Despite all this good stuff, I have been feeling a little flat recently. It comes to us all. Much unrealised. Everything in the rear view mirror. I’m too asleep, bad-tempered, just irritable at the world. James Hillman told me it’s important to just ‘decompose’ every now and then. Don’t make everything alright. Let Saturn and his dry, difficult, Beckett-like thoughts own the house for a minute. Let things get sepia toned. Draw the curtains. Inspect the ruins.

In the words of an old Welsh poem:

What I loved in boyhood, I now hate:

A girl, a stranger, a gray horse.

But love Hillman as I do, I can’t stay there forever (neither did he really, but he worked hard and brilliantly on the legitimacy of melancholy).

And it’s in this kind of mood that God gives me a talking to. Walks me over to my large-font-sized Bible and places his substantial, clean-nailed finger on the story of Moses and God gently sayeth:

Suck it up buttercup. — Martin Shaw