With religious resoluteness I retired to bed at ten o’clock last evening. But sleep was not to be had. Instead for the next hour I rolled back and forth, attempting, by stretching my left leg and reversing the extensions of my toes, to extricate myself from the convulsions of the muscles and the paralysis of my feet. Apparently the tricycle ride earlier that day had been more adventurous than I appreciated. The now immoveable and desensitized muscles of my left calf (below my new knee) were tightened and strained by the exuberance. At last admitting defeat I succumbed to the provocation and got out of bed. The soporific exercise was for the moment complete.

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If you’re like most of us, there are events in your life which didn’t pan out quite the way you expected or would have preferred. Depending upon the severity of the decomposition, it may or may not be unsettling. It may also be possible in some circumstances to rewrite the chronology of construction to captivate what was intended at the outset. This is generally called, trying it again.  But it is not always a ready option for a wide variety of reasons such as the penalty of doing so (expense or inconvenience); and some things, even if reversible, become more tarsome to undertake a project to do so.  In short, moving backwards, reversing things isn’t always the best or appropriate answer.

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As I drove home earlier today in my little Cadillac SUV crossover from the Village of Appleton to the Town of Almonte I abruptly caught myself imagining I were in Disneyland, so affecting was the scene before my eyes.

A crossover, crossover SUV, or crossover utility vehicle (CUV) is a type of automobile with an increased ride height that is built on unibody chassis construction shared with passenger cars, as opposed to traditional sport utility vehicles (SUV), which are built on a body-on-frame chassis construction similar to pickup trucks.

I was driving without purpose along the empty county road into a light and glistening snow squall.  The frivolous crystals of wispy white snow evaporated and disappeared from sight as they fell from the sky above towards the ground below. It was a flurry of activity which marked the beginning of November and the start of what I expect will be winter and its predictable snow.

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My inexcusable (and demonstrably inescapable) level of obsessiveness is seemingly without any dignity whatsoever. Any attempt I might advance either to distinguish or to relieve the psychosis is imperilled. My waking (and no doubt some of my sleeping) moments are preposterously consumed by the fixation.

Neurosis is a mild mental disorder NOT arising from organic diseases – instead, it can occur from stress, depression or anxiety. Psychosis is a major personality disorder characterised by mental and emotional disruptions. It is much more severe than neurosis – often impairing and debilitating the affected individual.

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“Nothing has yet been said of the great body of the people, of those who held the ploughs, who tended the oxen, who toiled at the looms of Norwich, and squared the Portland stone for Saint Paul’s. Nor can very much be said. The most numerous class is precisely the class respecting which we have the most meagre information. In those times (circa 1685) philanthropists did not yet regard it as a sacred duty, nor had demagogues yet found it a lucrative trade, to talk and write about the distress of the labourer. ”

Excerpt From
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 1
Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Etymology of Pandar

From Chaucer’s character Pandare (in Troilus and Criseyde), from Italian Pandaro (found in Boccaccio), from Latin Pandarus, from Ancient Greek Πάνδαρος (Pándaros). See also Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Contrary to popular belief about the social stuffiness of people of English descent, the Anglo-Saxons (that is, the Germanic inhabitants of England from their arrival in the 5th century up to the Norman Conquest in 1066) were a bawdy group of people. This dubious celebrity continued full blown into the 16th and 17th centuries. Among its famous authors is John Dryden (19 August 1631 – 12 May 1700) who coincidentally was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745).  Dryden was associated with high Anglicanism; Swift was an Anglican cleric.

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Always about this time of year, north of the 49th parallel, in late October and early November, the first snowfall paints the landscape an innocent white. The temperature is cool enough to preserve the tender blemish. But the import of the change is powerful. We heat ourselves now.

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I am listening to a nocturn in E-flat major by Frédéric Chopin, part of my Favourites stored on the Apple Music site, 245 Songs, 18 hrs. 34 mins. The picks are in some instances the product of maudlin recollection, but most commonly from whatever appeals to me on Apple’s algorithmic selections. I have abandoned the practice of maintaining a library of preferred albums.  Each time I do so (my acquisitiveness is unbreakable) I subsequently discover that my erstwhile favourites have piled atop one another and have been overtaken by random stockpile from the “Listen Now” feature on Apple Music. With so much from which to choose it quickly becomes apparent that saving things is an obstruction; that it is better to shed the burden and to look ahead. Nonetheless for the expediency of readily available music of choice, the Favourites are ideal.  I use it either at my desk or in the car.

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From the moment of rousing the day beneath the shimmering white moon hanging in the dark and clear morning sky, what followed was impossibly delicious! A superbly sumputous day! It was a day when manifestly everyone retired their anxiety and confessed the bounty and beauty of Nature. The scene was the matchless landscape of autumn in its array of colours and windblown varnish. And we saw it to advantage on a sunny day amid cool, dry air; a pastoral setting upon the shaded county roads wobbling between the villages.

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Unless it coincided with the end of a mid-summer month (when routinely there were numerous real estate transactions closing) Friday would normally have marked a pleasant day of the week for practicing law. It was not uncommon for one of my preferred clients to drop into the office unannounced for a glass of sherry and a casual natter. The disposition of the working classes on a Friday was collectively marked by a buoyancy no doubt in anticipation of the upcoming weekend. The uplifted temperament affected everyone, the trades, independent contractors, developers, private and municipal employees and people like me. While I no longer have the weekly need to recuperate from work (or anything else for that matter) nor as a result is the weekend especially distinquishable or remarkable, I nonetheless continue to harbour whatever it was that caused the synapses to diffuse on a Friday.  As trifling as my preoccupations now are, the end of the week is a notch in the post, a conclusion or dénouement. A time of retrospection. Today is no exception.

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