A Mental Ramble on the Bachsicord

Winter's come, Winter's come, The sun has gone away.

The wonderful thing about the English weather is how it can divert attention from other business. In this case, by burying it under a nice clean white blanket which turns my untidy jumble of scrap wood for the fires into lovely smooth sculptures which hint at faeries and unicorns and other esoterica of the mental landscape.

We would be struggling to afford to heat the place if we had to rely on buying logs and coal, because everything has gone rocketing up in cost this year. Even though the oil prices have come back down again, the bottled gas which we use in our heaters still has the 55% increase in cost which occurred last summer. We are wearing thick clothes indoors and looking like South Park characters.

Now is the winter of our missed content.

But this is not a whining post, my salvation was above me. I am burning my collection of old newspapers. Some people lay down a cellar of wine to have something to look forward to, but I stored up an attic of pulp. Like wine, the pleasure from the use of it is fleeting, but welcome none the less. And they're not all the same. It has been a strange sensation seeing the past flickering past my eyes as each paper is fed into the flames. The cheap local papers, of course. The Times, The Observer, Private Eye, the Sun, even. I used to buy different papers sometimes just to see what life might feel like for the readers of each, and to muse upon the nature of the writers. The Financial Times. A friend with whom I worked on several contracts used to read the FT, because, as he said, "All the other papers are pushing some political message, but the people with money don't care for the politics of the world, they're just interested in the bottom line." So the FT told it like it was.

Sunday Sport 1994 Super Model had Sex with 3 MPs story to shock the commons! How innocent that sounds nowadays, with the forty-minute warning under our belts.

And, of course, the Gaurdians (sic). I kept those because of my love of crosswords. I could regularly complete nearly 80% of most puzzles, and used to refer back to previous works of a particular compiler if I got stuck. I gave up crosswords when I moved into my rambling old station. I had too much else to do to be able to sit around at leisure scratching my head. But I recently started doing them again.

Here come de fugue

I went to Australia last year, for two weeks early in November. Little Petal flew us out to stay with her son in Sydney, in his apartment in the Blue, the old immigration buildings down at Finger Wharf, where I was less impressed by the fact that Russell Crowe lived in the same building than I was with the giant bats who took to the air at dusk and glided majestically over the marina beneath us. The flight out there was torture, literally. I got off the plane with permanent cramp inside my knees. I had watched all the interesting movies, and some of the uninteresting ones, and was saved from having to chew my own limbs off by finding a cryptic crossword in the paper we had bought in the departure lounge.

My knees had just begun to stop hurting when we took to the air again, this time to fly down to Melbourne. The seats were wider, but I had bought another paper just in case. It was the day on which the convicted Bali bombers were executed. In the row of seats behind us, a nervous woman began to cry and sob that she wasn't able to do this, she couldn't go through this, and we hadn't even moved away from the boarding steps. The senior stewardess came down and interrogated her sharply, suggesting that, although we were still delayed due to terminal congestion, she wasn't about to add to the delay any further. The frightened woman's friends said they would keep her under control, and when I glanced round, they had bundled her up into a fetal shape and were cuddling her into quiescence. We flew, I solved, we landed, we got into a hired car and drove through Melbourne to the south, guided by the voice from the sat-nav.

On our return to Sydney, jet-lag gone, I thought we should have a little trip on our own, and so we rented a car and set off for the Blue Mountains, delighting in some of the apparent absurdities of Digital Denise, as I called our speaking sat-nav. As we headed into a crawling queue of cars on the dual-carriageway, she told us "in four hundred metres, turn right and go back." But we're still in Sydney! And the other side of the road, which also prohibited U-turns even if there wasn't a heavy barrier physically preventing it, was just as congested. Forcing her to re-calculate, I took a left and we headed away from the toll-road, through the middle of Sydney, and out to Penrith, and then up into the Blue Mountains.

If I could be anywhere now, other than here, it would be in Leura, where we first got out to walk around and found the wonderful toy museum, or Katoomba and the dizzying Echo Point, where we let the evening slide away into the warmth of the darkness and stretched out on the beds to watch TV in the motel by the railway line, or Lithgow with the wonderful remains of the Zig-Zag at the end of the Bells Line of Sight Road, where I bought a book of cryptic crossword puzzles so I could carry on doing them without having to also look at the depressing news in the paper.

A foog widdin de foog.

After our brief trip on our own we were off again with Little Petal's son and his partner (who confusingly has the same name as I do), this time by car to the Hunter Valley, for wine tasting. As we sat on the patio of the country club that evening, the lightning flickered in the distance, the wind suddenly swirled around, and heavy rain began to fall. Next morning, as we got in the car and briefly headed towards Queensland, the sat-nav said, "in one hundred metres, turn round and RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!" The catastrophic weather was wreaking havoc to the north, and yet again the papers were full of gloom and doom and disaster.

Do foog is done, back to de foog.

And soon, sadly, we left behind the home-from-home to so many other Brits, and once more squeezed ourselves into the torture-chairs for a return trip. I recently saw "Bride and Prejudice", a Bollywood glitter-fest, and laughed at the sight of the hero subverting the protection of the mother by offering her his much-wider upper-class seat so that he could sit beside her daughter. (Was that a new fugue, or just a variation on the current fugue, and if so, doesn't it perhaps get classed as a counter-fugue? Was it really just a cunning subterfugue?)

And, as I sat and shivered on Woking station at six in the morning, waiting for the first train back to Wiltshire, I found that I couldn't solve a single clue in the Guardian.

Five across, 5-3, cease this play on words, away with you! (solution below)

That was the fugue, that was

And so I'm burning my collection of newspapers, even those with part-solved crossword puzzles. Once again I'm too busy to have the time to switch off the world and immerse myself in utter escapism. The good thing about this funeral bonfire of my previous vanities, and apart from the transitory warmth, is that I'm turning away from the compulsive collecting which was firmly marking me out for old age. Nobody is likely to force their way into a silent house sometime in the future and find me dead for weeks surrounded by floor-to-ceiling piles of old papers.There is still hope for me. It was intriguing to go back in time to someone I once had been, but I realise now that I can never return completely. Heraclitus might have said "you cannot do the same crossword puzzle twice." My past is behind me, no longer in flames, but in ashes.

Bring on the Phoenix.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart and freeze.

(Fugue-off)