In The Midst Of Life.....

                      '    .....we are in death. The present moment
                  is all we can call our own for works of mercy,  
                of righteous dealing, and of family tenderness.
                     All very old truths - but what we thought
                   the oldest truth becomes the most startling
                       to us in the week when we have looked 
                        on the dead face of one who has made
                     a part of our own lives....   - George Elliot.

 

 

The Cart And Horse Life

One of the phenomena of modern life
that I carefully choose my distance from
is the casual inflation of the ways
that human emotions are commonly decribed
into a new highly performative language.

Oh, I know, it is part of the modern media
is to make a virtue of being so inexact, for emphasis.
As presenters seek to make their readers
and listeners work harder to undersgtand,
and then conflate their audiences failure
to understand with them having a poor work ethic.

Yes some trauma is real, but therapy speak
is a world of its own, where in the past
it was difficult to talks for the mix of shame,
stigma and silence, now it the noise is so noisy
that no disrress can be ordinary, every emotion
breeds its own pathologising adjective,
from 'My distress' up to 'My anxiety, my ADHD,
my autism', until people talk ourselves
out of being useful through the way they reverse
symptom and anaalysis, and put the cart of symptom
before the horse of analysis, so the patient
can gain the attention of whoever they are talking to.

Describing being upset as 'being triggered' is unhelpful,
unless, perhaps, there is literally a gun in the situation.

There is a way out of this: Do less, think more,
and choose your words with more care for them,
and who you want to listen to you, than you have shown before. 

I Was A Teenage Quaker, I Still Am

My period as a teenage Quaker was brief,
briefer than my being a teenager. I found them
through being the first secretary of my local CND,
whose early meetings were held in the Quaker meeting house,
a building that was put up in 1704, 60 years after the peak
of popular Quaker belief amid the English civil war,
after which, when non-conformism was rife,
it meant exclusion from the instutions of the state,
and Church of England, such was the strength of self reliance
that was required to survive being ostracised by the state.

I was a very weak outsider: my commitment as a Quaker
foundered rather fast. In the world I might have liked
I would like to have had Quaker parents. 

Though even in the comfort of the 1970s it was a hard path to follow. 

I left the Quakers To 'sow my wild oats', until eventually
I had my own front door in a quiet place, from which
to shut the world out, where I could realise I was 'there',
whereever 'there' is - the place of radical quiet and rest
that was what attracted me in on that Quaker Room,
in the Gansborough in which I was a restless teenager. 

Democrazy (4)

Welcome to the new vice - signaling
president who acts as if he is the leader
of a renewed entertanment/sports franchise
where the sole winner is the new owner.
The sportsmen are losers who have to play,
and the viewers are the biggest loss leaders
for them not knowing where the off button
on the remote control went -
so the television turns them off instead.

In this new regime the president has reset
his sport in the law courts where the judges
don't know that he has recast them as heels/bullies,
there to enforce the rules against his lawyers
who don't know why they are so poorly briefed.
They are there to lose the case for the president,
who won't tell them what he wants.

What the president wants,
without being seen to ask  for it,
is to reduce the value of precedent
and case law across the country
to a series of minor farces
so that nobody notices 
when he drives through decisions
made purely for his personal enrichment.

As he burdens judges with frivolous defences
that they have to throw out, his aim
is to bring case law into disrepute
until the only winners, other than him, 
are his best freinds, the tech bros
whose AI chicanery remakes the world
of what were once made of hard facts
into a world of infinite malleability. 

Between Indifference And Acceptance

 What does it mean
to be known for what you do,
much more that what you say?
When what you are known for
is more for the words leave out
than the language you leave in?

It means you know what fits, and what doesn't,
and you are a misfit who other people don't realise
is the wrong person for the job they had in mind.

But if they are careless enough to not notice.
you adapt their indifference as your acceptance,
knowing, in spite everything, this is what we find...

Are You Betting On The End Times?

Being closer than those around you realise?
If you are then from what position of power
are you acting? The well financed politician
who has bought their popularity with adverts
in which they make a virtue of their getting in bed
with the tech giants, for whom their technology
is an each way bet where whatever the odds they win.
As a monopoly that is how they rig the odds:
whoever plays, they are always the biggest winners. 

Or are you one of the less powerful men and women
who knows more the limitations of what they can do,
and what they can hope for, but who keeps watch
because they don't know, day to day, what to watch for? 

I will always be in the latter group: whatever I do I accept
the limitions of my living to extend the limits of how how I live.
 I feel as uncertain about the future times as I feel about the past.
The present is the best point to be sure of. For others to survive
I have to show self discipline and work in consent with people
I know less well than I wish, for what I do to work well for them.

What Can Be Understood, But Must Also Change

The song title I would love to hear
that I don't know if it has been written
would have to be titled 'Irony Blues'.

A song in where in wracked tones
the singer outlines a narrative of suffering
but in the last verse he compares it
with the suffering of being confined
always to sing about his suffering,
as of the two sufferings are different
but they might be comparable.

How deep and lasting would the irony
in 'Irony Blues' be when I finally heard it?

Any listener who appreciates such a title
would have to have lived their own suffering,
unrecognised, for them to be caught
in the depth of the song. but how long,
would they remain thrilled by it?
Before they preferred some lighter entertainment?  

Healthy Irony Vs Unhealthy Irony

Healthy Irony is poor black blues singers
hymning what life has done wrong to them
where the passion with which they belt it out
is a partial curative of the conditions the sing of,
and an education and instruction for how some folks
survive the world, for those wh have never suffered.

Unhealthy irony is modern governments piling cover up
on cover up, on cover up, in palimpsests of shame
when rogue agents of the state do wrong in secret
and the powers that be side with those agents,
and against public decency, in the way they regulate
money sex and power, the basis of all law and custom,
and all the complexities that flow out of them.   

I Was A Teenage Loss Leader

When I was meant to start work I didn't,
I was diverted to local college courses
where the second and third components
of what I was studying were held far away,
and my family would not let me leave.
The alternative was 'youth training schemes'
in which the money that went with the youths
mattered more to employers than youths learning.

More false starts followed. There was work,
where I, or my family  could live with me being
on the wobbly bottom rung of the employment ladder
which could throw those on it out of work at any time.

And then I was no longer a teenager. But my family
clung to me as I tried to move away from the teen
I used to be, whilst I uncertainly sought a maturity
my family had allowed for, and late/slow but sure
get a normal education. My exit started  in a place
I did not expect. I read a book that changed my life,
'Depression: The Way Out Of Your Prison' by Dorrothy Rowe,
which explained how for those who are depressed,
much of how they feel comes from the doom loops
in the behaviour and language of those around them.

She wrote 

'Not spoiling' a child means trying to break that child's spirit'

and

''After all I've done for you' has alienated more children
from their parents than any act of parent cruelty.' 

amongst many other quotes 

Slowly, I inclreeased the distance I could sustain from my family,
and slowly I felt better. But all that I will leave for another time
in this much recalled, and often repeated, saga.   

   

Picture Set Of The Month - Romanesque Sea Beasts

One of over a hundred painted panels
on the ceiling of a Romanesque church at Zillich. 

But the panels that I have selected here
are merely the sequence of sea beasts. 

In the time these beasts were painted
the earth was thought to be flat.

The land was thought to be surrounded 
by mysterious and unexplored oceans. 

Protected by these beasts whose shape and size
could only be guessed. Some of us would be happy
for the world to return to a state something like that. 

Andre Gide On Georges Simonon

'Your are living on a false reputation
-just like Baudelaire*and Chopin*.
But nothing is more difficult
than making the public go back
on a too hasty first impression.
You are still the slave of your successes
and the reader's idleness would like
to put a stop to your triumphs there....
You are much more inmportant than is commonly supposed.'. 

*Both of whom were trapped by their early fame. 
Baudelaire and Chopin faced harsh early criticisms
and rigid public labels that evaded the depth of their genius.
Overcoming the rapidly arrived at, lazy early public judgment
takes a long time, The best estimations of artistic worth
last far beyond early limits set by popular critics.  

Book Review - 'Shadowplay' - Joseph O'Connor

 

   When the draw of a book is the origins of, well, a mythical being but the roots of the character are thoroughly human then the author has set himself a difficult task. This task is made more difficult when that character has been so comprehensively been reinvented by cinema, an art form not invented at the time of the source writings about them then the reader can multiply the complexites that the author has to grapple with. But with source material to draw on that is strong enough to tell the story the author can make play with the way that source material is used, particularly when said source material will be only mildly familiar to the casual reader. This lack of familiarity with source material improves the author's working chances for outlining the developments of the mythical character. 

  The character is Dracula, and to get to the outline of the character Josoeph O'Connor has to take the long way round via Victorian theatre: namely the relationships between actor Ellen Terry, actor Sir Henry Irving and stage manager and author Bram Stoker. So O'Connor starts with a rich palette of stories from which to fashion a figure who can never die and is never truly alive, who is a supreme exemple of a placeholder character who finds himself most at home in the shadows of given society.

  It is the theatre and Henry Irving that most brings the Dracula story to life. Irving is pivotal because he has the detachment, the airs and graces, and an interest in the occult, Irving is the one to employ Bram Stoker to run his theatre for him so that Irving can reserve his energies for acting and need not be too drawn into the actual mechanics of the theatre. Irving is the one to disparage Stoker's writng, but also keep him in employment and feed him material for writing. Whilst all the time O'Connor has Irving behaving as if that is not quite the case, as if Irving had no insight into himself. 

  The mechanics of  managing a theatre are detailed and complex to the point of exhausting. When the always wanna-be writer Bram Stoker starts writing he writes at night in a garret in the top of the theatre. It there finds the character of Dracula. As he sits in the still of night in the theatre Stoker writes and finds himelf caught up in an uneasy compulsion with the character, who even in the haziest of outlines clearly has some sort of life force that bids Stoker to write more. 

  In the meanwhile real life characters pass through the theatre, like Oscar Wilde before he is taken to court by the Marquis of Queensbury,. That is a minor side show and a bit of breathng space for the reader. But by the time that first draft of the Dracula story is complete, the reader has also absorbed the idea of the double life from Wilde's gothic novel, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. The reader is aware of Dracula being a presence even when he is not quite present on the page of Stoker's book, as conveyed in O'Connor's writing. But Dracula is becoming a much clearer presence in Stoker's mind, such that, at his wife's bidding (practical woman that she is) She makes Stoker write a play script of the manuscript of Dracula, so that when the play is read onstage, Stoker can claim copyright for 'Dracula - A Tale Of The Undead' from the British and Americam governments. This is done in Irving's theatre with the grudging blessing of Irving, for whom Shakspeare is king of the stage. No other writer in Irving's lifetime is going to compare.

  Ellen Terry's role in 'Shadowplay' is one of firstly adding sex appeal, second being an encourager, as the different strands of O'Connor's plot set off at great distant from each other and gradually become more thickly bound, as art imitates life, which imitates art, which imitates.....

  A mention here should be be made of the Jack The Ripper story who becomes an inciidental prop in the writing of the fictional Dracula. This is well aimed specuation on the part of O'Connor, in which ingeniously O'Connor also deflates the presence of Jack the Ripper in the book as other characters are horrified by the immediancy of the deaths of the seven women and the anonymity of The Ripper himself.

   As long as the daily life in the O'Connor's book is tied to the rich historical sources it takes it's cues from, the fiction of 'Shadowplay' is a highwire act where the only disadvantage comes from how each step forward is one step nearer the end of the wire/end the book. For that reason I am perversely enjoying not reading it as much as reading it: each step forward or chapter I read means less of the highwire act still to come, and therefore less to enjoy in furure unless the next book is as well sourced and written as this one. 

  When pleasure deferred is pleasure that is to come then it is better not rushed. Whatever is worth waiting for is worth reading more slowly. 

  That said, the way this book winds down with it's different endings would be a test of many reader's patience. This reader felt quite strongly as if they have been served a wonderful main meal in a resaurant. But towards the end of the book/meal the author/waiter so wanted to serve me me sweetmeats, in spite of me being full. And the author/waiter did not know when to stop. I so wanted to say to Joseph O'Connor as I read on 'Thank you, no more. The bill please.....   '.     

Deal? No Deal? Or Stalled Agreement?

Is the present dilema of 'the free (Western) world'
and the less aligned BRIC* countries have to navigate.

As America continues to be misled by its present leader.
Stalled, or more likely frozen, is presently the likely option
 - the most common choice between the USA and Canada,
where late in the deal the framework was altered,
and the alterations were summarily publicly rejected.

Back in the day, how free the freeworld was 
was tracked the same way that trade was measured
 - by the depth of the civility between citizens and nations.
Nothing was absolute, but there was a direction of travel
that was clearly worth going in. On present day trends
few will recognise it when America realises how many friends
it has lost, after it has torn up so many deals it once used to support.

Or how much tearing up the old deals shrinks the world we live in.
But then shrinkage rarely recognises itself through it's actions
as it slices through the world, seeking only to further itself.

I don't know how many countries America is in different stages
of negotiations with who don't knw where their negotiations are at.
Just as America does not know where it with in it's deal with itself

Of the smaller countries many have completed their deals,
according to trackers of how much work has been completed.
Other countries, including the UK and Japan, have frameworks,
which have been oversold of as agreements, where very litttle
is final about what has been settled: whatever has been agreed
can be recinded the following day depending on the days
the president and his ministers have been having.

Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,
which is when the deal might truly be said to be
truly 'locked down', until then little is known atall.

Everything that is not signed up can stall, be disagreed,
or frozen by both parties at any time, and the whole world watches
for future deals to be unravelled in the name of 'freedon of choice.'. 

*Brazil, Russia, India and China 

Wildlife Special (2)

The black-headed parrot (Pionites melanocephalus; sometimes incorrectly Pionites melanocephala) is a species of bird in subfamily Arinae of the family Psittacidae, the African and New World parrots. Other colloquial names are black-crowned parrot, black-capped parrot, black-headed caique, and for subspecies P. m. pallidus, pallid caique. It is found in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Credit: Mavera Yordam.

 

FalsityAnd Reality Through Data

In the new age of informaton, some would say infotainment,
there is little clear difference between truth, and lies.
Both are deliverd with blatantly evasive advertising, 
so why bother to try to make the distinction?

Many of the lies will illicit truthful responses,
in which the public will be keen to take part,
including venting fits of pique and cynicism,
to work out the rules that make the lies work?

This search changes how we look for truth -
from individual ownership of it to comments
from the public moulded by digital corporations.
This is old news-look at the ownership of the press
and broacasting. What is new is how much less
the individual can own their truth when they it is
a contribution to another corporation's monoply. 

Corporate lies define success so well
we don't know, where or how to start
when we seek to extract some truth
that seems personal to us, from them.   

When Good Fences Make Good Neighbours

Finland has prepared for their Russian neighbours
renewing their agression at the border, by installing
1300 metres of 4 metres high fencing with barbed wire
in big coils along the top, movement sensors, microphones,
and cameras all along the length of the longest border
between the newest NATO country and the Russian Empire.

The Fins have installed one advance that was unxpected:
in this new ground level boundary - monitored animal gates
have been fitted along the fence for the many bears,
and furry quadropeds, who have no interest in passports,
or the nation state. So they may pass through boundaries
that they would otherwise not know how to navigate.

  

The Siren Call For Smaller Government

is an easy call for political leaders to make,
particularly the are leaders whose income
comes from scams that are supported
by lax laws, and broken regulations,
that the public find it hard to ask how to fix.

The leaders' wealth relies upon such informal deregulation.

But when citizens get interested in what size the state should be
and the list of public interests and regulations the state should support,
that are worth retaining to make the future sustainable.

Let the public pose the questions in open media,
and hold their leaders feet to the fire,
to find out what sort of clay those leaders feet are made of.  

The Terrorist President

The more I am led to youtube videos that report
on the latest battle Donold Trump has with the courts
the more I try to avoid them, less for the click bait
(which they are) and less and less because they are repeats
of repeats of the same narrative: hyper wealthy man,
incontinent on hos own wealth decided to by the presidency
because technically it is one thing that should not be up for sale. 

More because of how much Trump's view of the law
reminds me of the IRA's view of M. Thatcher:
you and your government can make us fail many times
but we have to be on target only once for your government
to be radically forced to change tack, whilst in office. 

That the bombs stopped and wiser quieter heads prevailed
was a tough gradual, slow, reform that I am glad of.
I see no such detant reducing Donald Trump's war on the law
or pursuit of infinite wealth at the expense of everyone around him.         

Respite Wanted

How does a wounded heart
escape further self wounding
from pride for turning inward
whilst it looks out, around it,
for where it shoiuld find respite? 

Watch This Vast Distance

A classic vintnage Iranian rug
as might ber available today
  if you live in the right country.  

  As Iran and the USA both threaten each other, and seek to avoid being the one to start open conflict in their statements, whilst each applies public pressure on the other. I can't help but think that the USA is going to look like the loser. However much both sides pressure their presumed allies to fall in line behind them in new trade arrangements it can only extend the present new world disorder, as it has evolved since the end of the cold war, which ended thirty five years ago with the end of the Soviet Union.

   Where any of this goes next is hard to say. But I am convinced that the USA is on a hiding to nothing as it makes its public statememts. Iran was part of an empire so many millenia before American independence it makes the USA seem like it is barely out of nappies and into short trousers by comparison. 

 Not that I admire the modern human rights record of Muslim Iran, which I see as in a continued stalled revolutionary state, like Communism in the USSR. In both if it was not for export it was not  going to going anywhere, not even internally, when the exports stopped.

All I will say is 'watch this space' as two empires with stalled values who are based in differnt continents confront each other at so great a distance with such different language that words from one leader to the other will take far longer to reach their target than any arms they have to lob.    

Wildlife Special

Masked Trogon, San Isidro, Eastern Equador.

 

Creatively Unwaged

I am glad for all who read these blogs
that I naver have to say to any of them
'like, subscribe, or follow me',
though the latter is a choice for whoever
feels led that way. Whoever reads these blogs,
no money rides on what they read. No money
is directed towards me, though the shareholders
of Alhpabet Inc who own all this, and much besides,
would get their fair share of profit from what I write.

Whether you are reader, or like me, a writer
- I give thanks to all the creatively unwaged,
as a close friend described the unemployed
who employers would not touch with a bargepole.

We are all looking for the words that describe
the world we rely on, as we live out our days and being.

America First?

I was made well aware when I was grwing up
that there were long histories of boom and bust
behind me. Whilst my parents lived in the hope,
against hope, that they, and by extension I, would see,
and recognise the next downward cycle long before it hit,
so we would reposition outselves to get the right side of it. 

It was not to be. I needed to live through several economic troughs
before recognising that I was born in an eonomic trough and I did not
recognise it until I'd seen many. I don't partucularly rue the folly
of the family I was raised by, but remembering them, as the times
prompt me, make me anxious and watchful. 

I now see present day America from my own particular vantage  point.
I have to ask 'When will America realise that the time is coming
faster than it realises, when as an empire it will it will reap the fruits 
of puttting the rest of the wolrd last, whilst putting itself first so often?'    

Some Humour From The Russian Press (2)

The jokes from the Russian press
that Steve Rosenberg shares with the world
on his youtbe channel are now part
of my daily my daily social media diet.

Here are three more of them....

Q: Which tongue [language] has the greatest potential
in the future?

A:The one you keep behind your teeth.

Q:What is the most effective way to spread panic
in the population?

A:For the authorities to declare that the situation 
is under control.

      

Q:Is it true that the country's reserves of optimism

are growing?

A:Yes.

Q:How come?

A:Because there is nowhere left to spend them.

 

 

Chasing Ghosts - The Art And Life Of Bill Traylor

   Who was the first African American ex-slave and ex share cropper who choose to draw what he  saw around him that the modern world knows of, thanks to his mentor Charles Shannon who collected his work to preserve it. With the help of Charales Shannon Bill Traylor held two exhibitions in America, the second in New York in 1942, before his death in 1949. Nearly thirty years later Traylor's time came and his primitive drawings on scraps of paper that nobody cared about at the time found their own audience and adherents as recollections of a vibrant black culture that it seems could only be fleetingly captured if it was going to be captured atall.

  Nowadays anyone looking at the images would be tempted to take the ghosts of shapes he commited to paper, and animate them. To give the images the imitation of life. I would suggest that there are better ways of representing the times and spaces he lived through.....     

'Our Whole Life Is A Secret.... '

All I have to offer to mark five years
of the renewed rule of the Taliban is this,
a thirty mins audio diary that the BBC
gave to the world in November 2024. 

It is one woman's observations of the effects
of the Taliban redoubling their efforts to remove
the presence of women from all of public life,
so that all the women can say to themselves
is 'Our whole life is a secret.....   '. 

And if for whatever technological reason
you cannot hear the report, you can believe
that their lives are now even more secret.....   

An Appeal For Us To Be More Humane

Anyone in the first world, the over-developed world,
who hears the phrase 'dog meat' or 'cat meat'
understands it be something to feed to their pet,
or the stuff of hyperbole in the adverts that pay for
their youtube videos that while away the hours.

But in poorer parts of the world where civilisation
is redder in tooth and claw, and the idea of 'the pet',
the-animal-as-companion has not been invented,
nature, including dogs and cats is fair game
for leaving to live wild, before rounding up and eating. 

Not everyone there sees this as right, The Soi Dog Foundation
does powerful work in Hanoi to end cats and dogs living on the streets,
before the meet a grzzly fate. I admire The Soi Dog Foundation for what they do.
I have given money to them too, and I ask that you will concider doing the same.

The New More-Is-Less

I used to be astonished at how little
the popular music stars of the day
I admired, but not like, contributed
to their latest hits, as I saw what sold a song
was the padding/star power packaging.

But lately I find myself coming up with
my own paucity. My offerings here are thinner
than I used to write. I seem to be unable to grasp
the direction of travel of the new media,
as it heads in the direction of the false trails
laid down by and for the newAI kletpocracy,
which  always exonerates the latest dear leader.

My stake in the new media game cannot count for much.
The best of my old blogs will find other lives though whoever
steals the ideas in them. Nowadays I am old enough to look back
and recognise that I was left behind before I could see it happening
in the first wave of de-industrialisation, in the 1970's,

I have been looking for the present through the past since those times..... .    .  

Does The Cap Still Fit?

The satirist will always be energised
to more humour at the expense of others
by the latest target in the news for their ire,
no matter that in the search for new targets
of their wit will vary widely in quality.

The commentator is less driven by targets,
but nontheless can waver in their search
for subjects fit for their sense of enquiry.
Where they strive to find an even tone
with which to sustain their comments.

Being less of humourist, but liking humour,
I hope that the comentator role fits me better,
and fits me for a long time to come.
   

Superlative Criminality

There is no criminal like an old criminal,
the expert who can bend the law further,
and further still, towards his own ends
where nobody can guess the end point,
beyond how he bends the law into shapes
that it will never be bent back into.

Financially, the lawyers will always do well
out of this sort of thing, the judges will suffer
much more - as they repeat themselves
in judgement after judgemnt, where each time
the client instructs his lawyers 'Disobey that.'.

Nobody know how the history books
will record all this new lawlessness,
how it will end, or what will replace it.

But whilst we all live through this age
of superlative crminality the little people
can only watch how wealth and power
makes the wealthy unmindful kleptomaniacs.

From Tech To Text

Recently there has been an uptake
in technology from the recent past
that has became passe with buyers
of what has replaced it, as tech firms
make needless changes to what they sell
to increase sales and beat their competitiors.

This consumer choice give me hope
that those who are taking up such old tech
might also rediscover the oldest tech of all
 - language and reading, so that old books
get new readers and editors who rediscover
and reformat old texts to make them fit for new worlds.

The Long And The Short Of A Smile

The time it takes for a smile to be shared
can be very long or so short that to comment
on the sharing takes longer to say than it's sharing.
It took Brian Wilson 37 years, and overcoming 
multiple nervous breakdowns, for him to get
his song suitr 'SMiLE', from it being written
and recorded in 1966/7 to it being edited, fit
for Brian to it perform it live. Such was the strife,
and the travails of the times that Brian lived through,
But part of the pay off was that the publishing rights
were much better for his patience with the waiting.

By contrast  it took the Danish humourist and musician
Victor Borge less time than his satires on classical music
to say to the world one of his most enduring epigrams
'A smile is the shortest distance between two people.'.

Out Of Time

How can I describe living with dyspraxia
in a way that makes sense of it, to anyone
who does not have the condition?

Well, having it does not mean that
the carrier does not know how to write.
or that they cannot read, or cannot listen.
But to those who live without the condition
it seems that the dyspraxic cannot learn
how to follow cues at the same speed,
and with the same confidence, they have.

And after a certain age, a diagnosis
of the condition becomes impossible,
unless in getting the pronouncement
the experts can award themselves 
some social and material advantage. 

The length of time it takes for the dypraxic
to appreciate how they react and understand
is slower than other people expect is painful.
But, when they recognise the condition,
better late than never, life will get better.

But too late for there to be any real recovery.

The British Commonwealth And Anti-Homosexual Law

The British Commonwealth was first formed in 1931,
after a 1926 conference that passed the second Balfour declaration.
The first such declaration having been made in 1917.
In 1926, including Britain, The Commonwealth
was defined as being six or seven countries.
The Irish Free State left it in 1949, never to return.

Nowadays the number of commonwealth coutries
and former commonwealth countries is 57, combined.

Of those 24 have rescinded or updated the laws
that were written in the days of empire, to make consent
the basis of all modern law about same sex sexual activity.

The 24 are Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, India, Lesotho, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Rwanda, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago (subject to appeals) and the United Kingdom.

The other 33 British Commonwealth countries retain homophobic laws that originated from the days of Empire. Their disinterest extends to obscuring the difference between homophobic and non-homophobic law, and in obscuring the nature of the case law rhat follows. So it is hard to distinguish homphobic case law and non-homophobic case law, and the decisions that follow from it. 

They are Antagua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Cameroon, Eswatini, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kirfibati, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanatu, and Zambia.

The wave of recent recinding of colonial era anti-gay law started with the Nauru, Belise, and the Secchelles in 2016. Trinadad and India followed in 2018. Next Botswana overturned colonial era anti-gay laws in 2019. In 2022 St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Singapore overturned their colonial era anti-gay laws. In 2023 Mauritious overturned some of its anti-gay laws. The present focus on overturning colonial era anti-gay laws is focused on an appeal held in Britsh courts over colonial 'anti-sodomy laws' in Trinidad and Tobago. For much more about the advance in civil liberties please left click here.

It is odd how new American money is buying into 500 year old British colonial law. Many Commonwealth countries are now little more than tax havens to the people who don't live there. This might explain how  American homophobes with money are attracted to this now weak institution. If that is the draw, how do we dismantle that attraction?   

'The Burdened' - Kithchen Sink Drama Lives! A Film Review

It is rare to see a film set in Yemen, a country that is new to film making. It is rarer still in 2026 to see a kitchen sink drama. 'The Burdened' (2023) is both of these things, and more besides. It was co-scripted and directed by Amr Gamal, and was his second film and only the second film to be made in Yemen. I watched without doing any prior reading about the film, or the country that I expected it be set in. That the film script, co-written by writer Amr Gamal, was rooted in the theatre was obvious from the first scene onward. 

The film focused on one family, a mother, father, and three chidren all well under ten years old, living a hand to mouth life in the city port of Aden, which as I read after was until 1967 British, and like many cast offs of the British Empire was left to fend for itself in a very uncertain post empire world. In the last decade or more uncertainty turned to civil war. The effects of the war were there to be seen in the footage of the streets of Aden, where there was very little rubble but the place looked like mny bombs had hit it, and there was not the money to fully repair buildings. The script was terrific and made a virtue of its theare roots and minimal resources to craft a tight story where desperation fought decency, and wanting to do what was approved involved conflict. 

I lost count of the number of times when two characters met one would say to the other 'As-salamu alaykum', 'Peace be upon you' where the reply was 'Wa alaykum as-salam', 'And upon you be peace'. Those two phrases were the most used words used in the 91 minutes of the film, to the point where I wondered if there was some private intonation of the two rsponces in the film where, different intonations conveyed more private meanngs between the women who used both phrases. But the fact that the women where the majority of the characters and greeted each other so often with those two phrases pushed the film far further than I would have expected into it passing the Bechdel Test. The indications of the taboo with women's dress was also made clearer with, depending on the company, the women wore veils that were detatchable in an instant.

The core of the film was a family trying to get by an economy where the government does not pay its own workers the wages they are due for months after the wages were due. And yes, just as talk of illegal abortion was the sure fire way to spice up a BBC kitchen sink drama in the plays it broadcast in black and white in the 1960s, so the same rule of drama follows here. The real delight was in seeing not a second of the camera framing or the script wasted, as the characters explore disaster after disaster narrowly avoided. 

The film ends on an uncertain note of hope.

How Is Your Appetite For Life?

I can't mind appetite suppressants
taking up the air time that they take,
as they are talked up in the media.
I take control of what I eat,
so I have less need of them,
whether they are pills or injections.

I would like to be modest in how I live,
so I ask, is there a pill that will help me
reduce my appetite for living? Something
that as it helps me ask less of other people
will give those people I no longer ask for
more time that they can be with the truly needy?

The Unfinished Book

It is only when we have so few friends
that is clear that we have forgotten
how to  consolidate new acquantances
that a book that speaks about friendship
becomes a book we don't want to finish,
becuase to read all of the book feels
like reaching the end the friendship.

One such book is 'When The Cranes Fly South',
by Swedish first time author Lise Ridzen,
in which an elderly man's life is slowly dismantled
by time and circumstance, but the writing
about the dismantling is so detailed and tender
that even his fears seem like the old friends
he once relied upon and is loathe to part with.

I still have not finished the book:
I am not sure I want to, like life
I don't know that I want to know
what was on order to come after. 
  

The World Is Full Of Unoriginal Thought

There is an awful lot of bad poetry
bad painting, and bad photography
in the world. By all means add to it,
where that is the limit of the discipline
of the talent in your hand and in your eye.

I can testify to the thrill of taking photos
that on viewing them after, turned out less like
what I thought was in the viewfinder at the time.
There deleting the images was the obvious solution.

By all means put the bad art on your own walls,
if you are at ease with it, then let it be your style.

Put it online for free if you want to to, I have,
but please don't think it has any commercial life.
The market for AI 'paintings' already owns that market,
just like the commercial American AI songwriting,
replete with synthetic performance, AI 'painting' is a 'craft'
that is set to engulf and outrun it's once human counterpart. 

The Future Is Alive And Well

Even as it is in many fragments
where what remains is being retrieved
along with the dead who are to be buried.
The components are being reasembled
to be pieced back together from the rubble of Gaza.

Please left click here to listen to, download and share
a thirty minute audio documentary on how that future is being recovered.

Picture Set Of The Month - August - Stills From Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Nostalgia'

Which I saw recently at a 4k screening/rerelease of it, knowing nothing about the film
and little about the director, before I sat down in my cinema seat to watch it.   

Yes, there is a plot to the film, but it is, as The Guardian describes the film,
'a cine-poem'. 

The scene depicted above, where a mad preacher sets himself on fire
whilst preaching on libery was worth the price of entry on its own.  

 

The film also had what seemed at first viewing like a false ending, the scene above
which followed the preacher setting himself on fire. 

The image above was the closing scene in which any cynic/critic 
would have said was one of the scenes in which 'nothing happens',
repeatedly, but the image grows in richness with every second
that the viewer is given that, and just that, to focus on.    

Memorialising Absence

AI slop is not new. Eons before the utopian fantasy images
symbolising human omnicience over nature, human destruction, and despair
via images of luxury multiplied online, to counter the darker side
of the wars between humans, and the human battle against the world
with vuluminous empty fantasies that are meant to put people to sleep,
town planners fought older wars against nature, with brick and mortar.

Where they would convert fertile land, fell forests, pave over paradise itself
and name the road along which they built new, more comfortable, houses 
after the land and nature they had recently paved amd tarmaced over,
under which were sewers and increasingly complex electronic wiring,
all named after the memory of what they had recently erased through burial.

The planners knew  that human memories quickly fade,
even as names of what the memories were of would remain
thus Orchard Road, Birch Tree Drive, Cyprus Avenue,  etc
effectively memorialise the absence of living memory.
and the permanence of amnesia through memory.  

The Imitation Of Choice

It is clear enough to those with ears and time to listen
that however well commentors explain modern politics,
in its many shades of opinion, the parties we choose,
or we reject, present themselves as there to help us 
be more generous to those we see as more deserving,
whilst playing accountants tricks with the money and choice
that they control, thebetter to disguise how they divide us.

Our task as consumers of theses presentations
is to unpick the sophistry and accountant's tricks
that the parties work so hard so hard to disguise
as they continue to present their imitations of choice.    

Moon Of The Month - July -The Buck Moon

So called because many of the names we accept for our moons
were given to us by Native American Tribes. They named this moon
after the time of year that the male deer grow new antlers.

Look out for the 12th of August, when depending on where you live,
you may experience a partial or total eclypse of the sun by the moon.   

 

A Friendly Ghost Writes

I am one of many ghosts who are here
-trust me when I say 'none of us is real'.
We are all figments of selves that were
once lived in real time, in three dimensions.

But we are now left to reflect on pasts
where reflections are all that there is left
in a fading infinitely regressse pattern.

Join us when you are happy to restrict yourself
to a life in the past sense, or simply read us
to avoid falling prey to advertising instead,
in the meanwhile do all you can to avoid reports
from figments from the circuits of  computers
that were never existed in three dimensions.

Nature Special: Pygmy Three Toed Sloth

The Pygmy Three Toed Sloth is one of the rarest mammals on the Earth and it lives only on the Island Escudo de Veraguas, a tiny island off Panama. Its survival is closely tied to mangrove forests where it feeds, hides, and moves slowly through the trees to save energy. One rare fact is that algae can grow on its fur, giving it a greenish tint  that helps it blend into the leaves. This island sloth is Critically Endangered, mainly  because its tiny habitat isso limited and vulnerable. Credit: Wild Wonders.

 

The Ice Cream Sales Man Sees Everything This Way

When the BBC wanted rid
of it's most popular drama series
they first sabotged the in-house
writing and production team
that had held the show together
for most of two decades.

Then they scheduled the show
against the most popular programme
put on by the opposition.
Insiders dubbed this campaign
'selling ice cream in winter'.

The man presently in the Whitehouse 
who schedules all government policy
has some how learned about this
episode of BBC bad programming history,
even as he is using up more than enough
of his legal and political capital sueing the BBC. 

His misanthropy towards his government's expertise
has reached as far as choosing rank amateurs
to run powerful Gov't departments, helping them
to make rookie mistakes he is proud they are making.

This is not just selling ice cream in winter,
where, if he want to, then he could read how unpopular he is,
this is making ice cream in winter the contrarian policy
America is know for across the world, what is left of it.

The Moment Of Recognition

I notice afresh the new censorship,
of coded images of human sexuality
that have always existed in real life
through major barriers being erected
where in the online life that was once
the liberal, prermissive, new frontier
the old media is repeating itgself
and reclaiming old majoratist claims
to be the only life that should exist.

I don't mind this-the past is always witrh us.
But it reminds of the moment of recognition
in the film 'The Stepford Wives' where the wife
who was new to the perfect picket fence life
in the suburb recognises the uniform  falseness
in her new friends' lives after one of them breaks down,
and admits how all of them are married to plastic surgeons
for whom it is integral to their married life that as wives
they have to be perfect in their outward appearance at all times.

That the demand for such a continuous outward state of perfection
cannot be sustained without a lot of self deception should be obvious.   

Doom Loops For The Unwary

The internet is made of doom loops
that are ready to entertain the unwary,
and, before they recognise it, trap them.

The most powerful doom loops are the oldest,
the unscientific theories that pre-date the invention
of the internet by the longest time, such as
'the science of genetic superiority', in which
white males whose families were enriched,
generation on generation, through the sales
of instruments of torture that made the misery
of slavery seem normal, projectedv an image
of themselves for other people to take at face value
that should be examined critically, and taken apart,
before the famkily are treated like the old tempter that they were. 

Alas human vanity laps up this sort of material
and much more besides, I'd say the more was worse,
and perhaps it is, for how such ideas rely on far lower levels
of credulity for their advocates to present themselves as credible. 

Decide for yourself what to be most wary of. And decide again.....    

Some Humour From The Russian Popular Press

One of my more sobering daily habits
is to listen to the reports from the BBC
Russian correspondent of Steve Rosenberg.

in his short videos he reviews the Russian press,
many of which are broadsheet newspapers.
and neutrally notes how near or far the line
of argument in the newspapers might be
some new Kremlin line of argument, which varies.

He always says at the start of each short film
the date of the press that he is quoting from,
lest anyone be in any doubt about such matters.  

At the end of every episode he shares the best jokes
in the press about how the economy, and life,
are not working as they were projected to....

Examples as follows......

'Not many people know this
but that little pocket in your jeans
is for your salary.'

'On a long distance train the conductor asks
'Are there any foriegners on the train',
the chorus goes up 'No'....
The conductor calls to fellow staff Nina
'Turn the air conditioning off,
just our people are on board the train'.

''Have you been anywhere this?
'Yes, in shock''.

In the Polyclinic:
'Instead of your urine sample
you have brought apple juice.'
'Goodness. What have I given
my son to take to school.....  '

'The best way to buy a small business
is to buy a large business and have patience....  '   

   

Guantanamo Bay

Is not just still open, but fifteen men are captive there,
caught in the legal limbo that the US has set for them
one of them have been captive for nearly twenty five years.

The first category: Approved for release

Muieen Abd al-Sattar

Guled Hassan Dourad

Ishmael Ali Bakushmael

The second catgory: Not charged, not cleared

Abu Zubaydah (24 years in prison)

Abu Faraj al-Libi

Mohamed Rahim

The third catgory: Charged or Convicted in Military Commission

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Ramzi bin al-Shibh

Walid bin Attash

Mustapha al-Hawsawi

Amar al-Baluchi

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

Riduan Isamuddin 

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul

Abd al-hadi al-Iraqi

To comprehend how Guantamo Bay started,
and why it is still open, please left click here
to hear the first part of a three part podcast.   

From Democratic To Imperial Measure

One of many books that helped me mature
in the 1980s was 'Money, Sex, and Power',
by Richard Foster, a book about their opposites:
the choices that come from managing (relative) poverty,
chastity, and obedience to the powers that be,
which together give society and the individual
the widest choice for greatest nunber of people. 

For a long while it made a lot of sense to me.

Forty years on from what taught me more
how to make my way through the world,
I have seen this sage advice turned inside out.

Politics has gone from democratic to imperial,
the men who have the most have to have more
-to the point where no-one is allowed to count it.
Power is held more absolutely, money is controlled
by fewer and fewer corporations, the lies that sell sex
make it not worth taking at anything like face value. 

For those with the most, whatever they have
whether money, sex or power, enough is never enough.
Least of all when they combine into one big addiction
fueled by denial, broadcast across th4e world
as if such a depth of vice was actually a virtue.

The Biggest Rogue Is The One We Are Last To Recognise

The world is full of leaders
who when their enemies fail
blame the enemies for their failure,
as if the leader has either done nothing,
or had done nothing to cause the downfall
of another. Their leadership was omniscient
-proof of how perfect they always were. 

Such partisan presentations of leadership
and power are now so routine and protected
from all media enquiry about what makes
the leadership tick, they make being a sceptic
a necessary sign for showing intelligence.

There the allies of the surviving enemies
prove stronger when they act together,
in league with each other, against the leader
who cannot recognise how rogue he's become.   

Change And Choice With Jeanette Winterson

'Don't you ever think of going back?' Silly question.
There are threads that help you find your way back,
and there are threads that intend to bring you back.

Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away.
I'm always thinking of going back.
When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt.
Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean,
but it's a poor exchange for losing your self.

People do go back, but they don't survive,
because two realities are claiming them
at the same time. Such things are too much. 

You can salt your heart, or kill your heart,
or you can choose between two realities.
There is much pain here.

Some people think you can have your cake and eat it.
The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left.
Going back after a long time will make you mad,
because the people you left behind do not like
to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did,
accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

Keeping House Of Commons Rules

One of the motives for owning property
for people who rent and find they dislike it,
is what they dislike is not choosing who rents
the space alongside them. They think....
'When I buy where I live then I will keep
my neighbours at a distance that suits me.',
as if money by itself could cover for a will
that lacks the power to change how we live.
But willpower gets a person only so far
in choosing who they keep a distance from
and the distance at which to keep them.

Nowadays I find the people I need to keep
my distance from, and set it firm, are family.
I don't own property like they do, I knew how much 
they were disappointed with how they made me,
where all that was left was cover up how it happened.

That distance I now keep from my family
is much farther than the physical distance
between the front benches in House of Commons
-two swords distance. 

The distance I now keep from family
is more like distance between the values
each side of The House of Commons keeps
-universes, multiverses, farther apart.   

Modern Living

is all style and no life, an art form
that is accessorised by its makers
-who change the name of the product 
to sell it, before the public fully grasp
what the change is about, the manufacrtured life,
and change the names again to stay ahead
of their manufactrured competitors...

Caught In The Echo

Infinite scroll is nothing new,
though presently Youtube
are its greatest champions.

Commercial television first got there
sixty years ago. I remember my dad
being so impressed by the schedules
that he refused to let the set turned off,
or even acccept a change of channel.
Whatever was on when he was home
was right by him, even the adverts.

He screened us and reality out of his life
in the house, until he could get to the pub.
There his chosen family were the people he drank with.

I don't know how I survived those times,
particularly when the entertainment
was some alpha male being so alpha,
that nothing else around him mattered.

That was when the content of the screen
taught me what 'rhetorical' meant. Part of me
still feels caught in the echo of such self importance.   

Nature Special: The Marvelous Spatuletail

The Marvelous Spatuletail (Loddigesia mirabilis) is an endangered hummingbird endemic to northern Peru. It is famous for the male's spectacular tail feathers, featuring two long, wire-like feathers with large, iridescent "spatules", (discs) at the end. They are used in elaborate courtship displays. Males have a blue crown, turquoise throat, and a black stripe down their white chest, while females are less colourful. And have shorter tails with smaller spatules. They inhabit cloud forest edges and scrublands, feeding on nectar from specific flowers, and are a major draw for birdwatchers, with conservation efforts focused on protecting their habitat. Photograph taken by Carlos Altamirano.