Nothing Doing?

I went out to buy clothes today, maybe a new top or something, for the do on Saturday. I came home empty handed, because I was in one of my funny moods where I liked nothing I saw.

Nothing is a funny word. I was listening to In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg's show on R4, this morning on the way to look for clothes and I ended up taking a wrong turn and driving this little country road up the wrong side of the Cooley mountains. It's called Flagstaff and it is very high up indeed: it gave me a view over Carlingford lough that I've never seen before. Anyway, there I was driving along listening to physicists discussing atoms, nuclei, golf courses and golf holes and the thing is that there's never nothing going on in the spaces between all these particles, because there's a great deal of electrical charges all bouncing around, shifting and changing things. Talk about a state of flux!

I've now done a lot of thinking about nothing, because apparently when it comes to quantum, and the small particles that make up atoms, there's no such thing as nothing and in space there's no such thing either! And don't quote that expression, "nothing abhors a vacuum like nature" because apparently there's no such thing really as a complete vacuum either.

And then I get home and find this poem on Poetry Daily, which adds to the whole thing I have going on!

Now you know why I couldn't buy clothes this morning: I was too busy thinking about nothing.