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:
I wrote there that:
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
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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.
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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.
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