Worry.

At present thousands of people all round the world are worried.

Welcome to my world!

Just in case this is you, too, here are some irritating sayings about worry, that are, in themselves, so worryingly annoying they will replay in your head, like one of those earworm tunes, endlessly.  Eventually, if you say them often enough to the people who have the misfortune to be cooped up with endlessly worrying you, they will catch the irritation and beat you up to make themselves feel better and then you’ll have something else to worry about.  See, working already!

Worry is like a rocking chair, it doesn’t get you anywhere, it just gives you something to do.

Very true, it does.  The thing to do is something else.  This is the ideal time to learn to crochet, order a crochet hook, online, unravel the tank top your Auntie knitted that you can neither throw away nor wear, and get started.  In no time at all (because crochet is quite quick, what with the holes being deliberate) you’ll have turned out a small grey lump covered with finger grime and snivellings from where you’ve poked the hook up your fingernail, that you can burn ritually, when we are free.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Yes it is and next week is the week you worried about last week and next month is the one where you worried you wouldn’t get any birthday presents and look, you haven’t.  Oh we can go on forever in this vein.  It’s like sitting in the dentist’s waiting room isn’t it?  No one ever sings in there and if they did, they’d get lynched.

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one.

Mangled.

No, no, no this is meant to allay your fears.  For some reason this posting is taking a rather dark turn.  Sorry.  I’ll try again.  Um.  Wish I hadn’t given that set of encyclopaedias to the charity shop.  They were full of wise sayings that I can’t now remember.  Let’s have a look at the Internet.

The man of think – wrong!

Yes, well this is what happens if you put worry into an automatic translator and feed it into a search engine.  Rubbish. On the other hand………. this could be instructive. The man of  think, hmm, well worry is a kind of thinking.  Not a very helpful one.  And it’s so tiring isn’t it, when you just lie there all night with the stuff going round and round in your head?  Round and round and round.  What if I’ve got it and I don’t know?  What if I’ve given it to our Kev through the letterbox when he only came by to post me half a toilet roll?  What if the woman I heard sneezing in the garden, sneezed it over the fence and it landed on a plant and a pigeon pecked the plant and then, when it did that poo on the washing and I scraped it off the towel with my fingernail (which by the way I wish I hadn’t done) and then wiped my hand on the other towel by the sink and that got on the plate somehow and we’ve all eaten it?  What if I get carted into hospital with this hairdo that I’ve cut myself because I thought I’d have time to grow it out?  What if the financial planning goes wrong and we end up actually having to eat the dried pasta?  I don’t even like dried pasta and I’ve got three cupboards full of it.

(I would like to point out at this point that this is only a sample worry.  I actually only have the usual jar with several strands of different colours of spaghetti that we’ve always had.  I stopped eating spag bog when I went vegetarian and he keeps buying healthy stuff when he hasn’t finished the last lot.  It is so old it’s harder than most of the building materials that have been hanging round here.  I wonder if you could use very old spaghetti as dolls’ house scaffolding?)

Anyway, back to the worry.  Back To The Pasta.  Sounds like a film title, um……..Sorry, easily distracted.

Right. Worry.  Worries are like people, they grow bigger if you nurse them.

Oooh, that’s so true.  With application and practice you can take a tiny worry and make it huge.  I did it all the time with cancer.  The future scenarios in my head that so far have not come to pass were endless and massive.  Worries are also like houseplants for some people, if you don’t water them they shrivel up, go brown round the edges and end up in the green dustbin, fairly quickly.  Then you have an empty pot for a nice new worry.  And I think now I will worry about…………..

Very unhelpful. Back to Tinternet.

Worry, dormouse of the small.

I think this is saying the same thing, really, difficult to tell. It popped up in some tourist information (which seems a bit laughable now) about some villages you can visit halfway up a mountain in an area of Europe, surprisingly, that has its own sayings and its own language.  It’s one of those languages that only exists for the oldest residents, who look a bit odd, to say the least, though this did come up absolutely first in famous sayings of those parts. It’s obviously very significant if you live up an isolated hill in a remote part of the mountains.  Maybe they breed the dormice as a food source.  The Romans did.  Maybe they worry that the dormice will not breed and they’ll all go hungry.  Maybe they only want small dormice, though to be fair, dormice are pretty titchy anyway. Maybe it’s the dormice who are worried. If I’d been bred for food I’d be worried.  My stomach could keep a larger carnivore going for ages.  Wouldn’t be healthy though, too fatty.

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.

It’s that dormouse again.  Running up the hill in the sunset to look gigantic. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.  Villagers telling their children ‘Beware the giant dormouse of the evening.’  But in foreign.  With an accent probably.  You know, ‘Beewar he Hiant dormous hov he hevhenhing.  Hoop!’  Yes the dormice fight back! (I’m on the side of the dormice, are you?)

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Aristotle said that. And he knew a thing or two.  And was really keen to tell everyone about it.  I bet he was a pain in the neck to live with.  And I have got this pain in my neck, now I mention it, and there’s no way I’m going near a hospital with it.  I’ll just have to worry about it on my own without medical supervision.  That’s a worry, it is. Could be a congenital weakness of the neck that will make my head drop off.  You see them, people, with dropped off heads, carrying them in shopping baskets, up near their ears, I bet it makes your arms tired. Then you would get exhausted and drop down dead just like that after only six or seven years of carrying your head in a shopping basket and it would be such a difficult thing to dress.  What would you wear to go with your head in a shopping basket?  ‘This spring head baskets will be yellow with a hint of dormouse.’

The dormice – I’d forgotten about the dormice!  I was worrying about them very successfully. I was just about to give them names.  Here is Jamie Dormouse due to be eaten next week, in a sandwich, with butter and just a light dab of pickle, sprinkle of salt, parsley on the side…………..

Sorry, I worry I’m watching too many cookery programmes.  Well, I am, you can tell.  Back to Internet sayings.

Sock of the rubbing cream, no worry.

Well! That’s quite enough of that sort of thing.

Dear me, you could worry yourself silly looking stuff up on the Internet, shan’t do that.

What shall I do this afternoon? I know, I’ll have a go at crocheting a bird bath out of dental floss. and knicker elastic.  What could go wrong with that?

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