My very own Silent Spring in summer

Hubby and I have just come home from a mini-break somewhere in Warwickshire. I didn’t enjoy some aspects of it as much as I thought I would. The reason for some disappointments – rudeness –was obvious, but others it took me until I got home to realise why.

We went ‘up-north’ as Hubby called it (he’s a ruddy geographer for crying our loud, but I reckon his Southern upbringing trumps that) for a special cycle event with his mates and dinner on the Saturday night.

Not knowing his cycling buddies, not knowing anything about cycling, not wanting to know anything about cycling, and not really being attracted to the county, I was wondering why I agreed to go … Because I’m a dutiful wife, that’s why! If I’m not defending his honour against the likes of Fearful Sharkey and his Snivelling Sycophants, or the Gobby Guardian and its Regurgitating Rabble, I’m by Hubby’s side, smiling sweetly (well...) and making polite (well...) conversation.

Einstein, Jesus, Irving and Beethoven

While writing my previous blog (“Inspired choices of music”), I had a feeling that I’d written something very similar before. I checked previous blogs – no nothing there. I searched all my documents saved on my laptop – including archives – and found an essay I had drafted in 1998 while living in the US. It was almost published in a prestigious magazine, nay TWO prestigious magazines, but the first rejected it after a monumental tussle between two editors, and I rejected the second when the editor said he liked the essay’s first half but not the second so could I re-write it. No one tells me what or how to write, so it remained unpublished and I forgot about it …

 … until I wrote ‘Inspired Choices’, the following bit in particular:

“You can analyse the pants off it in the most scholarly, imaginative way, but at the end of the day it boils down to your instinct. Your soul. A religious experience. A certain piece of music just does ‘it’. What’s ‘it’? Ask your soul,”…

How to lose friends and alienate people

Yes I know that’s the title of a Simon Pegg film – we watched it the other evening, which is what prompted the plagiarism. Not his best film, but it still contains some laugh-out-loud moments, like when Kirsten Dunst kicks Pegg on the shin. It doesn’t sound much but I thought it hilarious.

Talking about hilarious, I’ve had one of those anything-but weeks when I couldn’t stop annoying people. The first was during a hang-over morning, when I did not want to wake up to a half-a-mug-a-coffee-long email from a complete stranger having a go at a local project I’m leading on. We are trialling a voluntary reduction in the village speed limit from 30 to 20mph before deciding whether to go for a legally enforced limit throughout the village, for part of the village, or leave well alone. He said things like: why stop at 20 and why not 5; traffic-calming was more effective; ‘Community Speedwatch’ was even better. I fired off a polite (honest, it was) riposte that included variations on a seen-that-done-that-got-the-T-shirt theme.

I killed an ant and I liked it

Being a tad green around the edges, I respect Mother Nature’s development and defence strategy, that everything depends on everything else. The smallest microbe is essential for the survival of the elephant because of the food-chain, pollination, dependent life-cycles and so forth.

Sometimes this interdependency doesn’t appear to be a good thing – like the ‘butterfly effect’ and chaos theory, where a waft of a delicate wing can, under a series of the right conditions, lead to a hurricane. But I still wouldn’t kill a butterfly because a) they are pretty and harmless and b) they are an important component of a food chain, as predators and prey. And it has to be said that, while very destructive, hurricanes have a part to play in the greater scheme of things and are overall much less harmful than human beings.

Everyone should be so lucky, lucky lucky lucky

With apologies to Kylie, I don’t think she was singing about access to the Great British countryside. Maybe I could adapt the lyrics, because today I had the most glorious walk and it struck me that not everyone can do this.