Friday, November 28, 2003

Oh No! Not the Madeline Biscuit Again.


The empty religious Sundays defied all logic and left us crawling home through mud and worse things. The ground baked hard that summer and we felt no compassion for anyone but ourselves. We ignored the troubles of the world and how terrible things might get; we sat by the stream fishing, calm and helpless against the problems we had to overcome. At night I was troubled by dreams of the most terrible things, things I cannot bring myself to mention. I have read books written by people who suffered the worst possible things at the hands of men and women and nothing I have seen comes close to that. I try to lift myself above the blackness that these dream have brought. Somewhere in my head there is a ghost, maybe an old ancestor but one transformed from human to spirit through years of legend and half-truth. Sometimes it sits outside my head, behind the doors like a shadow waiting for me to walk by. Then it will bring down years of worry onto me like falling buildings.


I thought I would link you to Paul Marsden's poetry page again just to show you how bad they were. This has been sparked by a poem of his being included in the BBC News Weekly Quiz. The poem in question is "She came in the night" which sounds like something I might have written when I was 15. Can't fault any of his sentiments about the war though.

Someone has just brought in a bag of chips for their lunch and the smell is wafting throughout the office. It suddenly brought back all sorts of memories which, if you forgive the apparent absurdity, I don't actually remember having. I suppose I am referring to some sort of Deja-Vu but what I mean is that a general impression is given by the stimulus - chips - but I can't actually pinpoint where it comes from. Smell seems to be the most evocative of the senses and I know it is the last to go when you get old and decrepit. It can be quite devastating sometimes. Remember Mole and Ratty in Wind in the Willows? The smell of Mole's old home was too much for him and he broke down in tears at the thought of not seeing it again. And what about Douglas Adams' idea about the cry of despair of a living thing being proportional to the distance from its birthplace? My parents moved house when I went to college and so I don't have any house that I can describe as my childhood home. Sometimes this makes me feel bad but I like to think I have got over this. All this from a bag of chips.


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