Category: Personals

Six Years of Mostly About Stories

I started Mostly About Stories towards the end of January, 2019, which makes it about six years old and provides the excuse for this post. I’ll cover some things I did this year, some writing I’ve done, and the statistics.

If you want to know what I’ve read and enjoyed this year, you can check out the updated All Posts page.

Personal

This past year I moved to Germany, where hopefully, employers willing, I will remain for the next year or two. For various reasons, primarily interrail tickets and the German Deutschlandticket, which gives me unlimited travel on all non-long-distance public transport at a very reasonable price, I have been quite busy travelling about. I’ve seen the Black Forest, Berlin, Hamburg and Luebeck, Copenhagen, Vienna, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Amsterdam, Tessel, Norderney, Utrecht, Maastricht, Aachen and Muenster. Of these, I do regret that after visiting Heidegger’s cottage in Todtnauberg the blog post on him never materialised. Another time. 

Compared to Russia, Germany is not very exciting. Still, I cannot say I’m not glad to be in a location where war seems unthinkable. While my German is reasonably good and improving daily, it’s challenging to integrate fully where I am, though I am working on it. Mostly, I end up with my co-workers. I would say the atrophy of my Russian has been halted by having many colleagues from that part of the world, while my Ukrainian has improved, now I have a friend here so crazy about a certain vision of her country that she has a trident stuck on her arm. Progress on my Polish is not good enough for my girlfriend, especially when I am learning Ukrainian over it, which even Ukrainians like to tell me is useless to me. Still, we get there too, slowly.

When I wrote my Three Years of Mostly About Stories post, I was struggling with combining work and reading, to say nothing of the writing I wasn’t doing. The company I was with didn’t know what to do with me, my immigration status in Russia felt precarious, and I was living under the shadow of a war that, it turned out, really was imminent.

Now I can say with some confidence that things have never been so good. I have a flat within walking distance of work, with green spaces nearby, and friends around. I actually have friends, where moving to Moscow was merely entering a vortex of potentiality. Work is fine – I am finishing up a graduate scheme so I get to try a variety of things to really work out what it is I want to be doing – and I get paid well. As noted, I’ve done lots of travelling. But the main thing is that I have finally sorted out the writing.

Writing

Mostly About Stories is a bit of fun and I hope readers treat it as such. The real thing is to become a writer of great fiction. To do that, I must first become a writer of fiction. At school I wrote a novel, which after paying an editor to go through, was picked up by an agent. I then, being about sixteen, got bored, feeling I was improving so fast that there was no point bothering with that old work. This was a mistake, obviously, but whatever. At university, I used to reach a boil of inspiration where suddenly things would spill over and I’d spend a weekend neglecting my studies and spewing out a short story. These I was proud of, and ultimately self-published on Amazon for a few friends to buy. A little later, I took it down.

Even with those bright spots, I struggled to write. I wrote and was immediately disheartened by the words, which meant I ended up producing blank pages rather than drafts that could later be improved. War and Peace, a novel I hold in high esteem, and which seems supremely natural, was actually redrafted and line-edited something like ten times. Perhaps only Goethe could get perfection the first time round, but plenty of people have produced things which in the end were even better, and all because they did not give up on what they started. This was not me: I produced neither perfection nor imperfection, unless we count the blank page perfection, and I am not into that kind of game.

After graduating, I did write the odd story, but given I spent vast amounts of time unemployed thanks to a certain autocrat, I was not making the most of my time. Writers get better by writing, they often say. There might be more to it than that, but it’s a good starting point, and one I wasn’t much aligned with. For various reasons, but primarily this incessant self-criticism, I got nowhere. It was also a little disturbing that I had no “ideas” for a novel. Any amateur will find it’s fairly easy to come up with great ideas – the family saga, the modernised War and Peace, etc – but it soon becomes apparent that these overarching ideas must be broken down into little ideas, little narratives, or they will not be possible to write at all. It wouldn’t even be akin to building the skeleton of a house – it would be like putting up the walls without the edges, and watching them fall over at the first gust. It’s the little ideas, the observations that sparkle on each page, that make a novel great – great ideas for overarching stories are easy, as ultimately there’s less originality there than you might think.

Anyway, this idea that is absolutely central to my idea of my own self – that I am a writer, must be a writer – was finding little justification in reality. Until this year, round about the half way part.

I resolved it in two ways. The first solution arose last summer, when for the first time I had an idea for a “novel”. Something more modest and practical than the ideas above. On its own, that was no salvation. But I was also helped by technology. I went and bought a small folding phone stand and a Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike with my laptop, where I could always tab-out to something else, with a phone if you are in the writing app it’s harder to leave. This simple technological adjustment made it possible to write by lowering the barrier of entry and raising the barrier to exit. Rather than forcing myself with great effort to sit down in front of my computer, only to write a few words that disgusted me, and then immediately switch to some tab or video that would entertain me, here I could write with almost no effort at all. From bed, on a cramped train, lying on a sofa, and so on. Because phones have smaller screens, there was also only so much neurotic re-reading I could do. I just had to accept what I’d written, and move on.

The result was a novel. 114’000 words – some good, some definitely not – with a beginning, middle, end, and characters who were, at least when you squinted, recognisably human. Also, gladly, it was not a work that was “semi-autobiographical”, a phrase that always makes my stomach churn. This was and is, absolutely, something to be proud of. I had made something come into existence that only I could have done.

But once it was done, in this first draft, I realised I still could not write anything else. Inspiration is great, but clearly unreliable. At a given moment, I’ve got a couple of things I want to write, but not necessarily so desperately that I must write them. Not enough to go back to that same method, anyway.

A second revolution was needed, one that was far simpler. I adjusted my routine. I am something of a control-maniac, and one of the joys of my life in Germany is that I have my own flat and life here. Initially, I planned each day to get up a little before 8, then from 8:05 to 8:25 I did my morning routine (shower, bathroom, clothes, etc), before leaving at around 8:27 to ensure I arrived at work at 8:57 and in time for any 9:00 meetings. I had imagined that, when I came home each day, I could then have “half” of the day to myself. This was delusional. I was not tired, but I was tired enough that this was not leading to the results I wanted. Yes, I might read, but certainly I was not going to sit down and write.

I have always had struggles with sleeping, though not proper insomnia or anything that might lead to wacky fiction. In the autumn I was waking up regularly at say six and unable to get back to sleep easily, so I decided one day to have a go just getting up then. Combined with my morning cup of matcha, I found I had something functional. I still got ready to leave at 8:27 and kept my alarms in place, but instead those alarms were not reminding me to leave bed, but rather to finish up my writing. Now, I woke up around six forty with no alarm (having also moved my bedtime an hour earlier), got up, made my matcha, and sat down to write. I then wrote until the alarms forced me to get ready for work.

So far this method has been in operation for a few months. Not every day has been a success, but I would say the clear majority of mornings find me doing this. No matter how rubbish the words are, I get them down, between 500 and 1000 of them. I then head away to work, knowing that however badly I spend the rest of my time, my day has been no failure.

These are promising developments in the life of a writer. It is impossible for me to say whether the quality has improved, or will improve, with this system. We might also question whether writing in this way forces me to produce things that are less cohesive compared to the several thousand words I might write in a single day when the inspiration pressure cooker was overflowing at Cambridge. But at least I am writing. I have no particular desire to be published at this stage, so I am happy just to get drafts on the page, for further editing and examination down the line. I have a well-paying bourgeois job – I’m no starving writer desperately trying to see things in the papers. This gives me the luxury of writing as much as I want and whatever I want, before I actually start trying to make money off it.

Mostly About Stories is just a blog about the books that I’ve been reading, and will not contain my fiction as a matter of principle, though thematic interests may be shared between work “off the blog” and the work that does go on the blog. Thinking aloud is nice, but so is thinking on paper. Borges used to ask why he should write a book of five hundred pages when he could write a book review for this imaginary book and get it all down in five. I am no Borges, but writing the review first, then the novel itself, may not be a bad way to go in terms of learning thematic focus.

While I do not want to share my fiction on the blog (ewww…), readers who think they might be interested in reading and providing feedback should certainly get in touch.

Stats

There’s inevitably little visibility on the amount of views that literature blogs get, and I cannot see much harm in sharing my own. Last year I had a significant increase in views. I have no idea why but I cannot complain. I’ve also had interesting comments. Really that’s all I can ask for. If you are reading, thanks.

Conclusion

Anyway, it appears to have been a good year. I have entered 2025 reading more, writing more, and getting better at the things that matter. Now all I need is a permanent position at work, and things will be sehr gut indeed.

My Job, My Life, My Blog

After my birthday dinner in November, my friends remarked, though not to me directly, that they had never seen me so happy. That really is a most extraordinary thing. I have been many things to many people, but happy? Not often. Entertaining, exciting, supportive, intense – those might fit, but not “happy.” At my worst I am depressive, moody, snappy. For people to notice, and be so shocked as to mention it to my girlfriend, must mean it was a real surprise. Indeed, the whole thing has been quite a surprise to me too.

In September, I started full time work. With Marx and Marcuse at the ready, I was so prepared to be alienated and miserable that I was completely blindsided by what actually happened. The work was interesting, my colleagues were brilliant and good fun, the company paid me well and gave generously into my pension, while allowing me great flexibility about when and where I worked. I quickly made friends with a few people in my team, and with several people from the same graduate intake as mine. I had time to meet them in the afternoons at the office café for free hot chocolate, and even hang out after work. I travelled to our headquarters in Germany a few times, and visited a power plant in the UK, walking around in a hard hat and covering my ears with a gleeful expression on my face as I tried not to be utterly overwhelmed by all the loud exciting noises.

Normally, when I go into work, I use the bus. From my family’s home, it’s a fifteen minute walk through the fields to get to the bus stop. In the mornings, the grass is slick with dew and you can smell the changing of the seasons. On the bus I read, and usually on the walk back I’ll call my girlfriend, who is just finishing off her studies at Cambridge. At home I have little enough time to sense its value, but just about enough time to make use of that knowledge and spend it well. Bizarrely, after many months of day-to-day freedom, I found myself reading far more, and far better. I even found myself writing, completing two stories late last year by getting an evening routine going. In November, I started running in the mornings too. Though I cannot say I always enjoy this, I’m glad I’m doing it.

A night or two each week I still teach a few Ukrainian refugees in the UK online as part of the charity my girlfriend and I set up. At this point, if their English isn’t good, there’s no helping them. But I have fun and so do they. On weekends I can travel to London or further afield. All told, I am managing to maintain a decent social life, given I’m not in London full time. And given I’m not in London full time, I’m able to put away a nice amount of my salary into savings.

So that is it on paper. A job that pays well, where I have a positive impact and career growth, travel and freedom, a good pension and nice colleagues. I have regular exercise, a wonderful girlfriend, a much loved social circle, some active participation in making the world a better place, and time for reading and creativity. Life is, perhaps as it’s never been before, good.

So why do I find myself asking if this is all there is to it?

We can approach the problem of our lives in at least two ways, psychologically and philosophically. I have been reading philosophical fiction, and now philosophy, for far longer than is perhaps healthy. But the main problem that we soon run into, clutching our copy of Crime and Punishment in the school medical centre while waiting for a checkup, is that Dostoevsky and his friends don’t actually have much to say to us, just yet. We may relate to questions of free will and meaning, but they are inevitably abstracted, airy – just like how we don’t really understand what it means when we read in introductions that Dostoevsky had gambling debts. All of these questions and answers about how to live our lives, even Rilke’s “live the questions for now” in his Letters to a Young Poet, require that one is actually living.

And living is an active thing. It is also a thing that requires, I think, certain life conditions. We cannot live at school, or even at university. We require a choice to live, and we require consequences. We may have to face our consequences all the time, but only rarely in the sense of consequences that last our entire lives. It was only when I was in an office with the odd fifty-year-old that I realised the impact of exercise and healthy eating can have as we age; and how undesirable the alternative is, as I watched the older colleagues shuffling around with the same kind of pace and face I’d expect at a retirement home. At school we make decisions about how we learn, in the holidays we establish good or bad habits, but it takes a great deal of wisdom to see through them all the way to their ultimate consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now I have plenty of regrets for my thousands of hours in Call of Duty matches.  

We have choices at university and school, but these are still fairly bounded. We can mess up our schoolwork and get kicked out, but this is like Sartre saying we always have a choice because we can always kill ourselves. It’s laughably irrelevant. Or rather, provided we make the decision to actually study, there’s only so much choice left. Just like, if we make the decision to fail, there’s only then a choice about how to fail. At the other end, in life, there are many more choices. Some of them rest on what’s come before – I cannot immediately become a doctor, for example. But most of them come to us with the freedom of a quest in Skyrim or any other role-playing game – we can choose whatever we want to do. Suddenly, a vastly increased weight of responsibility – for fitness of mind and body, for our social circles, for where and how we live and work and spend our time – is hurled upon us. Not everyone has to decide all of these things all at once, but the decisions come, and often sooner than we expect.

If the choices and the consequences were always there, as I now see they perhaps were, then what I mean is that once you are out of it all you can gain a wisdom you might have missed earlier. And some people miss it then too. But you’re on my blog, so probably haven’t. The wisdom is the knowledge that things you do matter. Now, at last, we can do philosophy.

It’s a bitter irony that the best times in our lives for reading philosophy, when our minds are most subtle (and supple) and our time most flexible, are inarguably the worst times for doing philosophy. Of course, I can kill a pawnbroker at any time, but as I age I am more interested in practical philosophies that will not send me to prison. I want to try Schopenhauerian ethics and annihilate my willing; I want to live the way Nietzsche’s works make us hope he does; I want to read Camus and Sartre and try it all out for myself; I want to be so religious my clothes stink of incense; I want to walk the world over with only Walt Whitman for company, looking like a tramp. Now I can start to put these things into practice.

Here is where that psychological element comes in. The problems of life that I face now are mine. If before, when I was depressed, I could often blame someone or something else directly, now I am in control. I could always say I’m not happy because I’m not doing meaningful work, or because I’m not seeing my friends enough and can’t, or because I’m not exercising. With all of those things sorted, any problem that remains – and there is one – is real. The easy solutions have been tried, now life is at hand. The diffuse problems of society and economics, these too are there in the background, but divided now from the mush of poor mental health that comes with living badly, as it were. I can see them, and I can allow myself whatever anguish they will cause – for example, when I decide to rent in London and have to deal with that mess.

So when I feel this this-is-it-ness, it’s deeper than just some unkind word taken to heart on the playground or a shut door at university where I expected an embrace. It is the world I have a problem with, and the world I must answer. The problem, it goes without saying, is that although I am doing everything I am supposed to, something is still missing. I have started thinking about death at night, and the repetition of days. “Days are where we live”, as Philip Larkin has it. And seeing my days not being right, still having some hole – that’s a problem, and one I am responsible for sorting out.

To resolve it, I can look at my life and begin tinkering with it. Should I do more writing? Maybe write to some literary magazines? Or is the running not enough? I feel disgusted with myself for eating meat still – can I finally give it up or properly cut it down? (Living at home, this is hard. When I move to Germany at the end of the month, then it will be all on me). Can I see my friends more? What about calling my brother? And so on. We approach life as if it is a PC we have built, and begin moving the wires around, occasionally adding some RAM or something else here and there, and see what works. It feels almost fun, like a game.

Then there are the stronger remedies, like the bizarre ones my Polish girlfriend gets recommended when she calls her grandparents with a slight sniffle (drinking onion syrup or placing a bulb of peeled garlic next to your pillow, to mention a few). These remedies are philosophical. Is my attitude right? Am I heeding the voice of my conscience? Or should I, on the contrary, just grab a pillow and suffocate the voice instead? Then there are wild lifestyle changes – why not try being properly Epicurean, or properly Stoic? Visit a monastery? Should I give all my money away? With these too, there’s an element of play involved. And a worth goal – our own happiness, or satisfaction, or soothed conscience, or peace. (After all, the goal is itself a question for the philosophers).

The general feeling is one of excitement. Life is real, and its problems are real, and the solutions are worth trying. Never have I felt so much joy from a cutting phrase in Weil or Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Weber. Like a child in a toyshop who can’t wait to get home and unbox the latest toy tractor, when I hear a cool idea I can’t wait to think it over properly, to live it, and to see whether it works. That is what explains my obsession with Wittgenstein these past few months – I am trying to live some of what he says. I’m not reading for essays anymore, not even for blog posts. (Apologies!) The sheer weightiness of my decisions, made day after day, suffocate me like a stone upon my chest. Yet at the same time, suffocation entails dizziness. And I am madly lightheaded!  

Life is so sweet when we know that this is it. Without excuses, with all responsibility heaped on, every joy is magnified. To look at a tree and run my hand over its rough bark is a pleasure I’ve never felt so richly before. I go through art galleries almost at a blind run, and then allow myself an hour before a painting that takes my breath away and reaches right through to my soul and makes it bleed. I live – more and more I am living. Even if the regrets are magnified too, because nothing now will ever replace the lost time, still I am living. Suddenly, I can say to myself “da capo” and mean it. I find myself growing strong enough to confront my regrets and my mistakes – not all of them, by any stretch – and tell them and myself that it was worthwhile. Life is good.

This insane post is an attempt to work out what I am feeling. The this-is-it-ness of life is frightening and I still do not have a solution to the thought of death. I am working on it. I am living and trying everything I can and not letting it get too much for me. Because this is the real problem and challenge of my days. One is rising and falling on a see-saw above the abyss. We can be elated, and find our excitement from the urgency and seriousness of the search, or we can be rendered miserable by the emptiness of all things as we confront the void. The latter is what happened to Tolstoy, but even he managed to get out of it. I know how he did it too – I’ve got his letters even, and I’m making notes, and maybe one day you’ll see a photo of me in one of my posts, my beard grown out and a roughhewn walking stick in hand. (Be careful though, that might be the Whitman phase!)

These thoughts and reflections, if they deserve that title, are best, I realise anyway, to have when you are not too old. I am now twenty-six, and not old by any stretch, but there are times when I do feel a bit un-young. Leaving aside the body, my memory is ever-so-slightly weaker and my ability to work with complex ideas is decreasing a bit too, from the baseline of my manic teenage years. I am not sure I could work my way through the Critique of Pure Reason anymore, even if I wanted to. Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem.

If I had come to the realisation that I needed to change my life too late, I might have found I lacked the strength of mind and will to actually do anything. Tolstoy latched onto religion and stopped thinking. But he did a heck of a lot of thinking before he got to that point, as even his mature religious writings show. I, anyhow, have time and energy to live. To take us back to the beginning, part of that is thanks to having been very lucky in ending up with the job I did. I know that my consultant friend at Bain, or was it BCG, who is much cleverer than me and knows her Russian literature as well as I do, doesn’t have the time to do any thinking any more. That, to me, is a real waste.

Anyway, against the this-is-it-ness of things, and the void in the far distance, I am trying to keep myself excited. I hope the drama of my mental life, which is as much a part of this blog as is the stuff I read, continues to provide some interest in the years to come. And do tune in again for the inevitable update, some years hence, when I say that I have finally had a child of my own, and owing to the stress I have decided to stop thinking after all! (From what I understand, this is fairly common, though hardly deserving of condemnation.)

I did not make a post about it last year, but this one marks five years of Mostly About Stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts. I’ve even enjoyed writing some of them!

The Death of the Black Hen

It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.

The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.

I went to find the black hen.

I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.

Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.

The girls

Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.

It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.

When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.

More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.

Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.

She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.

She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.

All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.

But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.

The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.

Looking particularly like a white onion in this one.

Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.

The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.

But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?

Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.

When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.