Strange echoes

Little Petal and her youngest daughter have left and gone to Dorchester, to rescue some battery hens. Their latest venture is to buy twenty or so of them at a time from the lorry carrying them to slaughter. They're worn-out and just haven't been laying enough to meet the production demands of the farms that feed the supermarkets. Little Petal's daughter puts them out to grass, where they stagger in amazement in the sunlight, and gorge themselves on things they haven't eaten before, such as grass and nettles and grubs and slugs. After a few days of this, they start to produce excellent eggs. They still look strange, wandering around with wings that are just quills and no feathers, but they seem to be better for being out in the light.

I'm left here to my own devices again. I've been painting the sitting room so that I can move Little Petal into it, desk, computer, phone and all, so that I don't have to listen to her shouted conversations with her deaf mother, or watch the television programs she likes. I hate "New Tricks", and Denis Waterman in wrinkled mode reminds me awfully of one of those battery hens on remission. She can have the big television set and the Sky satellite box that shows almost nothing but repeats of old programs for an exorbitant minimal monthly fee. I'll have the smaller television and the set-top box that shows almost nothing but repeats of old programs for free. It did show me a bit of Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's program about chickens the other night, which is relevant to the first paragraph of this quote, so that's the continuity nicely taken care of.

I've also moved out of the sitting room my large collection of video tapes, which one day I really ought to work through and catalog, because some of them don't have what is written on the label actually still on the tape inside. One, in particular, I know, has something radically different. I remember, because this evening, having not bothered to watch the Grand Prix qualifying, I sat down for a moment to watch the GP2 race from Hockenheim. Hockenheim is an ominous name in the Formula One list of tracks, because Jim Clark was killed there, not even racing in an F1 race, years ago.

The GP2 race featured Bruno Senna doing typically Senna-esque things in the sudden rain, and I have no doubt that he is going to try and live up the reputation that Ayrton left behind him. Quite a few years ago, I grabbed a tape from the shelf, looked at the title, knew that I had seen the film enough times, banged it into the video recorder, and went out to help my brother change the engine in his Datsun. I came back later that afternoon, rewound the tape, and started to watch the Imola Grand Prix, Soon after the beginning, Ayrton Senna hit the wall near Tamburello, and died of his injuries. The film I had recorded over, the name still written in biro on the label, was "The Man who would be King".

It always scared me, that coincidence, because it seemed too apt.