Norwegian island, Amy Winehouse, my freezer…

I’m finding it hard to blog at the moment. It isn’t just the time, although time is a bit of a constraint. I’m just finding it really hard to say what I feel and think in a way positive enough not to bring you all (whoever you all are) down.

Truth is that so far it has been a less than positive year for me what with one thing and another. If I were royal I might even call it my annus horribilis, but then if I were royal I probably wouldn’t be where I am now.

I’m told that bad things come in threes. Well, if that’s the case my bad things should have stopped a dozen or so things ago - dead cats, flooded kitchens, lost friends and work, bad blood, empty days - should I go on? Sometimes I think that I’m cursed.

The latest evidence of this - a broken freezer at the cottage and four white bin bags of rotten chicken, duck, beef, lamb, pork, gammon, prawns, salmon, lobster, cod, sausages, oh and the odd beef burger or two. The good news is that I’m so used to bad things happening now that I just mopped up the blood, loaded the wheelbarrow, and took it to the tip with hardly a whimper or mumble about my cursed luck.

‘What next?’ I thought as I drove to the tip expecting it to be closed, which it almost was - another minute and we’d have missed the attendant who was knocking off ten minutes early and about to lock the gate.

And then, as I was slinging the contents of my overstocked freezer into the skip, it suddenly occurred to me that I have no idea why things happen the way they do. Everything is random no matter how hard you try to make order and structure, or how hard you plan. At the end of the day ‘we’ are not in control - ‘it’ is.

I don’t know why Amy Winehouse died this weekend, wasting her talent and her life, or why some random Christian fundamentalist should blow away more than ninety of his countrymen on the weekend that I threw away just a freezer full of food. But perhaps ‘it’ does.

As I heaved in the last of the bags, the one containing my seafood into that smelly skip I felt lucky for a moment. After all, it was just a few prawns, some salmon, cod, and a lobster in that bag, not me. There were enough bags on that island after last weekend and poor Amy is back to black as her fans sang, maybe a touch insensitively, outside her home that terrible night.

Perspective is a wonderful thing. After all, what is a few lost meals and the cost of a new fridge-freezer compared to either of those tragedies?

The very talented Amy Winehouse was cursed, doomed from the start it seems, and that madman in Norway, shooting and killing everyone in his sight has cursed the lives of countless families for as long as they can bear or must remain living. What a pity that such tragedies should offer me a little optimism by making my own curse seem so very small.

I told someone I know that I was having a bad day recently and he looked me in the eyes and replied: ‘Why did a plane crash into a tower somewhere? Did a big wave wash away your house and kill all your family? Did someone invade your country and take away everything you own? Isn’t any day when that doesn’t happen a good day?’

And of course it is, but still I don’t really know how to finish up this post. I feel lucky not to have Amy’s demons and even luckier not to be a Norwegian teenager stranded on an island with a mindless gunman. I guess using these extreme yardsticks I really am a very lucky man. Maybe I should try to make myself believe it; perhaps then this curse will go away.