life's little pleasures

A couple of people have recently made reference to the fact that they are somehow able so shrug off little annoyances; to let them slide off like a warm knife off a duck's back. Whether this is an innate ability or a technique they have developed throughout their life so far was not stated. Whilst I do enjoy a goodish rant every now and then I do sometimes worry that worrying about things and fretting about stuff and being annoyed by life's little annoyances might not be entirely good for long-term healthy peacefulness.

Take today: a normal weekend-Sunday which should be perhaps slightly quieter than usual seeing as it's a long weekend for part of the population. As Nicky was at home catching up on sleep (after spending half the night exhibiting what could either be the symptoms of norovirus infestation or a side-effect of the Greggs prawn-flavour sandwich she unwisely bought between allotmenting and post-allotment pub yesterday evening) I essentially had the day to myself to fill as I saw fit and thought it best to spend it out of the house doing things in the nice fresh air and not pestering sleepypeople. The end result is that I took next week's shirts to work, wandered about for a bit, found myself in Leith then in Stockbridge and so decided that I might as well carry on along the Water of Leith Walkway to Balerno seeing as the weather was quite palatable and I needed to test both my trainers and bag for medium-distance comfort. As tends to happen when walking on paths I was annoyed to various levels by the things I encountered along the way and was wondering whether the overall effect of the walk was a net gain in calmness or annoyance and how long thing which annoyed me remained an annoyance before continued walking negated their effect. A woman with a dog not on a lead which licked my legs on the Rocheid path took about four hundred metres to wear off - usually this would piss me off for the rest of the day but I was able to shout at her a bit and encountered another annoying event (workmen attempting to block off the road between the Rocheid Path and Stockbridge whilst they replaced the perfectly adequate pavement with scrappily-laid tarmac) before the dog had worn off. One cyclist not saying "Thank you" for me moving off the path to let him by lasted only fifty metres and was easily negated by four whole cyclists saying "Thank you" and nodding between Dean and Roseburn. Some antisocial allotmenters having a bonfire RIGHT NEXT TO THE PATH between Chesser and Slateford lasted about three hundred metres. Some posh people with very loud voices and stupid coats lasted barely fifty stamped metres whereas a woman with two dogs on ten-metre pink and blue ribbons instead of proper short leads took a good half-mile to disappear. A sign indicating that the path ahead was closed for SIX MONTHS took the half-mile up to the point of actual closure which itself took the mile-long detour and a further half-mile to go away by which point I only had three miles left and encountered a bloke with a lead-less and inquisitive dog which I was worried might use up the remaining distance though the speed of the walking and the pleasantness of the surroundings meant that after another mile I was again free to just enjoy the walk, finally finishing in a relatively calm state.

I'll have to try and make a note sometime of for how long nice things give me a wee fillip though they tend to occur more on the low-grade nastiness of the street as intermittent quanta of pleasantnesses rather than on off-road paths where the niceness is much more continuous and the nastinesses occur in discrete events. I can't immediately think how the end of the nice-event could be measured whereas it's relatively easy to notice when a nastiness has worn off as I can feel my face relaxing out of the scowl.