Another day in the madhouse

Another day reaches its end as the moon - is it a full moon tonight? - rises over the forest and the bridge that for some reason had me thinking of the Ambrose Bierce short story An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge. I first came across this story as a film on my grandmother's television when I was too young to deal with stream of consciousness oddity, but today it just seemed suitable for the strange limbo of now. Are we escaping, or are we living merely through the interval between hanging and death? 

What brought this on, I think, is the current switching between optimism and gloom. I read something positive - let's say the rapidly falling Covid hospitalisation etc rates in Scotland, or the effects of the vaccine on the over-80s. Then I make the mistake of delving into Twitter over breakfast, and find the rancour of Scottish politics just now, or a group of people who seem to want to stay locked down for ever, and gloom descends again. It's not that I think the current political issues in Scotland actually mean much to your ordinary voter who's decided, in the light of the horrendous misgovernment from Westminster, that Scotland would be better on its own - it's the political classes who are having a field day, with the media in hot pursuit, horns blazing. But I spend too long looking at my phone, and then I hate myself ...

On the plus side, I've had communication from people outwith our church community who are keen to join in the next set of poetry workshops, and I sold two more copies of the anthology, which set me thinking that I might actually get doing a launch event this spring, a year after it came out. Passing over the books brought a doorstep chat, which is always good, even if my visitor got rather wet in her efforts not to sully my porch with her presence. (Are we always going to be doing this sort of thing?)

We went out very late, for a walk in Benmore Gardens. We saw no-one until we were just about to leave, when a brief conversation with a woman revealed that she had been a pupil, though only of Himself, and knew who we both were. It's strange, all these grown-up, middle-aged children ... Any way, this made it even later when we left the gardens, so that the forest was filled with shadow and the moon was rising. Blipping the bridge over the River Eachaig, with the dark brown water rushing after it and the spooky thoughts of a long-forgotten story.

Last moan: there was no butter in my click 'n' collect shopping today. No butter! I ask you ...