Cold...very cold

Monday 26th January, 2021

I keep receiving emails from friends who tell me the snow is building up outside their homes or even that floods are threatening. I may be tempting fate but today was another glorious crisp clear sunny day. Cold, very cold, but no wind and just somehow perfect for walking. I decided to take the Coastal path down the Tay to Tayport. One reason for so doing is that the winter sun is very low and therefore blinding as one walks and heading for Tayport meant it was behind me most of the way. The second reason is that it is beautiful and countrified. I was particularly pleased to note the incredible blueness of the Tay and of the sky, almost a match. Indeed I have not seen the Tay that blue for many months.

I took my grabber after completing a few letters and off I set. The lay-by I pass on that route was once more covered with litter. The weekly emptying of the two dustbins was underway but the men working the lorry do not have time to pick up all the blown litter. I spent quite a time doing so filling two bags and frustrated by the much litter blown out of reach. I noted that the place where I used to meet a friend for breakfast was as full of refuse as ever. We would sit in her car and overlook the field and the Tay. There we used to watch the charm of goldfinches feeding on the thistles and there we saw linnets and yellow hammers. We also saw litter and in the field a building up of dung. Today the muck was being spread across the fields. The gulls seemed interested and the crows and the smell was strong but somehow soothing as a country odour!

As I continued my way so I noted down on the Tay shore two ladies with grabbers and bags. I shouted out and waved my grabber and bag. They clapped and yelled back something like: " Wombles of the world unite". I loved it and felt encouraged.

A goodly walk. I posted my letters and then decided to return by bus. THEY, the anonymous bureaucrats, had changed the timetable. Not longer at 15 passed the hour it had become 28 minutes passed the hour. The bus driver was charming and apologetic...I was his only customer!

Back home I had a large lunch of two pitta breads and cheese and then a grand slice of Christmas cake which is diminishing rapidly but is so so good.

On to Episode 7 of Young Heretics. Klavan, the podcaster, is too wordy, too intellectual and each pod is too long for a man of my minor abilities but still excellent and I highly commend him. This episode was the first of two spent on T.S.Eliot's ' Wasteland'. I know I regurgitate these talks, and possibly badly and inaccurately, but what I note is what resonates with me. The Wasteland was associated with Eliot's pre conversion to Anglo Catholicism. It was written just after the First World War. Klavan gave us good biographical background also. It is, he opined, about the emptiness of the world without God. It is a matter of facing up to this, not shirking it or pretending all is well. All is falling apart, even Eliot's mental and physical health, partly out of a bad marriage. It is noting that there are no easy answers, no pretence yet there is hope in the despair. It is as if the west has lasted too long, Europe especially and new is needed, thus the Modernism of it. Klavan emphasised Eliot's initial quotation from the Satyricon. He explained the latter and ended with the last words of the quotation where the oracle, as it were, states she wants to die. She had been granted long life but had not asked for youth and she is wizened, shrunken, embittered, ancient, outliving her own existence as it were. She wants to die. Klavan noted similarities to the state of the west at this time.

So there is much to think on. There is hope even in the midst of despair. So the pandemic has a setting. Today my house mate received a letter with a date for her vaccination. I have not as yet. Good news but then she was foolish and said her Sister had told she would have to isolate for three weeks after it. Now that is false news. It is a lie. It is one of those malicious gossips circulating on the net. She should be thrilled. She will have to continue the lockdown as we all do but not isolate. Yes, it might take three weeks to activate but she has a date.

Today is also full of the good news of a friend who is 100. He is a monk of Turvey Abbey and one of the great good guys of my life. Ad multos annos as the Benedictines say. I have seen a photograph of him being presented with a large chocolate cake by his fellow religious, with a hundred candles on it! Try to blow that lot out aged 100!

As I write this so the sky is a deep rose and to my surprise I see a heron silhouetted against it down on the Tay.

I want to live but I am ready to die, as my Vicar Grand Papa would say.