Impressions of Insanity

Impressions

I'll just repeat the warning - the weblog below may contain strong language and explicit references. All links within the posts will open in the same separate window.

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Friday, March 02, 2001

17:24

It just started snowing.

I'm listening to some really good rocky folk music and it's snowing and in the back of my mind I'm aware of the foot and mouth disease causing mass slaughter all across the country because people are too greedy to support small local markets and they want cheap food, mass produced. The market economy has become the supermarket economy.

It's on a day like today when I start dreaming about where I would like to be in ten years time. On a small farm or smallholding, having made Raven Family into a co-operative company providing environmental, internet and esoteric consultancy services for the discerning customer who realises that these things are not as segregated as most people seem to consider them. I would live on this farm with the other people who were involved in the company - my good friends, sibs and cousins, with a couple of dogs and some cats and maybe some rescued corvids.

And on a day like today we would curl around a roaring fire with tea or something and we would watch the snow through the window while the dogs snored, and we would pray to the land spirits to help us protect our animals from unnecessary slaughter.

15% loss of production? I think I could live with that. Could we do such a thing, friends, sibs, cousins? Is this dream something worth turning into an ambition or is it just a wishful fantasy to turn into a work of fiction and live out in my imagination?

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Thursday, March 01, 2001

12:08

More bizarre dreams last night, involving Raven sending me a small, shapeshifting and incredibly intelligent robot that was an embodiment of the feathered fiend himself. I remember being on a boat in the middle of a sea loch. I also remember having to row out to the boat and having trouble because the pain was so bad and I was losing strength in my muscles, and then being hailed from the boat to have it pointed out to me that there was a massive great shark on collision course, and if I didn't get my rowing in gear pretty sharpish I was going to end up bailing out of a broken dinghy to feed the fishes.

I am finding the foot and mouth disease and the official response to it more depressing and infuriating than I can possibly say. I posted a bit about it on the front page blog. Of course, to make links to permanent archives when using SSI to include a blog, you have to use absolute hyperlinks, dammit, as I have just discovered while trying to get that one to work.

Feeling very stressed right now. I am very scared about what is going to happen to the Land. I am petrified that some sort of perceived "economic necessity" that is really an artefact of 19th century aristocratic selfishness will mean the mass destruction of wildlife. Foot and mouth, in reality, isn't much worse than if a human were to catch a bad cold or the flu, with mouth ulcers. I can't begin to describe this feeling of dread that I have.

Has selfishness and greed finally brought us to the brink of an unnecessary but inevitable environmental disaster?

Dear gods please no.

RB

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Wednesday, February 28, 2001

13:18

Yes. That's what the initials are for.

Anyway. Gym day today. Last day of my three days a week schedule, but I'm sitting here feeling stiff and sore and looking at the weather and thinking that I don't really want to go today, and maybe this week I could take my last opportunity to miss Wednesday and go on Thursday instead. The last three weeks or so I have been doing Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.

I'm applying for a job as Farm Biodiversity officer (and going to keep down the competition by not telling you where), and I've got the letter and CV in the post, but decided today to send them by email as well, because with all the movement restrictions in place as a result of the foot and mouth crisis, I'm not sure whether the farm in question will be getting its post. Of course, for all I know the farm in question may well have decided not to employ anyone because of problems caused by the foot and mouth crisis, but we'll see. The last time I applied for a job I really, really wanted I got an interview and everything but they ended up not employing anyone at all.

It's dreadful. I was thinking about just taking off for a couple of days to get away from the city. I have been sorely tempted just to get on off up North, even though the boat is in her winter hatches battened down and no supplies on board state. Of course, going camping anywhere rural right now is out of the question, and we don't have the funds to go up North.

Sigh.

Do I go to the gym or indulge my tiredness today?

Not sure why I decided to change the layout, incidentally. Mainly because I have noticed that every so often Blogger loses some of the archives, and this way I am more likely to notice if any of them do go missing so I can retrieve them. I may well have to start archiving by month, though, as that column there is rapidly going to get far too long.

RB

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Tuesday, February 27, 2001

12:56

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11:13

More bad dreams last night. Things are pretty bad all round. Did I mention the fact that I can feel the pain even in my dreams now? No? That must have been somewhere else. Gym yesterday was hard, very hard. I really didn't want to go. The weather was atrocious and I didn't want to cycle over there, and once I was there I really didn't have much motivation to do the workout. But do it I did, because I really have to.

I'm just exhausted now. We both are. Frood is even pissed off with Oddbins to the point of mentioning getting his CV out, if only because it really ought to be updated anyway. I'm very frightened that he'll leave his job before I've found something to see us through any bad patches. Oddbins used to be a really good company to work for, back in the days of "old Oddbins", when the loyalty shown by staff to the company was reciprocated by the company to the staff. I remember when someone in Frood's shop was attacked by a robber. The guy sprayed him in the face with hairspray - but our man didn't know it was hairspray, thought it was mace or something and was badly frightened. The company gave him a bottle of a fairly decent champagne as a thankyou. That was old Oddbins. I don't imagine it would happen like that these days. It's a real shame, because the people who work on the shop floor are still the same cool people as they always were, but the company is treating them like shit instead of a valuable commodity. After all, the people on the shop floor are what bring people back to their local Oddbins again and again and again.

Bastards.

Last night's dream was another post-holocaust thing. I was blind, or at least I couldn't see as other people see to the point where I was considered disabled, and was in some sort of research station or habitat in a very cold place. Most of it was dig out of the ice. There were mountains and crevasses and ice cracks all around. There was also a big polar bear threat. People were starving, and had this dream of getting to a semi-mythical place down river where things were warmer and there was food that grew.

The plan was to send two people down river on this little fibreglass boat, the only boat they had, to get help. Obviously, as a blind person, I wasn't chosen, but then we were attacked by a polar bear. We weren't allowed to kill it, although we could use tranquilliser darts on it, even though it was attacking and killing us. I don't know why we weren't allowed to kill it. We actually had to take care of it while it was tranquillised. The polar bear attacked everyone, I was the only one who escaped. There was blood everywhere on the ice. One of the others, fast losing consciousness on the floor, told me to go. I didn't want to leave her, and was going to take her with me, but as I reached for the boat the rope frayed away into nothing, having been chewed by a bear, and I fell in. The river was fast and it whisked me away before I could do anything. The ride was terrifying. If I fell in the water I would have died in a matter of moments from exposure to the cold. There were sheer ice walls either side of the river, which rushed down in a turbulent, rocky stream. The boat was small and fragile, and was knocked from side to side between these ice cliffs. I was sure I was going to die. The ice was so thick it looked blue where it met the water. The water itself seemed dark, murky green.

I lost consciousness after a while. When I came to the river was calmer and slower. I could see colours other than white and white-blue. I could see, ahead, trees and a building that looked like some sort of villa. It had red tiles on the roof and a courtyard. There were lemon trees growing outside it. It was very like a dream. The warmth was almost a physical barrier, as if the temperature changed really suddenly in a solid boundary around this place.

I passed out again. When I came to I had been retrieved from the boat and was lying in/on a bed/sofa thing in what I presumed was the villa. There was a bowl of fruit on the table next to me. It had an orange in it and I hadn't seen fresh food other than meat in such a long time. I had memories of surviving in harsh arctic conditions for months, maybe even years, with the people who had been with me slowly dying of exposure, or exhaustion or malnutrition.

The people there were very nice, and had some sort of ecologically sound co-operative community. They were competent, knew what they were doing, but they hadn't counted on me being followed down there by the polar bear who had attacked my people. These bears weren't like the bears we have here, they were far more intelligent, and ever so angry. They were angry with us for something, and I think one of the reasons we couldn't kill them was because they were right to be angry.

I'm not sure what happened after that. The pain started waking me up and the memories get very confusing.

The pain really is very bad right now. I've been vomiting with it again. Plus ça change, neh?

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Monday, February 26, 2001

13:34

The ravens had a minor virus and they weren't flying. Dammit. Just have to go back some other time. I'm pretty sure I want to start volunteering though. Edisto the Brown Wood Owl isn't as fluffy as he was last year, but by gum he's still as daft.

One thing's for sure, though, I'm not doing another weekend like that one any time soon. My body can no longer take that sort of punishment and I am definitely paying for it now.

We are now the sacred keepers of Minion Hunter (those aren't our house rules). Hoorah.

RB

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