I knew he would.
Shaky's already started complaining. "What is it with you and heavy books? You promised after 'Rising 44' that you'd keep them small, short! But then you said the same thing after 'Le ton beau de Marot', as well, didn't you? And you didn't, did you? If you think I'm standing here for a couple of hours a day with 'Moby Dick' on my back, then think again, sunbeam! Poetry's one thing but a bloody great big whale I don't need!"
Don't worry, he'll come round.........I hope. I would hate to falter, baulk, shy at the first hurdle for want of a penguin's back!
Windows, I've been thinking about windows recently. Not Bill's misconceived abomination. Not double glazed sashes. Metaphorical windows, portals into other places, other lives. What makes you open the curtains for the whole world to see what a mess your living room is in? What makes you roll up the blinds when you know that the one person you want to peer in and then gently tap on the door and offer to do the hoovering is never going to? Not in a million years! Why should the misplaced scatter cushions on the floor around your sofa be of any interest to anybody? And do you really want them tidied up? Even by them?
It's strange sometimes writing this blog. Fifty years ago, I would have had a pen, a little book. The book would be kept under the mattress and would see daylight only in quiet times, times of solitude. Times when gently remonstrating with yourself seemed productive. When rolling your life around the inside of your head seemed to make a kind of sense, in a nonsensical way. When sharing your thoughts, hopes, desires with no-one suited better than sharing with someone.
And yet now, what would once have been so personal, private, secret is now so public. Why? Arrogance? I hope not. A need to tell? Perhaps. But the whole world? I doubt it. A belief you have something of value to say? Scarcely and who'd listen, or want to listen, to a penguin anyway?
They say that every person on the planet is only seven or eight people removed from every other person on the planet. You never notice because you can never join up the dots seven or eight times on the trot, in the right sequence, to make the connection; but blogs sidestep all that don't they? They don't need the intervening steps. They allow you to pass the exam without showing all your 'working out'.
And what if the Elfin Queen should stop by? Curious that, perhaps of all the penguins on google, she might have known this one? In another life? Would she recognise herself? Would you want her to? And worse, what if someone merely thought that it was their face that was being reflected in the mirror, but it was only illusion?
Of course, statistically speaking, the dots still, in truth, have to be joined up; only now they must be joined by chance, happenstance, happy monsters.
But then chance created life and of all the improbabilities in the universe, that must surely be the most improbable of them all.
Of late my dear penguin, I fear you have ruminated too long on what was, what might have been, what can never be, what must never be. Fish, snow, ice, sea, orca, seal, penguins, these are life. The only life. Enjoy!
Whoops! That was just a bit too serious! Sorry!
There was an Irishman, an Englishman and a Frenchman in a bar..............
