Snow overnight again. It lay quite deep this morning, deep enough that, even though it was wet snow, there’s still plenty lying around. It also makes things slippery enough that I’m reluctant to risk a walk around the hill.
***
For most of the day I’ve been thinking about the work in progress and particularly the chapter I’ve got bogged down in. My solution was to print it off and set to work with a red pen, looking to sort out the text as it is and, possibly, slip paragraphs in to regulate the pacing a bit more. Sometimes it’s the only way. I did once get into a similar situation with a novella and solved it by tracing back to the point where I thought it went awry and deleting everything afterwards to continue afresh. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses, but I don’t think I need to do that with this one.
***
I had an interesting conversation with my doctor earlier. Ostensibly the reason for the call was just to follow up on whatever it was that laid me low around new year. As it happens, time and antibiotics did the trick. Anyway, we got chatting and he said something that hadn’t occurred to me before: so many people now have smart watches and Fitbits, that they are phoning their doctors about perfectly normal things that they didn’t know or hadn’t noticed previously, such as fluctuations in resting heart rate or blood pressure through the course of the day. Couple that with everyone currently being aware of every twinge or cough, then it results in an upswing in doctors having to reassure people that they are normal (cur Bonzo Dog Band earworm)
***
After a few days of paying attention, I haven’t tracked the news today. The Covid numbers are still horrible; the President of the USA did not deliver a stream of bile and invective overnight on Twitter.
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Music: One of George Harrison’s semi-forgotten compositions for the Beatles, recorded in June 1967, a three-minute version was shunted onto the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Yellow Submarine (1968) is one of the first films I remember seeing (The first was Thunderbirds Are Go, 1966). That was in the days when the programme ran continuously, so when the film finished you could sit in the dark and wait for everything to play again, and we did. The film was released not long before my ninth birthday.
For reasons I don’t understand, this song was critically panned on release. Listening now, it sounds a long way ahead of its time, and there’s a lot going on. On headphones you can hear RIngo being brilliant on the choruses, punctuating the spaces around the beat.
I woke a little earlier than hoped and it was easier to come downstairs for breakfast than to try to get back to sleep when it was getting light already. Naturally, this has left me open to napping. It snowed again overnight, very wet snow that’s thawing a bit, but more is currently forecast for tonight. It added to the flat feel of the morning, and lent weight to the temptation to nap.
45, a nonentity, a little thing, held a little thing for, and possibly during, his leaving office, and I caught up with lots of people going on about it on Twitter. I didn’t watch it–why should I? Why would I waste the chance of a nap on that nobody?
I did watch the inaugurations of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Biden delivered a good–and necessary–speech. I couldn’t help but be reminded, however, of the feeling around the election of Barack Obama. I wrote two posts then: Don’t Get Burnt (November 2008) and Starlight On The Rails (January 2009) and it was interesting to revisit them (Burdonated by Malcy 🙂 )
I kind of have the same feeling now: fingers crossed.
***
Not to be a downer or anything, but the UK reported 1820 deaths yesterday of people who had had a positive Covid test within the past 28 days, which is to say since just before Christmas. That’s the largest number on a single day since the start of the pandemic, greater even than the horrific 1610 announced yesterday.
The numbers are mutable, as numbers often are, but by my count there have been at least 21,275 Covid deaths in the UK since Christmas Day, 17,285 since 1 January.
The number of new reported cases is falling, as is the number of people being admitted to hospital, which is good, but a small mercy given that we currently have the highest death rate in the world.
World-beating.
***
Music: to mark the new Vice President, a tune by an all-too-often underrated African-American composer, Scott Joplin. The tune is originally in C on piano but Dave Van Ronk switched it to D for guitar and plays in a dropped-D tuning. It is still a bugger to play (van Ronk had big hands and could make the stretches) and I ought to relearn it. The Entertainer
Thank you for comments in various places about last night’s post.
Another touch of the groundhogs today, which I spent reading magazines, failing at the quick crossword in the current New Scientist (always harder than the cryptic) and trying to write. The subconscious didn’t kick in today and the produce from the word mines has been meagre. Usually this means that I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere in the narrative and I just need to step back a bit and apply a correction. I have a gut feel I may have pushed the story along a bit too quickly and need to go back and built it out somewhat to add texture.
I haven’t done much else today to be honest; a lot of days right now feel like winter Sunday afternoons in the nineteen-sixties. The sky today was monochromatic, and we have warnings out for Storm Christoph, which looks set to have most impact a long way south of us, though we’ll likely be on the fringes of it. All of that has given today a kind of ‘in-between’ quality.
Of course I’m whining here. People are still getting sick or going into hospital or dying in appalling numbers and the worst I have it is that I’m sitting in front of a laptop moaning about the weather.
***
Music: I put on a new-ish cd this afternoon, a compilation of four albums by Harold Land, and was struck by the guitar playing on one of them. I shouldn’t have been surprised–I checked the credits and it was Wes Montgomery. West Coast Blues.
Lindsay asked me earlier if I was OK, said I looked a bit tired. And it’s true, I am a bit tired. There’s no particular reason for that–I’m sleeping reasonably enough and it isn’t as though there’s a lot of opportunity for excitement at the moment. But I am in an odd mood. I think it has a lot to do with the weather and the time of year, but I’m not sure if they’re the cause of it or just an amplifier. Maybe both.
I measure my blood pressure twice a day, once in the morning and once around eleven at night. Generally speaking, I find it helpful to sit still and quiet and to let my mind drift. That never happens, of course, because stray thoughts bubble to the surface. The trick is not to let them distract you but to recognise them and go with them; you end up doing something like meditation-for-dummies, and I’m good with that. Last night, though, my thoughts turned to my Dad and a sudden sadness flooded through me.
The last time I wrote at length about him was in December 2017:
As we were leaving the crematorium in the funeral car I started to turn to look through the rear-view window but Mum stopped me: don’t look back, she said. And I didn’t. Nor have I ever been to the place his ashes are scattered: I don’t need to. He’s still with me before midnight, stewing the left-over tea in the old metal teapot on the gas hob, Navy-style, rolling up a tab, complaining about my hair and the music I listen to, edging towards the unspoken thing between fathers and sons, all the things he didn’t say to his own dad.
I’m now three years older than he was when he died and I’ve spent many more years without him than I did with him. It’s nearly forty years since he died. I’d just started work and now I’m retired. In between I’ve got married and brought up a family whom he would have loved but never knew. I still miss him and think about him in some context every day, often when I look in a mirror and see him looking back at me, or when I hear his voice in my head or in something I say. It doesn’t usually affect me, but last night it did, and I was conscious of the passing of the years, and my mood today is still caught up in last night.
My friend Colin whom I mentioned in that post in 2018 died suddenly early last year. I chose not to go to his funeral because I thought the risk of travel was too great. It was the right decision, but I still regret it, and resent having had to make it.
I think what’s amplifying this feeling is the virus and the inexorable passage of time over effectively ten months of lockdown. I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to be doing something more than we can do right now. My thoughts now are of the time when we’ll be able to do something. I’d like to get back to the Highlands and walk the tideline of an empty beach in a blustery wind flecked with spindrift from Atlantic waves, and I can’t wait for the taste of the first pint of good draught ale in a pub. Of course, we’re all in the same boat, and in most respects I’ve had it easy, but that doesn’t seem to make it any better
.***
I haven’t looked much at the news today, but I did watch some TV (American Gods) and a film (Pierrepoint), and did some writing. And that’s OK.
***
Music: just to continue the melancholy mood a little longer, here’s Loudon Wainwright and a track from History which is, I think, his best album. This song buried deep into me the first time I heard it, and still does : The Picture.
A nondescript Sunday in January and I have nothing much to say. I made more scones and wrote a bit, then went to catch up on some magazines and fell asleep to the cool sounds of the Elmo Hope Sextet from 1956. This wasn’t a formal band, just a bunch of guys playing a largely unrehearsed session. That could be the recipe for disaster, but in this case the bunch of guys was:
Bass – Paul Chambers
Drums – Philly Joe Jones
Piano – Elmo Hope
Tenor Saxophone – Hank Mobley, John Coltrane
Trumpet – Donald Byrd
The death of Phil Spector was announced today. I looked in on Twitter to find arguments raging between those who see him as a great record producer but a flawed human being on the one hand, and those who see him as a murderer with a track record of violence who also made some records once. Her name was Lana Clarkson.
Meanwhile, a guy in America has been arrested following the riot in DC on 6th January by means which attest to his operational intelligence.
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