EASTER EGO

I couldn’t think of anything new to write about Easter. Nothing. Nicht. Nada. Much like an Easter Egg, I was a big hollow shell. Naturally, my ego (or possibly my ‘Easter Ego’) wouldn’t let me get away with that. Oh, no. Despite the fact that the frazzled remains of my sleep-deprived synapses were unable to string even the most basic of sentences together, I still have goals. Aims. Things to achieve so that I can at the very least persuade myself that I’m not letting myself down. There must be something worth saying, something worth putting down on the page to mark one of the bigger national holidays of the year, although there’s nothing much that comes to mind. I should plan these things better, after all, it’s not as if I don’t get plenty of warning now, is it? Unfortunately, the best idea that I could come up with was a few lame puns and a very poor story involving a dinosaur.

Actually, I can blame the sleeplessness (at least) on the sticky heat of the unseasonably warm weather, although, when I think about it, perhaps ‘unseasonably’ is the wrong word. ‘Unexpectedly’ is probably more accurate, after all what is a British Bank Holiday weekend without torrential downpours and endless slate grey skies? Although, in recent years, April, far from being the ‘cruellest’ month has rather turned out to be the brightest month of our entire calendar and should be made the most of, what with the completely predictable and wholly expected weather-based misery of those constantly disappointing months of July and August still to come.

If in doubt talk about the weather, eh? Well, that’s a terribly British thing to do. I think that I’m now officially ‘British’ as I’m pretty sure that’s the option I put on my census form, completely disowning any claim to Welsh heritage that others might have expected of me. There’s none of this ‘second generation’ nonsense in my head, I can tell you. However, that form was filled out in such tetchy haste that I could very well have claimed to be a six-foot tall purple banana and I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Mind you, I suspect that if I had claimed to be such a thing, by now I might well have received an ‘official’ phone call questioning that claim. Being a banana, I’d have had to appeal, of course. These forms really are strange things though, because I really, really cannot remember a thing about them the minute after I’ve filled them in, which might be something that any future generations researching the early 21st  century should consider. Not that there’s much danger of any of my descendants wanting to, of course. Still, perhaps I should have made myself a copy just in case? Who was it who said that you should always photocopy your life in case you lose it? Hmmm… I’m beginning to suspect that it was probably me in one of my vain momentary attempts at being dry and witless.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been a lot on my mind lately. Far from it, I seem to be thinking all the time. It’s just that the stringing together of structured rational thought into some kind of argument has become more difficult. For example, I wanted to share with you a revelation that came to me a few days ago about air travel, but when I tried to grab hold of the thought and contain it and explain it, somehow the focus just wouldn’t come and the notion drifted away from me. Instead it just seemed like self-indulgent frippery and probably not at all that original a piece of frippery at that, and so I couldn’t formulate the thoughts. I don’t know, maybe I’ll come back to it.

I also wrote (very briefly) about how much I hated the news on one particular morning last week, but who on Earth was I trying to kid…?  Pretty soon I came to the more vivid conclusion that I actually hate the news pretty much on every morning of every week. Another day dawned telling me of another series of tragic deaths of people who didn’t deserve it, and, even worse, those many thousands that went unnoticed by the news at all in those conflicts that just go on and on, so much so, in fact, that we’ve almost started, in that terribly inhumanly human way we have, to take it for granted and almost accept the horrific truth of it. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I sit here not caring about all those who suffer and die in this great big scary and dangerous world of ours, and yet, it is basically true that I feel for some of them more acutely, that’s all.

Granted, Tuesday’s news made me feel more than usually pretty wretched because that particular sad announcement was about someone I had a personal investment in. Not in the sense of being a personal friend or anything, but someone who had managed to touch my impenetrable life in some small way over the decades. Still, the truth should be told. I think that I genuinely do hate the news every day. Now, I know it’s not the news itself that is at fault here, after all news is news and is just what is happening, the problem I have is with what is actually happening, the content. Sometimes it just seems unbearable to call yourself human.

So, here we find ourselves, whiling away our time on one of the longer holidays we all get to share together during the year. Some goddists I have known over the years would have you believe that the religious overtones of this particular weekend mean that only they should be eligible to have this break to enjoy and all the non-goddists should stay at work because they don’t deserve to share in it. It’s a point of view, I suppose, but I still believe that anything that is designed to bring people together and spend a bit of quality time in each other’s company, especially in the name of peace, rebirth and hope for the future of humankind can’t be a bad thing, even if the vast majority do all but ignore that aspect and just stuff their faces with chocolate. If it makes them happy and stops them hurting each other for a few days, what’s anyone’s problem with that?

EGGSACTAMUNDO

I’m going to keep things short today, after all, over Easter who has that much free time anyway? Here I am with about as many spare minutes as it takes to boil an egg to try to put a few of my scrambled thoughts together in the hope that no-one will get the idea that omelette-ing you down. Whether this will manage to keep things up on my sunny side or turn out to be more hard-boiled, depends upon a lot of things, not least how pickled I am, but, as usual I suspect that things will just end up most likely completely cracked and just a little bit off as usual.

How this all turns out will depend to a certain eggstent on whether or not I’ve managed to cook up any thoughts for you, or at the very least, poached one from someone else, because my mind is a bit coddled this morning from a lack of sleep and my ability to think is feeling pretty fried, if the truth be known.

I have a tendency towards instant tradition, in the sense that if I do something once and it goes down relatively well, I tend to think that people will be disappointed if the next time that particular day comes around, I don’t do precisely the same thing again, and suddenly you’ve got a ritual, a habit, a tradition and ultimately something else you’ve got to remember to do and organise beforehand. Now, I do tend to think that it is these small personal instant traditions that go a long way towards making each of our own little lives just a tiny bit more special and unique for each of us, although that is probably only in the sense of not being unique or special at all, I imagine, after all everyone else probably has their own variation that they are slavishly and uniquely pursuing as well.

So it is with the annual Easter egg hunt here at the nerve centre of Lesser Blogfordshire. This is a less than eggstensive annual festivity that lasts for about two minutes on Easter Sunday morning and one which would be a massive disappointment to those of you eggstreme egg hunters racing hundreds of children around your vast estate-like gardens which have been cleverly laced with thousands of hidden treats many of which are being tracked by GPS satellite tracking devices to ensure that they are all found, some of which will no doubt turn out to be inside the belly of a dog.

The event is less lavish hereabouts and is limited to a six-pack of crème eggs being ‘hidden’ in plain sight (it’s more ‘fun’ that way...) amongst the chaos of our living room, usually in eggsactly the same places as I put them last year. I first did this the very first time my beloved was here on Easter Sunday and, in the classic manner of these instant traditions, now feel that it would be a shame not to do it each and every year, although it was rather touch-and-go for a while this time around when my access to shopping emporia was recently heavily restricted by circumstance.

Nevertheless, the required purchase was made and the sticky sweet contrabrand was duly sneaked into the house under my usual self-delusion that she knows nothing of these events unfolding about her. Come the appointed hour, I will sneak downstairs and distribute them to their tired old hiding places, waiting for them to be rediscovered in the time-honoured tradition, and much hilarity of the “cold… cold… you’re getting warmer…” variety will ensue and I shall then hold the Easter Bunny entirely responsible for any resulting ballooning of any of our waistlines. After all, over indulgence is (and you knew that we had to go there, didn’t you…?) no yolk.

SOME TIME, NO TIME, RUBBISH TIME, EGG TIME

Public holidays somehow just manage to confuse me. I know that there have only ever been seven days in the average week, as far as I’m aware, but somehow, knocking a day off the end of the working week seems to send my tiny brain into all manner of strange places. For most of Wednesday, I was convinced it was Tuesday and suddenly for most of Thursday, I thought it was Friday*. Much of this might have had something to do with having my entire routine thrown off kilter by the fact that I didn’t have my car available until half way through the week.

I got it back on Wednesday, which was of course Tuesday in my head. On Wednesday, having collected the car, I then went to visit my mother, as I regularly do at some point in the middle of the week, but I went to the supermarket on the way, which is something I’d been trying to do since Saturday, which is when I would normally have done it. Saturday also was the day when I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) transport the garden waste to the tip because I didn’t have my car, and so the refuse collectors (quite literally) refused to take it on Monday. You know that you’ve come to some particular place in your life when you can hear the refuse collectors chunnering and complaining about you outside your own back door. Somehow it tells you precisely where you are on the great ladder of life.  Monday should be their regular collection day although it sometimes slips to Tuesday and it has been known to be delayed until even the Wednesday of some weeks. There was a period a couple of years ago when that Monday didn’t come around for nearly three months, but thankfully those days seem far behind us now.

Still, who knows what day they’ll turn up on over the next couple of weeks with all those public holidays to negotiate…? A Monday collection suddenly gets a bit unlikely when so many of those ‘Monday’s off’ get clustered together, although they do occasionally surprise me by actually turning up on them. Nevertheless, I do still suspect that heaps of bags filled with warm, maggot infested waste products will be cluttering up the neighbourhood for the best part of a month, and pretty soon, because of the lack of those grounding regular ritualistic days that help to keep the week in order in my mind, I really won’t have a clue what day it is, or even what week it is in order to juggle whether it’s ‘green box’ week or ‘brown bag’ week.

Things used to be so much simpler when the Department of the Environment didn’t want us to do much of the work for them. I am aware of the landfill shortfall, and the need to divide and separate recyclable items in order to make them easier to process, but I am left wondering whether all the petrol I use driving to the tip, and all the water I use rinsing out old bottles and tins has a more damaging impact than anything gained from the tiny numbers of  waste cardboard boxes our little house manages to generate.

I seem to be waking up ever earlier, too, which isn’t due to any guilt I may feel about my shortcomings in the recycling department, but more due to the fact that my whole brain seems to be out of whack. Too much daylight in the wee small hours, or too many early nights, or just too many thoughts rattling round inn the vast empty cavern of my brain cavity…? Who can say? I can lie awake for hours thinking about it…

Of course I am an utter idiot. I should have arranged for us to go away over Easter, but, of course, with the problem of transport and the continuing requirements of the aging parent meaning that we’re never one hundred percent sure that it is safe to do so. Somehow time slipped away from us and we never quite got around to organising anything and so the extended break stretches ahead of us with nothing really planned. Now, instead we have to face the prospect of coming out of the other end of this relatively long break with the dreadful feeling that we’ve wasted yet another chunk of our fleeting annual holiday allowances on just sitting around the house and not getting anything done.

Life is managing to slip away from us, I fear.

The year itself is rapidly running away from me anyway, like watching the sand pour out of the top of one of those old-style egg timers, vanishing swiftly into the lower bulb before my very eyes. The year slips away as those significant dates come around again, although Easter itself managed to hang on for as long as it could this time around, but before I know it I’ll have to start wondering what Christmas presents to buy, again, and how I’m going to find the time to get everything done that that requires. Sometimes it feels as if your on a carousel that is spinning faster and faster and making you dizzier and dizzier, and all you want someone to do is put on the brakes and let you relax and breathe slowly for a while, and give you a moment to just look at those magical crystals of sand for a moment before they pour away into the other bulb and are lost to you forever.


*Incidentally, for most of Good Friday I was definitely convinced it was Saturday, so the pattern did continue.