Back bach…

So what did I learn from my sojourn in Wales? Well, Wales (as I have suspected before) probably isn’t the best place to spend the ‘between’. Even as New Year arrived I was long asleep in my bed, the wind outside howling. Strange weather again - one minute blue skies and the hope of a break, the next the wind back and bringing horizontal rain. Scuddy I might have called it once and ventured out. These days it frightens me a little, maybe more than a little, so I stay indoors and think and scribble.

It isn’t the fallen trees or the fact that the electricity keeps cutting. I can live with the mud and the blown away flower pots, the jangle of breaking glass in the distance, the fact that no birds - apart from the crows wind-sweeping in the gusts - seem to want to venture out. It isn’t the fact that the mountain I can see from my bedroom window is there one minute, then gone the next in a blur of blow and a thrash of water against the glass. No, it isn’t that. It’s me and how easily I fall into listless nothingness, convincing myself that staying in bed until ten and going to bed before nine is okay, good for me even.

I tell myself that it’s all just part of the cycle. A time to be got through before the ‘new’ can begin. But I’ve been here so many times before and what exactly did that ‘new’ bring? It’s probably me; hope, unfortunately, does not spring eternal in my breast. I try, but it’s so bloody difficult this time of year and I know, despite intentions and my best resolution, that little if anything will actually change.

Off course there are those that believe that these things (so many t’s) are in their own hands and that all things happen for a reason. Poor fools, how disappointed they will become unless of course they comfort themselves with that oldest of lies: ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ To quote an old friend of mine, the one that makes me think: “Life is chance; it’s all chance, random, random chance, whatever you may think it’s just going to happen. Resolutions and good intention won’t stop you getting bitten by the stray dog, won’t protect you from cancer, it won’t even stop your car from needing a new gear box when your bank account is empty. There is no karma, no kismet, no plan, and God isn’t working: least of all in mysterious ways. It’s just random chance, so suck it up.”

I lie listening to the wild Welsh wind and wonder and wonder (so many w’s). Hoping that he’s wrong but I don’t think he is. Life is like the weather here; the blustering wind blowing this pot over but leaving another, a single gust toppling the big cast iron chiminea (which I can barely drag) but not the chair by its side, the rain pounding at the front of the cottage, but only a light smatter just a skip over the roof at the back.

Random - best suck it up and wait for some sunshine I guess.