At your age who knows what excitement might do

I had pie and beans for dinner. Nothing reminds me of school more than pie and beans: pie with baked beans on top. There are fewer than six degrees of separation between school and the City Bakeries. Pie, beans and potato: pie with mashed potato on top, baked beans in the middle. It’s funny just what I remember, and sad how much I’ve had to force myself to forget.

I arrived at 2:30am from two different directions this week. In the early hours of Wednesday, I woke up for no apparent reason, and never slept again until that night. This morning, my head hit the pillow at that unsociable hour, but not before I noticed something in my Twitter feed; a tweet from ‘Philosophers Quotes’ (@philo_quotes) attributed to William James, brother of Henry, the novelist:

‘Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.’

I’m not sure I can subscribe to that, at least not every day. I’ve tried, many times, but to no avail. I’m a fatalist, or so I’ve been told. If my life was meant to be different, it would be.

Searching for the William James quote, another caught my eye, from Jean-Paul Sartre:

‘For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.’

I woke up one day and realised that I’d stopped saying ‘Oh God, not another one’. I woke up one day and discovered that I was on one of those adventures. It’s a story I’d love to recount, one day when I figure out what occurred, and when. But how, and who would listen? A friend I've not seen for a while, a philosopher, no less, replied to me today in one of her fleeting appearances on Facebook:

‘At your age who knows what excitement might do’

Well, it might just kill me off this time, but I hope I can accumulate at least a chapter’s worth of memories and occurrences for the storytelling.

A footnote: ‘Revenge of the Folksingers’ arrived in the post today. It’s everything I hoped it would be, and something that probably played in my ear one night as I slept during ‘Late Junction’. Catherine Bott even gets a mention in the ‘Thanks’ section of the liner notes.