A Message from the Universe

Down at the petrol station, people park in front of the pumps but don’t buy any fuel. They just block the pumps for the people who need them. They saunter in and get their bacon rolls and their Mint KitKats and they saunter back out and they don't give a toss. It drives me a little bit askew. 

A few months ago, one person managed to park their car strategically so that all four of the centremost pumps were rendered unusable. It required a pinpoint level of accuracy and an immeasurable absence of empathy. I applauded the person as they returned to their car, having bought no petrol, of course. “Amazing parking,” I said as I slow handclapped, “truly amazing.”

Yesterday morning, I was setting off on a bit of a journey and I felt I should fill up the tank before I hit the road. Getting to a pump was a battlefield. Abandoned cars were strewn all over, as insensitive punters stocked up on toilet rolls and hash browns and no fuel whatsoever. I got to a pump eventually, unlocked my fuel cap, released the nozzle, jammed it into the appropriate orifice, squeezed the lever, and waited. And waited. The display showed the cost of the previous fuel fill. Forty Euro. Any moment now, it would reset to Zero and my fuel delivery would begin. I knew that a little alarm was sounding at the cash till inside the shop, alerting the staff to the fact that I was out here, in advance of my trip to Athlone, waiting to get a little gas in the tank.

Any moment now.

I waited.

My own personal fuel temperature began to rise. Badly parked cars, battles for space at the pump, delays en-route to destination, being ignored in my hour of minor need. I started to get the right hump. Perhaps I should let out a roar at the shop window, a Dustin Hoffman like protest along the lines of, “I’m waiting here!!” I could do it too. I have the lung capacity. That’s for damn sure.

Then I looked down.

Beside the petrol pump there stood a stainless steel circular bollard, about a metre high. It has a black plastic cap that fitted on top of the tubular fixture. It was evidently there to prevent errant vehicles from banging into the petrol pump. A guard, a protector, quietly doing its job.

Someone had taken a pencil and written on the top black surface of the plastic bollard cover. Where most writing instruments would not have made any impression on the dark surface, the graphite of the pencil had seemed to taken to the medium remarkably well. The single word, that somebody had written there, stood out in subtle but legiible relief from the background. The almost childlike cursive style seemed all the more personal and intimate. Somebody, probably somebody in my own heightened state of annoyance, had taken a moment, produced a pencil, and written a message to whoever may come after them.

A one word message.

The message said, “Smile.”

I don’t think I smile as much as I used to. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The world is a harsh place, in many ways, and we are plugged into the harshness of the world in a way that previous generations could not dream of. Two hundred years ago, a horror or a sadness on the other side of the world would never be known or considered. Today, it is in our heads two minutes after it happens. I'm not bemoaning this connectivity, I think it helps us to keep the world straight, to not let horrors be enacted without any repercussions. It's necessary, but it's also hard. We are plugged into the whole wide world and it is a pretty tough narrative to keep up with. 

I remember an illustration the appeared in a copy of the Radio Times when I was quite young, decades before Internet and Cable News. It showed a humanoid figure reclining in some kind of comfy chair. The naked form was connected by hundreds of cables running from every corner of its body to devices and machinery, being fed every aspect of the world directly into its being. The figure in the chair was charred and frazzled, twisted, and distorted, obviously in significant pain. I sometimes think we’ve kind of become that character. Wired to the whole planet and all of the grief and horror it has to offer. Bearing it all as best we can.

Maybe that’s why I don’t always smile as much as I used. Maybe it isn’t.

All I reckon, having read the single word message on the bollard at my local petrol station, is that it’s okay to smile now and again if we can manage it. More that that perhaps. There is, perhaps, an onus on us to smile and live and enjoy our lives as best we can. Because when we do that, we can remain strong and able to assess and fight and resist where necessary. If we try to carry the world on our packs, forever unsmiling, we will surely break in two and be of no use to anyone.

The petrol pump clicked and the fuel started flowing. I was on time for my meeting in Athlone and it was a useful meeting. I had a coffee afterwards and a nice chat with the guy I met. Not about the job or the cost of it or the difficulty in doing it. It was about his sons, and how he loves books about history, and how he can sing for hours if you give him a guitar.

And, somewhere in the middle of all that chat, I had a smile.

Weight Loss, Crunchy Gravel, and Guilty Secrets

My current attempts to lose a few pounds are going okay, I guess. 

The scales move downward, but only at the slowest of paces. Sometimes they go back up again. But the overriding trend is a downward grind over a period of months and I tell myself that’s all for the best. A slow loss of weight will make it easier to keep it off. All bullshit, of course. Any slight decline in poundage can so easily be undone by a couple of double size Mars bars and a litre of 7-Up.

Still, on we go.

My methodology is low key and old-fashioned logical. Eat less and exercise more, with neither of these things being done to any great extremes. Rather like a smoker (which I’ve never been) I have one big vice which it immediately benefits me to give up. I’ve already alluded to it and we’re only three paragraphs in. I will eat loads of rubbish and sugary things, if left unchecked. So I’ve checked it. The rubbish is out of the equation and, like the smoker, I can feel better by making that one adjustment alone. Add to that a drive to eat smaller meals with no in-betweens and that’s the full extent of my calorie-reducing regime. As for exercise, I do what I’ve always done except I try to do a bit more of it. I walk. I always walk quite a bit anyway but now I throw in an extra quota of walking whenever I can.

That’s all I do. You can tell I’m no expert, nor am I a person driven to weight loss excellence. I just want to continue a slow decline into Christmas then hope to fuck I can get through that festive season without piling it all on again in one short week. If I had one word of insight or help to anyone who is thinking of doing the same, I would offer that fact that every half pound lost feels like a victory and evokes a little increase in self-esteem. You don’t have to become Where’s Wally to feel like a success at this game, however misguided that may be.

None of which is the point of this week’s post.

Some of the walking I do is around our local lake. We have a designated pathway around half of the lake, a circuit with two bridges, and it is the best thing since sliced bread. Peace, nature, a view of The Reek in the distance, ducks, swans, reeds gently swaying in the breeze, wild flowers, little dogs, big dogs, smiling people… it’s a good place for a walk. There’s a car park you drive into, along with all the other cars, and you set off in one direction and you arrive back from the other direction (in the nature of circuits all over the world) and it takes about 25 minutes to get around so you go around twice or even three times. It’s all good.

But, just lately, as an added bonus, I’ve started parking in another car park which adjoins the lake path in an altogether different location. This public car park is much less used and parking my car there gives me the feeling that I have my own private access to this most public of places. It also has a remarkable, hard-to-define bit of loveliness that makes it a slice of heaven for me.

Gravel. It has gravel.

You heard, the car park is finished with lovely, crunchy, loose stone rather than the utilitarian tarmac of the main car park. And shoot me if you want, but I bloody love gravel. That crunch underfoot is one of my favourite things in the whole world, seconded only by the crunch under my tyres as my car pulls in. I can’t really say why. That crunchy, cornflake sound just makes me feel as if I am off the beaten track and away from all the concerns that come with being in a town or a city. I’m on the gravel, dude, and life couldn’t be better. Since re-discovering this quiet, tree-lined parking area, my walks are exponentially better. And, no, I’m not telling you where it is. Sod off.

As I walk the lake circuit, I’ve got my earbuds in and I’m listening, listening. What is Ken listening to, the entire population of the lake wonders (as if!). Is it the very latest scientific or political treatise? Is it some in depth analysis of the current state of the Arts?

(Guilty secret incoming.)

Nah, it’s Reacher.

I listen to Reacher books. Not all the time, obviously, but quite a bit. I’ve often got one on the go and, of late, if I’m on a long drive or walking our esteemed lake, I’ll have Jack Reacher in my ears, kicking ass in stereo.

Part of the attraction of my listening to Reacher audiobooks (which I get free from Castlebar Library via Borrow Box) is the person who reads the books. Jeff Harding is the absolute voice of Lee Child’s Reacher books and his rather harsh, uncompromising tone eminently suits the material and, after listening to quite a few, has become like an old friend to me. Jeff imbues Reacher with a voice that is an utterly American blend of capability and wariness, and it brings the character to life in a way that no visual adaptation has come close to doing. Not even that enormous guy on Amazon.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Any pleasure we can extract from the world is okay as long as it’s not hurting anybody or putting on weight. Although, if there was one element of the Reacher audiobooks that is a little guilt inducing, it would be the way that Jeff portrays the females in the Reacher books. Jeff is either an extremely macho person or else he is really good at portraying a really macho person. The ladies in the book suffer a tiny bit from this fact because, as Jeff switches from Reacher’s trademark machismo tones, the ladies all fall into a similar vocal pattern that is slightly prissy, matter of fact, and declamatory. 

In smaller words, all of Reacher’s women sound the same. Similarly, the bad guys and authority figures all sound the same too. They all get a rather weaselly borderline belligerent voice. The overall effect is that, as Reacher traverses the United States and the wider world in search of justice and fair play, it sounds rather like he’s meeting the same people over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, I like all this very much. There is a comfort in knowing that Reacher’s next lady will sound just like his last one and the next bad guy will die making rodent noises, just like the last one did.

Reading back, this has been a rather random trek through weight loss, loose gravel, and voiced anti-heroes and it seems to be of limited value to any one right-thinking person.

What can I tell you? This is my mind.

'Welcome to it.

A New Autumn

“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date...”

In my head, autumn has already begun. 

I know that might be an annoying thing to say. Summer holidays have weeks to go yet and, if you’re in school in England, your holiday has practically only just begun. 

Conventional wisdom would also say that the 1^st of September is as good a time as any to resume calling the world ‘Autumnal’ and, for most of my life, I would have agreed with that. When we were small, autumn started on the night ‘The High Chaparral’ was on the telly and we were sitting on the floor, trying to sellotape wallpaper covers onto our new school books. School was starting again the next day and another supposedly endless summer was sudddenly at an end.

But, as I’ve clocked up a few years, I now tend to think that autumn arrives as soon as the very first signs of it peep through. A leaf or two on the trees turn golden and brittle, the daylight slips a little sooner out of the evening sky. Signs like these speak clearly to me that autumn is now here and, even though it’s only the 10^th of August, summer’s lease has once again prematurely expired.

It’s an age thing, I think. To find Autumn present so very early in the year. But it’s an Irish thing too. The season is historically caled 'Lughnasa' and it’s that time when harvesting begins. (I’m a townie, I don’t know actually much about harvesting). And, like I said, the natural signs are there too. The first of the blackberries on the thorny bushes on my back garden have ripened and are now dark and luscious. “Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it.”

I like Autumn. For me, it’s a time for getting things done. Nothing is in the way. No Christmas edge, no summer doldrums. Let’s get it work. But I tend to mourn the passing of summer a little bit too. I’m always left with the feeling that I never even came close to celebrating it enough. I have worked all the way through, as I always do. I have let it sidle past. 

But another part of me knows that I haven’t really done that. For every day of thsi summer, I have taken a moment and looked around me and acknowledged the full trees, the endless evenings, the kids on the green doing their holiday hurling classes. I may not have rolled around and covered myself in summer, but I have always known it was there. It that sense, I haven’t missed it at all.

One other slightly sad note. I had written somewhere before about how a Chestnut tree that sits across the river from my childhood home was always the first to turn golden at the end of the summer. If I went to Sligo now and looked across the Garavogue, I’m sure that same tree would have the new season written all over it. Every year I noted it. When I moved here to Castlebar, I found a new ‘Early Tree’ right there on The Mall. Another Horse Chestnut. Most years, I would sit on one of the benches in the town green and just note for a moment that the tree had turned and autumn was here once again. This year, the tree is gone. I wrote about the cutting down of a few trees last Christmas, for safety reasons, and, silly me, I never realised that my tree was one of them. I guess I’ll have to find another tree to stare at.

As an antidote to all this morosity, I went for a walk yesterday just after writing the bulk of this thing and found large residues of summer to be still in the air. I guess it’s just one of those times of the year when everything is on the turn. One day one thing, the next day another. Best not to sweat it too much. As my old pal Rod McKuen sang, “And to each season, something is special…”

And anyway, you mustn't pay too much heed to me. I'm a law unto myself. I hope that your own personal summer runs right on up to the middle of September. The weather is usually at its loveliest then anyway. Summer isn’t over yet, for most of us, not even close. As for me, I’ll be just fine, down here in my own new Autumn.

Summer will come again.

With a little luck and with a fair wind.