Anxious to get back and tell a horse about it
A mind of winter, found treasures, a deathly dog.
I thought it was Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. Or maybe it’s Thursday. This is such a common occurrence in this weird interlude, Michael McIntyre got a comedy routine out of it.
An aside here: should you listen to this and think, as I do, “why does he speak like that?” do not google Michael McIntyre and accent because you will get his routines on other accents but not on his own, which is just collosally bizarre. I got a kick out of a Reddit thread that was trying to get to the bottom of it, because the conclusion was, he went to public school. No, Americans, that’s not why he sounds like he was taught English by an emu or that sometimes in the middle of a sentence it sounds like he’s clenching his butt cheeks.
This period, then, between 25 December and 31 January, is known as Yuletide. No it is not called Twixmas or ChrimboLimbo, because “Chrimbo” is a word that should be burned and used to warm cold people, along with the words “hubby”, “hollibobs” and “sleeps.” (Only the plural. “Sleep” is fine.) Except Yuletide, depending on how Germanic you are, can be the whole month, more than a month, less than a month. And looking up Yuletide leads along labyrinths that branch off into all sorts of pagan and Norse delights, including the charming Dísablót in Norway, something to do with women and blood sacrifices or something. Go, Norse women.
My point is that there is time to do things you would not otherwise do. I have turned a shower curtain into a robe for my costume for the Auld Lang Syne race on Sunday. Previous years: half a Noah’s Ark, carrying a cardboard box of inflatable animals; a Suffragette in full-length Victorian skirt and a flowered hat; a reindeer; and last year, Grumpy the dwarf. Fancy dress makes me nervous, so I make a big effort at it. Perhaps I forgot to mention that I have to run six miles of moorland dressed in whatever costume I’m wearing, including fording a deep beck twice, and getting up and down a very muddy field. What, you can think of something better to do to celebrate a new year coming?
I also with trepidation opened a box of diaries by young me. I won’t inflict them on you; they are hard enough to read and I wrote them. But I did find things I had noted down and loved and thought I had lost. First, this, part of a series the Guardian used to run called True Confessions.
This is the only thing I have ever read or seen that makes me want to get a tattoo.
One diary covers an unhappy summer I spent in Bulgaria being in love with a cruel Bulgarian. I read the diary now and shout at myself. He’s controlling! Run away! It took me a while before I did and so I had time to read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, which is a) huge and b) mostly brilliant. And I had the nouse to write down my two favourite bits.
The first:
He had come to a famous well, and we found sitting by the waters a couple of Albanian Moslems, paupers in rags and broken sandals, who were quietly merry as the morning. “Good day to you,” said Constantine. “What are you doing here?” It was a natural question, for this was far between villages, and they did not look to be of independent means. “I am doing nothing,” said the older of the two.
“What, nothing?”
“Yes, nothing,” he said, his grin gashing his beard widely.
“Shame on you,” mocked Constantine. “And your friend?”
“He has come to help me!” said the Albanian; and over glasses of stinging water, risen virile from mountainy depths, we jeered at industry.
And the second:
At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage nearby, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool out of itself and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.
Perhaps now Rebecca West would be condemned for her authority or her class or something. Whatever. Fill your cancellation boots. But the woman could write beautifully. (Not always: see “risen virile from mountainy depths.” But mostly, and better than most.)
Animal hero of the week : Conan
WARNING: THIS SECTION CONTAINS SOME TRUMP
I’m a bit conflicted about this one. It’s another military animal, because military animal heroics are easier to research. And I’m reluctant to agree with Donald Orange Wotsit on anything, even praise of an heroic Belgian Malinois special operations military working dog. In 2019, Trump tweeted this:
He also said that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who blew himself up using a suicide vest when US soldiers approached, “died like a dog.” But not like Conan, whose name was eventually revealed (he was named for the talkshow host, not the barbarian), because Conan survived. Of course he did. He’s a Delta Force dog. Trump later tweeted a mock-up of him awarding the dog a Medal of Honor, a reward only given to humans.
Conan was injured in the incident, known as the Barisha raid, although its official name was Operation Kayla Mueller, named for the young woman killed while in ISIS custody in Syria, and whose body has never been recovered. An article in the Stars and Stripes gives an indication of what Conan’s job may have been:
When special operators clear a building, the dog can be the first one through the door to attack and make it safer for troops to enter quickly to kill or detain enemies.
“The dog is often used like a flashbang,” Schnell said. “The dog will enter first because a lot of times it’ll distract the enemy. Especially if it’s dark, it’s hard for them [the enemy] to pick up on the dog. It gives you those seconds that are really valuable in that dangerous situation.”
Hunting down the most wanted terrorist in the world though does not apparently qualify you for an actual medal if you are a dog. In 2019, the US launched the Medal of Bravery to emulate the PDSA’s Dickin Medal, a century old and counting. Conan, who has since returned to active duty with the Special Ops people, has yet to be given a medal.
That is unfair, because Conan has not just given the world a gift (depending on your view of extrajudicial or judicial-adjacent assassinations) in the removal of the head of ISIS, a definitely vile organisation. But he — or she — has also given us this headline, in Vice:
Dog Genitals at Center of Federal Public Records Lawsuit
There was some confusion about Conan’s sex, and, as the subheading made clear, “whether Conan the dog, who works for Delta Force, is a very good boy or a very good girl is, the government says, a state secret.” At least until someone in the military took pity on the mystified world and tweeted that Conan “was a very good boy.”
Snowman
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Here is the bit where I repeat myself and say, please do share this post, and please do let me know if you have liked it by clicking on that wee heart below. I do it for nowt for now, and a little click is reward enough (along with the generous people who have paid for a subscription: thank you).