“Eccentric and Mediocre” – a Moment Captured in Time

 

We were living in 78B ,West Wycombe Road HP11 6PY, not far from where we are now. Photo from google street view 

It was an English favourite: blackberry and apple pie. But you cannot pick blackberries in January . . .* †

Originally drafted 7th January 2007 on “perpetual-lab” in Blogger and never  published there. 

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve chosen eccentricity as an alternative spiritual path. I was encouraged down this track by reading John Cowper Powys, who I consider to be the greatest novelist in English of the twentieth century, despite being hardly known. He was noted for obsessive fetishes, like baptising his walking sticks in rivers. I’d define eccentricity as being true to yourself in defiance of social conformity. I would recommend it but for two things: (1) my strict rule not to recommend any way of life and (2) Jack the Ripper might fit my definition, and hardly anyone would see evidence of a spiritual path in his known activities. Of course we know nothing of his later life after the murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel, for his identity was never established; so he may have ended up as a saint.

Our front door, with stairs leading up. My photo this afternoon

In my disputatious way, I refuse to accept that anyone’s journey from birth to death is not a spiritual path; and this includes any hanged dictator and any stupid president who fell in with the wrong crowd, to take two imaginary examples.

I’m scribbling this whilst cooling the pastry for an apple pie, which in the scale of eccentricity isn’t so high. The kitchen radio was finishing a serialised dramatisation of Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last work, and then it was Jonathan Franzen, author of a “great American novel” The Corrections appearing as guest on “Book Club” before a studio audience. It was such heady stuff and such exalted literature that my brain got overheated. I had to switch off and start writing this.

What can I do? I’ve sliced the apples and lightly stewed them with sultanas, cloves, cinnamon etc but realised there is not enough to fill the pie dish. I’ve decided to add some mincemeat, left over in a jar from making Christmas mince pies. Instead of mixing it with the apple, I’ve put it in one quadrant. There’s no actual meat in it: the name is historical and these days it is a mixture of raisins, spices, fat and so on.

We lived in the upstairs flat. The door on the right. is to the ground floor flat

The pie’s in the oven now, so I can get back to writing this. I’d intended to go on about the eccentricity of walking out in pouring rain & getting ecstatic over spontaneous rivulets flooding down the steep streets, & jewelled granite shining in the dirty gutters like treasures in rockpools by the seashore; and how I sometimes like to sniff like a dog on such walks—obviously not on all fours, but with total appreciation, brooding on every aroma as if it’s the main function of my brain. But the pesky pie has upstaged it taking up my attention and too much of my self-imposed 500-word limit. I’ve just realised that I never marked the pie-crust to show which part contains the mincemeat.

Just before I closed the oven door, an odd thought popped into my head, prophetic perhaps, who knows? Never mind Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: you can keep that. What about this for a theme: “Mediocrity is something we can all do, the great leveller. Why waste life in trying to be someone above the ordinary, when you can simply be yourself?”

What could be as unique, as magnificent?

98-101 West Wycombe Road, snapped from 78b this afternoon. The yellow house actually is smaller than the houses on its left

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PS, 7 years later: I’ve decided to add the photo of the pie (but forgot to press Publish?)
*  I remember now visiting an old school friend Bill McCullagh, at his house in Freshwater. He gave us 2 or 3 lb. of blackberries. We put them in small bags in the freezer. I rang him up just now, thought he was dead as he hadn’t responded to my Christmas card. Had even looked online to see if there was an obituary in the Isle of Wight County Press.

† It was great to speak to him, serendipity in action, as the post above says the ingredients were apples, sultanas, cloves, cinnamon and mincemeat, No blackberries at all.

Serendipity, or what?

I’m planning another post, “Good Old Gasbag”, as we called our History master, Mr Gaskin. Bill set me right on a detail there, watch this space.