The dying of the year

Autumn trees the colour of bleeding. They pour their bulk away into bright drifts until all the red is drained out of them. They skeletise themselves. And then it is winter, when the whole titanic world collides with its iceberg, scraping white down its flank and starting its slow subsidance into the deep cold. The snail-trail of frost everywhere. The sky bone. The ground pulped and rolled to fresh paper. The black tree given half a layer of Hiroshima-white skin.

It's the transition from leaf-fall to snow-fall. A solid tree dissolving itself into myriad rustling droplets; a fluid rain chilling itself into solid flakes. It's all in the interchange.

Girls

Of course it’s true to say that some girls are bigger than others. But some girls are the same size...

What the blues is the blues cures

Catharsis is a homeopathic principle; and we know how much credence is given to homeopathy in this modern world ...

Self-love

The phrase amour-propre (since 'propre' means clean) elides 'self-love' and 'clean-love'. What a striking portmanteau that is! What truths it contains!--not that self-love is somehow good or valuable, but that notions of cleanness are, at root, prideful notions. The euphemism 'ethnic cleansing' has taken on wide cultural currency for a reason, after all ...

Feeling good

The advertising tagline on a packet of breakfast cereal: 'helps you feel good on the inside!' (And, actually, a swift google reveals that that's a phrase applied to a variety of health products.)

It's an expression that naturally leads us to contemplate the alternative; for what would it feel like to 'feel good on the outside'? This is to think beyond the obvious point that feelings are inevitably 'on the inside.' It is to note that the goodness too can only be 'on the inside'. There's no outside to goodness. The closest we come is that epidermal sense of goodness travelling from the outside to the inside, where the feeling will collect itself; but even that is a kind of illusion. No such word as extrabonum.

But of course 'inside' here is a euphemism for 'gut', to be implicitly distinguished from (say) the head. That's even more interesting; as if the line separating our insides and outsides is drawn along the line of the neck ...

Decapitating the vampiric hydra

And why are we faffing about with this tiny bottle of holy water here, and that tiny bottle of holy water there? Instead: take a priest to Land's End and have him bless the Atlantic ocean. Fly him then to California and have him bless the Pacific. For completeness sake, scoot him over to India and have him bless the Indian ocean.

Then, as the natural cycle draws moisture into clouds holy water will fall from the sky. Plants will soak it up, mists and dew will be holy, and the vampires will dissolve in agony world wide. As we drink and eat, holy water will seep into our bodies and form the medium for our red cells. Drinking our blood will scald and destroy vampric mouths and gullets. Breathing the moist air will corrode their lungs. Within a year all vampires will be gone.

Historic Caernarfon

Standing on the battlements of Caernarfon, looking across the bay, he said: ‘I like it here. You get the sense of a lot of history here.’

Which is an interesting way of looking at it, as if history is something that accumulates, or pools, in certain places. But of course the reason why Caernarfon feels historical is because it has had relatively speaking only a little history. History is a force that is continually erasing the physical traces of history. There’s much more history in Coventry, or Southampton, than in Caernarfon or the shambles at York.