New Media, new fake guru/false teacher,
new sincerity, minted so recently that how fake
it is cannot be recognised until the campaign trick
is repeated so that the public can how to spot
the falseness through repetition easily enough
for the insincerity behind it more clearly.
So that half the people now see it half the time,
when to some the insincerity was clear,
and obvious from when they first saw it.
Forty years ago I was one of the youths
who grew up in a small town surrounded
by military bases. I lived with my family
who lived in the shadows of the cold war,
and the long memory of World War Two.
Prompted by accurate depictions of it on television
I feared nuclear destruction with a vehemence
enough to take to the streets with friends, to protest.
I was too late to protest against World War Two.
Nowadays when I listen to the military madness
that my radio calls 'The News' it is no longer
Soviet Russia vs America that makes me squirm.
It is Israel vs it's many opponents, all of whom
have too little diplomatic good will between them
to resist the slide into a multisided armed conflict.
Any war might be the prelude to World War Three,
a war I now do not get worked up about, but see
as going on well above my head, and pay grade.
I listen to try to get past how what I listen to
is something I can do nothing to stop, and those
who are talking have no recipe to make it stop either.
But still I listen until I notice I'm being inattentive,
then I turn the radio off, Emotionally and physically,
I am too far away from what they are discussing to care.
Consensus may look like unity.
But the expression of it will vary greatly,
contingent on the subjects the consensus is about,
the numbers of people forming the agreement,
and the size of what the consensus is against,
relative to what, or who, the consensus is for,
and has the legal and social strength to enforce.
The greatest strength in individuals
is the will to withstand the discomfort
of loving their enemies, where the consensus
decides who their enemy is, and why to hate them.
The time with Graham left me feeling optimistic. I had shared with him the new positivity I felt with my Creation Centred Spirituality approach to Christianity. I had explained how I preferred that over past versions of Christianity which I knew had left him on edge with me. It was a welcome change when I wanted to write less, last thing at night, to sleep better after his visit.4
But it was only a few days later that I was back to writing more intensely late at night. And it was odd how the triggers for me needing to write so much could be quite light, an utterly innocent response to anyone else. But even a casual exchange that was intended as affirmative politeness from, say, the staff of the job centre could have me wondering what they meant by what they said. The arguments I found myself writing out would have been openly vicious were they spoken out loud. These dialogues were built on the gaps between what I remember my parents saying and the actions from them that followed where they would imply some hope in their words and defer in their actions the means of fulfilling that hope, simultaneously diminishing from me the hope I had in my own ideas of how to act. On paper I filled in the gaps in their arguments with the words that came to me, pen in one hand A4 pad in the other hand. I knew. If as an adult I wrote as someone who was trapped in their anger, then I accepted that description of me. I would defend myself by saying 'This has to be sorted out; now it is opened out it can't be left unexplored'.16
I was increasingly unable to connect the way I felt when venting in writing in order to be able to sleep better with the sociable and prayerful person I was in church, the most sociable place and community there was about me to be part of. Somewhere in all this nightly sturm and drang, in my prayers I got a very distinct message 'Book some time with a church leader. Ask assistant pastor Lou if he will pray with you in his office; there is something you need to hear and that is the best place to hear it', I found it remarkable that my prayers were responded to in a language that was so modest in tone.23
Although I prayed I thought other people were better at getting answers to their prayers than I should expect for myself. I felt better praying that my doubts be accepted than vanquished and permanent change happening to me. Often enough I had seen people spoken to at the end of meetings when there has been an altar call, and it had become like a scene from an over choreographed self-dramatizing Hollywood musical, with the experts in prayers marshalling the scene and keeping those they thought either inexperienced believers or rubberneckers at a distance from the person who was having a spiritual experience and being prayed for because inexperienced people mostly get in the way.31
Whatever I hoped for from the prayer time it had to be very calm, all responses in plain language, and politely and quietly spoken. There should be no need for marshalling in prayer to manage the scene-they would remove me from being the centre of the prayers for my inexperience in prayer if they were there. And so it was that I was sat in Pastor Lou's office and I explained what had God told me, and he very neutrally suggested we all three in the room pray. After ten minutes of prayers with silence between the prayers the words very gently came to me that 'I had a spirit of death about me. My father had the same spirit too, I had got it from him. The spirit of death was part of what was behind him always keeping the television on when family were around; he preferred the television over his family but the spirit would not let him say so'. There was a simple form of prayer afterwards that technically was a casting out or renunciation of the spirit. But again no histrionics. This was not quite the spiritual equivalent of removing the fuse from an unexploded bomb, but it might as well have been. Lou and his prayer partner asked me to leave the room. After ten minutes of sitting in the church I assumed they were done with me and I left the building and went home. 48
When I got home I realised that I did not know what was safe or what was unsafe for me with the television. To be on the safe side I avoided watching television with the rest of the house where I could sociably leave the room. My need for quietness and discretion had left me without follow-on instructions. Three days later I was contacted by Pastor Lou on the phone at home. He asked me call in his office that same day 53
Since I was unemployed I was free and so I went along to his office as I was asked. The first point Pastor Lou and other elder explained to me was to clear up the misunderstanding that after the prayers they had wanted to talk to me, but needed to confer with each other first. They were surprised when they could not find me to talk with. Then they reassured me that that watching television sociably was now probably safer for me to watch than it had been in the past when the spirit of death might have directed my viewing habits. Most entertainments were safe as long as I sought discernment on the matter.60
Then we had a discussion where he asked me about my background, since it was obvious to both of them that my family was, ummm, unusual in how it was structured. I told them I was gay, That I had been labelled maladjusted at age 10, and from age 16 I had struggled to mature against a background that had inhibited my maturity, including my spiritual maturity, At aged 19 I had switched writing with my right hand after nine years of writing with my left and nobody seemed to care or notice how cramped the writing was. I gave them the word picture of me where I was more awkward to help, than I was too silly to be worth taking notice of. I was an outsider who found asking for the help to be drawn in to a more regular sense reward mostly did not work for me. Where help did arrive, then it arrived at too late to be the help it was originally promised to be; it fixed only second order problems. I told them about the cottaging, since for some time I had worked out that if the mechanism that ensured the anonymity of the sex relied on was silence then breaking the silence would surely break either the anonymity of the acts, or the desire for the sex outright. Lou sided with me about that and did not put sex on some pedestal where being obedient to God in that area of life was some unexplainable process of faith, bound by taboo where taboo was expected to keep the language safe but leave the unexplained life potentially dangerous. Instead sex had to be explainable-whether the sex was bad, poor quality and an activity to be disapproved of, or the sex was good, enjoyable agreeable and accepted, sex had it's mechanisms that required explanations for those who owned to own it intelligently.81
Pastor Lou was easy to like, and an immediate help to me that I had not expected him to be. He was an assistant pastor who was the second assistant pastor I had liked since I had started attending service in the church, and the second one that my acquaintance with was cut short by his being promoted elsewhere to lead pastor. The point about lead pastors was that getting time with them where we could both be regular human beings with each other was always more fraught than they admitted. They were like the mistimed promises of help that I had known in the past; by the time I got my appointment with them I sensed an anti-climax approaching me, as they tried to meet me but were busy. When I eventually got the appointment I thought I wanted I ended up having to explain to them 'Things have changed since I first want to talk to you.' whilst avoiding saying 'Your appointments system does not work for me'. This usually made them respond 'Well I am glad that you did not need me after all then. Was there anything else?' and I had to avoid saying 'Okay lets cancel this now by mutual agreement. That way I can let you be too busy to meet the present day needs of somebody else.'. 96
Whether the issue was mental health or spiritual matters, the booking systems for getting one to one time with professional people always seemed to be freighted with retreating trust and desperation from those in need, coupled with the needy hearing the polite detached language of the health/spiritual professional and intuiting that their needs were unlikely to be met from the tone of voice. It could have been eight to ten months since I had last seen my doctor to ask for further therapy and there was no sign of any letter offering me the group therapy. At least I had the A4 pad and plenty of pens with which to write out what no other person wanted to to listen to me talk out. 103
Life is time infused by character,
enhanced by the collective skills
of each generation, where as individuals,
we grow through the collective experience,
or the lack of same, that teaches us.
In this age of high tech communications
the wisest are often those who have the means
but say the least, and wait to know what to say,
by seeking first to know who to say it to,
the better to say it once, and not repeat themselves.
That the quietest are the least noticed
is a given, that the loudest never know
how loud and empty their words are
is something for everyone else
to deal with, on their own terms.
and know how skill limits them,
ir skills,
and the ways that their character has been
I grew up in a town
where the cinema closed down
when I was eleven years old,
seemingly never to re-open.
Had it limped on, shown films
fit for edgy teenagers I still would not
have had been given pocket money
to throng with the youths watching
the cowboy films of the 1970's,
that I might feel included in normality.
Seeing films on television gave me no sense
of their proportion, or the ability they aspired to,
in their original settings, to take a person out of themselves.
Seeing films as a pensioner, in the cinema,
the memories a value most are the times
I have been in there before, with a friend,
and how easily he got out of his seat to complain
to the manager whilst the film is still showing.
The decision to leave when you know
you have seen enough applies not just to films,
but also to real life, where people freeze so easily.
To be able to stop, and leave when you choose to,
half aware of the consequences of doing so,
is a choice too many people deny each other.
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| towards the collective amnesia where the rich have more than can ever count and the poor have so little that being able to count it seems disappointing, and for the wealthy to give away what they don't need is that complex that we daren't do it with any enthusiasm. |
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| The above is meme on a T shirt. How casual the 'Bro' is on it? What age will the male be who is going to say that? The anonymous author ignorantly paraphrases the gospels. In Mathew Ch 14 v 22-33 we can read that Jesus walked on water, and the disciples thought he was a ghost, Jesus proved how real he was by inviting Peter to join him. Peter walked with ease as long as he avoided all thoughts about the weather, thus illustrating the point about faith being about aim and intent more than faith being about concentration on the means. Peter nearly fell, but didn't. I respect technology but with having had one billionaire buy his place in space, all such travel proves to me is how far the love of money can get a person in America. |
The film seems puzzling at first, and then proceeds to engage with the viewer by seeming to be almost casual. This is how 'slow cinema' works. The further on the plot proceeds the more the film becomes a Hitchcock style romantic thriller, as it would play out if Fay Weldon had written the script. To tell you what happens would be wrong of me. It is one of those films where the reviews have to be opaque about the plot, to preserve the surprises for the viewer about how the plot evolves.
The pace and acting in the film seem natural and entirely believable. This film is led by actors in their seventies who are acting their age. The script is quite detailed and precise, with the location shooting in some ordinary looking Iranian city suburb adding to the atmosphere. Also whilst the film is slow it is smoothly and tautly edited.
If this film has a point to make, a target, then that target is the Iranian interpretation of Islam where how women can dress and engage in public life is more advantageous to men than women. But the rules are explained as being 'for the protection of women'. The film explores what the rules are, and who the rules benefit vs who they are said to protect.
I can heartily recommend this film to the legions of fans of films that have to have subtitles.
That when I pick the autumn blackberries
from the nearby roadside hedgerows
the blackberries might be cleaner
than they would have been in the past
because that nice Mr Musk makes cars
with much lower emissions than vehicles
used to emit, before modern electrics.
That Musk is the supplier of such cars
and makes people pay through the nose
for their servicing and maintenance,
and the cars are computers on wheels,
much to the annoyance of drivers
who learnt to drive on manual cars,
is something I don't want to think about.
On my own so much of the time,
I remain unsure about how to compare
how much I feel alone vs having so little
in common with the people around me
who collectively seem rather far away.
The government of my country
have declared that in future
fewer folk will smoke in public.
To save the taxpayer and the health service,
smoking will be even more restricted
away from where people eat in public,
particularly where drink means alcohol
and the language slides from lunch being food
-served where folks sat down to enjoy it-
to being a liquid that is designed
to make the afternoons pass faster
for people who are easily bored.
There has been a minor outcry from
faux libertarians who want to fume,
both about not being in government
and being against government controls
they would choose if they could use them
to best the opposition in their smugness.
There is nothing new about this outcry,
or the inconsistency with which it is pursued;
since the days of canon law, before 1537,
laws that be enforced had to be policed
through the invasion of privacy were common.
That a secular society should raise the same complaints
as a theocracy show how alike many societies are.
Alchemy is to autocracy what science is to democracy.
When an alchemist has a success he will share the results
with his fellows, whether alchemist or high status citizen,
but he will never share, or compare with other alchemists,
the processes by which those results were achieved.
Autocrats, like alchemists, root their faith
in their manipulations of nature and people
in how far they are above having to explain
their actions. able, Whether alchemist or autocrat,
they hide their failures behind word salads,
and slight of hand and word presentations.
Both modern science and democracy
are experiments where confidence
in the process depends on openness,
and well thought out definitions
for the parameters of what counts
as as 'success', where the process
of being observably effective
matters more than any given result.
Though how either system stacks up
against the plethora of new media,
boosted by turbo capitalism, remains to be seen....
Prison literature is generally a category on it's own in the book world. From well before the secretive sexual fabulism of The Marquis de Sade through to the profoundly Christian outlook of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress there is a history of epistolary books and first hand accounts where a prisoner or person in forced retreat relates their daily thoughts over time. Or through hindsight they recall what their prison was like including descriptions of the life they wanted to have, but could not have.
One such unread book on my shelf is 'The Prison Diary of Albie Sachs'. Even Jeffery Archer has written a prison diary about his relatively short, relatively comfortable, time in prison. By their nature these accounts concentrate on small events and changes in microcosmic settings because the world of freedom of choice is beyond the author. The more oppressive the prison the smaller the changes the authorities permit the prisoners to focus on.
If ever you were told that student politics is a dangerous hobby, then in the wealthy liberal West you would not believe it. In the wealthy West student politics are almost a mandatory time to put some distance in values between themselves and their parents, often using the latest technology and jargon. The most oppressive aspect of student living is the levels of student debt they will be tempted to accept. But for anyone living under an absolute ruler, whether president, dictator, or king, then student politics is some sort of toxic forbidden fruit. The idealism of student politics attracts the young partly because they cannot 'read' or interpret the political signals the way the adults around them can. The adults play out a sort of student politics the young can't interpret. The dictator remains God, the parents become the snakes and the students are cast as Adam and Eve.
This book is his recollection of his life in that prison, it details his attempts at being a good Muslim in spite of the paucity of his surroundings, the dirt floors to the jail cells, the constant odour of disinfectant, the very poor starchy food, the being allowed out only for the funeral of yet another prisoner and then not being able to take the sunlight, and so many other privations. The author's biggest battle was his trying to not remember life when he was free, because the memories were too painful for him to recall and stay sane with. As he saw with other prisoners, insanity was the quickest route to death. And in that place insanity was as going to be a horrible death, the worst death was a slow death from being stung by scorpions that were released into the prisoners cell by the guards.
There are short bursts of light and shade in the book, times when he briefly recounts how and where he grew up, recounts some of the simplicity and beauty of life with his mother and sisters that he knew when he was free. But they are understandably rare.
It is a book of very short chapters, thirty nine chapters over 190 pages, with three pages of glossary at the end. That said, it still has to be read v-e-r-y--s-l-o-w-l-y otherwise you skip over some detail that it is an act of compassion towards the author to absorb slowly and meditate upon.
The prisoners have to have group discipline and have to have group activities. So prayers hold the group together, as much as the story telling does. No author's stories seem more apt for group sharing than the writings of Albert Camus, who I never particularly thought of as anti-empire in his writings and yet the toughness of what is required for existential self reliance his writings are apt for the population of a prison where the government wants not to know who the prison governor is, much less who the guards and the prisoners are.
When I looked up how well known this book has become I was surprised at how it has travelled and how many languages it has been translated into. I liked it that much that I found that many of the paragraphs were self contained enough to read well on their own, so on my blog I put up a series of the paragraphs on my blog, each of them linked from the first quote from the book onward Anyone who is interested can read the sequence from the following link https://woodenlodge.
The last three years of his imprisonment prove the grimmest. Those are the years in which the prisoners' collective resolve crumbles, before the author's resolve also crumbles, which tests the resolve of the reader, to keep on reading. These are the times in the writing when the author feels most broken and unrepairable as a person. They happen when he knows that the wider world knows he exists and where he is. But this knowledge comes to him in the most frustrating and most intangible of ways. This is when it felt right to him to think 'If I am ever released will I be able to feel it?'
It is a cliche to say that the last hour before the light comes is when the dark is at it's most concentrated. In this most exceptional book and story it is true. Eventually the surviving prisoners are all moved. Their prison, place of slow torture and starvation is bulldozed and palm trees hastily planted over the site, as if it were an oasis. Each surviving prisoner is slowly rehabilitated so they can eat regular food, appear to be relatively normal, and their pasts are officially erased.
Only the look in the former prisoner's eyes remains immune to rehabilitation/reform, there the mark of having been imprisoned and tortured remains. The author finds some sort of temporary peace through being reunited with his mother who for being elderly is somewhat still, her stillness is good for both of them.
When the technology we are urged to trust
seems to us like an errant child we want to punish,
because it has done what we didn't want it to do,
the fault probably started with us; as adults,
we never learned how to control it, or what makes it work.
It is up to us, the older we get, to simplify
what we rely on, and make technology our servant
on terms we prefer, rather than allow ourselves
to be led by advertising that talks tech up
to be 'the new master', The Way ahead.
I do not want to quantify the media hot airtime
that is dedicated to promoting AI as 'the new tool
to be increasingly efficient' when as technology goes
it is jut another servant that we have to set limits on,
and define it's tasks tightly, if it is to meet our needs.
Advertising is to materialism what porn is to sex,
illustration to the point of unaware self-parody.
We need a wider awareness than adverts allow,
whatever they pay for, to help us define need over want.
In the first world wealth my country lives in
those who own cats and dogs spend more
on the care of their animal companions
then people in subsistence economies
across the world have to spend on each other,
or the animals they breed to live off,
e.g. cows for enjoying the milk of.
Animal companionship is a fine thing,
but to see the degree to which it monetised,
in a society in which how money is spent
matters more than how we care for each other
makes me think that my society seriously lacks proportion.
There are many acronyms and labels
for mental health nowadays, far more
than existed in my misbegotten youth,
when adults had few words for illness
of any sort, no words to describe the fear
of inviting a doctor the diagnose another
(weaker) family member to being fit
only for the nearest mental hospital,
a feared place, for the rest of their lives.
No words to describe either the fear
of the committed as they become unpersons
in strange surroundings, nor language
to describe the sorrow of the family member
who had to call the doctor, or later social services,
to have them intervene and take over.
The nearest there was to a describing word
was the word 'dibby' as a synonym for stupid,
which one teenage male would use describe another
who knew the word felt wrong, but were too weak
in themselves to say 'dibby' a word of abuse.
Nowadays we have more names to describe
variations in mental health than we know
what to do with. P.T.S.D, 'being bipolar',
A.D.H.D, dyslexia, dyscalcula, dyspraxia,
aphasia, dementia, Altzheimer's, 'the autism scale'
and words for many more conditions, besides.
Note; conditions, not illnesses. And nothing
for the individual to made to feel guilty for,
more something to be sensibly managed.
I can't feel bad over this improvement
but I feel ill at ease when the individual
behaves badly and blames their condition,
and that way justify being unneighbourly
whilst expecting to be better treated than the less needy.
To restructure my life after Boots had booted me onto the dole queue, and to prove I was still willing to work to The Job Centre, I picked up from where I had left off five years earlier and returned to doing voluntary work of my own choosing. When I worked as a volunteer in the mid-eighties Gainsborough was a deep pocket of economic depression amid an uneven country-wide upward mobility. If Nottingham was even a bit like the Gainsborough of the previous decade then I knew where I was better than other people did for whom 'being in the wrong place at the wrong time' was a first time experience.
Even better, in the 1990's my parents could no longer tell me to submit to the worst choices that were open to me in the hope of some weak short term acceptance, To them I was now a guest who they could co-opt into performing old routines-Mother's area of interest in particular-on my visits to them. But I was no longer the person who would obey her blindly, not even recognising my own blindness. The Gainsborough of her memory was gone anyway, along with the manpower services commission scheme jobs.
The advantage with my voluntary work was that I found out who to work for, based on what I could see that I could do. When I limited the work to what I could see how to do it, that made the work more agreeable. Any charity of any size that had to rent a building to operate was already going to be tighter for money, so the free labour that came it's way could negotiate when and how to be most useful. Church based charities had a ready made network for seeking volunteers, their church notice boards. It was through that network and word of mouth that I chose what to do.
The disadvantage to my presenting my voluntary work as an effort to work was that when most paid jobs required either a degree of sophistry, a disguise for the lack of employer support, or some mild degree of coercion to make the reduced choice for the new employee seem attractive, then presenting my open choice of subscribing to good natured voluntarism went against the disguised market forces that were behind the new recession. I quietly resisted the poorly disguised bad deals, when bad deals were the norm. But what if I bad deal presented itself as unavoidable?
Jed who lived in the shared house was partially deaf and worked in a gardening centre had found a job that that was a win-win. It fitted well around his disabilities-plants were quiet as were many of the people that bought them. With 'my nerves' and my unresolved feelings around my being gay I was unsure there was any job that would be a win-win that readily fitted around my weaknesses and needs. And if there was a win-win job for me then it would not take much of a change in economic climate for that job to become a win-lose. And anyway I saw my job that year as 'working my way 'out of the closet'', escaping being a bruised square peg who had been hammered into a round hole, rather than looking for better disguised bruising through employment. My voluntary work fitted around my agenda.
I worked one day a week in a dry house, serving food at lunch time to the sober homeless who might be tempted to getting drunk on the cheap elsewhere but in the house they simply wanted somewhere to sit down and be sober with their mates that was warm, and be served a meal and all the tea they could comfortably drink. For my own small daring to be different I took The Pink Paper in to read on the quiet. It was a weekly newspaper where the content was aimed at, and representative of, gay men. It was London-centric, rather than having much about Nottingham in it, but that was fine. If there was local content in it that would have been my entre into local gay life then I doubt I was ready to use the knowledge gained from the paper as my introduction. If the newspaper had a purpose for me it was to prove that homosexuality was a thing of words and civil life at least as much as it was about having nothing to say and much reduced means of meeting people socially, well beyond waving my willy in the toilet as if I were drowning in the wrong choices, or waving as if there was nothing wrong and I liked being silent.
In my other voluntary work I knew better than to take 'The Pink Paper' in to read in quiet moments. I worked one night a week-either a Friday or a Saturday every fortnight in a Christian coffee bar that St Nicholas church subsidised as an alternative to the notoriously troublesome alcohol based night life in Nottingham. I liked the sound system they had and as a volunteer I could sometimes choose the music. Was (Not Was) and Da La Soul were fine as up to date R&B sounds went as far as I was concerned. World Party were thoughtful listening too. Other volunteers may have preferred some up to date Christian music-the sort of artists who had recently headlined at The Greenbelt Christian Arts festival which I had neglected to attend of late. Say, Deacon Blue, and Mike Peters.
But however much I found workarounds for some of the expectations I wanted to break down there was a central problem facing me that I did not know how to negotiate my way around. My life was unevenly compartmentalised. In one difficult compartment there was my being gay which I dearly wanted to be less secretive about, in another I trying to learn more about mental health though I knew that some in my church would say that Freudian therapy was of the occult. In a third compartment there was the church attendance where only at the very edges were the complexities of the lives that people had were accepted. E.g. when Celia whom I had prayed with for a few months, admitted to her friend that she had feelings for me that were far nearer a Mills and Boon fantasy future than the safe sense of accepting merely being prayed for/with which I'd intended.
Then there was what to do about paid work. How ready was I to be some sort of loss leader in employment, financially, which left me on housing benefit. I could live with doing such a job but only if it had a no-fault exit back onto the dole from it. Windrush Nursing Home had taught me that much. Then there was my work record. I had done too many ACE schemes and done too little other work to disguise my dependence on government schemes with. What did employers want most? Would they apply the old catch 22 logic of 'you don't have experience? Then say I was barred from the job, because it would give me experience.'? I had found the catch 22 wearing enough last time....
Finally there was the identity that I had collated as an adult in Gainsborough of part dole queue drop out,/part late period hippy, part record collector, where if I was bad at making relationships then I was better at making relationships with friends through music, lacking in foundation as such friendships would always be. My last and oldest friend in that line was called Graham. Through ease and difficulty, address change after address change, we had stayed in tenuous touch with each other. In the spring or early summer of 1991 he visited me in Nottingham and I tried to show myself more receptive in one area of life where we had always differed. He followed several recently living eastern teachers, where their term for teacher was guru, all of whom promised that the whole world could be transformed in the right instant. We talked about this and I stuck to my Christian belief, but admitted that I preferred the Creation Centred Spirituality of a teacher I'd found over historic, traditional, church teachings, and I was part of the diversity that the household I lived in represented. My tone was conciliatory.
But either I hit the wrong note with him, or I could not know that he visited me mostly to say that he was returning to Cornwall for good this time. Where with previous attempts at living in Cornwall he had never lined up both a permanent well paid job and a good long term place to stay, he had pulled off that combination this time. I.e. the visit was mainly for him to say 'Goodbye'.
Whether I saw his visit as a delayed fresh start, and he had difficulty saying that the visit was always his last as far as he knew is impossible to say given that his visit to Nottingham was thirty three years ago as of 2024. What can be said is that it would be a long time before I realised how permanent his departure from my life was, and we would both be very different people to who we once were when he finally rediscovered me.
To be directed to Chapter Twenty Six please left click here.
I understand what euphoria is.
I just can't get my head around
why other people get excited by it.
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| Seaforde wild planting at it's best and longest held to. Co Down in Bloom. |
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| Rare Mexican plant Beschornearea in Seaforde Co Down in early bloom in April. The stems can grow to ten feet in length. |
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| This arrangement of plants and shrubs has been left to look after itself, much like the shed that is hidden behind the plants. |
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| A bank of ferns caught by the sun will always create dramatic shadows. |
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| A little honesty is always good for us, and good for our gardens too. |
