There’s a certain inevitability on a November evening that if I get home in the dark and look up at the sky to gaze in wonderment at the stars, the joy of it is always tempered by the knowledge that, come the morning, I’ll be scraping ice off the windscreen in order to repeat the journey I’ve just made in the opposite direction.
As expected, the prediction came true and venturing out into the dark of another cold morning, there was a slight melancholy in my spirits as I arrived at the car and found that white sheen covering all the glass forming an opaque barrier to all-round visibility. There was a slight glimmer of optimism in that all the doors unlocked first time and opened, so the expected gymnastic shenanigans that a person of my great age really shouldn’t have to contemplate or attempt were not necessary today.
Clambering in through the wrong door – or more alarmingly the hatchback - because it’s the only one you can get to open, is a real assault on the dignity, especially as you discover that your legs won’t really bend quite enough to get past the gearstick. It’s an even worse challenge to the limits of human origami if the only door you can get through is a rear door and all the front seats with their headrests form an almost impenetrable barrier to getting into the front seats themselves.
Things forming barriers to their own usefulness… maybe there is a slightly profound thought nestling in here somewhere after all.
Meanwhile, today the calendar clicks around to 25, which means that it is exactly one calendar month until Christmas morning, and we’re all suddenly aware that there’s an awful lot to do. It’s a strange thing that one entire month can immediately seem like no time at all, even though it’s one full twelfth of a year or, to put it another way, more than 8 percent, which is a not insignificant chunk of time, but somehow it still seems so.
If we consider that one month is no time at all, then twelve times no time at all remains no time at all. If you are relatively lucky, here in the North West the average life expectancy is (according to news reports) now seventy-seven, which means that you’ve got more or less seventy-seven times no time at all to do everything you’re ever going to get done ever.
If my maths is correct, anything multiplied by nothing is nothing, so really, our sliver of time in the light before the endless dark is nothing more than a momentary flicker, so instead of frittering them away, those 30 or so days that remain before the big day should be savoured. Cram them as full as you can with as much as you can. Make them as memorable and slow-moving as you can because no one is going to say at the end that you didn’t make full use of those ones so you can have them back.
Instead a lot of us here in England will be spending a lot of our time seeking out a good bargain. We love a good bargain, the Brits. We like to think we’re getting one over on someone somehow, which is why I think sales and ebay and pound shops have become so popular. Something for less than you think it’s worth always seems to make us very satisfied, even if it’s a load of old rubbish. We know that we get what we pay for, and that a screwdriver set bought for a pound is likely to be completely rubbish, but it’s still “a screwdriver set for a pound!!!” and that sort of thing seems to make a lot of us very happy, and I guess we should make the most of it because come January (after the sales of course) we’re all going to have to make the pounds we’ve got stretch a lot further.
Amazon have been trying to sell the British on the American concept of “Black Friday bargains”, with their “lightning deals”, but it seems to have slightly backfired on them over here if the forums are anything to go by. Forums. Don’t you just love them? The bile and spite you can read there always astounds me. Would anyone writing these things truly say them if the person they were saying them to was right in front of them? Or is this the only way anyone pays them any attention?
Anyway, the Amazon forums are full of those who are furious that the “lightning deals” have gone like… er… lightning, and they feel like they never got a fair chance, and those who are winning the offers as a kind of personal challenge (to be a "winner") with no intention of buying the stuff anyway. You couldn’t make this stuff up, but get between a Brit and his bargain and you’re asking for trouble. Dangle a bargain in front of us and then snatch it away and we really won’t be held responsible for the massive backlash of mutterings, grumblings and complaints.
Once upon a long ago there was a line in a “Spitting Image” sketch which kind of sums up the attitude of the Brits to me: “What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? After EastEnders and before Inspector Morse!” Shove “X-Factor” or “I’m a Sleb…” into that sentence and we’re still much the same. Although, to be fair, the students of this country do seem to be finally waking up from their apathy and bucking this trend. It’s hardly the sixties revisited, but it’s nice to know that people can still be motivated to try to do something when they feel strongly enough about it.
Finally this chilly day, I got up just in time to hear Peter Siddle get his (actually - to be fair - extremely well bowled) birthday hat-trick for Australia (who writes his scripts?), and then I found out that the England (and Wales) Captain, Andrew Strauss, had been out to the third ball of the match. All those hopes of people who like “winners” crumbling. Welcome to the wacky world of being an England (and Wales) cricket fan. I think I mentioned yesterday that following England could be something of a roller coaster, but I’m glad to be here for the ride, even though I'm now convinced that they play much better when I'm not actually listening. The curse of me strikes again!
Apologies again for the purposeless meandering of these thoughts this morning, hopefully the old “little grey cells” will be back on form soon.
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