Brvhrt

It is hard to enunciate anything without vowels, although a thick Scots accent comes close in some cases. I remember Celine Dion singing that her heart would go on (and on and on and on to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars).

These two things eat at me sometimes. They don't irritate me, but they are things which are of interest. And they hardly ever come together. Except, today.

I don't think I am suffering from a splintered mind. I think I am suffering from an abbreviated heart.

My heart is normally large enough to give a space to almost anyone who needs or wants it, and even to those who don't believe that anyone would want to provide some. This is of course altogether different from the romantic ideal (or idyll, for the more romantic) of the single heart given to another – or else how on earth could we love the others we are supposed to love?

(It is unlike my mind, which operates under a different paradigm. I am known to give a piece of my mind even to people who do not want one (or have one of their own, poor things). My mind is clever. It regenerates what it has given away by transcriptive and descriptive crypto-cloning.)

But of late, with the heavy end of the last bright year descending, the whole thing is just a claustrophobic blackness which squeezes what's left of my heart into a lump the way the Scots accent squeezes what's left of your tongue into a haggis. It will pass. Of course it will. Yet, this is one of those times you just need to let go. You need to let it out and away. And over the sea to Skye.

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No soy el hombre más piadoso ni más honesto, sino que soy un hombre valiente, said Captain Alatriste in the wonderful novels by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Not I a man most pious nor most honest, but I am a brave man. And that courage comes not by force of arms or force of will, not by passion or by mighty striving, but by the grace of God.

Ha. My heart will go on...