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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The mad March wind

There’s a mad March wind,
roaring around the eaves tonight,
testing the latch.
It shoulders the fence,
searching for gaps,
for an inch of spare
to get a grip and then to tear,
to splinter wood, or lift
a tile so brother rain
this gift can win and let the wet
come pouring in.

Meanwhile I sit in snug of night,
A book to hand in this warm, soft light.
But with each flicker of the mains
The wind another victory gains
Through skipped heartbeat and
anxious dread,
Drives home what oft escapes my
head, that for all our wit and
clever laws, the mad March wind
still gives us pause.

 

 

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Pillow Talk

Heavy rain this morning, driven in great curtains by a roaring wind that had even the stoutest of trees swaying. The Motorway was shiny-slick with an ominous standing wet, visibility down to as far as the end of old Grumpy’s bonnet, so we crawled along at a cautious fifty, buffeted by unpredictable gusts while the fast lane streaked by pretty much as usual, sending up smoke.

It was turning to snow as we approached the borders of Greater Manchester, translucent splats landing like suicidal moths upon the screen, to be brushed away at once by Grumpy’s fussy, squealy wipers. The wash I’m using is all smeary, though it advertises itself as Super-clear, and Streak free! But like much in life our words these days boil down to little more than shallow promises. We have to look deeper for the truth of things.

Visibility clears but slowly, and by then the wipers are crossing again, dragging out more smeary mess. They mark time, mark the blurry rhythm of my life: forty miles a day, two hours drive-time, and a day job shift between. 38 years, this year. Winters are the hardest. There is nothing else to do but buckle down and weather them.

The car was a warm cocoon against the elements, against a season that is characteristically bitter, laughing at our scurrying haste, at our fragility. There was an accident here, some weeks ago, four cars caught up in what I guess began as a nose-to tail-ender. It finished with one car crushed beyond recognition, the others bent and spun off at dizzy angles. I was two hours late that night, a night lit up with the combined electric blue halo of a fleet of excited cop cruisers. The whole filthy, roaring ribbon of road was hushed, three lanes bottled down to one, the rush-hour tailback ten miles long. Meanwhile, the coppers brushed furiously at crystal shards, as I waited my turn at the clearing-gate. Others stood guard over the fluorescent coned perimeter, brusquely waving on the rubber-neckers.

I was two hours late home last night too. I don’t know what the problem was; it’s often like this now – just the way things are. I waited out the gridlock on a shopping mall carpark rather than inching bit by bit along the road. Depressing places, shopping malls on a cold winter’s night, but they do at least have food of a fashion, and toilets for the marooned. While I was there, I wandered into a swanky bed-shop, thinking to kill time by browsing pillows. I’ve had a stiff neck lately, and I’m thinking my old saggy pillow might be the problem. The lady sat in this cavernous emporium, presiding over rows of inviting divans – she was middle aged and smartly uniformed in the livery of her employer’s brand. Her smile dimmed only a little when I told her a pillow was all I wanted.

So she showed me her pillows, and I liked the way her hands patted them down and fluffed them up. She invited me to try them out on one of her beds, to lay my head upon them and feel their quality. There was something sweet in this, my fatigue lending the encounter something of a surreal quality – just she and I in this vast palace of beds. I said I would be embarrassed, which was strange, and she laughed, said I mustn’t feel that way. But I also felt unwashed and unshaved, too dirty from my day for any of her nice clean beds, and this of course was a thing not for explaining. She was, I think, in the briefest moment of our exchange, proxy for a curious kind of muse, and my sense of unworthiness was itself a telling thing.

I was persuaded there is much to be said for a quality pillow. It is, after all, where we lay our heads at the end of the day, their comfort a balmy isle, oner would hope, from which we set sail each night, on course for the more distant land of dreams. She did not tell me this, of course, but I was thinking it. And as I handed over my card I noticed her nails were shapely and painted different colours, and I fell momentarily in love, as an adept with his priestess. But I’m an old hand at spotting the faerie and I know such creatures are not for loving, living as they do inside our heads, and only pretending to be at large in the world. I crawled home at going up for eight; indigestion from my McBurger-tea, and a coffee hardly worth the name, but I slept well on my fresh duck-downy pillow, dreamed of windmills blown flat, and crumbling towers spilling grain into the wind like vast murmurations of tiny birds.

So,…

Where are we now? Coming up to my junction.

A motorbike roars past me, doing seventy. I’ve ridden a bike in the long ago, and I know the rain stings at forty, that it mists your visor so you can barely see. A twitch, a sneeze, the slightest unexpected thing, and down you go. I know; I’ve gone – hit the deck and rolled – the bike one way and me the other; walked away, then ached for years.

If he would only back off a little, tuck in behind me and old Grumpy for a while, he’d surely be safe. At least I hope so. Pray God, don’t let me die on the commute! Let it be on a warm summer’s day with a vaulted sky, on a hushed mountain top, or laying down among the bee-buzzed heather, with the larks rising; not here on this filthy stretch of miserable road, grovelling for a crust. I’m reminded though the Reaper rarely works to a time-table that permits us such dignified exits, that he has a penchant for hammering in the full stops. Before the sentence is properly ended. It’s wise to be cautious, not to tempt fate in the teeth of a howling gale, but he’ll get you however he likes in the end, so maybe we should just say to hell with it? And crash on recklessly.

Not a good choice of word when driving on the Motorway: Crash.

Mornings are a fraction lighter now, dawn advancing to the drive-times, so I arrive at least in daylight. The nights are still a hopeless case though, darkness overtaking before I’ve even joined the tail end of the red lighted queue that’ll ever so sluggishly lead me home. It’s at home my flighty little rag-top dozes under a dust-sheet in the mouse-scented garage. She only emerges these days, sleepy eyed, when the rare dry spells, and that pale winter sun, coincide with a weekend. Then she gambols in the brief openings such short days afford, while Grumpy sleeps, his week’s commuting done. She’s waiting for the spring, dreaming of a summer like the last one. And so am I. A part of me rests with her now, warmed by the memory of other times, while the remainder of me sits in this rain-washed traffic yet again, buffeted by the wind, a dull chatter coming from the radio, a voice bleating on about all the snows yet to come.

I think of the feel of that quality pillow, and I think of the woman who picked it out, sitting alone among her beds, late into the night, each night, and I wonder if she remembers me. I fancy the pillow has a comfort now charged with meaning by those hands that so nicely plumped and patted as if to bless, and will surely guide me safe to much warmer, and more fertile climes than these.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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