"In the Velvet Darkness of the Blackest Night"

Shingles sucks, and you can’t even have chocolate. 

I re-started 300 words (and chocolate, obviously) about three weeks ago, but realised I still wasn’t very well.  This dawned on me due to my fatigue and overwhelming crankiness.  Make that rage.  Possibly sick-bed binge-watching ‘Game of Thrones’ was a mistake.  Although I am contemplating giving the rage a name, much like the Westerosi named their swords.  I favour, ‘Beheader’, due to the ‘head in your hands’ receiving-end of said rage. 

Probably a bad idea.  It would only encourage it.

Instead, I shall live on the edge, by posting a doubler of 600 words, as I suspect that breaking a rule or two may be just what the doctor would order, if anyone could actually get an appointment to see one.

The R&R plan involved going to the cinema, as I couldn’t be bothered concentrating to read.  (The horror).  I wanted to get out and about but not too far, and preferably with a seat at the end.  I saw ‘Firebrand’ slow, naff; ‘The Critic’, something’s wrong with the plot, but Ian McKellen is brilliant and oh, that clock-ticking amber living room.  ‘Lee’, gutsy and harrowing, except I thought Alexander Skarsgård, wonderful as he is, was miscast.  (I did mention I was cranky).

Meanwhile, autumn is spritzing a new palette, changing the beat, mostly to drumming rain, and surrounded by books as I am, what else was there to do, but to buy a couple more. 

I thought that short stories might be a good in, so bought Dillard’s ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ and a wee book called ‘Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain’.  What can I say it had a tree on the cover, and I wanted to add some points to my Waterstone’s card.  I am the marketing man’s dream.  (And if he looks like Jon Hamm in ‘Mad Men’, he is my dream too).

Ever judge a book by its cover?  If it’s got a tree on it, I’ll pick it up.  Or stars.  Am partial to witchy or spooky images, and gilt-stamped gorgeousness also.  It’s pathetic.  I read the blurb, the first paragraph and then what-the-hell it, magpie-like.

‘Know thyself’.  This is ancient wisdom.  A Delphic maxim. Much good it does me, but an adage is often grist for a goal. 

I enjoy Annie Dillard’s writing very much.  It’s both life-affirming and thought-provoking.  One of the more provocative thoughts being, how many books do I read, concluding they were crap?  Unsatisfying.  Unedifying.  I really should be of an age to have favourite authors and stick to buying them, plus some Russian classics.  For perspective. 

As for the vacuous bonnie covers, sell them to the 15p rip-off-merchants and look on it as worth every penny to sharpen up one’s act.

As if Goethe himself were looking down from on high, willing some forward-stepping boldness, any sort of boldness, an email advert arrived offering an additional 10% for each book they buy. 

That’d be one-and-a-half pence each. 

Ka Ching.

Nevertheless, God bless Annie Dillard.

And trees. 

God bless trees.

Some of which become books.

Then, just as I was feeling heaps better, something terrible happened.  I did some DIY.  I put up a wee IKEA shelf.  It was a gateway drug to more DIY.  If only I could have seen the slippery slope I was taking.  But then it happened, I DIY’d the DIY I had been dreading – sanding (gads) and painting the wee weird side door to my kitchen.  I felt fabulous.  Next, draught-proofing it, but am holding out for the gold trim ones.  Magpie-like.

It’s a trageD-I-Y.

Images for this journal have been posted on Insta @purplehaze_journals

Credit: ‘Game of Thrones’ 2011 HBO DVD Series 1-9.  Created/Prod. David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, George R.R. Martin.

Credit: ‘Over at the Frankenstein Place’, ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’.  1975.  Richard O’Brien.

Credit: ‘Mad Men’. Matthew Weiner. 2007. Weiner Bros. Productions, Lionsgate Television, RadicalMedia (pilot only) AMC Original Productions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself#:~:text=Immanuel%20Kant%20(Metaphysics%20of%20Morals,one's%20will%20with%20one's%20duty.

Credit: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Credit: ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters’ Annie Dillard.  1982. Canongate Books 2017.

Credit: ‘Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain’ Amy Jeffs.  2023.  Riverrun books