Thursday 3.9.09

I've been enjoying Youtube clips of Tim Minchin lately. He writes and performs good tragi-comic songs and has a sexy stage presence down pat. It has been fun reading the comments from thousands of besotted teens and twenty somethings. It's amazing what way too much eyeliner and hair gel can do to make a man alluring. Gordon Brown might wish to take note. I don't totally get the image thing, but his work, which attempts to strip away sentiment but is paradoxically sentimental has me hooked. I'm perhaps showing my age by being a bit less keen on the atheist stuff. There seem to be a lot of young comedians God bashing and raving about science. I think it has become as fashionable to the new breed of white liberal intellectuals as homeopathy was to mine, taken up with equal zeal, and with equal ignorance. Do you follow the values of Jesus Christ? No, I follow the values of Dawkins, I like his books better.

It isn't that I'm bothered by this change in fashion. I had abandoned Christian belief before my age reached double figures, spent my teenage years in morning Assemblies refusing to bow my head, justifying this to friends and teachers. I grew out of talking about it though, and feel no desire to bang on about it or debate with anybody. One of Nina's friends turned up a couple of months ago with an Atheist badge. I wore CND badges in the 80's but I don't get that at all. Why would you need to tell people what you don't believe in? There is a whiff of faux superiority to the new atheist movement. As though having a spiritual belief of any kind should be considered childish. In amongst comments on Tim Minchin's work was a debate between two fans, one of whom was strongly denying the existence of the 'soul'. It was a music video, but they weren't talking about David Soul, it was all very earnest and conceptual. Considering the main aim is comedy, I felt the urge to tell them to lighten up. I also felt ever so slightly defensive because in spite of my own rationalities where organised religion is concerned, I do believe in the soul. Without soul, what is sentience, or love, or friendship, or humanity but a few ounces of grey matter and electrical impulses? If that's all it is, then that's too scary for me to get a handle on. I need a bit of mystery.

Closer to home, I had cause to wonder what makes one person like or dislike another. H had a new friend over today. From a brief conversation, I found myself liking her, which is odd, because I'm generally quite reserved and don't really like visitors (that's not the depression talking, that's just me). While I scrubbed up the kitchen I thought about it and concluded that I had taken a liking to her because she had laughed at my jokes. That was enough for me. I think I may indeed be that shallow. Later on in the evening, I told H about this. "Ah", said my kid. "I'll phone all my mates and let them know, then they can all come round tomorrow." Gulp. I shall be sure to make no more jokes to teenage strangers. Just in case. It would be for H's own good. There's nothing worse as a teenager than having your Mum try to ingratiate herself with your mates, now is there?

Sunday 29.3.09

After a stormy yesterday, today was all sunshine. At Nick’s suggestion, we changed our plans to spend the day with our respective families and instead, spent the day being tourists. Nick fancied seeing some of the ancient standing stones, and as I don’t remember having seen them, (although as a little girl, I probably did) I was happy to go along.

First stop, the Merry Maidens, a circle of three foot high standing stones in a field. The story goes that the maidens were turned to stone because they were dancing on a Sunday. This seemed a touch spiteful to me as the maidens would have been six year old girls having a party on the grass, perhaps singing the Okey-kokey. I can’t imagine that any god would have objected, but who knows about gods? Perhaps s/he prefers Agadoo? While I didn’t feel any spiritual connection, it would have been a nice place for a picnic on this sunny morning. We were the only people there, apart from a young woman waiting at the gate, for a bus as it turned out.

We moved on to Men an Tol. There were a handful of cars parked up. It was an easy walk of perhaps a mile along a farm track. We were chattering and taking photographs, me trying to make the best of my new camera, which I still can’t get good photos from. We remarked on the quietness, there was no road noise, no aircraft and no livestock, just the rustle of last years grasses, and the crunch of mica under our trainers. We saw a few people, but fewer than we expected given the number of cars. Men an Tol is a circular stone with a hole in it flanked by two finger stones. By tradition, people would pass their babies through the stone, but we couldn’t remember what for. The Men an Tol is quite small, like the knee-high fripperies they put in to model villages, but it feels like its in a good place, set up on the high heath which is interspersed with scrubby pasture (there were a couple of cows, but only a couple). Other walkers started to appear, so we made our way back down the hill. All of the couples that passed us were holding hands. Were they affected by the stones, or was it just the warm Sunday sunshine? I wasn’t feeling romantic, but was lulled by the walk and quite tired.

Nick was keen, so we went to see just one more stone in a field. Lanyan Quoit was originally a barrow, but now is a three legged stool for a giant. Looking beyond it is a run down engine house, standing alone on the hill. History upon history. I was starting to get bored and irritable.
We stopped for lunch at The Commercial Hotel in St Just. The proprietor was standing at the door and bigged up the roast offered, “You won’t get a better roast anywhere”. We felt like we couldn’t say no, and it was a fair meal in the scruffy, under invested place. The building’s proud exterior sadly too big for today’s population, built when travellers would come and go, brisk trade in the nineteenth century when mining was at its peak.

In the interests of ice-cream, a final stop in StIves. By this time I was weary and too much in need of a loo. My mood had sunk to the extent that buying the ice-cream was an effort. My mouth was moving but little sound coming out, the eyes of the young ice cream seller too shiny, too brown. I left Nick and wondered up and down the harbour which was busy, perhaps for the first time this year, everybody stripped down to tee shirts.

We never made it to Squire for tea. I went to sleep at around seven, and didn’t wake up to watch the TV, to write my blog, or even when Nick came to bed. I blame the spirits of the stones, of course.