Philosophical Monday or chicken slaughtering for beginners

Mysweet slept badly on Saturday night.

Sunday morning was going to be the moment of truth for Tom, Dick and Harry, the cockerels.

Mysweet had been agonising about the procedure that would ensure the least suffering. He seemed to feel that it was an important part of being a meat eater…the readiness to assume responsibility for the death of the animal. It had taken on a spiritual dimension, the respect for life and the animal that had given up its own in order to feed us.

I feel it myself when I pop the live crabs in the boiling water. I find myself thanking them silently.

It is because we all have it in common, don’t we? Life. Followed by death.

It also seems to be more difficult the closer an animal approaches us in intelligence.

But it is a spectrum. Intelligence and complexity.

I watch the dogs working on Sunday morning on my cliff top as they intelligently search for bits of wood to drop at the feet of their God-like masters and meditate on the ease with which we permit ourselves to take life from those we consider our intellectual inferiors.

I think of my autist students. Some of them live so very much in their own world that they are sometimes unaware of their surroundings and problems posed by their immediate environment, and are perhaps the happier for it.
But on Thursday morning the boy with the red hair looked at me for a moment with trapped pain in his eyes, aware that something was happening that he did not understand… understanding that he did not understand.

When I return, the deed is done and Mysweet is cleaning the last bird, pleased that he has completed his task quickly without causing suffering.

I wonder if there is an intelligence, somewhere, that would consider us as dogs or chickens in comparison with itself...
My problem is the same as the boy with red hair’s: I understand just enough to know that I don’t understand.

The big boot and the ice cream cone on the pavement

I have been sending out job applications and doing tax returns, a mixture of boring and worrying which is just right to bring on stress mania followed by migraines. I feel better today after an afternoon in the dark, so my apologies for lack of blog visits and comments. I shall soon be back out on patrol.

Last week went well, with two D’AC concerts, lessons and culminating in the “Saturday night could have been a horror” show, where I had to help another teacher’s singing class perform with some amateur musicians. I think we pulled it off in spite of some shaky moments. After we performed Amazing Grace, I was approached by a bald man with a white beard who resembled a garden gnome. He wanted to know whether I was the one with the strong/loud voice. It is ambiguous in French, but I suppose that neither meaning is particularly complimentary. One of the singers standing next to me started to sob audibly during the rendition. I thought that I had either sung over her part and so spoiled it for her, or moved her with my gospel improvisations. It was, of course, nothing to do with me. Her father had died the Thursday before and it had been his favourite hymn. She told me afterwards that, coming on top of her child being treated for leukaemia, it had all been too much for her. Ah, the cathartic quality of music…

That big boot just keeps coming out of the sky. I’m sorry. I ought to explain that reference. When my parents died the children were very young and we needed something to explain the inexplicable - the fact that anyone can die at any time, and it is a good idea to live your life in the present, whilst planning for the future. The big boot of the Monty Python cartoons seemed to represent this rather well. To this we added the concept of the ice cream. When someone dies, it is as though their ice cream has fallen onto the pavement (a disaster that we can all identify with...especially when aged six). If they die when they are old, they have very nearly finished their ice cream down to the last lick, and so it is a bit less sad and a natural end to things. However, when a nearly full ice cream cone drops, it is a great loss.

Slugman was supposed to go and work in the South of France next week. But he heard today that the daughter of the theatre company owners was knocked down by a car outside their house and is in a coma. His trip is cancelled. She was mentally handicapped, so already it seems that she hadn’t had the fairest portion of ice cream.

We swim on through the sea of random events, trying to make sense of it. I’m off for a walk with Porridge….