I was hoping, in a delicately guarded and inconspicuous way, that if I stubbornly just ignored November then it would just sort of go away. And whaddaya know: it did. Here we are, right as reindeer and cute as a mutton, it’s the 2^nd day of December in the year of 2009, praise be, and the November of this year is duly taken care of, truly sorted out and verily filed away in an appropriate manner, neatly and tidily, with curiously warm temperatures all around and a pointedly comprehensive absence of snow. Yes, it was a suspiciously good one and being now firmly in the past tense makes it even better. December always shines in more soothing and comforting colours than its’ predecessor, even if those colours mostly consist of different shades of gray. The days may grow darker still as we tumble down the last remaining weeks of the year, but the spirit grows lighter as the pendulum slowly starts to swing towards springtime.

Whoops. Did I momentarily  slip into the realm of Overtly Optimistic Tree-Hugging Hippie Bullshit there? After all it’s only 2 Dec and there certainly is plenty of time left for all kinds of unpleasantness to occur, weatherwise. Well, let it occur, I’m content at the moment, hugging my tree of November-gone-past.

Here’s some trinkets of information I never knew I didn’t know until I found out, to further enlighten the dark season:

THINGS I WAS PREVIOUSLY UNAWARE OF:
Hermes, a member of the Greek pantheon, the messenger of the gods and so on and so forth, is also a patron of a stupendous amount of different go-getters and never-do-wells, and of things and ideals of steeply conflicting qualities. According to an educational book I’m currently reading he was “definitely the most talented of all gods. His inventions include alphabet, lyre, scales for both music and weight, mathematics, olive tree farming and boxing.” He was the patron of both people who write and recite poetry and people who punch others with fists which must have caused a lot of delicious situations as lifestyles and ideals clashed (“He’s our god!”, “No he’s bloody not!”, “Yes he bloody fucking is!”) in those mythical times of ancient Greece when persons were still only two-dimensional and couldn’t have opinions that disagreed with their chosen lifestyle or belief system.

An inebriated, pugilistic poet of modern times has become almost a norm these days but somehow I doubt that athletics mingled much with thieves, or poets with merchants back when Hermes held sway over his colourful bunch. With the vast crowd of gods and demigods hanging around the pantheon, couldn’t they split and share the duties more evenly? Ares had only the bloodlust and slaughtering to take care of, surely he could have taken the burden off his fellow Olympian a little by adding, say, wrestling to his repertoire?

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Hermes. He was also a psychopomp, among all his other duties, which must have been entirely awesome even, and especially if, you didn’t know what is required of a person bearing such title. He probably invented Hermesetas the artificial sweetener too, being the god of inventing and all, although I couldn’t find any facts to support this supposition of mine.


Pictured above is Hermes with Athena, by Bartholomaeus Spranger. He looks like a twat (Hermes, not Bart. I don’t know what Bart looks like, presumably Flemish) in his baseball cap and definitely is not my god, whether it was music, literature, travelling or olive tree farming I happened to dabble with. Althought the psychopomp part is quite cool.