A Tangential Sort of Day...

So, the Conservatives have elected a new leader. Woop-de-doo. And who have they chosen, but yet another mildly unhinged small-state right-winger, in the shape of Kemi Badenoch. This lot are either simply arrogant, blind or stupid, or any combination of the above. They haven't learned a single lesson from their almost total annihilation at the General Election. More of the same, ad nauseam: I just wish they'd curl up and bloody wither once and for all. Anyway, let's just get on.

We took our weekly lunch at The Bull in Biwmares today, rather than on Monday, as I need to sign for a parcel then. It had the benefit of a fresh barrel of Bass on offer - at least after I'd had a good pint of Welsh Pride and a bite to eat - which will, in all truth be better tomorrow as it still tasted a little 'young'. But that's real living ale for you: it's organic and responds to its environment and handling. Whilst there, I overheard the young barman regaling a couple who were obviously interested in such stuff about the hauntings of Biwmares Gaol, where he'd worked in the past. Although a non-believer himself, he'd still had some weird experiences there himself. I mentioned that I used to work for BT, and did he know that the Telephone Exchange - to the rear of the Gaol - was also allegedly haunted? To which he replied that his grandfather had worked for BT and had told him as much in the past. I have to say that the place always gave me the creeps when I was there alone, but I was never sure that it wasn't simply a case of auto-suggestion.

It made me think of the supposed stories surrounding The White Horse Inn in Clun, Shropshire, involving the alleged ghost of my Great-Great-Uncle Job. I'm directly related to his wife, Elizabeth Southall, who survived two husbands to inherit not only the Inn, but the top corner of Market Square itself and a parcel of agricultural land nearby, selling the lot for a decent profit in the 1920s, not long before expiring herself. What her part in the haunting of the place by her late husband was is open to speculation. As this was one of those branches of the family I've only relatively recently discovered, I have no family anecdotes to go on: like many poor rural families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Southalls were itinerant and formed a sizeable diaspora of their own, settling across the Marches and straying into the towns & cities of the Midlands and London, to varying degrees of fortune.

Anyhow, it's been an eclectic sort of day, starting with discovering via Radio Four that I have spatial sequence synaesthesia, where I visualise time [in my case] as a convoluted, meandering, sometimes spiralling line: which I have done since early childhood. I always thought is was a bit odd, but not particularly a thing in itself. But the discussion on the radio, particularly a contribution from a youngster, who described - the fine detail of which, and hence the visualised shape, differed from mine  - pretty much the same personal experience, and which made me smile at the sheer familiarity of it. When I tried to explain the thing to Jane, I found that the internal picture of my 'timeline' itself was pushed away from me somehow: it seems I have to be thinking in terms of time and where I am in it to see the image: a bit Schrödinger's Cat in nature. So there we are. I think...