Halfwit and the Spider

 

The other night while watch my favourite TV programme (Big Brother) I heard some tapping sounds on my bedroom wall. Thinking that The Teenager was trying to entertain me in a new, novel teenagery sort of way I happily start tapping back.

There was more tapping, a little more insistent than before.

I merrily tapped back.

Then there was even more tapping, followed by a faint call for help.

I dash to his bedroom.

‘Don’t come in,’ a near hysterical voice pleads. ‘Don’t come in. You can’t come in.’

Now I’m in a panic.

The Teenager’s knees dislocate easily and I’ve got visions of him lying on the floor in agony just by his bedroom door.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask through the closed door.

‘There’s a spider,’ he wails. ‘It’s just by the door. If you open the door it will move. It’s huge.’

‘Okay,’ I reply. ‘I’ll get a glass.’

‘Come back quick,’ he pleads.

I get the glass and return to the door. Where’s the spider?’ I ask.

‘Same place.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m on the bed.’

‘Okay, well… I’ll have to open the door in order to catch it. ‘I’m coming in,’ I announce.

I open the door SWAT style and see the spider which is already on the run…it’s a monster. It’s huge, ugly and fast, and it’s running towards the bed. A white faced-teenager is now screaming.

‘Okay’, I say, ‘you go into my room and I’ll catch the wee beastie for you.’

The teenager bolts for safety, slamming shut the door behind him, and I’m left all alone in the room, alone that is except for the spider!

I now have to crawl under The Teenager’s bed in search of the beast.

And that’s when I discover the dust…a decade of dust lies under the bed. It lies over books and over bits of a computer that we were going to build but never got around to building in the end… and somewhere in amongst this grey, soft, dusty land is the arachnid.

I shine the bedside light into the gloom but there’s no sign of it.

Eventually (cutting a long story short) I do catch it, and it is a monster. It is quick moving and angry and it waves hideous long legs at me through the glass. It has a fat, swaying bloated body suspended on legs that are anything but spindly. It’s one of the meanest looking spiders I’ve ever seen; and I can hardly bare to look at it.

I realise though, that I will have to show the beastie to The Teenager otherwise he’d never believe that I’d actually caught it, and that his room was now free of it.

I want to set his mind at rest.

So I go back to my bed room hoping to set his mind at rest by showing him a glimpse of the spider trapped at the bottom of a Guinness beer glass.

All I wanted to say was…‘I just want to show you that I’ve caught it before I put it outside.’

But I only get as far as ‘I....’ because The Teenager has caught the merest glimpse of it, and he’s already started screaming and he’s backing up onto the bed and pressing himself against the wall.

I try again to explain my good intentions over The Teenager’s alarm. I’m not taunting him at all…The Teenager though is doing a passable arachnid act of his own, he’s now all scurrying arms and legs, and he seems to be scrambling up the wall in a whirlwind of white-faced activity that’s defying gravity. He’s now screaming and he’s completely hysterical; his voice has gone up several octaves, and multiple decibels. And he’s incoherent and shouting something incomprehensible… but I catch the drift. I know what he’s trying to say: GET RID OF IT!

I take the spider outside, and release it.

Then I go back upstairs to calm The Teenager down.

Spiders, it seems, are definitely not his thing!

‘Why did you do that?’ he complains bitterly.

I try to explain my reasoning for showing him the spider trapped in the glass, but his terror has cut off any link to any part of his brain that I can reason with. Elemental fears have shut down his higher cognitive reasoning skills. He thinks I’m a fool an idiot.

I give up trying to explain and go off to watch Big Brother instead.

There’s a spider in the Big Brother kitchen and Siavash is trembling and has climbed onto one of the kitchen units. Halfwit comes to his rescue. (It all sounds familiar)

It’s hard to say but there’s a moment, just before Halfwit squishes the spider in the kitchen sink, when I catch a glimpse.

No!

It couldn’t be…could it?

Mazzy Star

Still falling
Breathless and on again
Inside today
Beside me today
Around broken in two
till you eyes shed
Into dust
Like two strangers
Turning into dust
till my hand shook with the way I fear

I could possibly be fading
Or have something more to gain
I could feel myself growing colder
I could feel myself under your fate
Under your fate

It was you breathless and tall
I could feel my eyes turning into dust
And two strangers turning into dust
Turning into dust

Mazzy Star

Leaping over the Wall

 

I’d noticed the plastic bag next to the wall in the garden and had dismissed it, thinking it was nothing more than a bag that had escaped from the nearby bin bag.

It was there the next day too.

And the next.

I’d already put the black bin bag out on the front when I caught yet another glimpse of it. I went to pick it up.

That was when I realised it was full of lettuce, tomatoes, water cress and cucumber. They were all kinda warm from the sun.

That’s when the penny dropped and I remembered what my neighbour had said, ‘I’ll put the bag over the wall for you,’ she’d said.

I glanced at her windows, all the blinds were down she was on holiday…and that bag full of food had been waiting several days for me.

Panicking, I chopped up the food, and rushed back outside. I jumped over the wall balancing a plate on which there was a rather warm, hastily prepared salad.

Then I went in search of the beast… that was probably on its last legs.

The beast I was supposed to be looking after.

I search the overgrown garden and eventually…

I found it.

Still alive.

Just

But it was barely moving.

I placed the food in a heap in front of it, and it lumbered exceptionally slowly the few centimetres it had to move to reach it.

And the look in its eye!

But what else can you expect from a tortoise!

Bliss!

 

Revision can lead to cabin fever and The Teenager wanted to go out for a drive and a walk somewhere.

I drove him to Everdon Stubbs where I knew there was a rope swing.

The woods were astonishingly beautiful.

I thought the bluebells would have gone over but they hadn’t quite and it was quite a magical place. A cuckoo was calling. We saw rabbits and squirrels, and later views towards Daventry of open fields.

There was a low swing, empty and waiting for us. The Teenager had a go first, and then it was my turn.

There is nothing more wonderful than swinging gently, suspended over the ground. There was birdsong and bluebells in every direction. It was perfect…until…

The Teenager started to push me.

Suddenly, I’m whizzing through the trees hollowing like Tarzan … which is fine until…the swing begins to go in a great circle. This is fine too, until… the swing is pushed very hard once again and I’m now swooping close to the trunk of the tree from whose branch the swing has been tied. I realise that I’m on a dangerous trajectory… there is a near miss of the mighty tree trunk… and I realise that another push is all it would take for me to hit it.

I shout to The Teenager not to push me. I shout that if he does push again that I will crash into the tree trunk. I shout warning after warning.

I forget that I am with a teenager.

As the swing passes him by, he pushes me even harder than before.

The swing obeys the laws of physics, and the meaner laws of fate, and swirls and swings me around so that I curl high up into the air before being smashed, defencelessly, sideways on, straight into the tree trunk.

 

I discover to my cost that tree trunks do not yield when something swings into them. I discover that bark is like a giant form of sandpaper and that clothes are no defence against it. I discover that I’m made of softer stuff than a tree.

I am knocked from the swing and dragged through the earth like a human plough.

Shaken, I stagger to my feet.

Later, when I asked the Teenager why he'd still pushed me after I'd shouted out to him not to; and warned him about the imminent danger, he said...

‘Oh, I thought it was just banter!’

And I’m left wondering why he couldn’t see and guess the outcome of the trajectory he had set me on… how he couldn’t see how dangerous the last circuit was…and I’m also left wondering as to what ever had happened to his common sense and his imagination if he couldn’t predict the outcome…especially when his own self-preservation, and pain threshold is always set at a default setting of maximum!

And why did he not heed my warning shouts.

(sigh)

‘It was funny though,’ he says later, as I checked on bruised fingers, and turned down socks to discover how little skin was left on my ankle bone. ‘It was really funny.’

I can feel tinkling bruises already deepening their hues all down my right hand side. The bones in my wrist are stiffening… I haven’t yet dared to inspect the damage properly…probably because my head has been too jarred for me to think straight.

But I did get back on the swing again, despite the bruises, the fingers that would no longer bend, the concussion, the blood stains, and the dirt covered trousers, and the…er..pain!

And it was lovely once again to be suspended in the air again…to see the bluebells… and the robin…and to swirl freely though the air…and to enjoy the fragrance of the flowers… and to swirl over that strangely disturbed mound of soft earth where once a teenager had stood!

 

 

 

Bliss!

Henrietta the VIII

 

Scientists do thought experiments and reveal the wonders of the universe. I was wondering if the same could be applied to history. England glories in the colourful character of Henry VIII. His portrait standing astride hands on hips is synonymous for many with the image of manly power, wealth and authority. So here is my historical thought experiment. What would we have thought of this monarch in this painting if he had not been Henry but Henrietta?

We would of course be seeing Henrietta first not as a human being but as a woman, with all the negative and critical baggage that that brings with it.

I guess the portrait would be reviled for starters. Imagine people standing before a portrait of Henrietta. Gone would be any allusions to a colossus striding the world proclaiming his power and authority in its place would be simple, bloated, ugly Henrietta.

What would we see?

We’d see a fat, bloated, obese woman. We’d see her tiny, mean-looking eyes. We’d see the fat, blubbery cheeks that spoke of self-indulgence and gluttony. We’d see the mean closed mouth. (We’ll assume that she wouldn’t have had the moustache and beard.) We’d judge her by our terrible scales that weigh up her feminine beauty and we’d find her scoring a big fat zero. I doubt that many would choose to look upon her portrait for long. We would mock the woman who covered her bloated body with outlandish gowns, rich furs and jewels. We would laugh at her ra ra skirt and snigger over her wearing a mini skirt at her age! Her sagging Nora Batty tights would give us delightful hoots… we’ll spare her the indignities of commenting upon her cod piece .

The point is: take away our expectations of Kingship in this portrait and substitute simple Henrietta and you get the truth about the person that once stood there. You’ll see a self-indulgent, unkind person with dark small eyes and trumped up self-importance, a creature that looks like a bloated maggot.

Perhaps this is the message that the painter was trying to achieve. The artist shows us what was once behind this monarch and perhaps what he turned his back on in the elaborately painted background. We have the beauty of the Celtic knot work… the rich historical heritage of the land. He has shown us the splendours of the architecture in the carvings behind him which have echoes of broken monasteries and of looted wealth. He depicts a verdant land with the full greenery behind Henry, showing the once over-abundant richness of the country. The artist then gives us all the trappings of kingship in the clothing of the monarch topped off with the flamboyant Tudor hat. Perhaps it is in the carpet that the artist tries to show us what this king has really achieved, and what lies under the shadow of his legacy; we are given the carpet’s patterned leaves which are brown and faded. Perhaps the artist was suggesting that England has been worn thin under his dominating rule.

We can set Henrietta aside now and truly see Henry for what he was.

All the painter’s skill goes into the painting exquisite detail showing us an abundance of wealth and riches…and then the artist turns his attention to the king’s face and what do we get? We get the bland, contourless features of Henry. An empty, pale face devoid of all that makes us human; a face devoid of animation. There is no twinkle in the eye, no smile that says I’ve achieved all this for my people. No deeply etched lines that speak of worried and well considered thought. Instead there is blankness and emptiness: a face upon which nothing is written. Why? Why is there this emptiness, this blandness? Why has the artist painted the king this way? Is it because what the artist knew of his model was too horrific to depict in paint?

Was it easier to depict a maggot than a monster? A maggot that grew fat on the riches of his Kingdom? Was the painter depicting all men of power and their corruption in this painting as a warning for our times too?

A strange Form of Life by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

.

a strange form of life
kicking through windows
rolling on yards
heading in loved ones' triggering eyes
a strange one
and a hard way to come into a cabin
into the weather
into a path
walking together
a hard one
and the softest lips ever
25 years of waiting to kiss them
smiling and waiting
to bend down and kiss twice
the softest lips
in a dark little room
across the nation
you found myself racing
forgetting the strange and the hard
and the soft kiss
in the dark room
and a strange form of life
kicking through windows
rolling on yards
heading in loved ones' triggering eyes
a strange one

Robert Mirabel The Dance