It may well be true that our homemade carbon dioxide is a culprit and not just a gas and we can believe that, but we can still believe that it is just still an innocent gas, and that the climate is fluctuating as it always has done, which we could believe to be demonstrably and indisputably true. How did we become this ball of tail-following sardines, with ears full of Bluetooth, ignoring the hardly-hidden agenda and passively buying carbon indulgencies, like leafy twigs, to brush away our footprints? Maybe it was the contagion of mourning during royal 1997 that started the ball rolling.
I sometimes have doubts in firmly accepted theoretical truths, but I have enjoyed some serious cognitive dissonance at times. As you know, that can mean knowing that something is true, but refusing, for your own benefit, to accept it, in a way ambiguity can be accepted and tolerated, even justified. Changing your own perception of the reality of a situation to assuage the unacceptable in unavoidable circumstances you find yourself in, could be called self-delusional I suppose. I think it differs in that you are conscious of, and not deluded by, the factual known reality and you choose to adopt your version of the perceived truth and avoid the intrusion of a paradox that is impossible to accept, unless you blatantly ignore it, which seems delusional. Not as harmfully dishonest probably as Roman Catholic Mentalis restrictio, the convenient doctrine of mental reservation, a salve to apply liberally when deliberately deceiving anyone from a child to a court of law. Just come up with an equivocal answer to a tricky question, that you know will be accepted in it’s dishonesty, and if it’s ‘permitted’ on your part to be believed, and supposedly not ‘willed’ then you haven’t lied, and you can still go to Heaven. Hooray.
You may be shrewdly thinking this is all flabby trumpery, and it probably is, but there is an indisputably believable truth, that my left buttock is absolute agony, I have tried standing up and perching on one leg like a heron, but it hasn‘t helped much. In the last two hours it has decided to have it’s own migraine, finally disproving my long-held theory that only one thing can hurt at a time because my right elbow is also discontentedly mumbling. I could ask my colleagues about the possible reasons for a suddenly painful double-entendre, and it seems cruel to deprive them of such promising subject matter, but they’re not medical experts, a fact that hasn’t stopped us all in the past diagnosing each other with everything from post pharyngeal-trauma syndrome to a hiatus hernia. We have never once, not even once, been able to triumphantly plead later: “Ha! Told you it was, didn’t I? No, d‘you remember I said it was, didn‘t I ?”
The weakness of the human condition is full of surprises.
Without stunning, or any other type of good looks whatsoever, or even a charming or amusing personality, it was always a pleasant surprise to find that there were women, so obviously too good for me, who would find me initially vaguely tolerable. Some were not just out of my league they seemed to belong to a different species altogether, or so it seemed in those first few months of discovery, repeatedly convinced that I could cross any boundary, overcome any barrier (yes, even that we should have speciated apart 4 million years ago). But of course I couldn’t, and as the realisation cruelly dawned on me that, yet again, things were going downhill, and if I didn’t find an insurmountable flaw in her first, she would certainly, sooner rather than later, find one in me, I resigned myself to the thrill and optimism of another fresh start.
Grimacing uncle Norman would be so alarmed if he read this, his grimace could reach critical mass and implode, he comes from a generation where tolerance and convention could be relied upon to cast their resentfully benevolent and obscuring shadows over every problem. This can’t be the best way can it, or can it?
While I consider this question and some others, you may be interested to know that I’ve found one way relationship difficulties were tackled or possibly caused in the past, a past we can barely recognise now with all our apparent sophistication. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th June 1757.
Upon crossing my threshold was most enthralled to confront the comely Mary galloping down the main staircase holding her skirts so high as to almost reveal her fadge-warbler (no, a cheap whistle ladies carried for their protection, sometimes under skirts, impractically). If the fair Lady Houghton would condescend to descend similarly I might be most euphorically disencumbered.
At seven we were with neither pickle nor lobster and shortly to be visited by Mrs Harford and Lady Houghton’s sister, Miss Dulch. I called for Mary to hasten and purchase victuals giving her 4d.
Miss Dulch arrived alone, Mrs Harford being in a poor state of dropsy and indisposed to join us. We played at cards til nine when Lady Houghton repaired to her chamber complaining bitterly of an ague on her spleen.
Partaking of copious pickles my blood had inflamed most dangerously and the vision of Miss Dulch languishing gloveless on her chair drove me to belay all propriety and invite her to give my Crumhorn a blow. My suggestion met with such an uproarious hystericalism from Miss Dulch that it brought Mary from the scullery and Lady Houghton from her bed. Was so mortified as to suffer a miasma of shame and collapsing before the library door. Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.
The very much misunderstood and music-loving Sir Thomas Houghton, a man of his time, in his time.
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