Friday and I’m feeling chipperish. A quick burst of regal misery over breakfast and I head for the Shed to construct a letter. It takes ages to get to the end of it. At lunch time my partner and I eat bagel and beans before she returns to work, and I wander over to the post office to send my letter. The afternoon starts with watering yesterday’s daffodilled pots from which I move onto putting a new cover on the greenhouse. I decide to leave the old cover on and weather tape the frame pole lines so that the new cover will get a softer foundation. I perform an amazing feat of greenhouse cover fitting that makes putting on a duvet cover solo look like child’s play. I am surprised by the ease and the speed with which I complete the task. Go me.
So I move onto other chores like removing the accumulation of dead flies from the dining room light fitting, fitting new corncob bulbs in the inspection lanterns and getting my washing. I am on auto pilot, bored with myself, bored with the world of royal misery and bored with the pain of the fucking chicken egg sized lump my injection has left in me. I’m bored with only being able to perform mundane chores around the house and garden. It’s not like I’ve got that amount of time left to fritter away. I get a call from my sister who tells me how she is and what she has been occupied with of late. We reminisced about our grandfather and the things that she still has of him. He is someone who I would like my children to know more about, he was quite a character. Apparently the extended family at the time clubbed together so he could buy his way out of the army. After having spent almost nine years in India without home leave he was put on notice to go to Ireland, at which point the family decide that my grandmother could not face any more time away from my grandfather. We end our call and I move on.
Pizza bought from the village, drafting the blog and half watching a “psychological” thriller (which at least has the good grace to have a psychologist in it) constitutes the evening. It will whimper away with meds and increasing irritation till I slouch off to be born again, like some second coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats runs through me, one of my early influences, interesting that he turns up now again in these circumstances and his “The Second Coming” comes so clearly to mind.
