Postscript
ah! business P J. Kavanagh The beginning of a new year is a good time to think about changes and our attitude to them. If we dislike them it is difficult to know whether this is because we associate them with changes in ourselves, as we grow older, which dismay us, or because, as the gloomy Scotsman re- marked, All changes are for the worse.' We can become permanently angered by change, which is bad for the facial expres- sion. We can even convince ourselves that nothing that is important changes at all, but this is such an apparently abstract and unworldly view it angers those who do not share it. Also, of course, there are things that should be changed.
The way to avoid noticing unwelcome change is to keep moving about and never to visit the same place twice. It is the familiar that is dangerous.
For some years now I have been finding myself in the early morning in the High Street of what I suppose is now a suburb of a provincial town. It is a pleasant, modest street, mid-Victorian, none of the houses more than three storeys high, and their ground floors are glass-fronted shops. There is an air of the day beginning, of blinds going up; shopkeepers greet each other from their doorways and sometimes, as I stride along still half-wrapped in dreams, they greet me. On one side there is a pub, and next to the pub is a long brick wall.
I cannot know if others are as affected by old brick walls, the kind that sag a little, and have taken on a certain concave and convex curviness over the years, but I am very fond of that wall. Behind it is an allotment. For years. every morning, _I have peered over the wall and marvelled at the allotment's neatness. Cabbages in rows, strawberries, chrysanthemums, even roses carefully trained over a rusty pergola. I never saw anyone working there, but there was never a weed; the whole thing was the result of patient, loving and suc- cessful work.
But it is a valuable site and this summer a Site for Development notice went up. Within days weeds were everywhere and the roses straggled. Now it is a wilderness.
Inevitable, of course, but the speed of the change is startling. I wonder what became of the gardener who tended it. I do not wonder what will be built there. Sufficient unto the day.
Opposite was a little haberdashers that sold buttons on cards and ribbons and other useful things that did not seem enough to give the proprietor a living.
Clearly they were not enough because not long ago the windows were whitewashed and a placard announced that it was soon to be 'Another Computer-linked Office'. Just that, without saying what the office was to be for. The link with the computer was thought to be excitement enough.
This morning the windows shone clean
and I looked in; it was a new estate agent, but what took my breath away and made me say, involuntarily, 'Corr was what was written in foot-high shining letters over an arch above some steps the prospective house-purchaser would presumably have to descend:- SELLING HOUSES IS oh! BUSI- NESS.
Who could have made such a joke and then thought of making it permanent, in chrome? I strode on, less wrapped in dreams than usual. How could anyone so exalt 'business' or imagine those words would do anything but strike terror into the heart of the customer? As he descended those steps, with sinking heart, passing under that terrible legend, he would know he was doomed already, followed by men rubbing their hands in anticipation, licking their lips, measuring him for size.
I shall have to pass that joke every morning and shall try not to notice. My only consolation is to think what Dickens would have made of it.
But that was not the last involuntary exclamation of the morning. Up in the hills above the High Street the rabbits have come back, after the myxomatosis of the Sixties. Not many of them, not enough to do serious damage to the agriculture busi- ness; easily kept down by occasional late- night shoots from a Landrover.
In a field, stationary, was what I hoped was a stone and was not. It was a rabbit, alive, and someone has reintroduced myx- omatosis. How anyone could do that, knowing what horrible and long-lasting suffering it inflicts. I do not know. I skirted it, turning my back. 'Putting them out of their misery' is difficult, they lurch away, brokenly. from any mercifully intended blow. Long ago I decided to let them have the last of the life they so cling to. It stayed where it was, indescribable. I heard my- self say, 'God forgive mankind.'
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