I was drinking my morning illicit cup of coffee earlier, illicit because caffeine seems to be not good for those of us with M.E. however....I enjoy it and I've had to forgo quite a few things since being ill so I've reached a point of, "Oh what the heck and allow myself one cup savouring every sip!"  Anyway I was reading a magazine article, simultaneously raising my favourite cup to my lips, I reckon if I'm doing something illicit it had better look the part  and then I came across Tim Lott's words:

'Because I had learnt, more deeply than ever before, that life is lived not through fantasies of control, but by giving in to it and trusting to the future.  Why?  Who knows?  What happens now?  Again, who knows?  And isn't that the wonderful perfect, remarkable thing about being alive?  The uncertainty.  You must love the uncertainty.  Because only when you have begun to accept that life is as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke and that you are helpless, that it will end in death and oblivion, can you discover the true joy of simply breathing, and looking, and being, just being, right here, now.'    -Tim Lott- 

 Uncertainty according to the Chambers Concise dictionary means not sure or certain, not definitely known or decided, not to be depended upon, likely to change, though it can also mean lacking confidence or hesitant.  So the fact that I'm uncertain dealing with uncertainty poses a difficulty....certainly.

Mind you, if I'm uncertain then even that difficulty itself becomes uncertain surely?  Which is what Mr Lott was saying I think, although I don't like to think that there is only oblivion after death, that's not a certainty and therefore he can't then be certain of that outcome of course.  ;)))

However....'The moment when you first wake up in the morning is that most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.  No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen.  And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot.  The possibility is always there!'  -Monica Baldwin- 

I was about eight when I first saw the film 'The Red Balloon' it was all in black and white then, no colour, hardly any dialogue, although as child I don't think I noticed this at all, it was totally magical. I never forgot the small boy in the rain greyness of the post-war streets of Paris rescuing the sentient balloon and its befriending of him.  Recently I was enchanted again watching the newly restored coloured version.  Paris looks romantic if shabby, the skyline pearly and its people worn.  The small boy in his brown shoes runs through the cobbled streets playfully followed by the cheeky, rebellious balloon so red...so shiny.

Why aren't balloons shiny any more?

Les Ballons

by Oscar Wilde

Against these turbid turquoise skies

The light and luminous balloons

Dip and drift like satin moons,

Drift like silken butterflies;

Reel with every windy gust,

Rise and reel like dancing girls,

Float like strange transparent pearls,

Fall and float like silver dust.

Now to the low leaves they cling,

Each with coy fantastic pose,

Each a petal of a rose

Straining at a gossamer string.

Then to the tall trees they climb,

Like thin globes of amethyst,

Wandering opals keeping tryst

With the rubies of the lime.

Angels about?

This morning sunshine after two solid days of heavy summer rain, there's been flooding all over the north- west of England.  Earlier a magpie landed on my window-ledge and looked in at me with his black shiny eyes and sharp pointy beak, whilst snowflakes of angels feathers blew on the breeze or so it seemed.  Either someone somewhere was shaking free their duvet or a million dandelion clocks had stopped ticking and tufts of time floated freely in the morning air.  Lazing along not a care in the world.
This side of my magpie stand white freesia and carnations, they capture my heart and their fragrance perfumes my day.

Questions About Angels

by Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask

about angels, the only one you ever hear

is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time

besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth

or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges

of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colours?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

their diet of unfiltered divine light?

What goes on inside their luminous heads?  Is there a wall

these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole

in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

filled with silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive 

in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

the appearance of the regular mail-man and

whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.

The only question you ever hear is about 

the dance floor on the head of a pin

where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,

billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

to glance at his watch because she has been dancing 

forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Copyright 1991 by Billy Collins. All rights controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

At 3:45 am. the birds were singing this morning.  The light has been so bright the last two nights, hardly what you would call night at all.  The sky flushed with that blue-grey of early summer, late spring.  This time next week we will be in the thick of summer, all the lawns are taking off with growth, at the front of the house it's a jungle for the neighbourhood cats to hide in.

Speaking of the 'wages round' earlier this week reminded me of a funny story.  Our wages office at work housed two elderly ladies of twin-set and pearls, tightly permed hair and sober disposition.  In their brightly lit office they would drink endless cups of tea, not coffee and constantly there was a sound of the scrunch-crunch and rolling ratchet-rattle of old fashioned comptometers or adding-machines, which was how calculations were done in the modern world of 1967.
How did we ever get things done before calculators and computers?  Yet, even then a few miles further on into Manchester, the boffins were improving and tinkering with the humongous invention that has transformed the lives of humanity...the computer.
Mrs T and Mrs K bumbled plumply into each of the surrounding office departments on a Friday around lunch-time, handing out wage packets much like the Queen Mother did the Maundy money on Maundy-Thursday.  Munificently, as though it was money from their own coffers they were doling-out gracefully.  Mrs T was the senior employee, way past retiring age or so she appeared to me as I was then, a slim unwritten upon maiden of seventeen.  She did seem to get distracted and kerfuffled,  disarmingly she'd drift off somewhere never finishing a sentence she started.   This particular day she put her comptometer to sleep at 5:30 as was her routine.  Routines were to be adhered to especially in the most important office of the company, everything had a place or a moment for doing it otherwise the whole creation might collapse about our ears.  Therefore the wages department was put to bed for the night and Mrs T having said her farewells to colleagues made her way outside to the bus-stop.  Some moments later our manager deciding an important letter needed to catch the evening post and therefore needing a postage-stamp used his pass-key to open up the wages office door and then the safe where all the stamps were placed overnight, only to find Mrs T's handbag cosily bunged inside the safe, squashed in 'fatly' with the stamp-book and other safe-keep-ables.
"What the.....??" he must have thought to himself.
Quick as a rat up a drainpipe he was out of the office door, down the steps outside the building and sprinting to the local bus-stop where stood Mrs T with the cash box tucked into her shopping bag apparently, blithely unaware anything was amiss.
The story goes she had been on automatic-pilot and absent-mindedly put the bag instead of the cash box into the safe.  Well that's the way the rest of us had it explained to us, but I can't help thinking if after forty years she'd finally 'had enough' and decided to go AWOL for a final fling somewhere in Acapulco!

Does anyone remember what it was like on Friday's when the wages staff came around where you worked and you were handed a small buff coloured envelope with your name and works number on it?  Not only was Friday the best day of the week being the one before two days off, it was also 'pay day'. How great did it feel when you had that small brown envelope in your hands?  I can remember the sheer anticipation of prising open the very sticky glue and with two fingers reaching inside to slide out the crisp notes.  Not so long after I started work everyone went over to bank-transfers to receive their salaries and they phased out the wages round, I suppose it was safer to have the money always in the bank instead of having security firms delivering tons of money here and there and everywhere all over our towns.  I've never forgotten though that feeling of holding the real money you had just earned that week by your toil for the engines of industry, it was exciting.  Sometimes there wasn't as much inside the packet as you had reckoned you would receive, fluctuating tax deductions or pay-docked for lateness etcetera.  The best pay-days were when you were taking your annual leave the next week and then your pay-packet would be thick and bulging with an extra fortnights money for your holiday.  How brilliant it was to have your wad of cash and the excitement of a whole two weeks ahead of you with no work!

Caricatures...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Peter_Altenberg_by_Gustav_Jagerspacher_1909.jpg

....."The time has come," the Walrus said

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes..and ships..and sealing wax..

Of cabbages and kings..

And why the sea is boiling hot..

And whether pigs have wings."

-The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll-

Look at those long thin hands.  You can just imagine shaking hands with this weird creepy little man can't you?  His real name was Richard Engländer, he was writer born in Vienna in 1859, Peter Altenberg was his pseudonym.  Apparently he was described as being a true Bohemian and was know for his eccentric wild way of dressing and his outrageous opinions.  He was inspired by the prose poems of Baudelaire and also by postcards because they necessitated a condensed style of writing.  Speaking of his prose-pearls he said,  "They're extracts!  Extracts from life!"  His own life was fractured by more than one internment in the local asylum and his writing was an amalgam of fiction and fact.  He had his letters delivered to Cafe Central his favourite coffee-house in Vienna where he used to like to write, and where there is now a statue of him permanently seated at a table near the entrance.  Apparently he wrote the phrase,  "Are we not all only Karikatures from the truly and ideal wishes, which God and nature made with our souls and our bodies." (with the spellings and punctuation as original) in English beneath Jagerspacher's portrait of him.

He would most definitely have been delighted with the invention of blogs.  I feel a certain sympathy with him, if only for the fact that sometimes he wrote his short prose-pearls whilst propped up in bed and like me his writings were liberally peppered with wild fireworks of exclamation marks!!

'Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.'  

                                  Johnathan Safran Foer