Well, the rain has set in, and Wisebeard personally is glad.... for lazy gardener that I am, I am happy to let nature water my onions.... and my lettuce, carrots and fennel... not to mention the savoy cabbage!! For wisebeard now has vegetables... and fruit, for the tomatoes are growing fine...and the peppers seem to be doing well... with the help of a certain young lady my beds are getting more prepared, and the herb garden is cleared and growing....oregano, chervil, sage, thyme, lemonbalm, rosemary... mmmmm.... nothing like home grown produce.... humans seem to love growing stuff... even if they're not much good at it sometimes....some say this is a throwback to the Judaeo Christian god telling Adam to look after stuff... some that it is due to Frey, or Buddha, or whoever, telling us to.... but i just think that it is something in us, something natural, just in the same way that some ants farm aphids... something we can't help, like building big nests and killing each other.... why is a mystery... probably we'll never solve it... but the point is that we like doing stuff for ourselves, and i think thats why we have a lot of antisocial behaviour.. because now more than ever we are discouraged from doing it ourselves.... we don't build our own houses, we don't grow our own food, we don't make our own clothes... we don't do much except cook, and we try to make that as easy as possible... no wonder people play up... frustration at not being able to do stuff, even if they don't realise this....people are made to feel useless... and why... well, my theory is that its because theres money in it... if we grew our own food, where would Mr Tesco be...??? if we made our own clothes, what would happen to poor Miss Selfridge???..... if we built our own houses, how would Mr Barratt survive?? but at least we would all be busy..... occupieed.. and content... lets be honest, mos people have jobs they dislike, and lives that are very samey... get drunk, watch telly, shout at a football.... and get frustrated and become antisocial... and its happened before.. the better off a society becomes, the more decadent it gets, and the greater the level of violence and antisocial behaviour... just look at rome!! but waht's the answer... even a wise beard does not know.....but until we find one... Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fatalism.. or not......

Well, the beard that is wise but inebriates not is having a rare old time.... one of the best he's had for a while, to be honest... windowsills full of tomato plants, a coffee table model railway about to jump off the planning board and into reality, an ISA, a lovely fun relationship with an incredibly beautiful woman, a Ford Cortina, and many other great things... strange how things go... which brings me to a quandary i've had for a while.. religionwise I should be a bit of a fatalist, but often I find I'm not.... to enlighten you as to the reasons, I must tel you that the Beard is in fact pagan... and I mean it in the old fashioned sense, not the more modern (and innaccurate) one of Atheist... pagan of course comes from the latin paganus.... meaning country dweller..... meaning one rustic enough to still believe in the old gods of nature, rather than the more sophisticated "city gods..." but i sort of digress... a fair while ago I decided that the old gods of my viking forefathers made far more sense to me, geographically, culturally and faithilly... (is there such a word..?? there is now...) now, according to this faith, a man (or woman, of course) is born when one of three sisters begins to spin a thread.... everyone has a thread, and it is this sister's job to spin them... a person dies when the third sister (of three, I hasten to add...) cuts the thread.... now, it is obvious that no one has any choice in this.... at all... you are born when you are born, you die when you die... this explains, of course, why we all know of someone who was fit, and healthy, but dropped down dead art thirty... and we also know someone who smokes like a chimney and never exercises, and will be celebrating their 80th birthday next week.... but what happens in between...??? well, one theory has it that the second sister, the one who weaves, weaves a pattern that you follow.... the other theory is that she weaves the pattern you make.... now, the first of these denies totally the concept of free will, which, as anyone knows, may or may not exist... there are good arguments either way, and in fact if there is no such thing it actually makes things easier to explain... but it denies the existence of both evil and hope... the second implies that we have complete control over our own destinies, except where our existence is impinged upon by others.... the second is also, however, a more modern way of thinking, coloured possibly by the Nazarene heresy... plus we all know of incidences of "Fate " and "Destiny..." personally, my take on it at the minute is that for most people, it is enoughthat we live our brief lives as we wish, and the second sister is content to tick over and weave what we do... but that at times, wehn it is necessary, either she is instructed (and by whom?? even Odin is subject to her weaving...) to weave a certain pattern for a certain individual, or that she, either in conjunction with her sisters or apart from them, decides for whatever reason to weave that pattern... which leaves us all at the whim of some power whose objectives we cannot fathom, and cannot resist... which to me is a fairly comforting thought... far more so than the Judaeo-Christian tale that God will no longer interfere with our affairs till the end times.... I want divine or supra-divine intervention, thank you very much.... and i think most of us do... but there we are.... anyway, enough from me for one evening... until the cutting of the thread, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!