THE AIR BETWEEN THE SPACES

This’ll be the last post for a while then, while I spend some time reminding myself how to ‘breathe the air between the spaces’.

If you’d like some things to read from the blog, I’ve added some new pages with links to the poems, the stories, and travel diaries I’ve kept. They’re at the top of this page.

Meanwhile, I’ll be ‘shriving’ I suppose - an old-fashioned word for realigning, rebalancing, refreshing, re-penting. The idea is that you clear the house of all the things that might not be good for you (rolling them into pancakes) and live cleaner and healthier. Even if you don’t believe in God, that’s still a great idea from time-to-time - we all need to turn it off and turn it on again. Everyone should have a pancake day.

I’ll be back at Easter, when my system has rebooted, and this long old winter will be no more than a memory. That’ll be nice.

Until then, don’t forget to breathe.

M

Breathe

Breathe the air between the spaces

Catch the glimpse you’re waiting for

Lost where wonder, love embraces

All you are, but wanting more

Find a moment, feel the ocean

The winds and waters they may roar

Let your love be your devotion

Catch that heartbeat, and you’ll soar

THE SWEETNESS OF THE ORANGES

The sweetness of the oranges

From summer’s distant coast

The butter soft and spreadable

On fresh and golden toast

The crispness of the crusty loaf

In thickened slices made.

The quiet pop of opening

The jar of marmalade!

The butter curls in yellow swirls

To vanish out of sight

Deliciously, invisibly

It melts in pure delight

And then a spoon of marmalade

Oh! nature’s golden shred!

Lands softly on that buttered slice

Of freshly toasted bread.

The wind outside the window;

The rain that fills the night

The winter world’s more bearable

With each delicious bite.

The sweetness of the oranges

This thing I like the most,

Where butter meets the marmalade

On fresh and golden toast

IT WAS FLUFF ALL ALONG

“I just feel as though it’s not fair,” I ranted at the EE lady. She looked at me, person to person, as though caught between what she should say and what she actually wanted to say. Her yellow EE badge glistened against the corporate green fleece.

My phone, just six weeks out of warranty, could not be fixed by them for free. I wasn’t able to upgrade early either (without forking out a couple of hundred) and they would have to send it away to look at it.

“I feel like I pay a lot of money for this phone,” I went on, politely, you understand. I was more resigned than upset, “and for it to just stop charging properly, just feels ... wrong. I mean doesn’t it? I haven’t been chucking it about!”

She was sympathetic. And I don’t know whether me going on about capitalism and big greedy companies would affect the outcome, though there must have desperation etched into my face.

She very kindly laid out the options, all of which conjured pictures of guns and barrels, and none of which seemed fair. My phone flashed on 13%. When that ran out I would be uncontactable until November, without a solution.

I thanked her very much - she had helped me to the best of her ability after all. I figured I might as well see what they could do, if anything, at the Apple Store.

-

I only go in there when I have a problem. A cracked screen here, a MacBook stuck on the logo splash screen, there. It was packed as usual.

I elbowed my way through the tattooed millennials and happened upon two Geniuses chatting by the IPad Pro folio cases. I did not have time to be bashful.

“Hi can you help me? It’s a long story, but I bet you’ve heard it before...”

He took my phone and disappeared behind a silver door, leaving me gazing at some iPhone XRs, plugged in, and at 100%. Next time, I mused, I’m getting a cheap phone and a SIM card.

The guy took ages. Just as I was wondering whether he actually did work for the Apple Store, and whether I’d been fleeced by a confidence trickster in a fake t-shirt, he reappeared and beckoned me to the Genius Bar, where he started rifling through a drawer.

-

Now. One of the things I like best about being a human, is that life can switch your mood in less time than it takes to blink. It is amazing, the tiny distance between despair and joy!

Actually, that’s also one of the things I like the least too, but then, that’s the nature of existing, isn’t it?

On the whole though, surprises are a good thing; there’s something sweet about an unexpected boost - moments ago it was impossible; now it’s unbelievably real - a miracle, if you’d like to think of it that way.

The Genius uncoiled a phone charger and plugged it in to the socket. Then he clicked the charging end into the port on my phone, and watched my face light up. A battery symbol appeared next to an unmistakable display of 14%.

“Wh.. what happened?” I trembled.

“Dust,” he beamed. “Over time, it builds up from your pocket..” I knew it! ”...and as you keep plugging the charger in the fluff compresses and makes it harder and harder for the phone to connect.”

The joy was palpable. Funny the things that make you happy - like not having to jam a charger in with your thumbs holding it there for 53 seconds, nor needing to wrap the charger three times around the phone case to apply the right tension to get it charging. And for that simple fix to have all been for free!

I smiled to myself as I left. I would treat myself to a tea in Caffé Nero to celebrate. But not, I reminded myself, before I found a new phone case for an iPhone 7, with a flap over the charging port!

CALENDAR CALCULATIONS

For reasons I can't quite remember, I've been working out how to tell what day any date was in history.

What a useless waste of time. You can just look it up.

Nonetheless, it's lead me to some discoveries. One is that the day and date repeat without fail every twenty eight years. Whatever day it is today, it was exactly the same 28 years ago, and, 56, and of course, 112, and so on. That was helpful.

The second thing I've found out is that the calendar actually changed in 1752, and in the UK, we actually lost ten days from existence while we switched from Julian to Gregorian. September 1752 was 20 days long. That made my calculations really annoying, not to mention the fact that Europe as a whole, didn't complete that switch until (would you believe) the 1920s.

The next interesting thing is that the dates also repeat every 6,5,6 and 11 years, but the order depends on whether it's a type 1, type 2, type 3 or type 4 (leap) year, and whether the current date is before February 29th or after it. 2019 for example, is a type 3 year: the dates after February were the same in 2013, 2002, 1996 and 1991.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, century years (-00) that aren't divisible by 400 aren't leap years. So any date in the Seventeenth Century (1600-1699) has to shift three spaces along to account for 1700, 1800, and 1900, if you're calculating it based on a current date.

What a system! And all because it actually takes the Earth 365 and a quarter days, rather than exactly 365 spins, to make its way around the sun. Oh, and that there are twelve months with a weird number of days in them, and awkwardly enough, seven days in the week. I'd be adding another day to the weekend if it were me.

I tested it and got September 1st, 1666 right without looking it up. Then I tried some more convolutions and realised that I'd just fluked it. My maths isn't great.

There's got to be a better system, surely? I mean I know we're kind of limited by the physical constraints of the planet's motion through our Solar System, but maybe a ten month calendar with each month having 36 days in it, and then a five day break at the end of the year? Or how about days that are just ever so slightly longer than twenty four hours to compensate, and gradually shift to get longer in the summer and shorter in the winter? Computers could sort it all out for us, couldn't they?

Well that's a can of worms isn't it. I'm not starting Skynet.

I think I'd just like a three-day weekend to be a thing. Actually I'd really like that.

Happy Friday.