33 This pied life

sorrow & joy

It’s nearly midnight, and I’m standing outside in the Home Meadow of the Beautiful Middles out of Nowhere looking at the vastness of the Milky Way. The sky’s clear, and we are in a dark zone so that the Milky Way is thick, distinct and dramatic.

I need to breathe in this spacious starriness for a few minutes before I go in to what I left; draw strength from that cliché of the sheer scale of the universe, even our relatively tiny galaxy, reminding me of how minute and insignificant, fleeting, transient, our human lives are.

This evening I’ve had, unexpectedly, one of those rare(ish) times of long moments of heightened and pure joy. Yet, this afternoon, I had dreadful and shocking news. How can these two states co-exist?

Banal, but looking up at those rivering stars I remind myself I can only see and experience them because of the backgrounding darkness.

This has been a hard week. My birthday was on Monday, and TM and I were going to have a very rare day out, on the Ile de Batz, near Roscoff. Instead, I spent the afternoon in the vet’s, with one of our two young dogs. In fact, I’ve spent part of most days this week at the vet’s: Bran has been really ill, but he has had a multitude of confusing symptoms, for which the likeliest explanation was Lyme disease, which he also had in our first summer here, in 2022. However, he didn’t respond to antibiotics as he should have, and has had to have other tests, scans and an x-ray. The news today, Friday, was not good: he has anaemia, a mass near his spleen, and abdominal bleeding. He’s young, has been fit, and is now in a bad way with crazily accelerated breathing and no appetite. We’re awaiting more complex blood test results.

How ironic that I wrote in post 32 that one of the reasons for not living with more animals was the heartbreak when they’re ill.

I’m just through a period of several months of being ill myself, and this new anxiety has provoked the insomnia I was just, it seemed, emerging from.

I’m back from this latest trip to the vet just before 5pm. My daughter, with a family friend, has managed to organise tickets as a birthday celebration for me and her to go to a gig in a church about an hour’s drive from here tonight. I need to leave in 5 minutes. I have to drop the dog back in, break the news to TM, change, and race off out to meet my daughter.

Obviously I feel torn – I don’t want to leave the dog or TM after such news, but on the other hand the tickets were apparently hard to come by and expensive, a family friend contributed, and it would probably do me good, even though I don’t know what/whom we’re going to hear (it’s a surprise. I rather assume it’s a baroque concert.) I’m assured I will love it, though. TM is adamant that I should go, after my having had such a lousy birthday. I throw clean clothes on, notice that my rain jacket (it’s tipping) smells of dog, and get in the car.

In the long queue, I try to guess from the concert-goers the kind of act we might expect. Unpretentious rural or small-town people, not dressed up; a range of ages from teenagers to plenty of my age to older people. Families. Probably not classical music after all, then.

I don’t even recognise the artist until his fingers touch the harp that I couldn’t previously see, end-on to me as it was on the stage in the nave of the church. And then – ALAN STIVELL! – the Breton harpist who is a Celtic cultural and musical icon for the Breton people, and whose first album, Reflets, was one of the first three albums I ever bought, as a teenager. I’ve known and loved his music for – swallow – half a century. His voice now, at 80, is even better than when he was younger.

This is a precious evening. And I manage – mostly – to immerse myself in the joy of much-loved music.