No Good Boyo was very excited when I proposed a romantic weekend break in the Cotswolds. His enthusiasm wavered on the morning of departure when I said I was coming along too, but he still managed to negotiate the M4 through his tears.
It was the turn of my heart to sink on our arrival at a rectory that had been converted into an hotel, and not only because the nearby church had not undergone a similar fate. Boyo pointed to the welcome note in our room and sniggered: "Dogs are welcome".
Just as his father believes hedgehogs can sing if you tickle their bellies, Boyo is convinced that the English invented the country hotel for the exclusive pursuit of coitus with canines. He cites fellow Celt GB Shaw to the effect that all the Englishman's pastimes bar gambling and smoking can be shared with a dog.
The result is that he spends our every weekend away in speculating on which of our guests wants, as he puts it, to "canoodle with the poodle".
I chose not to join in, and reflected instead on comments by Gadjo Dilo and Kevin Musgrove - the Brains Trust of Boyo's circle of little electro-friends - on the ephemerality of life.
In brief, Gadjo had an antiquated relative who held that the world might have ended in about 1918. Kevin opined that this may have been true, and that all of our subsequent existence is a group delusion.
This ties in with my view that Boyo and his web-fellows are merely projections one of the other. The thought that we are in fact all but the dying dream of Europa is a comfort to the Spengler Within. Bolshevism, television, congés payés - all a passing nightmare.
If enough bloggers state this "simultaneously and at the same time", as the Welsh have it, will the world awaken from its slumber and finally die?
A consoling thought to get you through many a bad night.
7 comments:
As somebody stuck in Dante's Pugatório
(Dà oggi a noi la cotidiana manna,
sanza la qual per questo aspro diserto chiamato TEFL
a retro va chi più di gir s'affanna.) (my emphasis)
the world ended long ago. How do I join the Brain Trust? Is it as rigorous as MENSA?
I think Mrs Boyo knows full well that this thing we call "the world" never existed in the first place (and therefore can never be said to have ended), but in order to spare our brittle sensibilities she is kindly pretending that only our continued perception of it is delusionary.
Left-footed Sculpor Eric Gill is the only Englishman I know about who "did" his dog, but at least he had the decency to romance the mutt in his own backyard rather than checking into some seedy hotel!
I dunno about Spengler, but to me "the dying dream of Europa" sounds very Lars von Trier.
Haha, the Welsh are a funny race, aren't they Mrs Boyo? Never say one word when two will do.
The key, MC, is to say something of potentially cosmic significance, if possible involving an family relict. I admire the wisdom of our tribal elders.
Gadjo, I would include Von Trier's film in my list of 12 if Boyo had bothered to ask me.
GB, their language is an echo chamber of verbal redundancy that they try to reproduce in English. The effects are comical, at a distance.
Life is a dream. If you wake up, you die.
Life is one long entrapment in somebody else's acid flashback.
btw — I like being part of a brain's truss.
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