Red Leader: Enemy activity has been slight

There was a time and it was not so very long ago when I would really look forward to the winter.

I loved the long dark nights and the long dark overcoats.

To me, it always resonated with something deep inside.

Not sinister, necessarily, just enjoyably melancholy and perhaps even a touch romantic.

It's a great time for viewing your life as if you were in a film, when, being young, you have the luxury of being so self-possessed.

I indulged myself as a mysterious character treading softly as the screenplay slowly evolved around me, either in the deserted streets of a silent city or in the depths of a barren and bleak countryside.

My happiest times have been experienced in the misty gloom of winter nights.

The thrill of winter: When I was in my 20s, it was walking through unknown avenues in Bologna, Milan or New York or, more prosaically, Liverpool and London, throwing long shadows, running and laughing with friends to shelter from squally rain and hail.

To me, it was just wonderful.

Such a different and unalloyed joy as opposed to the moany way I can easily feel now about being rained on.

A little bit later in life, it was huddling under an abandoned fisherman's shelter on the River Dee, the river flowing thick and dark as ink in deepest Wales. I was with my wife and young family on New Year's Eve, miles away from anyone and everything, and I was stunned by the absolute stillness.

A massive silence observed under a massive sky that you won't ever find in any city, town or village.

It was mystical and I'm sure had something of the old Celtic magic about it.

I felt that I was experiencing something - was even part of something - very old and important yet now totally forgotten.

Well, the more remote stretches of the River Dee at dusk on New Year's Eve can do that to a man.

I listened and watched spellbound as snow fell in sheets on the fields all around us.

It was so quiet, so intense that, eventually, if you tuned in, you could actually hear the snowflakes landing nearby and above on the rickety shelter roof.

After a while, when the sun had disappeared behind the hills and it was becoming pitch black, we trudged back through the snowfield, the only guiding light the rosy glow from the windows of "our" ancient and much-loved cottage.

As we got closer, we could see our hearth-fire was still burning, as always, doing its steadfast duty and twisting peaty-coal smoke up through its hopeless chimney and warming the house...

Now another dark winter lies ahead as yet untouched, and I'm struggling to feel the spell.

I've spent a while analysing why this should be and I've not reached any reliable answers.

It's possibly to do with being pushed further and further into the corporate machine which, at my age, feels infinitely agonising.

Each dragging day teaches me that anyone with a touch of independent thought, let alone a touch of the wanderlust, is drawing down the kiss of death.

Still.

The snow will soon be falling again over the Dee at dusk and it will be mostly unnoticed by anyone.

And even if I won't be there to feel it any more, or see it any more, just knowing that it's happening and that my family's footprints once upon a time were the first and only ones to be there at the approaching dawn of a new year...well...that's fine.

Well, now I just feel STUPID.

For quite a few years, I played slide in a blues duo and every gig we did, we did Muddy Waters' Hoochie Coochie Man.

And every time we did it, I always thought the words in the second verse ominously warned the listener: "I've got John The Kangaroo and we're gonna mess with Sue."

I admit I was puzzled as to why a Mississippi Bluesman, credited as the Father of Chicago Blues, would own a kangaroo, much less one called John, and also how he and his sinister and mysterious marsupial would "mess" with this poor girl Susan.

Bit odd, but then the whole song is a "bit odd" anyway, and I thought no more about it.

So imagine my surprise when, today, almost ten years later, I googled the lyrics and found the actual words were: "I've got John the Conqueror root, I'm gonna mess with you."

None the wiser, I googled again and discovered: "John the Conqueror root is one of the staples of African-American folk magic. Its use in mojo hands is as ubiquitous as its qualities are varied, and its very name signifies power and prosperity to many."

So there we are.

A lesson in Blues voodoo and a kangaroo illusion shattered.

Never a dull moment.

Had a quite surreal experience this evening while getting cash out the ATM at the local Strangebury's.

Silhouetted against orange sodium lights of the high street, I saw the unmistakable outline of my ex-mother-in-law.

She was with her husband and, from the hazy view I had, what appeared to be a young girl.

As the apparitions drew closer shouting Hullos into the glare of the supermarket windows, I was convinced that the svelte youngster had to be one of their granddaughters. Maybe a 17-year-old college student.

But it wasn't. It was one of my ex-wife's sisters. She has to be 47 if she's a day, but she was so slim and trim and UNAGED I was actually taken aback.

Even though it's a bit cold, she had on a crop-top, tiny leather jacket and skinny jeans.

I literally couldn't believe how little she'd aged in the past 18 years, how she'd not put on a POUND of weight, and how her face was utterly unblemished by the harrowing experience of growing older and all the shit that goes with it.

Mind you, her husband is LOADED and in a powerful position in the London judiciary at a ridiculously young age. One of the youngest briefs to take silk in the city, so I was told.

Yeah, the kids are Alpine skiing with their "nanny" and we're still in the same part of town. Well, Richmond. Moved a bit nearer the park now.

But...You've gone a bit gray, Redleader, since I last saw you.

Oh, haven't I just.

And I've felt a bit shit since, to be honest.

Woe, woe and thrice freaking WOE!

Just handed over 60 hard-earned pounds to the local "computer shop" to pay them to kill off a Windows-attacking virus that no amount of AVG scrubbing would clean.

WEEKS pass...

Eventually. Plug in, switch on and...

Pop-up message appears from "WINDOWS POLICE PRO" (Utterly Bogus Department).

"Your computer is infected with extreme virtual bubonic plague etc etc etc.

"Click here to let us totally destroy your hard-drive and laugh in your trusting face."

Why, God?

WHY?

I think I wish I had as much energy as almost everyone else on the internet to ACTUALLY care about Jan Moir, and, locally, about the hot fuss about the peculiar "Blogger's Oath."

But then I also think I wish I did not.

In fact, I think that all the moaners and screamers and shouters should consider themselves fortunate that there is no one left of the calibre of Hunter S Thomson to rip them to shreds anymore.

It's so easy for the followers to jump upon the bandwagon. It always has been.

I don't have the wit or the words to do justice to it.

Hunter would have.

He would have been able to describe perfectly what's wrong about the cynicism of clever people writing polemical outrage for stupid people to get over-excited about.

But he's gone.

And all that's left is for us to nod our bovine heads in agreement with the rest of the herd and jump on the next digital bandwagon that rolls past.

And as to the Blogger's Oath, he would have taken it to the extreme and would have hunted the signatories down like a rat across the tundra.

And you know it.

Yeah you do.

I've got to stop following the England cricket team on the telly.

I find it a uniquely dispiriting experience.

Watching the same players make the same mistakes over and over (ha) again is really depressing.

As I write they are being battered and humiliated by Australia and look certain to be rolled over and knocked out.

What is it about England players that makes them capitulate so easily when the prize is so near? Ashes aside.

I think I know.

I think they must have some sort of Englishness DNA in them that makes trying "too" hard to win trigger a genetic response of making them feel unsporting and a little bit embarrassed.

Well most cricketers - BUT NOT ALL *sigh* - I suppose come from a bit of a posho background.

Private schools and privilege.

Yet you might think that the uber-competitive grounding of pushy, aspiring parents, a school governing board made up largely of the local Tory party and roughneck but rich self-made businessmen, would see the WIN-at-all-costs brainwashing become second-nature.

Well they must do, be posh and that, cos I never so much as even laid eyes on a cricket bat at school for the entire time I was there.

It was bloody football or nothing.

Which, on reflection, suited our pervy gym teacher who used to "test" our bodies for "wetness" with a stroke of his hand from neck to bum as we came out of the showers.

He got away with it by the hilarious pretence that it was the only way of checking we'd been under the water jets. I imagine that in 2009, as opposed to 1974, he'd be looking at a couple of years in chokey quicker than you could say "sicko".

But back then, well. You know what boys are like.

They'd rather sit at their desks caked in mud, blood and sweat than ever take a shower. It was important, do you see, that he checked.

But what the hell? EVERYONE'S sports teacher was a perv in those days.

Anyway, as usual, I digress appallingly and the sad old bastard is long dead.

Where were we? Oh yeah.

The point I was trying to get to was that, perhaps the Will to Lose demonstrated by our toothless cricketers is a latent reaction to all the horror of being pressed and bullied and mentally fucked-over in their early years?

Glib?

Oh yeah.