My little Gnudren,

Meditation and reflection are very useful tools for helping find equilibrium in life. Below is the gist of a meditation Old Gnu preached to himself after he had been drinking heavily – [tea, not alcohol.] Please bear in mind we are all unique, just like everyone else! And if Old Gnu’s ramblings have no logic – what’s new – think Stream of Consciousness a la Virginia Wolf.

We are into the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosom friend[s]” – yes, Strictly Come Dancing has started again. [It seems John Keats despite his tragically short life of 25 years had prophetic foresight.] The nights are drawing in.  It’s almost time to sit by a crackling log fire and feel cosy in the evenings; provided you don’t live in a smokeless zone, or you have a DEFRA certified wood stove.

Otherwise, you can snuggle up to you Vaillant Eco Tec or your Worcester Bosch Greenstar 4000 boiler. If you don’t feel these achieve the same effect of homely cosiness, try dimming the lights a little while sipping a glass of wine, and you’ll be surprised how your boiler may well conjure up a more romantic atmosphere. If that doesn’t work, try turning it off for a few days and then your feelings of cosiness will certainly come rushing back when you turn it on; subdued lighting or no subdued lighting.

Life is never static. Soon we are going to have to wean ourselves off our nostalgic affections for our fossil fuel burning Combi Boilers as we know them. Old Gnu understands there is the possibility of modifying them to burn non fossil fuels. Nevertheless, we shall have to find increasingly nostalgic and romantic feelings for heat pumps, solar panels and the like. While it would be difficult to snuggle up to a solar panel, they do create the possibility of a storage battery to which one could snuggle up more easily, without having to climb on to the roof to achieve a sense of cosiness.

But Old Gnu is determined not to become a whinging old person. “Change and decay in all around I see” wrote Mr. Henry Lyte in his beautiful hymn. It is a sentiment with which folks, who are knocked for six by poor health – he died of Tuberculosis at the age of 54 in Nice, but not in a casino – or another of life’s routine calamities, can identify. There is a place for expressing one’s down-heartedness and even a place for whinging. Some of the Psalms demonstrate the art of whinging beautifully. The place to whinge par excellence is in God’s ear. The psalmists gave the Almighty a right earful at times! Yes one may also need a human ear to whinge into too. [This last sentence illustrates the perils of finishing a sentence with a preposition which one should never do. To add an adverb after the preposition is a heinous crime the enormity of which Old Gnu’s horrified English teacher at school could never have anticipated.]

But beware of becoming a chronic whinger. It will drive your friends round the bend. Some may remember, if they are old enough, the now rightly politically incorrect folk song [that was taught in schools in the late 1950s] about the “…man with a double chin, who performed with skill on a violin; 

And he played in time and he played in tune
But he never played anything but… (‘the same old tune’).

So the neighbours said “Will you kindly play
‘Nellie Bly’ or ‘Where are the Flowers in May’?”
Any tune will do if it’s not that tune
But he wouldn’t play anything but (‘the same old tune’).

So they took the man with the double chin
All his worldly goods and his violin,
And they shipped off to a foreign shore
Where the people had never heard the tune before”

But there too he drove the residents quite mad with his repetition of the same old tune, and to cut a long story short:

They left him there by the deep blue sea,
Where he lives alone in a hollow tree;
And he played that tune and it never ends,
So it isn’t surprising that he has no friends.

Yes, whinging can increase your sense of isolation on many fronts.

Is it the same old thing that comes out every time Old Gnu opens his mouth? Mrs. Gnu used to say that Old Gnu was a man of few words, and them would add, “the trouble is he says them over and over again”, like a record with a needle stuck in the one groove. [ed. Old Gnu appreciates this last sentence will be lost on most people born after 1980.]

Life moves on. For example: never did Old Gnu imagine that he would be able talk to three people in 3 different cities at the same time. He has been released from envelopes, writing addresses and the effort of finding pen and paper. What a blessed liberation.

If you deny the possibility of newness and new beginnings in life you end up despairing. The Book of Ecclesiastes in the First [Old] Testament beautifully illustrates this point. “There is nothing new under the sun “ [1:9] says Mr. Qoheleth [the Hebrew name for the book] and goes on to ramble about everything being pointless,  “Vanity of vanities [AV]. “All things are wearisome” [1:8 REV] “It is a worthless task that God has given mortals…” [1:13] I’m sure God is delighted to hear this profound thought from Mr. Qoheleth. I wonder how Mrs. Qoheleth coped with him if he talked like this at breakfast.  Yes he does end up with some reluctance on the right track, but truly he is a bit of a bore! But one part of the value of Ecclesiastes is that it gives an inspired insight into what happens if you start from the wrong premise and deny newness in life. You can sentence yourself to misery.

So stop whinging!

[Now he can catch up on Race Across the World on iPlayer]

Vetus Pater Gnu
Musicorum et Theologia
Turris LA
XVII Mensis Septembris MMXXIV