Well, OK. I fully admit it, I often feel like I’m on a different planet from the people about me. Graham excepted, of course, but then everything I say that isn’t directly about Graham tends to be a long way apart from Graham.
When the feeling gets to be too strong I just sit here, blank of mind and still of hand, and there’s nothing in me that I can coax onto paper. Then it’s time to stand still for a while, see without seeing, hear without hearing, and let the rest of the world catch up with me.
Or, put another way, sometimes I need a day off.
Actually, I’ve not missed much. Two-and-a-half world events seem to have bounced up, and that’s not so much really.
Firstly, Steve Jobs bounced on to the stage to announce the much-anticipated igadget of the decade, to be known henceforth as iPad. Looks like nothing so much as an iPhone that’s been sat on by an exceedingly heavy large animal of the hippopotamus kind. And of about as much use.
Next, and it’ll be a matter of sadness to some, the death of J.D. Salinger at the age of 91 has been announced. To me, and this’ll come as no surprise to those who know me, it’s news of only passing sadness. Ninety-one is a good age; shame he didn’t do more with it since Catcher. It’d have made little difference to literary history if that self-same iPhone-destroying hippopotamus had sat on him just after publication in 1951.
Finally, and I can’t bring myself to grant it more than a half-point in my list, I caught most of the US president’s State of the Union address. Sad. Nothing else to say about it. Just sad.
And so, on the day when Graham put the final coat of varnish on the living room floor–nothing should be allowed to look that shiny–and the fumes dissipate into the damp Welsh January air, I lift my head to look about me.
Ye gods and little fishes but what a mess we are making of our poor old world.
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