Ramble In Rows

Good lord! How did it get to be October already? So much of my life is racing by me unregarded, like the star field that whizzes by the starship Enterprise. Things happen and I think how cool it would be to waffle to my blog about the significance of them and then .... What? Well tempus ceases its fugitive property and simply frangits [Sic] with the result that I find myself passing on to the next fascinating tableau and contemplating the griste worthiness of that instead. And oh! Lordy, Lordy! Lookit me making unconscious associations: tableaux versus the tabular (in the keyboard sense) nature of my sense of time's careless passage.

Last night, for no good reason other than because it was on the TV schedule, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption. I have loved this film since I first saw it and found to my delight that it had captured every drop of the essence of Stephen King's orignal novella. It is a delightfully brooding and horrifying plot full of shockingly naive little deux ex machina that somehow seem plausible anyway and the film extends the liberties taken with our credibility exactly far enough to add the seasoning that a movie demands; the richer meat of words on paper needs no such condiment of course.

It's funny in a screwy kinda way. King's novella, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption was published in a collection of four such stories that had outgrown short but had somehow miscarried in the gestation period leading up to full-blown novel. Three of the stories were simple tales of human-scale experience but the fourth, to be oxymoronic about it, was so larded with salt it was neither believable as real horror nor especially horrific in any gothic sense. Or maybe I am just cynical .... Maybe I just think that King had three good stories and a notion of attaching a seasonal theme to them: Hope Springs Eternal, Summer of Corruption and Fall From Innocence. The first and last of these — the Shawshank story tied, seemingly with irony, to spring and hope, and The Body (which was made into another great film: Stand By Me) which was a fabulous metaphor for the loss of the innocence of childhood ... and its lasting effects — qualify as great fiction. (The middle one, Apt Pupil, was, well ... ok but a little ditsy). It was a shame that the fourth and last story was so unsatisfactory. Winter of Discontent: The Breathing Method was risibly out of place and skulking around at the back of the book practically screaming, "I don't belong here!" (like the new fish at the start of the first story in the volume) ... perhaps that's the point.

Hmmm.

I shall adjourn to the kitchen to contemplate while concocting a bacon sandwich and to fret over my unweeded garden and the horrors that will be revealed when the volunteer flora dies back for winter .... Uh oh! Maybe I ought first to worry about the quantity of leafage to be harvested from two rather large sycamores; leaf mould is an excellent compost but where to build a heap? Decisions, decisions. Why could I not have been born royal and pampered? I am sure I was never meant to fret so over such mundane things. Surely I was meant to concentrate more about the artistry of pruning roses than with what to do with the prunings ....

And now I am suddenly thinking about the imitation Lalique specimen vases that I saw in the window display of a local hospice's charity shop all reasonably priced in the one or two pound bracket. But why break with habit? The triptych of peach coloured blooms on my windowsill looks just as good in their sherry schooner.