A small thought.

I lost the internet yesterday. I don’t know where it went; down the back of the sofa, I expect. I was disproportionately cross. I realised suddenly what a cheering thing it can be. When I’m tired after a long day’s work, I really like the jokes and the camaraderie and the pictures of small elephants. I know that some think it clever and fashionable to mock, to sneer at people on Twitter saying what it was they had for breakfast, or those Facebook show-offs with their travels to foreign parts and their swanky airline itineraries. But I don’t care; I like it. I like the betting tips and the sudden wails and the moments of truth and the fabulous jokes.

Too tired now for much here. Rode the mare; did my HorseBack work as a new course swings into action; wrote 769 words of book; did some overdue logistical tasks.

A rude man in a dustbin lorry shouted at me for parking in the wrong place. I gave him my best Lady Bracknell look. ‘Good manners cost nothing,’ I said. He sneered at me. ‘Neither does common sense,’ he said.

I am a big fan of common sense, but I think manners trump it. There really is no call for shouting. Then I felt a bit sad for him. He was probably having a horrible time at home or was fretting about something or had a dream smashed, or some such, and it was an Object A and Object B situation. He was furious about Object A, and he took it out on Object B, which was in this case what he must have seen as a maddeningly flaky woman with scarlet hair (I had just dyed it from a box) parking her stupid car in the way of his truck.

Object A and Object B is one of my old saws. I use it to check my own mental health. If I find myself shouting too loudly at some poor person on the radio, or getting far too furious about a dangling modifier, or become uncharacteristically brusque when I am usually polite, I know that there is something going on which I am not addressing. Chastened, I sit in a quiet room and do an inventory of my own psyche.

I was more upset about that grumpy man than I need have been. I think it is because I am missing my old dog. It’s a stupid thing and I always feel a bit ashamed to admit it, when the world is so troubled. But there it is. I miss her and I don’t think I’ve quite mourned her properly, because I’ve been so busy and driven by all this new work, and I need to do something, quietly and discreetly, about that. The heart is the heart, and you can’t wrangle it into the impervious shape you would like it to be in, just because you’ve got work to do.

So I suppose that is my very small thought for the day.

 

Some quick random pictures of the day before I collapse: