Fuel

 April 3 Word of the Day: Fuel

 

April fuel jokes abound, come thick and fast in recent days, gush in fact, keeping gush in the vocabulary. Gush is at risk of vanishing from use. Gush is at a standstill. Plans to purchase a horse or two, now that the car will soon be off the road for months, preoccupy our minds temporarily as we sit in peak hour traffic, wondering unconsciously if peak hour traffic itself will become a thing of the past. These conjectures never get as far as thinking about the amount of fuel required of a horse. It would return us to a time on the Heidelberg Road before motor vehicles, where we chat now idly amidst plenteous other and ravenous idling cars, checking stations for the rising cost of a litre of standard. Artificially collaged images circulate online. A bus with a tea clipper fastened to its roof, sporting over thirty sails, provides the best in wind power. Convertibles converted into coaches, BMWs into buggies, Toyotas into troikas – graphics whizz past on a production line, good for a laugh. Dependence on crushed fossils meets dependence on why-oh-why wi-fi. The days when fuel was simply the wood collected for the hearth fire are found in books. We have arrived at a pretty strait. Still, as we know, April fuel jokes have a short lifespan. Strike a match, the potassium and sulphur quickly flares then burns out. The import of the joke is understood and quickly forgotten, given its shared universal meaning: fuelishness is a joke on us all. Fuelishness is a tank of petrol, here today and gone tomorrow. What’s fuel for the goose is fuel for the gander. There is no fuel like an old fuel. A fuel and their money are soon parted. It is said that a practical joke is the lowest form of wit, and if it wasn’t before it is now. Only who is the joke on, the object of the joke or the teller? Newsfeeds deliver them and commentary explains them, until this form of humour needs be put to rest. The bigliest April fuel joke though is the one about the man who started a war without telling anyone and then expected them to join in and finish it.

Rivaroxaban

 

April 2 Word of the Day: Rivaroxaban

 this is the delicate balancing act the go-slow streaming service my body ingests after breakfast the tiny orange dot in the base of a japanese teacup a dot called rivaroxaban

 riveting riviera realistically rivaroxaban

 my haematologist I have one of those too held significantly airily eccentrically the forms where I ticked all the boxes my body that is ticked and yes I pass with colours, presumably the flush in my cheek, and he will see me again at ninety he said if I need to go off at that stage rivaroxaban

 the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in command of all the letters for quite a time yet rivaroxaban

 appointments flowed easily major concerns were lowkey and operable I circulated without fuss from pillar to post popped the letter in the letterbox friends never asked anxiously and days passed without event in the days before rivaroxaban

 revealing revelling rivulets oh thankyou rivaroxaban

 let me repeat let me repeat my repute is a request to repeat and repeat what the doctor ordered for my own good and my pharmacist repeats matter-of-factly her eye keeping to the script rivaroxaban

 aches and pains lead to tests and diagnoses like everyone else our mortal flesh leads us to specialist referreds and dead certs pills and potions with top of the list once a day with food a sip of water rivaroxaban

 crossing the rubicon righto rivaroxaban

 imagine there’s no heaven it’s not easy if you try it’s a waste of time like thinking above us is only sky imagine a world without rivaroxaban

 thank god for small mercies cereal friendship without terms conversation in the kitchen lively and light a glass of fresh water breakfast and habit becoming habitual quick rivaroxaban

Cosy

 

April 1 Word of the Day: Cosy

 Reading the letters of Oliver Sacks, recently published in paperback. His friendship with Wystan Auden tracked via the index. Arriving at this signoff to a two-page letter dated New York, 31 March 1973, the year of Auden’s death. Sacks recalls Auden’s ultimate departure from America the year before: “I remember at the airport, on that painful Saturday, when a stranger came up and greeted you, I asked you whether you thought of the world as being a large or a small place; and you replied, “Neither. A cosy place.” So – the world being a cosy place – I am sure I will see you in England, Austria or New York within the next few months.”

 Knowing full well the abstract meanings behind a large place (immense, unmanageable, impossibly complex) and a small place (inhibited, claustrophobic, a dot in the universe), Auden instead personalises the world, affirms our experience of our world, accepts already that it is larger and smaller than anything in our experience, but that it is at the least and importantly, cosy.

 Sacks has memorised the word. It deserves our attention too, as used in their exchange, for surely Auden means cosy in all of its meanings. The world is comfortable. The world is pleasant. The world is snug. The world is a homely home. The world is sheltered. He also knows the opposites of all these adjectives.

 Readers of Auden’s biographies are familiar with his messy, even chaotic living arrangements – whether on socially sunny Ischia, regulation rundown New York, or ungarbling gemütlich Kirchstetten. This was always Auden at home and cosy. Humanity moved through the rooms and humanity’s need for belonging kept being copied by hand onto paper. It’s what we have, so make the most of it.

 His writing too, constantly sharing itself with a not always understanding world, moved towards someone who connects and somewhere that is cosy. Which is to say, where readers are at home, can recognise the place as their own, despite everything. This is done in full awareness of places that are not cosy. Sacks believes, in this worldview, that he and Auden will meet again in this world, soon. Instead, he is left with Auden’s message of faith, hope, and love.