Fretting over what we cannot fix

February is blowing itself out in a whole long week of storms, one after the other. It snaps some more of my rotting fence panels, and says, there you go, suck on that. It rattles the eaves all night, and howls through the vents, keeping me awake. I put on sound-cancelling headphones, which do a good job, but then I wake at intervals with hot, itchy ears.

Mornings bring a bloodshot dawn, and days indoors, sheltering from the weather, with the mood, like the trees outside, swinging from one side to the other. The various media show me roads flooded, lorries toppling over, and all the trains are cancelled. I watch big jets on live feed, making precarious landings at Heathrow.

Now and then there is a tease of sunshine, and the wind holds its breath, tempting one to contemplate escaping out of doors. But before I’ve got my shoes on, the rain is hammering against the glass. Submit, it says, you’re going nowhere.

In one brief interlude, I cobble back the worst of the damage to the fence panels, to stop them waggling about, and creaking in the night, at least. But we’re looking at replacing them, soon, and that means finding some workmen. But workmen are difficult to find, and, when found, they are difficult to persuade to turn up, and when they are persuaded, they suck their teeth and charge the earth. Reasons are various: it’s the price of wood, you see, mate? It’s the pandemic, it’s inflation, it’s the cost of energy, it’s the lack of lorry drivers, it’s BR*XIT’s sunny uplands! All of these things, I suppose, make their contribution to these late winter blues.

It has me fretting. It disturbs my sleep as much as the wind does, this seemingly endless business of maintaining fences. Is that another panel gone? Of course, there’s more to this. Are these possibly metaphorical fences? Is it the borders of one’s-self we feel are not so secure as they were? And have we the energy to keep on renewing them? In twenty years I’ll be eighty, which is not so long, since twenty years past was five minutes ago, and I imagine that’s too old to be moithering over fence panels. We do not normally toss and turn to such thoughts. How interesting! I surmise we are actually suffering from stir craziness, or cabin fever, when a mood can be punctured by so little as dropping the end of your carefully dunked digestive biscuit into your cup of tea. And it is, after all, two weeks now, since we had a walk.

So we brave the buffeting, and take a drive to the shop for a change of scene, noting in passing petrol is once more at an all-time record high. As for the shop, the etiquette is now confusing, since Boris declared victory over Covid, having fought it on the beaches, and in the air, until it finally surrendered. I wear a mask anyway, like the health services still advise. I am alone in this, but for the other fuddy duddy, who wears his mask as a chinstrap. Half a kilogram of butter costs nearly five pounds! And wine,… well, never mind. In emergencies, cheese and wine are called for. We pick out a modestly priced French Red, and a wedge of Stilton, then head for home.

Meanwhile, Russia invades the Donbas region of the Ukraine. I did not think they would, but, in retrospect, like many things in life, I see it was now inevitable. The western press is awfully keen of a sudden to talk it up as another infotainment conflict, somehow forgetting Russia has had effective control of this region since 2014, with the result of 14,000 deaths already, and barely a peep. But I am avoiding headlines as much as I can. This is not a good time to be further oppressed by things one can do nothing about.

The house always feels cold, in windy weather. Also, since our last email from the energy company, we have set the heating to knock off early. Then again, it never does quite warm the place to cosiness, since we also set the thermostat to economy. So we read a little, we write a little. And when the cold creeps in, we toss a rug over our legs, and think of spring.

To accompany the wine and cheese, we put Amelie on the player, settle down to watch its warm, gentle whimsy. I’ve been learning French off and on for years, with the aim of one day sitting through films like this without subtitles. I find I can catch the occasional phrase, now, the occasional line, by playing them back in my head, but by then dialogue has moved on, and it’s hard to keep up. My brain is just too slow, so I put the subtitles on.

Amelie is permanently in my top ten of movies, though it must also be said my top ten has many more than ten movies in it by now. The story defies explanation, but five minutes is all it takes, and the world and the wind are forgotten.

Why fret over what we cannot fix? Those rotting fence panels? Yes, we’ll have to fix them eventually. Let the wind pick them out for us, hopefully no more than one or two at a time. But the rest of what oppresses us, the media is geared to presenting us with stuff we can do nothing about, while social media lends the illusion that by shouting about a thing, it makes a difference, when all it does is make things worse. In other news, the forecast is looking fair for Friday. We’ll pencil the little blue car in for a run to the Dales.

I think we’re overdue.

See you there.

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A month of storms

Yarrow Reservoir overflow – Anglezarke, West Pennine Noors

“Februaries of late years are a month of storms. We get as many as two or three in succession, battering in off the Atlantic now, bringing gales and rain, the likes of which seem every season to break new records.”

So muses Rick Jeager in the latest chapter of my work-in-progress ‘Winter on the Hill’. An ageing socialist firebrand, Rick has gone to ground in an old house perched on the edge of the Western Pennines. He’s thinking back on the Left’s crushing election defeat last year, accepting that perhaps the struggle is now lost on all fronts, and imagining the course of the next few decades as the climate becomes ever more dominant in human affairs. And while he ponders, he passively watches the rain as it pours down off the moors, swelling the rivers and lifting the grids on the plain, drowning meadows and homes, on its way to the sea.

In many ways, being senior in years, the climate breakdown doesn’t matter to Rick as he won’t be around to see the worst of it, though it strikes him as curious, as his own life enters its winter months, the planet itself seems also to be set on its own end-game.

I’m a bit disappointed in Rick thus far, actually, and I’m hoping he’ll get his act together, that through his bunch of newly acquired eccentric friends in the Autumn Tints walking group, he’ll somehow rediscover his mojo – perhaps where he left it on a mountain cairn in his youth – and maybe he’ll enjoy a little late-flowering love along the way.

For myself I’m looking forward to the coming spring. I know we’ve a way to go yet but as the last Friday of February approaches and the daffodils and the crocuses make their appearance, I cannot help but feel more positive. Hopefully my own rallying mood will rub off on poor old Rick.

So,… it was a busy day yesterday, repairing fences left gap-toothed by a week of gales, repairing a nasty crack in a UPVC door that was let fly in the wind, replacing a window handle that had come off in my hand. Added to that, the boiler is on the blink again and the roof is leaking around the chimney, but only when the wind blows from a certain direction. The boiler man should sort the former out on Monday, but not I imagine without his usual sucking of teeth over various reg changes that provide him with a million reasons for walking away and leaving us without hot water, in spite of our premium-gold-peace-of-mind-or-whatever contract. As for the chimney, it’s leaked off and on for the twenty years I’ve lived here – and probably long before that – in spite of the attentions of a long line of  roofing men who have tried various fixes in exchange for my funding their holidays, and all to no avail. I shall keep the buckets in place and trust the wind changes direction.

Come on Rick, buck up, man! We need you to sort this mess out.

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Stormy Dreambreakers

The weather has changed. The dead-heat has gone out of it and though we’re still enjoying startling blue late summer skies, those skies are now a broad canvas, at times full of storms, compact blooms of white, towering to a great height like the smoke-plumes of a sinister weapon. They drift ponderously across the land. I saw them first in a dream, at the weekend, but I misinterpreted them, turned them into apocalyptic mushroom clouds, out of which poured the ruin of mankind. Then, on Monday, I drove a long way, travelled south, through the Midlands,  the North Wessex Downs, and the Chilterns. And there, all along that two hundred mile roaring ribbon of the M6, the M42 and the M40, I saw them, those same towering storms, painted on the blue, like lotus flowers, or old English roses. They were remnants of a hurricane that’s blown clean across the Atlantic, and are still lending a richly animated energy to our days, breaking up the sluggish humidity that has lingered since mid July.

As I drove, marvelling at this beautiful spectacle, my dream broke, or rather the storms broke my dream, brought it back to me, fished it from the black waters of unconscious memory. I don’t know how the mind does this, how it sometimes works ahead of itself, lets its dreams be informed by imagery we have yet to encounter in our ordinary waking reality. I only know that when we do encounter it, it turns a key and we cannot doubt a part of us has passed this way before.

I’ve written about Dunne, the pioneer aircraft designer who first studied this phenomenon, and who published books on it, to very mixed reviews. Word of it still falls upon a largely sceptical audience, so I won’t labour it here, except to say that in the West we have forgotten how to dream, are no longer in awe of them, and consequently no longer open to their potential for revelation, or healing.

I puzzled for a long time over Dunne’s books, troubled, because to see the future implies our future is fixed, and I didn’t like to think of the world being that way. Unless we have a choice in the paths we take, unless we can choose our future, I felt the world had no meaning for me. But nowadays I think it’s more a case of seeing not the future but a future, that only on occasion do our waking lives coincide with one of the futures we have already seen.

I did not dream of that weary journey down the sluggish motorways. It was too tedious, I think, to make anything other than the most abstract impression upon the dreaming. But the images of those storms was so impressive, they could not help but be borrowed as background for an allegorical tale, one in which I was preoccupied with visions of a civilisation on the brink. The dream made no sense to me, just as my journey didn’t in the end. It was just ten hours in a new-smelling lease-car, a night in a worn-out hotel in a fold of the Chilterns, within earshot of the rumbly M40, and all for a one hour meeting. But like many things, purpose and, more, the direction of our lives is often only revealed in retrospect, and with the perspective of long years passed.

Meanwhile the storms continue to drift across the land, darkening skies of a sudden, and sending down great wetting rages of rain to paint the roads black and slick and splashy. Mazzy and I slipped out last night, in a pause between the squalls, but I kept the hood up. My rational excuse for the impulsive jaunt was that I’d run out of bush tea, so made a circuitous 10 mile twisty-road tour, finally swinging back by the Sainsbury’s store in the neighbouring village for my Rooibos. I didn’t really need the tea. It was more that I’d been away for a long time in the south, and had missed her.

While we were out we clipped the northern lash of a slow moving cyclone, a vast thing, slow circling across the plain, raising columns of dirty white against a blue grey, dusky sky. Cars were coming out of its shadow with their headlights on, looking drenched and startled. We turned north and outran it. Mazzy and I were both safe under cover before it staggered sideways a little and tipped its buckets over us, to no effect.

Clear skies again this morning, but a tuggy wind and more rain forecast.

I dreamed of trees, and butterflies, and I was among a gentle, brown skinned people; we fished clear, shallow waters with long spears for rainbow-coloured fish.

And we were happy.

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