Animals of October

Let's talk about Christmas. Come on. Let's just do it. It's lurking there in our peripheral vision, drooping and thirsty, like an end-of-the-line tree losing all its needles and baubles. I was in an ASDA yesterday for the big shop, and while Halloween was still the headline, Christmas was there in its mass-produced shadow, desperate to burst out and flounce around on centre stage, like it does. There were selection boxes, cut-price mega bottles of spirits, bags of chocolate sprouts. I spotted a couple of reindeer, a few santas, a twinkle of tinsel. And there, in the frozen aisle, the depressing sight of engorged turkey carcasses piled on top of each other, straining against their shrink-wrap. It's beginning to look a lot like the holidays are coming and the weather outside is frightful. The problem is, its not just the weather that looks bad. It's going to be a tough festive season. Tomorrow is Halloween and I've already seen multiple houses in the neighborhood ...

Half an hour's run away from our house lies the UK's largest municipal cemetery, the Southern Cemetery in Chorlton. It is a vast place, with graves and tombs as far as the eye can see, ranging from your fanciest granite obelisks and mausoleums guarded by stone angels, to unmarked paupers plots. There are a few famous folks buried here, including Manchester's favourite artist LS Lowry, Manchester's favourite record producer Tony Wilson, and Manchester's favourite football manager Sir Matt Busby. Basically, anyone who Manchester claims as their own tends to end up in Southern Cemetery and, to be fair, its not a bad place to wait out one's deathly eternity. It is also an excellent spot for an autumnal stroll given the abundance of trees, so we met a friend there yesterday and crunched our way through the carpet of leaves. Hannah and I have a bit of thing for cemeteries. We often include a visit to interesting ones on trips abroad and my desktop background is still ...

Sometimes I wonder if animals were invented to save us from the Internet. Or, more gloomily, to entice us to stay on the Internet. Because, whatever else this trickster demon of world wide interconnectivity brings us, we'll always have cute pics and vids of creatures to ease the pains. My Twitter feed is a doomscroll of angry political opinions, desperate good-hearted folks raging against various dying lights, men being absolute dicks to women, natural and unnatural disasters, and lots and lots of talented people publishing amazing books while my own effort languishes somewhere in an ambiguous void. But, like jewels, out pop various wholesome images of adorable animals doing adorable things. I added one such to Instagram this morning, catching Marble and Finch in a pleasingly photogenic pose . And on the whole this is amazing and lovely and wonderful, and rarely fails to raise a smile. But sometimes I wonder. What is this abundance of animal cutesyness doing to our psyche in relati...

I mentioned a few posts ago about the re-discovery of local green spaces during the first lockdown. Remember those heady days in late March? When the cold was leaving us and the rolling ticker of infection numbers was driving ever-upwards in dizzying amounts? When masks were a novelty and we all had to relearn how to wash our hands? It seems and feels like centuries ago. There was a strange luminescence to those days, even amongst all the horror of an encroaching pandemic. Our houses seemed to strain with the burden of being excessively lived-in, we became suddenly more attentive about the dullest of things: the shopping experience, the new possibilities of home-based workdays and homeschooling. And then there was this curious reconnecting with nature, our one and only constant friend. The one-hour-of-exercise-a-day mandate came echoing down the pipes as if offered by the coronavirus itself as a sort of partial ceasefire. Among the gloom, we caught glimpses of silver linings in the sh...

Yesterday, I finished the video game Ori and the Blind Forest on the Switch, escaping (after many attempts) the wrath of Kuro the Owl, the game’s main antagonist. She is a velvet-dark mega-bird of hatred and revenge who spends the whole game trying to vanquish Ori, the little light spirit you play as. She’s actually pretty terrifying; looming in the background, screeching and keening somewhere off-frame, and if your clumsy human thumbs don’t quite hit the right buttons at the right times and in the right directions, she doesn’t hesitate to cut down Ori in quick-flash swipes of pure terror. Meanwhile, the rest of the game is similarly staffed with nasty creatures, ranging from amorphous slug-like blobs and chittering spiders, to armored rhinos and weird frogs who spit balls of pain. It is the most human-like creatures who are the heroes of the day, while the animals are suffused with unbridled fury.  Which is not to say I did not enjoy the game - I did, very muchly. It was more cha...

It feels like we’re on the cusp of another lock-down, and like many sequels to must-see originals, it feels rushed, unstructured and full of tired and under-developed characters. Autumn is pulling us slowing into it with its usual blend of beauty and doom, and winter has never been so collectively forbidding. And while there is much tragedy and griping to come, not least towards the incompetents who supposedly lead us, I still have belief in our collectivity and our community fortitude. We’re good at winters, we handle them every year of our lives, and we’ll find excellent ways to adapt. We may even discover surprising new methods to do ancient rituals: let us brace ourselves now for an unusual yuletide and use it to try on some different costumes. Yesterday, I managed to snatch some quality time in the actual physical presence of a dear friend and we took to the rural edges of the suburbs to while away the afternoon in catch-up chat and giggles. The long stroll took us from Didsbury (...

Plastic Dinosaurs What must they think of us? Making little effigies of long dead reptiles out of toxic materials and then putting them on our doorsteps among potted plants like we think this is somehow cute? It is quite cute though. We found the T-rex, the Triceratops and the Parasaurolophus in a box marked ‘Free - Please Take’ outside a local house, so we took them to decorate our entryway and they’re a pleasing bunch of rogues, peeking out from behind pansies. But what must our fauna think of a display like this? If dinosaurs were to come back, Jurassic Park-style, would they pause a moment and recognise themselves in the moulded plastics and think; what in the prehistoric ages? What did we do to deserve this? We leave the house, all perked up for a run, and the dinos see us on our way, the T-Rex’s mouth permanently roaring in what looks more like a yawn than menace.  Cackling Magpies The cackling magpies swoop among the trees of the street, flashing their monochrome wings with ...

One of my most treasured possessions is this stamp gifted to me by Hannah some years ago. It’s a wren perched on the words ‘EX LIBRIS David Hartley’ and I use it to stamp the title pages of every book I own that I finish reading. I used it yesterday after closing the last page of Ali Smith’s Winter , book two of her beguiling and fabulous seasons quartet, the one with the disembodied head and the ladies of the Greenham Common protest. I actually saw Smith reading from the book shortly after it was published and was amazed to discover that her writing was right up my street. The covers of her books do not convey the wicked weirdnesses within - quite the opposite. Not only is she one of our finest contemporary writers, she’s superbly skilled at weird fiction, although that might be a genre too far for the literary crowd. Well, let’s not get fall into that pit spikes or you’ll never get me out. The wren has some special significance for me as it forms part of a nickname for my autistic si...