's funny! Unless you live with someone who snores. Or you are the snor-ee ... snor-er ... ? ... one who snores ... and live life in a permanent fog of day-time exhaustion. Snoring is not restricted to humans. Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins snore: they sprawl in front of the...

Fart - definition: do I have to spell this one out? We all know what a fart is. It's Bertie Baggins emptying the room faster than even he could leap up at the rustle of wrapper and hint of a biscuit. Perhaps it's his passion for all things biscuit-crumby and sticky and generally curled up and slowly decaying that he finds on the kitchen floor or dead in the middle of a field that leads to the efficacy of his room-evacuating talent. The picture of innocence Farts are also the bubbles suggesting the early morning swimmers are using some internal combustion engine to propel themselves up the pool and that the changing room toilets are probably best avoided when the swimming session ends. Farts are universally unpleasant and embarrassing; always and instantly orphaned and totally necessary. We all do them. Yes ... we do; all of us. At all ages; next time you're near a very young baby watch it jump in  surprise when it noisily passes wind. Fart as flatulence is from...