The Tramp Of Time

Living in the UK as long as I have,
I have lived through one change of monarch
[she started young and was exceptionally healthy],
and fourteen changes of Prime Minister.
I have been a UK citizen both when it was
outside of the EU and when the UK was in it.

In both the EU remained the UK's closest neighbour.  

Abroad, there have been six popes, 
twelve different American presidents,
and seven different leaders of Russia,
where stable leadership meant corruption
at the top and increasing economic instability
the further down the social hierarchy you look.

The seven part series that documents
life under the third to sixth leaders, Trauma Zone
shows this up in more detail than can be absorbed, perfectly.

My views of the leadership have changed
as I have aged. In my twenties when Capitalism
disappointed me I was curious about Communism,
but from the place I was in I could not separate truth
from propaganda, not even with petty local rulers.

The older I got, the nearer I got to being the age
of the leaders that I both despised and admired.
I thought that with parity of age with them,
when I was over fifty, I'd come to a more balanced view.

But with my age, as I am now,
the links between age and competence
are more complex than I previously read.

All I can say is that populations reap what leaders sow,
and the wisest leaders are often the quietest,
but they have to wait for history to downsize
the noise of the loudmouths who want their say
to speak for everyone else, little realising
that they are just bit part players on the world stage.     

No Holiday In The Sun

What will those in the liberal and free west
do when their government decrees that only half
the population can be citizens of their country,
and for those who are citizens, the government bans
them from forming any sort of political party? 

And where a government permits a political party
to be formed they even more reserve the right to ban it
from standing to be elected in the few places
it might win, in the country's upper and lower houses?

Such a hemmed in voting process is a tricky idea to crack,
when brutality is rife, and the jails are intimidatingly filthy,
as if the people who are kept inside them are not worth
the pittance the government pays for the prisoners to be put there.
 
What would those in the liberal and free west do
if in lieu of being able to form political parties
government permitted citizens to form political societies
where, apparently, the nature of the government
can be discussed, but such societies are excuses for spies
to listen, unawares, in on how citizens think,
in an exercise in agent provocateur thinking
where the government arrests independent thought
before it can find any significant expression.

Such a government does exist, it is presently
promoting itself in the liberal, rich, west
as a holiday destination, it's name is Bahrain

Weather Report

From the memory fog of my mind
to your foggy thoughts is a distance
that I don't know how to calculate,
but through attempts to communicate
we might both learn how far apart we are,
though, daily, distances will vary.

Families And How To Escape Them Chapter Thirty

By the autumn of 1991 I was going nowhere slowly, and enjoying the journey whilst being uncertain about the destination. I had done short term paid work, and I was still contracted by the Job Centre to apply for jobs. My schooling and work experience streamed me into a place I did not want to be. I did not want the jobs I could apply for and wanted the jobs I could not apply for. My way out of being pressured this way was to apply for the jobs I could apply for, but put too little effort into making myself seem vital to the employer. I then told the Job Centre 'I did my best'. When the reply came back and I did not get the job they said 'Better luck next time', forgetting how often they had said that to me before. I drew the best choices I could get out of a stalemate situation. A year after applying I was left alone to wait for the group therapy placement that was due to me. Whilst waiting I continued to write my thoughts down every night, to get a better night's sleep. My days were full enough making the little money I got each fortnight stretch as far as it needed to.

Another tactic with the Job Centre was to do the maths with the jobs on their boards. When a job was one I could apply for but when I did the maths I could prove I would be worse off than my simply being left on benefits, then I pointed the financial disadvantage out to the adviser, who would let me off from seriously looking any further. Amid the economic shrinkage neither I nor they felt any great need to apply ourselves, or get other unemployed applicants, to engage with the idea of employment with any rigour.    

With all the media talk of the next downturn in the economy being closer at hand than anyone wanted to predict I was preparing myself for enjoying being long term unemployed. There I did my best, socially, to hide how much I enjoyed being at the bottom of the heap. Though perhaps I was more transparent about how I did not esteem myself than I intended to be, as this image shows.

The shirt I understood to be East German army  surplus.                                                       

They were strong, warm, and light.  As far as my choice in clothing went, they were my aesthetic, my way to dress. I first found the shirts in my twenties. They replaced my mother's way of dressing me, in ill matching and ill assorted clothing from the local Cancer Research Charity Shop that she made me wear even when it no longer fitted me. The clothing had to wear out, the trousers split, before it might be replaced by clothing that by faint chance I might like more. 

With discovering the army surplus market stall and shop I allowed myself to wear clothing, the caps and light coats that were comfortable, that were durable, and cheap. As far as I was concerned the shirt gave me a style, that had my signature to it. 

I took the colours of the flag on the left shoulder the black, red and yellow to mean 'Through the night and the blood come the light', a phrase I connected the phrase to the East German Communist government.

Having now checked the origins of the choice of colour on the flag I was right about the phrase but wrong about it's origins. The phrase went back much further than WW2, to the war that France declared on Prussia in 1870, which resulted in the first united Germany.

Germany was recently reunited when I was wearing these red army shirts I liked. The wall between East and West Germany had been dismantled, and East Germany was exposed as the poorer half of the new, larger, country. But being in the poorer half of society was something I could identify with. 

There were frequent debates on television about who was going to be worse off in the next UK recession, and when it would kick in. Most of the debate skirted around accusations of betrayal, before the argument collapsed into a lack of conclusion. I knew that the next recession would go through the bank accounts, credit cards, and pockets, of people who were far richer than I was before it hit me in any way. 

This new role of agreeable under-performer was also reflected in my commitment to church. I attended all the usual meetings, twice on Sunday and Bible study/house group mid-week. At the end of the Sunday morning service there was often time to ask the preacher questions about the sources for their sermon. They answered me as well, I liked that. The midweek Bible Study group I was part of was far more difficult terrain. Particularly when we studied the more fundamentalist texts-including 'the clobber verses' where homosexuality was thought to be both the subject of the text and the reason for rhetorical moral censure. Then I zoned out as my heart went AWOL from the topic in hand. The more in The Bible God threatened and smote his most errant followers, and similar fates were promised for those identifying with their error, the more I identified with the errors of those threatened, with a hidden glee. Where there was an obvious mechanical sense of sin and punishment we never probed the text with enough rigour for the mechanisms and triggers of it all to be apparent. The backgrounds to the situations Biblical characters get themselves into always seemed to be poorly sketched in and the oldest Old Testament male figures were alarmingly uncaring of their female dependents. But like the loss leader jobs I weakly applied for, there was no point in me applying myself too hard to pointing out the flaws and gaps in the original texts. I did not want to be on another hiding to nothing. 

It did not help that the two closest friends I had made in church had both moved away. Celia had moved house with her adoptive family, and now went to another Bible study/house group. Jerry, who was the first person I had shared that I was gay to, had moved to another part of England where he had started a different job. He gave me his home brew white wine when he moved. It was kept in my landlady's cellar in demijohns. I forget who rang who first each week, of a midweek evening. But sometimes when we talked I was on the sociable side of being drunk from drinking his wine. 

During the time that the nights started darkening earlier I came up with a plan for a change. The idea came to me in the nightly writing I was still doing every night. For years I had known of the weak dad joke about the bearded man who went to the barber to have his beard shaved off and his school cap had been found in the shorn off undergrowth. In the night writing I tore the joke apart, and wrote to myself to say why I found the joke numbly unfunny and illogical at so many levels that I did not care if I never heard it again. I recognised the point in the joke that pleased families, where the cap being re-found symbolised a man rediscovering his childhood. Families found it funny because they sentimentalised children. My letting my beard grow was one of the ways I separated myself as an adult from a childhood I intensely disliked. But with me being on my own, and with no family close by to personally care enough to reinforce a past I disliked, I thought about how my image might change.

Before I asked the local church leaders to help me with the change of image I looked like a cleaned up biker, or late period Jim Morrison on a bad day. 

                                                                                                                                                  

My hair and beard remained clean, and were never cause for  complaint  from  my  fellow middle class Christians, the  people  whose company I kept with the most. But I rarely shaped and trimmed the beard, I had nobody else to trim it for and with the indifferent childhood lacked the imagination to see myself differently. 

In my nightly journal, after dealing with the weak dad joke, I debated with myself in my indirect way coincidence vs causation with mental health, Question;  if I was depressed, which I was sure I was, then how much was my low level hair care regime a symptom of my depression? How much did the low level hair care add to my feeling depressed. How much was my depression about a lot more than how little interest I had in how I presented myself? My hands surely ached from such prolonged writing every night. But it was the only way I had of turning myself inside out until what stopped me from sleeping could be calmed down for that night.

So, I asked my local church leaders if they would cut off my beard and trim my hair very short. Pauline and David were people who treated me as an adult. They seemed to understand how I was, well, unsupported by my family, by the standards of most church members. They said 'Yes'. We agreed an early evening mid-week for them to come around to the shared house I lived in with others, with the kit for the hair cut and clean shave. With very little talk required they understood that I was looking for a change I could make. The change was about spiritual matter and mental health issues, combined.    

As you can see, the hair cut and beard shave make a big difference to my appearance, even to my posture. From this distance of time I don't know what was directly removed with the beard trim and haircut, beyond the previous loathing of the old 'Oh that is where your school cap went' joke. I think what the change of appearance gave me was a relative lightness with how much I disagreed my family, compared with the former suppressed anger that it seemed impossible to dissipate.

With the change in appearance, the positive recognition from other people was welcome even if some of the recognition had hints of being backhanded about me being so slow attached to it. However good it felt I still had to maintain the nightly diary writing to help me sleep well, in lieu of the promised, but distant, therapy. 

And the new, more socially acceptable, appearance did nothing to change the church member's consistent and evasive side stepping around what 'being gay' might mean to those who were gay. That issue was carefully swept under the carpet. They would argue their rhetorical proofs of why homosexuality 'did not exist' because 'families don't create gay men or lesbians', as if families created everything and everyone. Whilst they ignored all the non-parenting of care homes, and the fragile parenting of foster care and adoption, for instance. They could parade their Biblical clobber clauses, but the one thing none of them would so was bear witness to the gospel by simply listening and letting the needy define their needs for themselves.   

It Takes Trust

to accept how you are taken, and decided for,
and take your taker, who stands in for your maker,
at the face value of the acceptance they project.

How trust works is how it works, 
it remains a complex test of character,
but even when we endure mistakes
that consume our lives and times
there is always some recovery after.

A life with mistakes is impossible.
But the life where we find virtues
in our errors is what makes us masters
of the disasters we never knew we'd create.

    

A Watchful Underdog

is the role that has been allotted to me,
where far from the centre of events
I hear reports of a world gone wild
where money and technology make sure
people cannot settle with each other
for the length of a life or even half that,
the way it was once common to do.

It is possible retreat from the tech
or keep it that simple to use
that it is less of a distraction.

But anyone attempting to stay calm
in the face the coming high tech dystopia
had better be ready for collective myopia.  

History Has Given Us

many forms of government we can vote for,
aristocracy-direct rule by a royal family-
is the form that least needs a vote to measure
it's present acceptability among those ruled over.

 

Appointees run everything. Absolute rule,
with variations, is well accepted in small
to medium size Muslim countries, where
for theocratic reasons, the citizens vote 
for representatives whom the ruling family,
and religious councils selectively ignore
is an important process within society.

In the Timocracy* of Great Britain up to 1918,
a candidate for office had to own property to stand
for Parliament as an MP, in a representative democracy.
Up to that year those who voted had to own property too.

Socialism broke this rule. From 1918 onward

those in power remained highly likely to be wealthy,
but their voters were no longer required to own land.
-it is up to us now, in 2024, to reckon up how much
this makes voting for a representative democracy
more, or less, materially representative.  

 

Tyranny, or absolute rule by one ruler,
who can break the rules they enforce on others
is the least sustainable form of government,
because the tyrant is the one who is least able
to calm the passion for oppression by which he rules.
Where the tyrant is a royal, a king, his tyranny
always rebounds on the tyranny of his successor.

Oligarchy, rule of the many by the few,
often rule by a committee, has hierarchy
written into it, where the more wealthy
the few are the greater poverty of the many
who the richest decide for, not that the poor
want to more fully explore how devalued
their vote is amid a bought/paid for media
where money decides what they share.

I don't know the way out of all this,
or even if there is one, beyond how
we each of us have to find our own.   

*a word and idea handed down from Aristotle

Self Important Nostalgia

When computers became popular,
and took over from landline phones
as a worldwide means of communication
over thirty years ago there was a promise
they came with: our future communications
will seem important than they do present day.

Most days, nowadays the billions of internet users
can dial up the past of their choice, as if to live for a while
where the trivia of the recent past seems more important than it was.

When the past is surely more attractive
than today's political and social unrest 
because the past not longer matters.     

Theft Always Starts Sooner Than You Think It Does

As a guide to human behaviour
the above is far from infallible,
for instance it is gendered
-con women exist too, for instance.

But the principal remains consistent
that with wealth, honesty, and toughness,
those who have them rely more
on their deeds than their words to exhibit them.

   Whoever cons us uses other peoples deeds,
    then lies and steals by using the cover
      of other people's character.     

 

What A Lot Of Words

A Review of the documentary film 'The Blue Road; A life of Edna O'Brien' 

Irish writer Edna O'Brien (1930 - 2024) must have been immensely self possessed to not just live to the age of ninety three, after writing thirty four books, and having written much more material in every other genre except children's books besides over sixty years, but with what remained of her energy marshalled the materials for a documentary film of her life, in which she was the key interviewee.   

I did not realise how little I knew about her until I watched the film, which had the most basic of pleasures attached to it; it was very well edited. Reflecting on watching the documentary, it was unsurprising that I knew so little when she publishing her first best selling novel before I was even thought of. But that I was in a cinema with an audience mostly full of retired women who had probably followed her work all their adult lives should have been a clue to me. They were not downloading the documentary to screens for them to watch it at home. They were choosing the 'old school' way of watching films, being part of a cinema audience-something I wish I had grown up with a lot more if the films that were available for me to watch had been as well made as this film.     

Many aspects of the documentary spoke to me, her voice was one major surprise. Even when she was being filmed for being interviewed in her nineties, when she was obviously a composed but diminished figure. Her diction made me listen. Aside from the framing interviews, there were diary entries read out, and the words highlighted on the screen as they were read, quotes from her books were treated the same way. What people older than me might have predicted, but I didn't, was how much she sparkled in her many television interviews, on chat shows and book programmes from 1960s through to the 1980s when the budget for television allowed for much more erudition. All the top BBC male interviewers interviewed her, Cliff Michelmore, Melvyn Bragg, and Russell Harty, along with plenty of interviewers from the RTE archive where the interviewers sounded less posh.  What I liked was how easily in interviews she could be both posh and terse about how she did like men, and thought women should be able to like men, but she was not at all appreciative of typical male ideas about marriage.

Some footage was shot to dramatize parts of her books, and life, but it all filmed sensitively so that it blended smoothly with the diary and book readings, and the rare images of her parents and where she grew up. I liked her dress sense in the interviews, she chose incredibly dramatically cut and brightly patterned dresses, in a way that the women writers like Anne Enright who commented on Edna O'Brien's life in 2024 could not match. 

She died last July, 2024, and was buried in an off-white wicker coffin on Holy Island. One of her comments late in the film was 'I don't own my own house. I don't have a car....   ...but I do own my own island burial plot'. What a lot of well chosen words indeed.

  

As We Pass The First Anniversary

                            of the death of Russian opposition leader,
                            and anti-corruption lawyer, Alexei Navalny 
                            remember him for what he was: a patriot
                           when the most patriotic act he could make
                           was to die for his country, at the hands
                           of authorities so callous and barbarous
                           they were beyond not caring. 

                           Remember him whilst the latest bad actors
                           of world politics take the stage
                           and rehearse their woeful lines....

                                        P.s. please left click here for the audio of

                                        a 25 mins 2017 BBC interview with him 

                                        where he is very much a live and cogent critic 

                                        of what and who he stood against.... 

The Sense of Being Entitled Is Different From Being Deserving

Because when the spur to further wealth comes from
a sense of inferiority, whilst growing up wealthy,
then those poorer than the millionaires have one thing
that those richer than them have not got-their sanity.
Which, whilst it is pressed on, and fragile, is less oppressive
of those who live on less, far less, than any edict
from the super wealthy, emitted from media they have bought,
could ever be.
For a half hour radio programme/podcast about  how
detached the life of the super-rich is, please left click here. 
  

 

The Gulf Of Misunderstanding

between world dictators is always more wilful.
and bigger, than the people who want functional,
but flawed, democracy wish it was. Particularly when
in their last vote the dictator that half of them did not want
won by gaming the system, when their choice want have too.
Since then they can't get to grips with how their government
has changed, and the conflicts that mark international
disagreements have been sharpened.    
Where we might have hoped that Google would clip
the ambitions of leaders with a sense of consensus,
they rolled over and entrenched divisions.

The rocks of ruin and the straits of increased uncertainty
can't be far off now...   ...please say 'Hello' to me
when we meet amid World War 3.  

 

The Future Was Born Forty Seven Years Ago Today

Please left click here to hear their first John Peel session,

                                   recorded by The Human League on the 8th of August 

                                  1978 for the John Peel show on BBC Radio 1 and

                                   broadcast on the 16th of August. Their first album 

                                  'Reproduction' would appear fourteen months later. 

Better Bygones

Cancel the cancel culture,
whether it comes from left or right
and, even when people disagree,
let the people listen more closely
to what they each disagree about.

Whether listening before we react
makes us act more slowly
or makes our disagreement
with others more entrenched
it should be survivable, 
unless the argument is some
zero gain/winner takes all sum
in which at no level of opinion
was never going to be shared,
when it was aired, anyway.

Bygones should, at very least, learn
how to be, and leave others to be, better bygones.
It is as near as peace and good will as we get.

Calendars Can Change

As the public reliant on the internet,
in the liberal west are discovering,
that they can't find black history month
and gay history month online, when both
were fixed to appear in February, then anyone
who is interested in none-white minority histories
have to compose their own and celebrate them
in the real world, after Google have erased
the new liberal issues calendar at a stroke.

But Christians have known about their calendar
a/k/a the liturgical year, lapsing out of public awareness
since Victorian times. Likewise the calendars
and the history and liturgy of the Islam and Judaism
are 'private affairs', that the media need not be troubled with.   

With the rise of Godless Capitalism no moment is sacred:
Every day is a sale day where the public are taught to ignore
how much they live in debts that they will never pay off,   
where life has no beginning, no meaning, and no sense of loss when it ends. 

My religion, and my calendar, used to be BBC speech radio,
which I used to listen to by appointment via the schedules
which timed my world. There my 'listen again' feature
was the cassette tapes that I made of programmes
to share with friends, and think I would value in future.

I didn't know then that taping would die as a habit,
supplanted by sharing MP3 files, long before
I wanted to live in comforting and reliable past.    

What Does 'No' Mean?

I was raised in a patriarchy where
not only did the richest, whitest, men
write the laws in their own interest and gain,
but whether men were rich or poor
-by law, they owned everything.

As heads of families, men rarely stopped
when they realised they were being shouty.
But when they stopped to rephrase their demands
at a lower volume that still meant that when
others said 'No' to them, the men behaved as if 
'No' meant 'Yes', and 'Yes' meant 'Yes Master.'.

Shows of obedience hid in plain sight
how much acting out being cowed
both depressed those who made them
whilst making engineered consent 'work'. 

Those who were ordered so
might as well have been automata
in some patriarchal fantasy family life,
for the difference their sense of choice gave them.

As we enter another age where machine-think
feeds authoritarian politics, and billionaires
led fantasy lives where reality meant 'more money',
more praise, more power, and the final detachment
I see the return of ''No' means 'Yes'' thinking
in a world George Orwell once defined
by the right to assert 2+2=4. It now seems
as if the new freedom is the slavery to arithmetic.

Be affirmative, and make 'No' mean 'No' again.    

Swallows Swoop

 and dive for joy around the church;
the nests in its eaves are their shelter.
The transient are fed
the homeless are housed,
the spirit takes form on the wing.

Well beyond all worry about money
a world lightly pays its own way.

New Definitions (1)

'Fake News'-a description for a story
that a speaker, often some right wing nut demagogue,
knows is true in key aspects of the detail,
but the background is partially false as well.

Because the conclusion disfavours them or their party
the speaker does not affirm what is true or false,
and accept the partial disfavour, but rather
shuts down all of the story, and the newspaper
it comes from, by saying that where the story appeared
'Has been sharing totally false news since 1939.'.   

All Hail The Thief

People who admire spectacle have been quoted
as saying that 'organised sport is a good thing',
and more - that 'sport is war by other means',
where wars could be pursued by many means
other than direct military conflict. All of them
less acceptable to large television audiences
who watch team sports broadcast on large screens,
funded by advertising, as if sport on TV
with adverts between content paying for it
is good because they don't kill each other.

As if televised sport is the most peaceful time,
the safest opiate for the maximum audience,
that a wealthy consumerist society can give itself.  

Trump, physically unfit and mean of spirit as he is,
has made his sport rhetoric of poisonous sort,
which he shares in half filled stadia he will not pay for
as if the wealth he shows off with,
live on television, gave him his right to be there.

Wars will continue with President Trump
who will fight them with tariffs, rather than arms.
He will proclaim peace through bluster from stadia
at a distance from his fans, through television screens,
where he doubles the distance he keeps from his followers. 

As jaw jaw jaw morphs into war war war
so the world will be confused as to how to respond.

Spend Now, Live Later - If Ever

-is surely the best summing up 
of the new online shopaholic culture,
with it's 'influencers', infinite credit,
perpetual manufacturing surpluses,
and other flummery where the goods
become sacrifices in a cargo cult without a deity,
where asking any question about the circularity
of the motion of the pointless activity
is to invite being ignored, in favour
of the latest distraction in advertising.

  

Self Portraiture

Need not emphasise our self importance,
for all the world to behold, and recognise. 

Nor need it be declarative, it can be playful instead.
And in its complexity give out different messages.
 

 

Pun Of The Day

Though, of course, it is the humans who need
to have a sense of living better within tighter limits
and reducing their numbers in favour
of increasing the populations of other species 
-it was humans who invented the theory
of evolution in which, with their practically infinite
expansion, they made themselves the exception to it.

Please left click here to read the full article.   

 

Men Hold Up Half The Sky

and they play their part with much better grip,
when they predict more thoughtfully
how much better women have always been
at holding the other half than men of old accepted. 

Out Of Scale Living

Used to be called 'evolution'
by the humans who thought themselves
the peak of sentience in the history of the universe,
'I am the best. I am the measurer of everything,
the grader of all that is lesser than me around me'
thought Francis Galton, the author of the phrase
'survival of the fittest', that reduced evolution
to a competition where surviving by being second,
or lower in the scale of co-creative living,
was made to seem to be an unattractive option.

Fast forward to 2025 and the race for finite resources
is now reset around the search for rare earth minerals
with which to build new technologies, minerals-
scandium, cerium, promethium, yttrium, dysprosium,
thulium, lutetuim, holmuim, europium, praseodium,
terbium, gadolinium, neodynium, lanthanum -
are materials that occur in many places, but remain hidden
in the beauty of nature, where now, to preserve the planet
we must destroy the beauty that gives it a value well beyond
the reckoning of the species with the least sense of proportion
relative to its intelligence that the planet has ever had to endure.     

Faded Blooms

remain blooms until they lose their colour,
but whilst they fade they are still alive;
they live and blend into the background
of what goes on around them.

But with Valentine's day due soon
let old loves bloom afresh
and show their colours as signs of spring
whilst everything else is dithering.
 

Degrees of Unintended Narssicism

It is in the nature of every country
in the world to think it is the best,
better than any other nation state,
and better than every other empire.

Better to the point where the word
'empire' has become declasse,
devalued for how close to 'empire'
is to the old self justifying hierarchies
when slavery and trading in slaves,
were the foundation of the wealth of the few,
for whom everything was property, for sale, 
or for pompous displays to other nations. 

'Empire' has been replaced
by the phrase 'trading block',
where each signee portrays itself
as the leader in the agreement
and other countries come second,
third, fourth, or last, in value
of importance, due to their inferiority. 

The narcissism of the nation state
is something world leaders get elected for, 
to update their leadership status,
the more to prop up how each nation
sees itself  as the centre of the universe

The best ex-leaders learn humility
most by what they do when office deserts them.

The Overwhelm (noun)

 A. L. Kennedy has it right;

'The Overwhelm is the friend of every dodgy sales pitch
for bad leaders, bad ideas, bad products,
because it extinguishes thought.
Headlines and influencers, online radicalisation
they all get more unquestioning traction
if whatever they say overwhelms.
Authoritarians conjure horrors of the imagination
whilst planning real ones
and trashing the governments
we pay to guard and serve us.
Predators thrive in storms and profitable instability
whilst we waste valuable mental bandwidth
we don't have trying to understand chaos....

The storms in our lives, minds, bodies, hearts,
they can all be just as damaging as Storm Eowyn
but when we are overwhelmed The Overwhelm
we can make us lose heart in anything ever being put right.

Listen to the full ten minute talk by her here.  

Picture Set Of The Month - February 2025 - The Paintings Of Hélène De Beauvoir

'Serie Venise' a cubist/abstract painting
by Hélène De Beauvoir (1910-2001).
She was exhibiting here work across
Europe, Japan and the USA.

'Untitled', undated by Hélène De Beauvoir,
one of here greater accomplishments, away
from a painting career, was to be the president
of a centre for the care of battered women. 

'Self Portrait' as painted in 1955
by Hélène de Beauvoir. Her younger sister
Simone De Beauvoir (1908-86) was more
famous than Hélène for writing the feminist
philosophical work 'The Second Sex' in 1949. 

'Harvester in Morocco' as painted in 1949
by Hélène De Beauvoir. Morocco was, of course,
a colony of France, though further back it was
encroached on by the Ottoman Empire.
Presently it has the part of the fifth largest
economy in all of Africa.

'The Flower Market' (undated) by Hélène De Beauvoir
(1910-2001) who painted until she eighty five years old, 
and only stopped painting, whether from failing hands

or failing eyesight, in the last six years of her life.