You know those special moments that just seem so right… ? or wrong?

Strange, isn’t it… we’ve spent so much time hungering for knowledge about the world, and probably didn’t ever really appreciate the mystery and power of not knowing something. Of course there’s still plenty of stuff that we don’t know, but there seems to be an all-permeating notion that history stopped somehow… and that we know a pretty good chunk of what there is to know.

Rationality and science can be so utterly, mind-numbingly dulllll….zzzz..z…zzz…..

For some reason everyone wears black these days.. black! Or white, or gray… very few colours in general.

I remember in ‘92 when I came to work in black jeans and a black t-shirt, eliciting comments from everyone. Sarky comments!! But I liked Metallica and so it was compulsory to wear black.

These days, it’s practically the norm, so no sarcasm … but I like colours now!

I was out for a run late in the day, around 9.30 or 10 in the evening, and it was getting quite dusky, with lots of low-hanging mist hovering just above the ground, and really great colours flooding the world with blues and magentas. I didn’t, unfortunately, have my camera with me, but I found a similar situation in my photo archives.

This particular run, I took a little detour, which led me past a field with grazing horses - or rather, they weren’t grazing just then. The four or five horses in their field were conducting an impromptu race, tails held high, and dust flying like Tron’s motorcycle-walls in their wake. Three horses galopping back, the leader looking intently at the other two as they reach the end … then four horses galopping forth, the new leader again looking at the others in the race. Back and forth, these huge, gallant-looking animals, actually quite fierce, and definitely impressive.

I don’t know much about hierarchy in a troop of horses, but in this lonely evening moment, it seemed to me that these great big intelligent animals had a clear sense of each other and of their troop. Increasingly often, I wonder why it is we treat animals the way we do … we’re the self-appointed kings of the hill, with moral (ha!) and legal (doh!) right to do as we please with all under the land. More like we’re the most powerful animals on the planet, and in a system without anything to check and balance us, we’ve run amuck, to the point where we don’t even know if we’ve destroyed ourselves with our careless and short-sighted way of living. I don’t want to be a doom-sayer, but I think we’re actually at the point now, where we can tip the balance of nature, and ruin .. well, the entire world, really. At least the world as a place that supports this particular, wasteful civilisation.

Animals have a right to be here too, and I feel sad that we might ruin this world for them as well as for ourselves … I think I shall have to read some more Peter Singer, who’s written a lot about animal rights and animal ethics.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t trespassing. We’d been to visit a couple of friends, one of whom acted in the final performance of a play at Rugby Theatre - after the play there was a party for the cast and crew, and we were graciously invited along by Debbie, who hosted the event. She lives near Rugby in what is a pretty special house … a house, a garden three times the length of the house, and pool at the very end of the house (heated as well, nice that!), which was actually very large indeed.

So in we went - it was bloody freezing if you ask me, but as I was in there looking up at the stars (and doing a cannon ball or two), it just struck me that life couldn’t get much better. It did possibly get slightly better as I got out of the pool and froze my bollocks completely off, only to dive in there again. Thanks again, Debbie, and of course Will & Kate for a good time and a place to crash out - come visit soon

I was cycling home one day, and listening to my iPod Shuffle as usual. The weather was borderline rainy, but one of those weird kinds of moods, where the sun is shining even though it’s raining, and the sky is half-and-half. It’s cleared up a little here:

It’s about a couple of miles along a narrow path before I go on the road, so there was time for 3 or 4 tunes on the iPod, and it just clicked perfectly with the mood: the song selection just so thoroughly enhanced the entire situation that I found myself drifting away and enjoying it. As I recall, the songs were Teardrop by Massive Attack, a track from MD’s “Appelsap”, and a Mikael Fyrek track that’s very evocative (off his last EP, released on the Kahvi Audio Collective, I recommend it :))