Too much water!

Yesterday it had been raining solidly for over 24 hours when I looked out of the window in the early evening.  The sharp susurration of the rain drops was punctuated by a varying arrangement of more percussive drips from god knows what overhang on the house.  There was regularity from one source for a few minutes and then another location took over so that we got the full stereophonic effect of being surrounded by water in one form or another.  It was like being in some old-fashioned clock maker’s shop with all the ponderous grandfather clocks ticking out their varying take on the time.  At one moment the drips were playing some complicated syncopated rhythm given visual form by a surprisingly large number of magpies which seem to relish flying in ragged formations around the house in this less than clement weather. 

 

“Good morning Mr Magpie, how’s your wife!”  It may be superstition, but that phrase and the touching of something made of leather is a small price to pay for the averting of the evil eye!  And why would birds of ill omen be flying in that atrocious weather if not to tempt the injudicious to omit the necessary forms of superstitious safety though irritation at the adverse climatic conditions.

I regard weather like this at the weekend as a day stolen from me and the pairs of magpies as a supernatural laugh at my expense!  My intellect is becoming damp with the rain.  To say nothing about what it is doing to my multi-level cactus garden!

When the day is dull and damp there is a concomitant sluggishness about the whole approach to life and things planned remain at the planning stage and progress no further.

The only time I ventured out of the house on Sunday was when I went for the chicken and that miserable experience was only lightened by the fact that the driving rain kept the queue down so that I got the food in record time!

Rain is, however, conducive to reading.  Though what sort of reading is questionable.

I do not think that it is solely meanness that keeps me from purchasing electronic books – I certainly have no problem whatsoever in purchasing the means to read them!  I am rapidly beginning to fill up a shelf which contains nothing but various forms of electronic book.  I seem to be developing the same approach to these increasingly sophisticated devices as I continue to have with the camera in all its forms!

And on each one of these devices I download free books.  At the beginning I downloaded everything that I could no matter how remote the chance of my reading some of these was.  Classic after unreadable out of copyright Classic began to fill the disc space on the device.  I convinced myself that there might come a time when perhaps stranded in a doctor’s waiting room and waiting for an appointment, the reading of Sophocles or Aristotle or Hegel or Kant might seem like a good idea.  Though even then I doubted it.  But free books are free books and who can resist them.  Not I for one.

My telephone seems to draw on a library which is far more modern, but of much more questionable quality.  I have downloaded a quantity of science fiction which had its first publication in the pulp pages of Astounding Science Fiction.  I know that some of the greatest of the exponents of the art had many outings in the pages of that august periodical, but many of the writers justify the “pulp” designation for the literary worth of their productions.  Not that such a judgement affects my gobbling up of such stories.  I keep telling myself that even if the story lacks literary merit, there is often a central idea in sci-fi stories that is worth pondering.

On my phone I am reading a hallucinogenic series of stories called The Ant King and other stories by Benjamin Rosembaum whose free flowing imagination seems oddly suited to the gobbet approach of limited page size on the screen of the phone.  The easy way to approach his stories is to characterize them all as Surrealistic, but I think that they are a little more literary and a damn sight more contrived than that designation would suggest.  I am, within limits, enjoying them.  And they certainly have come in useful when I have been waiting - or trying to ignore what is going on around me!

Monday has dragged its tedious way along and I am waiting to take my final class in the final period of the day.  I am actually waiting more for it to be over so that I can affirm my old faith in the medicinal and restorative power of swimming.

I have (a long time ago) purchased a new multi-coloured swim bag that refuses to be ignored when lying in the maelstrom of junk which lurks in my boot.  I am relying on its obviousness to act as a vivid reminder to keep me on the straight and narrow, which in this case is the roped of lane of a swimming pool.

The negative element in this approach is that the swimming pool is not directly on my route home.  Not is it not direct, it is positively out of my way.  I have to make a special effort to get there, park, change and swim.  How easy was it in Cardiff to let the car go its own way and take me to the David Lloyd Centre (that energetic haven of the middle classes) while I debated within myself whether or not I actually wanted to go there.  Too often I was still continuing the debate while the car parked itself outside the centre!  Once there, it was foolish not to swim and swimming, after all, I like.

I am determined to get back into the habit of a daily swim and I am sure that not only will it do me good, but I will enjoy it too.  Probably.