Four in the Morning

A new day is dawning... blah blah blah. The moon hangs full, low and perfect over Edinburgh Castle. It reminds anyone who cares that in another half lunar cycle it will be over Penzance and Falmouth, its pointy black shadow searing a 10 mile swathe across the planet for the 1999 eclipse. I'd love to go there. But there's lots of things I'd love to do - it's really more fun not doing them and then getting depressed about it. Plus it might rain.

I've known of this eclipse for a very long time, although for decades the memory was buried. I was fourteen years old, you see, and reading the New Scientist magazine, when I saw this article about a total eclipse in the south of England in 1999. Looking up from the magazine to my mother, who was knitting, the following exchange took place:
       "Mam, can we go to the total eclipse of the sun?"
        "When is it pet?"
        "August 1999."
        You'll be middle-aged then, pet. I don't think you'll need me to take you."
(The above is true, if not word-perfect. You couldn't make it up!) So the 1999 eclipse has some poignancy, some special meaning for me. We shall see. What's fer ye will no go by ye, as they say here.

Yesterday afternoon was ghastly. At the beginning of the year we promised you structural changes. Well - we did change employment, and that's much better. But really not much else. The pub is rapidly becoming an Out Patients for the dispossessed and self-destructive, as each in their various ways sign up for their myriad downfalls. Set Phasers to AUTODESTRUCT. Life, Jim, but only nominally.

Courtesy prevents us from elaborating, but - put simply - it's just no fun any more mixing with people whose very spark has gone out. We may be older, much older, but still we harbour somewhere the knowledge that there's more to life than drink and drugs and the pursuit of the collaborating impossible. It wasn't always thus, you know. I sense the "post-kitchen" period is coming to an end.

Hmmmm. Things will definitely get better. Watch this space. Ideas for a new life should be emailed, but you can mark them non-urgent.

Alistair and Dolly came back from Australia and the Far East. Hong Kong was smelly, but the squid was delicious. Exquisite. Aren't queens wonderful?