About ten years ago my lovely friends Janey and Neill suggested I participate in a blind date. They’d be the other couple, it was with a lovely chap they’d met, a solicitor, a lover of books, paintings and other grown-up stuff. What could possibly go wrong?
The food was lovely; lovelier still as it was “served” to us by a really fab couple who I would happily have spent the evening with – had the aforementioned solicitor not treated them like “the help”. The rest got progressively trickier. It was clear that we weren’t going to hit it off but I felt I ought to show willing and so – as probably often happens – wrong signals flew all over the place and I found myself alone with him, in his study with a glass of whiskey (which I didn’t really like them) and faced with “Zimmie”.
Of course, I knew him – know him – as most people do, as Bob Dylan. The solicitor knew him as “Zimmie”. A life-size poster of the man had been placed on the wall so that he “overlooked everything I write. He judges everything I do”. Yikes.
I escaped. I wish the solicitor very well indeed. I bet he’s earning a lot more than me. However, I find myself thinking back to Zimmie and his works. I love Dylan’s writing, sadly his singing sounds (to me) like air escaping from a damaged bagpipe. But he does write a grand song. So, “the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”.
For several months we have been fighting the building of an ill-conceived wind farm on our actual doorstep. Here’s not the place for politicising about the whole business, suffice to say that the Inspector who heard the local people’s appeal upheld our non-NIMBYist position and championed the authenticity of our landscape. So for us the answer has been “no” (as it was for the solicitor a decade ago). We couldn’t be happier.
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