OF SICKNESS AND HEALTH

 

My sincere apologies to both my readers for failing to provide you with incisive analysis yesterday. I had 24-hour ‘flu, which put me on the canvas for the entire day. I used to think 24-hour ‘flu was a wheeze by which schoolboys got a day off school, but I have had it three or four times. It begins with a sort of pulse inside the cranium, like a cross between static and the high drone of an insect swarm. It is totally enervating. Use the laptop? I couldn’t even lift the lid. I spent yesterday reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric – about which I am writing a piece – for an hour, then going back to bed for half an hour. My cat stuck with me the whole day. Animals are said to recognize illness in their humans. I can’t call myself an owner. Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

But, after a much more restful night, sans fever dreams, I rose refreshed. I still have the cough, but that’s a smoker’s cough. I had given up before coming here, but cigarettes are $2.50 a pack, and it seemed churlish not to get back on the gaspers.

I don’t suppose you missed me, as you were all probably celebrating the 111^th birthday of Enoch Powell, who got so close to saving the country he loved. There is a piece of mine here at Counter Currents. Some of you, apparently, were alerted to this weblog via CC but, for those who were not, and who are not aware of CC, you must correct this fault. The late, great Jonathan Bowden called CC ‘an online university’, and there exists no better description.

I used the word ‘weblog’ earlier rather than ‘blog’ as I have always found the latter a little faecal in its connotation. I believe this goes back many years to when I used to try and rile David Miliband, brother of ex-Labour leader Ed Miliband, via his weblog by fact-checking him in the days before fact-checking became what the young people call a ‘thing’. He once wrote that he had, that morning, ‘done a blog’, and I still find the phrase an uncomfortable read.

Weblogging, as I have said, is like two players ‘hitting’ before a tennis match. It warms you up, gets your linguistic and stylistic mojo working (or should that be workin’?), and shows the English language who’s the boss. Of course, you never do. Anyone who writes knows that language is a strange reserve. Anyone who has written a sentence with a clear meaning in mind and watched it change in composition knows that language is what the Greeks called the ‘muse’. It speaks through the poet through ekstasis. Language can be a harsh mistress, but she is an irresistible one. But it is she who does the writing. Writers are just messenger boys.

Do Americans still call ‘flu ‘la grippe’?