The Rain Exploded With A Mighty Crash
Stop me if I’m repeating myself, but it was pretty quiet today, and the sequence of things I did was exactly that of yesterday, with the exception of a little garden tidying before the rain came on. It’s raining heavily right now, and as I type this up at my desk in the shed, I’m seriously toying with putting the heater on for a bit, even though I’m wearing a fleece. And a warm hat.
I did once encounter sleet and snow in Scotland at about this time of year twenty years ago, but that was 994 metres up on Sgor Na h-Ulaidh in Glen Coe. There’s no excuse for it in Edinburgh in June.
***
It’s been another day of not bothering to check the news. At the beginning of all this, I cut myself off from a lot of stuff because I realised I needed to control my anxiety around the virus and shut out voices that would make things worse. I’m normally pretty good at staying chilled, but I was aware of my lack of focus and poor sleep. As time goes on, that general anxiety has pretty much gone, though we still disinfect kitchen surfaces every night and I keep hand sanitiser about if I go out, which I don’t do often.
In fact, I’ve realised recently that I’m comfortable focusing on the very local (ie our household, my family, including extended family, a handful of close friends) at the expense of everything else. This might turn out to be cyclical and reverse itself over time, but I’m not sure as it will, and part of my subconscious is nagging at me to find ways of keeping things this way.
Nearly two months ago, on April 13th, I wrote here that:
The last time I saw my Uncle Alan he looked around his house and garden and told me he had everything he wanted right there. Subject to my previous paragraph, I know now exactly what he meant.
If anything, that thought has grown stronger over the period of lockdown.
***
I sometimes think of young me, what he’d make of how things would turn out for him, back when the notion of being 60 was unimagineable, because my life now is different from what he envisaged it might be. There was a fad a while back for writing letters to ones younger self, giving advice. It wasn’t an exercise that interested me at the time, but maybe I ought to have a go. I’m not sure as I’d publish it though, even if I could put myself in the mindset of young me–and I’m not convinced I can. He’s still here, but he also left town a long while ago. And there’s always that thing about the mistakes you make as an adolescent, and I made my fair share, being part of what makes you the adult you become; so why would I advise him to avoid them, however much I’d like to?
Which brings us to tonight’s music. This is another musical comfort blanket, another that triggers a flashbook to childhood and wet nights in in East Kilbride when I hadn’t yet made the mistakes from which I learned, though, strangely, I remember some of the mistakes much more acutely than the lessons.
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