Monday, October 24, 2005

Devon and the trance state

You thought I'd stopped posting about Devon, right? Well, you were wrong. I sat down today and thought to myself "Nathan, today you can either make a blog post about how you can't afford shoes, or you can get rid of the text file that's been sitting on your desktop since August". I was far too happy with my weasel similie to let this go to the bin, though your mileage may vary. So here you go, and we're now officialy up to date.



As is so often the case, it seems I owe you all another apology. Allow me to fulfil all those nasty things people say about bloggers by making a whole post about why I havn't been updating.

If you've ever read a post made durting the six months a year that I live in Devon, you'll know I don't like it much there. In fact, the only reason I've made it this far into the post without using some dubious adjective like "Grendelian" or "Unstup" is that I'm typing between bouts of vibration on the National Express heading for the county border at ninety kph.

It's a fact well known among those who watch nature documentaries: When a weasel is hibernating, its heartbeat slows down to once a day and it only breathes once a month. In this death-like state, it can last out the cruel winter on nothing more than a bellyfull of pine-needles. A similar thing happens to me when I'm staying with my family.

The essential thing about my home life is that I always try to find a job or some other excuse differentiate one day from another. Through a combination of geographical isolation and my own laziness, this always (always) falls through. The means I've come up with to survive the unyielding monotony is to slip into a trance where time ceases to have any meaning.

Some animals don't hibernate. Maybe it's a stretch to describe the National Express as a means of migration, but it's good enough for me.

Seven swans