I woke just before dawn this morning, and dawn comes early now, thinking I could hear the twittering of small birds outside my window. But as the mists inside my head cleared I realised it was nothing but the squeaks of my sinuses as I breathed. As light slowly filtered in through the window all was silent outside: no cock crowed in the dawn, no bird sang, no muezzin turned his amplifier up to eleven and blasted the call to prayer out of speakers on top of the minaret, no hawker stood in the street outside yelling that he could sell me a breakfast better and cheaper than I could make it, and throw in a free coffee.
All was silent and cold as the dark paled into grey. A greyness that brought with it a lethargy that has not lifted all day.
Do you remember the tiger-striped dogs?
I'll remind you with a picture.
Wait until you take it out for a walk in the rain, was my first reaction.
But Charles does not seem to be someone who would be easily duped so I take him at his word.
So just think how cute one of those puppies would look under your Christmas tree this year.
Cringing Hell.
Your response to my question on cringing was very disappointing, and no Mars Bars will be awarded.
It is such an interesting topic too. The obvious emotions are too easily recognised. We only have to see two googly-eyed teenagers walking hand in hand to recognise lurv, or to have an apoplectic bus driver chase one's car down the road to recognise anger ( Happened to me.)
It is the emotions one can only catch from out of the corner of one's eye darting from shadow to shadow that are worth giving some thinking time too.
I think that cringing feeling is a very nasty one and all to do with status, power and pecking. I think the emotion might have a lot to do with a desire to hurt people we see as being socially beneath us; to put them back in their place.
Decent people don't cringe.
However the word is ambiguous, there is the submissive cringing of the whipped dog and the false 'empathetic' cringing we feel when we see a bad amateur actor. Something brilliantly described in the opening chapter of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road.
Is there really much difference between the two? I don't know.