I hate moods. I like good, clean emotions. I don’t even mind painful ones – sorrow, fury – as long as they come from somewhere explicable. I like things to have an explanation. Moods descend, without reason or rhyme, and flatten the spirit.
Without any discernible cause, I am heroically grumpy. My throat is tight with grumpiness. I stump about like a furious old woman, muttering under my breath. I crossly tidy the house. It is our highland games this weekend and people will be coming, and some of them may knock on the door, and I do not want them to go away thinking me a slattern.
Usually, tidying the house gives me a tremendous lift. I feel saintly and relieved. I may glimpse, just for a moment, the Mount Olympus that The Organised People know. I even went and got flowers. (The garden is too confused with this weather to have much for cutting; besides, I went mad with the box last year and so there aren’t that many flowers anyway.)
Instead of improving my mood, the tidying induced an orgy of self-recrimination. Stupid idiot bloody piles, went the Mutley mutter; why can’t I learn to throw pieces of paper away?
The Younger Brother arrived to pick some of my honeysuckle for our sister. He was also after sage for the supper he is cooking tonight. ‘I am bloody grumpy,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There is a terrible alignment of the planets.’
This is the kind of thing he says. My empirical mind takes a step backwards like a spooked horse. But quite frankly, who bloody knows?
The brilliant Johnny Murtagh lifts my mood momentarily by riding a perfectly brilliant race on the lovely, tough Saddler’s Rock, on whom I appear to have had rather a lot of money. ‘Go on, JOHNNY,’ I yell. The Pigeon does her cartoon dog jumping up and down on all fours, barking her head off.
Then I lapse back into non-specific fury.
Ah well. I shall take some iron tonic and count my blessings and smell the flowers and everything will be better tomorrow. It always mysteriously is.
PS. I do apologise for the tenses, which are all over the damn place. I am far too cross to go back and correct them. I hope that the Dear Readers will allow my flaws for today. Better better better tomorrow. Really.
Pictures:
Tidy house:
You see I have a great fondness for decorative bottles.
Loveliest decoration of all:
Look at that Pigeon, with the paws and the posing. She does not give a stuff about the misaligned planets:
Red the Mare, who is actually quite grumpy too:
The hill:
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