My life as an angel.

from my unwritten diary - Sunday 18th January, 2015 / Rabi al-Awwal 1436.

Although the moon has just turned from descendant to ascendant, I planted a handsome evergreen/red tree (Photinia “Red Robin”) in my slice of glen-forest today, to shine forth throughout the year amongst the oaks and hazels - and also a few plants in sundry (some sun-dried) other spots.

From Cailutz I headed back on the beautiful, winding, plane-lined valley road to St-Antonin - in the middle of which encountered a bearish chap with very long dreadlocks looking agitated.  There was a distinctly beery smell from somewhere…  The poor guy had turned off the road into a muddy lane for a piss or a wank and his car was lodged in the mud against a wall.

So I reverses on to the road and takes a buck's leap (an Ulsterism, dear readers, in which the word leap rhymes with crêpe [cognate with English crisp] as it did in old gasbag Shakespeare's day, when floor rhymed with Moor as it still does in parts of Ulster) in my trusty Mazda and I whizzes past his vehicle, only grazing his mirror, an’ stops on a level gravelly bit about 5 yards in front of him.  He had one of those modern tow-ropes which aren’t ropes but woven like seat-belts or safety gear on boats, but he didn’t know to tie it to the two cars with a round hitch and two half-turns – sorry, a round turn and two half-hitches, as I learned in the Scouts (Dear Readers, I was a Queen's Scout, a great wee Protestant honour in Ulster in them far-off days of the nineteen-fifties, when everyone - except me - knew their place).

Then just before I prepared to tow him out of the sheugh, I asked had he anything heavy onboard.  He opened the boot (trunk in New World patois) and took out 24 bottles of beer, a vacuum cleaner, some metal equipment which looked heavy, and more besides…  These he placed delicately on the stone wall (which are very common, and often mossy, in this part of France and much better constructed than most Irish ones) – and lo! I got into gear, turned up the volume of Das Rhiengold playing on the CD-player, and easily, white-bearded Wotanly, towed his uncargoed car (registered in the Haute-Vienne [87] in the ancient province of Limousin which gave its name to limousine) from mud and possibly-hungover despair to freedom.  He gave me big (not hungover, I hope) hugs and lots of smiles (but no beer).  Had he wished to continue his wank I would have assisted in a modest and (of course) tasteful way. 

He also had a very sweet little shaggy dog who hopped into my Wagnerian Mazda (named after the Zoroastrian solar deity ?) but did NOT want to be driven away from his sexy and somewhat inept and feckless owner.

This was, of course and needless to say, not the only good deed of my day, dear readers  – I had saved some vegetable leaves and peelings etc. for Ulysse, a donkey who lives with a goat which he doesn’t like.  I kissed his ears, and so he received a material and a spiritual blessing.  Donkeys should be called asses, because the D word comes from Duncan [or possibly Donald, though the word should rhyme with monkey and not with manqué - which itself passed into English as manky and rhymes with panky as in hanky-panky, first known use: 1841 - oh, how I digress! - let's return to Duncan/Donkey...] and is a reference to the stubbornness and possibly the hairiness of Scots, who are, on the other hand, not known for their beautiful long ears.

Ulysse is lonely, as are all isolated herd animals.  Human beings are crass and stupid, thoughtless and self-aggrandising, totally unlike donkeys, who even carried mad preacher-prophets around in Palestine way back in Roman times, long before the halcyon nineteen-fities, and now transport mad jihadists with AK-47s across the sad and ruined landscape...