Delving into the freezer, I found something marked 'app', a pale golden substance in a bag intended for the Christmas dinner to accompany the turkey. My sister is a middle-aged Yorkshire-woman like myself, and the way she refers to '...these... (sigh, then jaw setting firmly) "APPS" ....' shows what a tough and discerning marketplace the likes of us make for those who peddle these devices. I am not at all sure what an 'app' really is, and I will have to Google for what comes under this umbrella.
Another way into my thinking today was the idea of synchronicity, 'cos my self-help book asks me every week whether I've experienced any. Wiki says, as I have quoted before:
"Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance and that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s".
Yes, definitely. I suppose the event in the song 'My Grandfather's clock' is such an occurrence. Thus when I faced a night of inner overheating due to the usual Dec 27th bout of ill-health - a classic winter cold - I had the laptop with me for comfort and entertainment, and dammit if the thing didn't overheat for one last time and go black and into literal meltdown, so I discovered afterwards. Connections invisible to the observer fell apart, and the thing ceased to function. Fortunately I am still functioning, but I had a night of soul-searching as in my fevered state I had to think hard about re-drawing the line around what I consider to be 'me', and exclude anything to do with the now useless scrap 'Hewlett Packard tx 2000 notebook'. All those un-backed up files and pictures! A big chunk of my life down the plughole and connections severed, it felt. I'm not the only one upset by this - there are thousands:
http://www.petitiononline.com/deadhptx/petition.html
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I suddenly felt very abandoned, just when I was starting to get comfortable in this realm of apps, whatever they are; all this electronic stuff to which I'd entrusted a lot of myself had let me down, and I yearned to exist solely in the world of apple sauce and things I can see. Without thinking, after the meltdown my hand reached groggily for a book entitled 'The Mediaeval Tailor's Assistant' and I started to research ways of covering the head with pieces of cleverly cut linen. A sudden very obvious dive into a comfort zone; but its lack of providing anything more than immediate temporary assistance proved that comfort is largely to be found in being connected to one's past and present and other people by whatever means the age we live in allows. (But the later discovery that my data is recoverable strangely also made me slightly regretful, as I'd started to redraw that line I spoke of, with a lot less baggage within it.)
I'm reading 'The Book of Margery Kempe', the 14thC autobiographical-spiritual writer; I feel sure that she'd have been a classic blogger if she lived today. My reading of her is in its infancy and I apologise for again reaching for Wiki, which says of her: "Part of Margery Kempe's significance lies in the autobiographical nature of her book: it is the best insight available of a female, middle class experience in the Middle Ages." I think this backs up my suggestion. (Wow, she really was forging ahead in the apps of her particular age!) I'm not sure whether she is officially classed as a mystic or not, as in the past there was a lot of stress on her being barmy and not really in the same class as Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle etc etc. At this stage, I'm simply taken by the way she refers to herself as 'this creature' or 'the said creature'. I did start to read her stuff with the thought that that there might be something in it that would be transferrable from her blog to mine, and just when I need it, she reminds me of our creatureliness, and I'm thinking that a creature is really a lone thing and in essence quite low on baggage when examined on the dissecting table (though I expect to find that she had quite a bit). A bit of synchronicity there just in the timely appearance of the term itself.
This creature went over the Humber bridge today on her pushbike, into the teeth of a storm, that kind of rain that feels like a lot of needles being hurled at one's cheeks. It seemed a good way to get rid of stale air in the lungs accumulated during a cold, replacing it with fresh petro-chemical rubbish blowing across to the bike/footpath lane from the road level, and something to take me away from thinking too much about lines to be drawn. No pics today, as although I took some of bridge-towers-with-moon etc, I haven't yet sussed out how to deal with them now I don't have my usual tools. It's been a learning Christmas for us; my mother-in-law is musing that garlic is probably a kind of strong onion and really not to be feared. Where will this all lead......
This blog piece is maybe rubbish, but the ride and the cold and running the Christmas house-for-ten makes me pleasantly sleepy, so the tired creature needs to go to bed....... awful without pictures though - this will have to be remedied. Being a creature of habit, a Yorkshirewoman who likes the tried-and-tested, I won't be properly happy until t'owd man has installed 'Lotus Word Pro' on whatever machine I am to use in the near future.
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