Day 52

The third named storm in a week. Its change in direction from its two predecessors chases it down our chimney, fills the house with big noise and drafts we didn’t know existed. One of the plastic panes on the garage shifted so far the rain started leaking onto the old car and the spare boards I keep in there, so, in the late Sunday afternoon gloom, I went next door, their drive higher up the slope towards the Heath, and shoved the pane all the way back up into the position it should be in. I had intended to take my Antarctic gloves with me to do the job, but forgot, so my hands looked as if they had been shredded by glass shrapnel, but it was only the dirt of years of neglect. Come spring, I hope the garage will have a proper roof on it. Too late to deal with these storms and others that may yet come as the earth spins ever more quickly through the cosmos fuelled by the heat of climate change. At this rate it will burn out before the sun does, many many life times before the sun does.

I have always said that Sunday is the first day of the week, in the hope that it would make Mondays easier. It doesn’t really work, in truth. I woke up this morning after 7 hours of sleep, of which at least 5.5 were uninterrupted feeling stale and tired and pained. I’m never convinced that this is purely the aging process, more that it’s my body’s constant rebellion against this artificial societal imposition of routines humans were never intended to be submitted to. But then what is history but a chronicle, a reality, of the imposition of rules on the many needy by the few who have everything and need to do nothing? But then I think of those who aren’t as lucky as I am, those who don’t have jobs they love doing most of the time.

The wind hurtles through the sky, and the birds allow themselves to be driven along indeterminate paths by it. Faster and faster they fling themselves through the air, are flung through the air. Perhaps we should be more like those birds, and allow ourselves to be thrown in unexpected directions at breakneck speeds by the winds of fortune. We might find more fertile places to rest when the winds cease.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 9