I Know It Would Be Tasteless

but, alas, true, to say that Lady Diana Spencer
'had a car crash marriage'. That was her demise.
But from the start her life was a privileged, but bumpy, ride.

Long before she took that last short ride,
hounded by photographers who wanted to be
the last to photograph her alive, the Royal Family
led her towards a long slow demise from teen pin up
to her being ostracised for acting out the sense of privilege
that they had taught her as long - as she was one of them.

The Royal Family understood how much P.R.
was like the hunting with hounds they supported:
first find your bait that leads away from yourselves
then set the pack running, and Diane had the misfortune
of having the mix of being both photogenic and having
low self esteem, which made the photographers
snap harder after her. This could only increase
the gap between her sense of esteem vs her adopted royal status. 

Today's princesses have less charisma,
and with that present themselves
as tamer and more sensible people.
Long may they resist the wilder extremes
of the new monster P.R. machines
looking for who they may devour,
unrecognised, in new best selling regimes.

Who Would Choose To Be A Block To Make Others Stumble?

When 'They' is the only collective noun
an individual, including one of faith,
can use to describe their government,
to share with the world media,
then all the 'We'  of those who live
for older identities can hope for
is that their past is strong enough
for it to become a stumbling block
to the government's idea of 'the future'?

Welcome To The New Inflation

Where, whether it is credit or cash,
money remains relatively stable.
But what has grown beyond all proportion
is the competitive need for praise
in an ever expanding media landscape
that has reached epidemic proportions
as every attraction seeks more likes
and more thumbs up than everyone else,
and nobody can understands
what being that attractive means.   

Temporary Equality

The kindness of strangers always surprises me,
and I write that as one who has hitched lifts,
for being unable to drive, for nearly sixty years.
As a passenger of a system that I could never
be a host in, I have always been grateful for the invites
I have received, even the double minded ones.

It was only after my need to hitch was much reduced
that hindsight showed me how much with the lifts
in which I was temporarily treated as an equal, a guest,
I was esteemed more, and my host got me further,
than how my family saw me or hoped I would become.

Nowadays I have the gratitude to trust who I am
when I am stationary, and when I am able to travel.

Meanwhile I shall wonder what collective noun
should be coined describe a group of outsiders?  

Measure For Measure

To be born a male in a patriarchal society
is to be half the way up the top of the tree
well before you start trying to climb higher.
And when, further, that patriarchy believes
is predestined by gender in its superiority, then Whoah.

Who will measure the grace of fortune you live in?
Rest assured that those who have far, far, less
but are numerate, if not literate, will measure
the wealth the ultra wealthy luxuriate in,
both as a guide to what they have not got
and for the ignorant to measure their 'love of money',
money that they are never going to get, by. 

On The Anniversary Of The Death Sinead O'Connor

 

What better performance to celebrate her life with then her performance of 'Trouble Soon Be Over', a song by legendary gospel/blues writer and performer Blind Willie Johnson (1897 - 1945). For the original please left click here. 

The Unexpected Good News

Is that with ailing leaders
and failing presidents,
as world leadership lands
on ever older candidates,
their ailments,
much more than their memory,
may be the most reliable aspect
of their ability to lead the world.

Let Them Eat Humbug

Political cycles will pan from left to right,
and back again, and from the rear to the front
when they are presented in 5.1 surround sound,
whenever a new leader is thrown up to the public.

The new leader will aim to sound like
a new broom sweeping the past clean away
with freshly polished rhetoric in a media so new
that the old media does not know how to absorb it.

They will upset some voters and parties,
whilst hoping to please enough of the public,
enough of the time, to be able to ignore
the malcontent of those who can't be satisfied.

Those with Humbug of their own don't need
to be told that fresh new Humbug is available.

Spinning Curency

In a spin
on a roll
a joy ride
out of control
into being.

Beached pro-tem
on the Spring tide
of another's life.

They see the pockmarks
our journey give us
more than we do.  

Re/Action

Like empires and sharks in water,
governments require perpetual motion, 
or like some scientific observation
every government action prompts
an equal and opposite reaction,
a new response in perpetual dialogue
with the latest iteration of 'the crisis'.

When the government I'd like
is one that passes only laws it can enforce,
rather than regulating that which resists 
regulation and therefore have to pass more laws
to tighten the laws that went slack
the moment they were given to the courts
I see no sign of my ideal government yet.

Woah! There my government goes again
on some new cause it wants to put into the hands
of judges it trusts to manage matters arising
from past they could not control then either.

The Salt Path - The View Before And After

I wrote the following review after reading 'The Salt Path' a couple of years ago as a summer read. But first a preface to the review, given the recent publicity the book and the author have attracted.

With modern popular writing that flatters our intelligence it is meant to be hard to spot the tricks, the deceptions, the author and the editor create between them that make a narrative easier to swallow and resist awkward questions. At the time of reading the book I found it easy to grasp the deceptively simple narrative 'property owning upper middle class couple take a tumble on the property market and take a very long walk with their tent for shelter to think about what has happened to them', but I did not not grasp at the deceptions that made the book so easy to read. Calling Timothy the familiar 'Moth' was one, we are apparently let in on their intimacy that way. And the story of Moth having an illness that was both intermittent and defied doctors diagnosis seemed to be both baffling and opaque. If the author was being dishonest at that point, then the reader could not tell where the dishonesty started-with the doctors, the patient, the author, who renamed herself Raynor Winn, or the editors who were taken in after signing the right legal wavers.   

Any adult who as a child used to watch 'Dr Who' as a child can understand how it was written as an adult: there had to be a ratio of moments of ease followed by moments of heart tugging anxiety, and every so often moments of extreme anxiety including moments of grief, mortification, and great loss. The nearest Raynor Winn got to in print to being genuinely scared and scary was when with nearly no money to call on from anywhere they were genuinely hungry and their middle class values were tested by the temptation to steal junk food from a shop. The hollowness of the account of being tempted was plain when the couple faced none of the consequences of those who  had stolen might get, all they got was a mild attack of middle class guilt at breaking property laws that were immersed in that had served them so well. And was Moth really ill? We only have Raynor's word for that, but even the name of his illness had a literary/almost Dr Who jargon-style feel to it. It could be something or nothing but it was well used to heighten tension when the book needed it.

  

Review starts here: Bob Dylan wrote one set of couplets in his song 'Like a Rolling Stone' that was always the fulcrum of what was already a powerful song lyric; 'When you've got nothing/you've got nothing to lose/you're invisible/you got no secrets to conceal'.

Very few people ever go from having all that society gives to having-literally-nearly nothing. Here are a couple who are married for over thirty years who have built themselves up to have a lot and they have a personal history tied the land and the farmhouse that have lived in a long time which due to who knows how many slip ups with the law and the increasingly complex financial systems over a period of three years they lose it, all of it. Not only that the man, called Moth, is ill with some disease that makes him tired that no doctor has a name for, and more importantly a medicine for, that actually works. So that on some days he hopes to be going his body does not know whether it is is coming or going. The body of the book is about what they did next.

So, with very little money coming in every week they decide to walk and go wild tenting the length of The Salt Way, a long ancient coastal path that runs through several counties of South West England that became known for it's scenery but was in the days of much slower transport a route for selling salt, which in those slow times was a vital commodity. Indeed, they put the preservative -the salt- back into their own lives through taking the walk and keeping going however long it takes them.

Thus they proceed on a series of repetitive actions, walking, camping, observing nature, observing people from the point of view of being outsiders, getting tired, but most of all not giving up on the goal-the length of the walk they set themselves. The end of the book is surprising, less for the way as outsiders and wild campers they see the rest of society, than for how surprised they are when one particular insider on society alights on their story, they tell the truth and the face value of their yields Raynor and Moth what they knew they needed but had no clue how it might be got. Their story and the walking/camping that became part of it, became the currency that paid for it's own renewal among people who were not like them and had plenty whilst Raynor and Moth had only what they could put in rucksack and walk away with. And it all happened in a way where the demonstration of human generosity meant more than any talk of same.

Having said what the book is about, my description is still only an outline. The journey is best taken by reading the book, one final tip; if you have a map of the route they take then as they name places they go through then it might compliment your read and prove helpful.

With Rewilding My Garden

I did not realise how much I had lost interest
in 'keeping up with Jones', I knew the phrase.
But I had forgotten who 'The Jones'' were,
the people who cut their grass, removed the weeds
and tidied their borders for appearance' sake. 

And when one neighbour did invite me in,
partly it was to make me sigh and wince
every time I passed her astroturf that to any uncaring eye 
imitated what should have been grass,
which with its zero maintenance required
gave her more time for her job, her holidays, and watching television.

Not for her the creative life at home, 'get a man in to do the job'
Mrs Jones said, even when she did not know what job he would do.
Paying others to get things done was cheaper, if less engaging,
than planning and doing the work herself. I am sure landscape
gardeners are glad of the work, the Mrs Jones' of the world pay them,
but I seek to celebrate the insect life my garden supports
and the birds that feed, fly, and sing, day after day on their journeys.

In my limited activity, the grass is greener and longer my side of the fence. 
       

I Read And Write Therefore I Am

Many who claim to 'be victims' in public
have to be careful when making their claim:
they make sure their account seems credible
enough to nullify accusations of slight of word
before any such public slights can be made.

This makes 'the victim' shape the facts
into a taut tautology that, unawares,
becomes a tick box exercise, where the aim
is to miss cliché by a whisker by reminding
the reader of how familiar the familiar is.

Many a rich story starts with an unintended lie
that writer did not recognise it as when they wrote it.
When it becomes the foundation of what is clearly true,
this creates a dilemma that is impossible to undo.
When this applies the well written books by new authors 
lawyers help the publisher to devise a legal sophistry
that smooths over the awkward lie the author's story rest on.

In every life, people live with levels of sophistry
that if they were individually tested and examined
would resist the invitation to honest self examination
-which would only reflect poorly upon them.

So long live true life stories built on lies
-they not only entertain us but they are
the shorthand that we rely on to get by.

the Future Is Not What It Used To Be

Some utopians in the 1980s thought
of the future as place where machines
did most of the boring jobs, and man
(very few women shared this vision)
would be free of the shackles of labour
to see the world, like the rich young men
of the early 19th century who in their time
did grand tours of Europe. With the wealth
that they depended on theirs for the asking 
close behind them they went off to live in splendour.

But alas, modern freedom from drudgery
works for best for those who manage
other people's drudgery, where the more
the manager refines and defines the drudgery
the less the drudges can define it for themselves,
whilst their bosses reward themselves more
as they pass on, now screen related, drudgery
to people who to compensate for the inactivity
have to go factory-shaped gyms spaces
as free of character as where they work. 

The Extra/Ordinary Minority

To accept being gay
is the seek acceptance as a small minority
for having a character which is for the most part
quite is ordinary - they/we breathe the same air,
eat the same food, rent or own housing similar
to that which is owned by the hetero - majority,
and desire it for the same reasons, shelter and wellbeing.

But for the minority, who are seeking acceptance
this means seeking acceptance for part of yourself
that the majority seek to ignore as if it is invisible*.
That is what being outward similar to the majority
whilst being inwardly different from them actually means.

This is where the Majoritarianism of  race-based
right wing politics cuts deepest: such politics are riddled
with cliques who think they are majorities for being cliques,
whereas for the minority they know that they are only one minority
among several trying to find their place, and a place for others*
in a world media that does not want to hear that.      

*The same principle can be applied with many of the new
definitions of mental health conditions, many of which
invite any number of different coping strategies.

Running On Half Empty?

When the whole seems to be less
than the sum of it's parts
remember hearts will vary,
and a time for a less full life
will still be part of the journey,   

Can Science Or Religion Give Us Cause For Hope?

The hope of the end of the world will
hitch a ride on any hope, any optimism,
pessimism or aspiration disguised as 'truth',
according the the latest living guru or teacher
that it can find and that appears to accept it.

That such a hope is built into the foundation
of many centralising systems of collective belief
is a fact. All three major theistic faiths in one God,
whatever the variations of attributes they ascribe to him,
agree and look forward to the end of the world.

I don't, and have my doubts about the predestination,
that many of my fellow followers in faith aspire to.

What I observe, though, is that observing the world
 leads me towards accepting that the sixth extinction
comes with incorporating the scientific method
hypothesis-test-result into our thinking,
Though the sixth extinction took off in earnest
with the industrial revolution-long before
the effects of applying the sense of science
and the scientific method could be seen
for to recognise all across the world.

If there is a life after this life then fine.
I will greet it, but part of that life will be
lament what and who is not there with me,
because some of my fellow human beings
have made sure to put themselves before
all other life forms, before recognising
the consequences of them doing that.    

The Lesser Violence

Most modern media focuses on the subjects
that offend the public easiest: outrage.

That the rap trio Kneecap outrage others
so easily almost makes their act have a grace
all of it's own, or means that outrage is cheap.
Choose for yourself with that one.

But the outraged forget/don't want know
why what outrages them does so. They just react.

The verb 'to kneecap' means to seriously damage
someone's patella or kneecap, so as to disable them.
I admire a band whose name is both a verb and noun.  

The history of the internal discipline applied
by non-government forces in the disputed province
of Northern Ireland is long one. Relatively few
were killed, but the deaths there were made headlines.
What made fewer headlines, but was equally personal,
was the more common fear of life-changing injuries. 

So for a band to name themselves by what made
the headlines less often and make themselves headliners
makes their act remarkable in itself. And the music?
It is the usual amphetamine fuelled rap and sampling
that simulates the impression of life going by so fast
that what is actually happening is hardly noticed
in the mad rush of the soundtrack, where the point
becomes more that their videos are surreal high speed fun.

I will follow them more easily when they slow down with old age.

For The Rich Detachment Is The Ultimate In Luxury

Where you from the privacy of the room own
and from an encoded smart phone you can proclaim the victory
 of your choice, quoting the people in rooms far away
who you have bought to do your bidding 
and they don't even have to know what you have said.
 

 

Cold Comfort Town

Was a place where careers were pipe dreams,
sold to youths by careers officers for whom the career
move du jour was to be a careers officer,
mis-selling placements on government training schemes
to youths for whom the point of them doing the scheme
was for the employer to attract the government money
for the placement-yes that is right. Youths were trained
as bait to attract money for nothing for their trainers.
Because nothing was what the trainees were going to be taught.  

Searching For The Ghost of Sir Roger Casement

 The following is the revised text of a forty minute length talk I gave on an Edward Carpenter Community retreat I attended in June 2025. Enjoy.

Sir Roger Casement is the most famous gay Irishman that most English people have barely heard of, though he is famous in Germany. His name is more likely to be recalled as the answer to a quiz question than for his role in attempting to change the course of Irish history. And yet to the Irish he is a pivotal figure-he signified both deep humanity and deep folly. He became famous for reasons that are similar to the reasons that made Edward Carpenter famous in his time.

Both Casement and Carpenter saw and acted for what they saw as justice ahead of their time, where what they did is difficult to extract from the times that they were part of. In his advocacy of non-state Socialism Carpenter acted well outside of Government circles, and apparently stayed clear of establishment threats until 1916. Casement ended up acting from within the establishment before acting outside of the establishment.

But first the background that made their homosexuality invisible. Before 1861 all homosexual acts, whatever the acts involved, were described as ‘sodomy’, which by the 1850s was one of six crimes where the state could still impose the death sentence on criminals who convicted of the crime for. Other capital crimes were murder, treason, espionage, arson in the royal docks, and piracy with violence. This list was down from a list that was at its peak in the eighteenth century included 220 capital crimes, many of them against property, as passed by those with the most property.

Homosexual behaviour, or ‘buggery’ as it was defined as, had been a Capital crime since 1533. In 1861 the law on homosexual acts changed from making such acts punishable by death to the punishment being imprisonment for between ten years and life. The further on the nineteenth century progressed the fewer the crimes were that anyone could be hanged for. One difficulty this presented for the government was that public hangings were ‘a popular entertainment’. That is hangings drew crowds and crowds had to be managed, sold food to, by street vendors, pickpockets at the events apprehended etc. The fewer the hangings, the more crowds gathered for other reasons - non-conformist preachers and parliamentary reform come to mind. For the government a crowd caught in some fever of collective projection of homophobia was a safe crowd. Homosexuality was visible, the law and courts and law made it so. But with the new law the government problem was how to manage homophobic crowds without the draw of the hangman with his gibbet and noose? From 1861 onward homophobic crowd who came to see a homosexual punished had to be managed in a different way. Instead of those convicted of homosexual acts attracting a crowd through them being hanged, they would instead attract a crowd through the publication date of the trail in advance of it happening and the would-be criminalised man punished by the crowds who would jeer and pelt rotten fruit and more wounding objects at the man en route to the trial, which was a foregone conclusion.

My feeling, and I can’t prove it, is that Edward Carpenter, Roger Casement, and many other men who were similarly privately inclined to same sex relationships would have known about these pre-emptive public punishments and would have read, and been told, about the grizzly details of the prisons that those who were convicted and locked away for homosexual behaviour for would be put in, which was the 'improvement' on Capital punishment. The new law also encouraged a new form of homophobic vigilantism and agent provocateur behaviour. There, supposedly ‘moral societies’ secretly set up alcohol based secretive same-sex sexual activities in secretive rumoured-about houses to get witnesses to observe homosexual or sexually suggestive behaviour which the organisation who set the house up knew would get the attendees arrested. There, with secure witnesses a court case was an open and shut case. The police would arrest the drunken fumblers lured into their immorality by the moral society who set up the house.

There was a strong social class bias in this activity, where the upper classes who bought the law for their own advantage made sure that the poor paid for the law in the time they served when the poor got trapped by laws written by clever mean whilst they were barely literate. Whilst literacy rates improved in English society, the dynamic of the most literate and wealthy writing laws that trapped men who were tempted by the idea same-sex relationships, unawares of the consequences continued until the 1950s. where it was exposed by the trial of British/Canadian journalist Peter Wildeblood who was arrested and imprisoned, and while in prison voluntarily  taught fellow prisoners adult literacy.

Casement was born in Dublin in 1864, into a mixed Catholic-Protestant family who were downwardly mobile. His grandfather was a bankrupt shipping merchant. His father, also called Roger, was a sea captain and sometime soldier who died when young Roger was thirteen. After this the young Roger stayed for short periods of time in many different relatives’ houses, where the fear of draining his host family’s finances followed the young Roger around and surely left him unsettled for life. Aged sixteen he started work as a shipping clerk.

Polish/English author Joseph Conrad first met Casement in The Congo in 1890 when Casement was 26 years old and working for a front missionary/trade organisation that was secretly funded by King Leopold of Belgium. Conrad was piloting a Belgian ship when he met shipping clerk Casement. When Conrad first commented on Casement, Conrad described Casement as 'A positive piece of good luck' and wrote '[Casement] thinks, speaks, well, most intelligent and [is] very sympathetic' when both of them were well disposed towards the apparent aim of the mission, the wellbeing of the native, not knowing who funded it or why-when it was for the future exploitation of the natives of The Congo.

 Later, after Casement's arrest and trial, Conrad had more critical thoughts: 'Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion.’. Casement's career started with him being a shipping clerk working in the office of a dock through working as a clerk for The Colonial Service up to him being transferred to the Foreign Office, where by 1901, aged 37, there he served as British consul in the eastern part of the French Congo. In 1903 whilst Casement served in the civil service the British government of the day tasked Casement to compile a report into the human rights situation in The Congo under rule of the King Leopold of Belgium, who saw The Congo as his personal fiefdom. This report is where the reported emotionalism of Casement became Casement's strength, rather than his weakness. The period of compiling the report through on-site investigations was also the time when Casement first noted in his diaries some of the casual sexual pickups and possible fantasies he had as a gay man. The homo-erotic sections of the diary are self identifying but opaque. From this distance in time from when he wrote them it is impossible  to distinguish whether they writings referred to fantasies he'd had - larger penis size has been a standard fantasy among men who have had fantasies about same-sex sexual relationships probably since the stone age-or whether the events that were described, mostly random pick-ups of young men some of whom were poor and were given money in kind, happened as the description of them describes them. 

When the government published the Casement report on The Congo, the report compiled a lot of King Leopold’s mistreatment of his slaves in The Congo up to 1911. The report was an immediate hit with the British political establishment and got Casement knighted for his service to Britain and Ireland. The people the report was unpopular with was the British Royal family who whilst knighting Casement had blood ties with King Leopold’s family they were keen to maintain.

Aged forty seven, Casement could retire and tour the world on the back of his fame. This he did. His reputation hid his homosexuality, but even if he were not famous other narratives would have availed themselves as cover for his homosexuality-the behaviour recorded in the diaries of which it is tempting with hindsight to see as a reaction to the stress that witnessing the distress of the Congo natives in the rubber plantations would have caused him. Stresses in themselves are one reason why diarists write diaries, the diarist need a place they can process and leave their thoughts when they have work to do that creates stress in them. And their thoughts turn to stress relief which become diary entries.  

When Casement looked at the way that London and Parliament directed the affairs of Ireland as part of The British Empire, he could not avoid seeing similarities between the way King Leopold of Belgium and The Congo ran The Congo.  If the social inequality in Ireland was less absolute and less brutal than the inequality in The Congo, then the comparative inequality still left him itching to do something with his position, of being ‘a knight’, no less. 

Come World War I and both politics and civil life are convulsed by change. Carpenter, a writer who's writings were known to be written in both German and English, was caught out by the patriotic paranoia that was spread by the popular press. And when patriotic paranoia became the focus of certain people with unorthodox domestic arrangements hid by unconvincing explanations, that was what put Carpenter even more in the cross-hairs of a patriotic’ press looking for targets. It was that pressure that made him abandon his home Millthorpe in 1916, and move south. Casement felt frustrated by how Parliament had, with a world war interrupting the Parliamentary deliberations on greater autonomy for Ireland, let change in Ireland trickle to nothing.

My contention is that for a few men in those times homosexuality could have been a means to a relationship that was worked-at, and provided mutual material and emotional support. Carpenter was one of them. There part of the support included keeping records of daily life in such companionship. But such people had to be quiet and keep any record they kept of that life secure against a dirt seeking sensationalist press looking for homosexual scapegoats to sell newspapers with. 

Carpenter and Casement were both career bachelors. Both knew what had happened to Oscar Wilde, a married man and a bisexual who was caught by a law that allowed him no loophole of ‘privacy’ for his ‘open marriage’, who was exposed in court. Carpenter could move house, and cut short/absorb the losses of losing the local fame and community he had in Millthorpe. His books and pamphlets would still sell. 

Casement had no such safe but disruptive plan B for himself or for Ireland, to claim its relative autonomy from England with, with England’s agreement. And since Casement’s homosexual behaviour was probably ‘reactive’, and his character was what we now call ‘straight acting’ - his homosexual behaviour as recorded in the diaries amid the stress of recording the distress of the natives of the Congo, his homosexuality was a hidden Achilles’ Heel for him. At best ‘a hidden Achilles’ heel’ was how homosexuality might have been empathetically understood. That such homosexuality had to be hidden, because of the homophobic reaction that revealing homosexuality generated was a painful paradox it took much later law reform to unpick, and the paradox is still here in the 2020s.

I won’t go into the botched Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 that Casement and others planned here. But that it was botched was part of why he was arrested. His arrest led to the discovery of his diaries where he recorded his homosexual thoughts. When Casement was put on trial it was not just him on trial, it was the claim of the Ireland he wanted being put on trial. When in the 1880s another Irish campaigner, Charles Stewart Parnell, had stood in support of ‘home rule for Ireland’, his stand was later cut from under him by the public exposure of his relationship with Kitty O’Shea, the long-separated wife of another MP of his own party.

The same would happen in a different way to Casement. When prominent figures wanted to support Casement and his view of Ireland at his trail, shadowy government figures told them about Casement's Achilles heel, the homosexual content in the diaries. Casement got little of the support in court that he could have had.

Casement was hanged for treason in 1916, and the whiff of sulphur in the question ‘were the homosexual parts of Casement’s ‘Black Diaries’ real or forged by the British state?’ remains to this day, albeit somewhat faded by time. Casement was known to be charismatic. He must have been very straight acting and convincing to have climbed the way he did from a childhood imperilled by lower middle class financial instability through to being knighted: that straight acting that even now looking for evidence of his homosexuality is like looking for a ghost.

Malcolm Walker June 2025

Footnotes

German “Roger Casement Execution” bronze 1916 Medal by Karl Goetz. (Sold at auction on 26 March 2024). The 1351 law of King Edward III was invoked by his barrister as a defence against high treason for Casement, who finally addressed his speech from the dock also to the Irish people.

Roger Casement

Biography  https://www.dib.ie/biography/casement-sir-roger-david-a1532

Film https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-trial-of-sir-roger-casement-1960-online

Complete diaries on kindle @ £9.99

https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/

Casement’s self portrait, poems some photographs and Irish interests 

https://www3.smo.uhi.ac.uk/oduibhin/bgilmore/furthernotes.htm

Edward Carpenter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carpenter

Oscar Wilde

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Peter Wildeblood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wildeblood

Joseph Conrad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad

King Leopold

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium

Charles Stewart Parnell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stewart_Parnell

The 4th edition of Roger Casement: The Complete Black Diaries with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life (Belfast Press) has now been published. It comes only in an Amazon Kindle eBook version, available for £9.99 at: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/

Note the word ‘Complete’ in the title, as all four journals are now here in full. The eBook has, for the first time, unabridged versions of the 1903 and 1910 Diaries and the 1911 Cash Ledger, and all of the never-otherwise-published, highly sexual 1911 Diary over which London threatened an obscenity prosecution.

This extensive book provides all the diaries and supporting text with explanations for their many characters while giving a context for Casement whose significance and seminal role in the political development of separatist Ireland has been masked by the debates over his homosexuality and the diaries; explicit content. An Advanced Liberal in British terms, Casement’s effective humanitarian role in official investigations in the Congo and Peru is outlined in specific chapters as is his Ulster family in Ballymena and Ballycastle. His part in the pre-1916 development of Republicanism in the north and later in Dublin is uniquely detailed.

His two named boyfriends, the betrayer and fraudster Adler Christensen, and the respectable Millar Gordon from Co Antrim, plus his key mentor, the Belfast solicitor and antiquarian F.J. Bigger, merit separate chapters. There are now over a hundred photographs in this edition with some images of actual diary pages.

The 3rd paperback edition remains available on Amazon. This should be the final definitive version of the diaries but the diary authenticity dispute continues unrelentingly as per the first review, visible at the bottom of the Amazon page link: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/

Jeff Dudgeon (author)

Jeffrey Dudgeon is a pioneering gay activist in Belfast, who successfully prosecuted the UK government at the European Human Right’s Court in Strasbourg. Please watch https://vimeo.com/637486105 for the Council of Europe’s video on the 40 th anniversary of the case of ‘Dudgeon v. the United Kingdom’

Please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxhe7WCqhtw for Jeff Dudgeon’s lecture hosted by The Linen Hall Library, ‘Dudgeon vs United Kingdom.

Fiftly Shades Of Grey... ...The Sequel

 

Cheap Grace*

might take the waiting of wanting
and might leave you feeling fine, 
but it will definitely leave you
with debts too heavy to carry.

*a phrase coined by German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer
to describe a Christian life, but perhaps all human life,
compromised by short cuts and shallow foundations.   

Rendezvous: Sixth Extinction

Disaster capitalism, please meet climate change,
your friend who when you convert them properly
to the causes for social division closest to your heart,
I know - other people thought you did not have one.

But when you first met the climate, Capitalism, D.
she could not see you in your disguise.
you were cloaked in maths and theology.
empire, and wars where people fought
to not have to recognise each other
until one side, at least, could fight no more.

Now the past is passed, the old covers are blown,
you can meet each other naked and face to face
for that final meeting, as far as we can tell.

To create the sixth extinction. 

How Much Water Is Used To Make A Water Bottle?

Not that we should need a drily funny
old man to remind us of that up to four time
more water is used up in creating the bottle
then will go in the bottle when it is made.

Manufacturing is funny that way.....
The cost of the convenience it makes
is more often about hiding the truth
about the process than we credit.
  

 

Sporting Chances

I would have done a lot better in school sport
if I had understood before I began attending
the place that sport was more meant to assess me
than the teach or support me: School was no place
to learn to swim, play football or cricket.
or prove to anyone how teamwork works.  

School was there to discover if I was fit to be taught.

Meanwhile I had to work out between home
and school which of them expected the other
to support me more, without either asking either.

If an aptitude for competitive sport was ever meant
to be a signifier in my life my lack of aptness
would be the case, though I did learn to swim
aged 30, and enjoyed mild attempts at being fit.

But fitness and competitiveness? No chance.    

Less Than Ontological Understanding

Superlatives mark the boundaries
for where and when our understanding
has exceeded our shared capacity
for language. It takes imagination,
or drugs, to think far enough
that we don't have words for it.

Education makes language the drug
we all have to share for us to feel alike
which is why learning limits us
to within the limits of each other. 

Time And Words

Those of us who were teenagers in the analogue world,
well before digital communications sped up all messaging, 
can remember the joy and despair of trying to be pen pals
with somebody whose address we had discovered
and we were both displaced and hungry in the need
to connect with another well away from where we were.

Then, and since, other people's handwriting might be
the ongoing small miracle that we became attached to,  
letter to letter, unaware of what our handwriting meant
to another unless they wrote as much to tell us.

Now we have standard print Trebuchet, Times,
Georgia, Courier, Arial, Helvetica and Verdana,
and screens that invent the time economy, and limit
our attention spans, and therefore at what length
we are at ease we can write hoping to be read.

There the smaller the screen and the more information
the device the machine stores then the sooner
that more of us will wear glasses more of the time,
in a print and image based information-rich society. 

And those who prefer to use emojis
do well to say as much with them as they do
whilst leaving print based human life forms mystified.    

Test Pilot

Not that the weather you fly through
as you take your time is under your control.
But whether good or bad the conditions 
are yours to make the best of. 

 

A Short History Of BBC War Announcements

When WW2 started in Sept 1939,
it started in Britain with a BBC announcement
from a man who affected to speak
as if he were a retired funeral director*.

After the announcement, and what followed,
the British people were more agitated
by the government than the enemy,
as their lives were rendered much duller
and their moments of joy were cancelled.

Eighty six years later, when WW3 happens
I wonder what form the recognition of it will take.

We could do worse than recognise the 'starting gun'
as the BBC being unable to broadcast the short film
'Gaza: Doctors Under Attack' which was there
for the BBC to show and horrify the world with,
from February 2025, where the lead choice
for showing it has now fallen to other media,
through which, I promise you, it will go viral.

So, at under six minutes long and with a narrative
that defines the words 'contested' and 'contentious',
here is 'Gaza: Doctors Under Attack'

It will be contested as propaganda by those
who have pre-chosen their side in the conflict.
Decide for yourself-that is what free will is for.

*Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 - 1940).
Hear the speech in full here. 

Dress To Overwhelm, Or Be Yourself...

The difference between a fetish and a relationship
is one of process, understanding: with a fetish
one dresser-up dresses to shock or impress another,
until the one who is impressed cannot process
what they are impressed by any further.

Enter collapse and decline in the relationship.
You can read about this in 'Venus in Furs'. 
I read the book twice, to try to understand it better.

Whereas in a relationship the parties see past
the need to impress. Seeking instead to make the relationship
more about their natural selves, no dressing up required. 
Maturity is like some comfy chair they both share
which is neither 'I' nor 'You', but an 'Us' they both occupy.

Picture Set Of The Month - July - Home Made Art

The Mystery of the Hill

Even Monster Need Allies

A Field of Rape

The Worm of Doubt