problems problems...

First problem as Granny arrives at that threatening site labelled 'New Post' - she doesn't seem to have anything to say....either her head is full of sludge or dead wood or it's just plain empty - leaving aside the matter of a skull, cranial matter, the odd neurone, you know the sort of thing. All of them at the moment like empty pots - or was it sounding brass? - signifying nothing. She's quoting the Bible here -she thinks: she was brought up on Bible as was dear old friend just departed; you didn't have to be a heavy fundamentalist to be brought up on the Bible in those longer-departed days. And it did put some pretty good words in your head; instead of the deadly prose of the Good News Bible ('God said to the snake. You will be punished for this.'.) you got good thunderous seventeenth century English. ('On thy belly thou shalt go..'), Forget religion. Think myth, literature... LET THERE BE LIGHT. Not to mention a burning fiery furnace...

Actually there is not too much light here just now, let alone burning. Just haze, probably come from the Sahara - the north Sahara in this case. So the wind is cold. Shame dear old friend didn't get better weather. She got good flowers, though, thanks to the rain, she got good food, thanks to Granny and Beloved. But she and Granny went on more nostalgia trips than tourist trips - neither of them, they agreed, would want to be eighteen again which is when they last knew each other well - let alone back to the fifties, where they grew up alongside each other.

On the other hand, Granny is thinking now, there was something to be said for that time - and the sixties and seventies, come to that - times you didn't feel compelled to go around inspecting every label, every provenance, for every type of food, every type of garments, reading spectacles donned, perched on end of nose, to peer at small print. (Right on Granny is full of environmental guilt, you see - maybe this, like her liking for seventeenth century syntax, is the the result of all that Bible study.) Once upon a time, there was just food and clothes: a much less wide choice of food, admittedly and not nearly such nice clothes. In Granny's and dear friend's youth, women of their age didn't go around in jeans, fleeces, smocks, crocs, Birkenstocks, etc, all the comfortable stuff; it was high heels, stockings, permed hair, powdered noses, not so simple in that way; Suspender belts: too easily laddered nylons: frizzed hair.

And you wouldn't then (mostly) have got to be an expat in nice climates either, the way Granny is, not unless you were exceptionally adventurous. But this, too, is getting awkward:carbon footprints and all that, Granny's cup of guilt altogether overflowing, as she goes to and fro to visit her family. She thinks back wistfully to those times in her life you just bought, wore, travelled your travels - if you could: when like sex, after the Pill arrived, there appeared to be NO problem. (Apart from the Bomb, of course. But she tried not to think about that.)

But sex turned out not to be so simple, did it? Maybe it was the AWFUL WARNING. After lots of lovely problem-free sex along comes AIDS, along come Chlamydia, Herpes, etc etc. So what do you know? You got free, then you got frightened: the wages of sin and all that. Back to the Bible.

Dear Beautiful Wimp went fishing yesterday and got his nose nipped by a crab. His wages of sin maybe - not that this would have occurred to him. Lucky dog. On the other hand Granny wouldn't want to be a dog. Or a man, come to that. So there you go.