Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all.  Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears.  Mostly I wander.  As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there.  My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal.  When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it.  In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another.  There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating.  When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic.  Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders.  Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days.  The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago.  There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection.  There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow.  The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation.  It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere.  Hope* in every tree.  What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days?  Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird.  As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers…  Emily Dickinson