Back-Pedalling

Return to the Sky

I’m back-pedalling to the place

Where once we used to be,

When you were me and we were us

And I was you and me

We lived and loved by cheek and gall

No question of defeat

Our enemies we held in thrall 

Our righteousness was sweet 

What happened to those fearless hearts 

That beat a different drum?

That told the world to stand aside

And bid its saviours come?

We’re here, my dear, despite ourselves

Our challenges outstripped

Their eager ends belied the means  

Our pipe-dreams have been pipped

We’ve landed on a different shore

Of mellowing desire

Where comfort claims our aches and pains

And soothes our cooling fire

So here we’ll stay and let this play

Unravel to its end

We’ll show them how to take a bow

Together now, my friend.

IG

Painting the Daytime Black

Black Widow

Dragon Run

DES GAGES D’AMOUR

Tu m’as donné une bague d’or

Une bague d’or pour mon nez 

Tu m’as donné un bracelet d’argent

Menotte pour mon poignet 

Tu m’as donné un rang de perles

Un nœud coulant pour mon cou 

Tu m’as donné ton nom de famille

Et tu m’as retiré mon tout

Si je te rends ton nom de famille

La bague, et les autres bijoux

Si je te rends le rang de perles

Et mets mon corps à nu …

Tu me rendras mes choses précieuses ?

Ma vie, mon esprit perdu ?

Si tu rends à moi, moi-même

Je rendrai à toi, mon tout.

IG

LOVE TOKENS

You gave to me a ring of gold

A ring of gold for my nose,

You gave me a bracelet of silver

A shackle for my wrist

You gave to me a string of pearls

A noose around my neck,

You gave to me your family name

And took away my all

If I give you back your name

The ring, and other jewels,

If I give you back the pearls

And strip my body naked …

Will you return my precious things?

My life, my spirit lost? 

Give me back myself

And I’ll give to you my all.

IG

Novel Therapies

A few words of explanation ...

There has been a lot criticism levelled at the proposals of our great leader President Trump today to treat COVID-19 patients with injections of antiseptics, internal radiation and heat treatments.  Unfortunately the (fake) media are clearly unable to follow the Presidents' nimble leaps of creative thought, so here is a little insight into that unique train of consciousness:

Antiseptics - disinfectant - democrats - eat 'em up - consume them - inject 'em - get rid of 'em - problem solved!

Radiation - light - enlightenment - bad thing - keep it covered - consume - eat it up - suck it up - sun lamp - I spend plenty of time under the sun lamp and what's good for me must be good for the nation - crisp it up a little - problem solved!

Heat treatment - easy - ovens we all know where that goes - fix the soap supply - need that for the hand washing - problem solved!

Hand washing - IPA kills the virus in one second - Wow! - good stuff - inject IPA - drink IPA - problem solved!

Editorial Note

IPA in the hand washing context refers to Isopropyl Alcohol, an industrial solvent that is used in antiseptics, disinfectants and detergents, but is toxic if consumed.

IPA in the beer context refers to India Pale Ale, originally brewed by Hodgson's Bow brewery near East India Dock London as a beer that would be stable enough to survive the sea passage to India.  Even now almost 200 years later this libation is an effective solvent for Trump induced stress.

Déjà flu

Photos from 1918

The photos below are claimed to be taken during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, they look authentic but of course you can never be absolutely sure with material from the Internet ...
Just click on any photo to enlarge.

HOLD THAT (DEAD)LINE

Cartoon by Mick Stevens

After 40-odd years in journalism (some of them damned odd), I respect deadlines.

It's not that I grudgingly obey them, or that I've had to coach myself to accept them. I need them. I cling to them. They are the dangling carrot that propels my life forward.

Obviously, deadlines determine when I go see a movie (remember going to the movies?) in order to get my review in the paper. Sometimes, they influence which movie I see, depending on which showtimes are more favorable to making my deadline. My entire week is orchestrated around seeing a movie on Friday, writing my review on Saturday, and sending the finished piece to my editor by Sunday afternoon — all to make my Monday morning deadline.

The entire book-publishing industry also runs on deadlines. They exist for turning in that first draft, for each new revision, for providing front and back matter, author photos, Q&A guidelines, PR material — everything depends on each successive deadline being met in a timely manner. Miss one, and the entire infrastructure stutters to a halt.

The habit has spread to every other part of my life. I pay bills according to which due date is looming next, and plan meals around which item in the fridge is most likely to rot if ignored much longer. I'm inspired to clean house when I know visitors are coming, and dress according to whatever events are going to take me out into the public eye.

But now all that's changed. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed yet another casualty: the deadline.

Five weeks into lockdown, and my schedule is completely out the window. Movie theaters are closed and I'm taking my yoga classes on Zoom, so I'm liberated from the task of having to actually go out in public. I don't drive any more, so I'm not even shopping; kind-hearted friends are picking up my groceries and bringing them to me. Some are intrepid enough to come in the house; others do a porch drop. Most days, the only one I interact with is my cat.

Did I say "liberated?" I'm in free fall. Without deadlines, where's my motivation?

The decline was gradual. First, I stopped strapping on what I call my ID bracelets every morning, the ones with my book titles spelled out in tiny silver alphabet-block beads. I never used to appear in public without them, but now . . .

Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss Havisham

Then, I stopped washing my hair every single morning, a big adjustment for someone as psycho about her hair as me. Maybe once or twice a week, if it doesn't look too hideous, I dare to let it go. Who's going to see me?

Some routines are still inviolate, in the absence of actual deadlines. I have to get dinner on the table by 7 pm in time for Jeopardy, and cleared away at least by 8:30 to have time to read before bed. Monday night is still Pizza Night, without fail — but the rest of the week, all the days tend to run together.

I don't go out, so the clothes I wear in public (you know, the ones that are still intact) stay in the closet, while my comfort outfits (sweatshirts, jeans, pom-pom slippers) get worn all day. I still wash my clothes every Saturday — even though the loads are smaller — but I'm down to washing my sheets only every other week.

I used to make jokes about Miss Havisham — until she popped up in my mirror.

Meanwhile, my living space is showing signs of — let's call it benign neglect. If those discarded slippers are littering the stairs all day, or a cobweb the size of a volleyball net is hanging from the hallway ceiling, who's going to know?

I'm starting to feel like that tree that falls in the forest. Am I still a sloth if there's no one to see me?

Why are flowers so excessively beautiful? [Photographic evidence provided.]

Almost like a bullseye 

From a Darwinian point-of-view, it seems to me that flowers are way over designed — an unconscionable excessive use of beauty.

For Darwinians: Flowers just need to attract bees for pollinating their species, for reproduction.  All that is required to get the help of the bees is a simple design like a round target [like a bullseye], emitting a bee attracting odor, and some nectar at the center of the target.  What’s with the excessive beauty?

Do bees see and desire beauty?

Thoughts about “What The Bee Sees”

CLICK here to open.

Ample photographic evidence provided: Roses, dallias, and county fair award winners

CLICK here to open online gallery.

Can you find the bee?

Flowers can’t see each other’s beauty, so there’s none of that going on.  They’re not like humans, all twitterpated [Bambi, 1942], consuming wine and chasing each other around [Fantasia, 1940]. At the time, who thought Disney was being so erotic?

Speaking of erotic and flowers, for a good time Google “Georgia O’Keeffe Flowers”.

So if it’s not reasonable to assert that bees are motivated by beauty and that’s why flowers are so beautiful, then that leaves the Flower Anthropic Principle: Flowers are beautiful for people. [I think Georgia O’Keeffe understood some of that.] I know, I know, a Flower Anthropic Principle puts humans at the center of everything again, but what’s the alternative? The flowers are doing it for God? Bees, humans, or God — those are our choices. You pick one.

Maybe flowers somehow know that if they’re beautiful then humans will plant them in human prepared earth, from pots to acres, watered and fed, in numbers from singular to millions.  Seems Darwinian to me. ;--)

Excessive flower beauty remains a mystery.

Cheers, Kurt

Random award winning flowers at the San Diego County Fair.

Make every day count

DEMAIN

J’adore cette vie ;  je veux rester

Juste ici, juste près

De toi, mon cher, mon bon ami

Ne pars pas … 

Aujourd’hui

Reste-là un autre jour

Dans ces bras d’aveugle amour

Bien installé dans mon nid

Ne pars pas … 

Aujourd’hui

Sourde à l’heure, sourde au monde

Je connais une paix profonde 

Reste avec moi, reste ici

Ne pars pas … 

Aujourd’hui.

or, in English -

TOMORROW

I love this life, I want to stay

Just here, right near

To you, my dear

My love, my life, my special friend

Don’t leave …  today

I’d like to rest here one more day

Within these arms 

Of blind love

Safe ensconced within my nest

Don’t leave …  today

Deaf to the hour, deaf to the world

I know a peace

So sweet profound

Please stay with me, my dear, right here

Don’t leave …  today.

Quarantined Art

John sent me this - just had to post it ...
Thanks John!

Mobile Wife

For a really in depth account of life as an expatriate wife in the oil industry read Shena Matchett’s book Mobile Wife. Shena also lived at the same complex in Sumatra Indonesia in the mid 80’s as well as many other locations. She co wrote the PT Arun bulletin with Laura May. Book is available from Amazon.

Diary From Richmond UK

Have not left the premises all week. It now appears that the lock down may not be long enough to complete all of the projects that we've identified.
Since I posted on last Saturday, weather was good Sunday lousy Monday and good for the rest of the week. You may recall that I had a birthday last Saturday so I finished of the good dregs on Sunday and have been surviving on Australian plonk for the rest of the week.
We don't have a garage but have a Chalet (large hut) at the bottom of the garden. This has been our dumping ground for stuff from childhood school notes through University to travels abroad, childrens books and letters etc. etc. I also managed to assemble my childhood train set there for the benefit of our grandchildren. Anyway we decided it was time for a clearing. It's been a real trip down memory lane. Part of this effort involves digitizing my old slides and building some more compact storage system to keep them in when I have finished. I should throw then out but can't just yet. It's much the same story with the train set. I'm building a box for that also.
Our deliveries from grocer Sainsbury's still seem to be working. We also had one from Waitrose but I fear that will be the last. Getting a delivery from Waitrose being considerably more difficult than winning the lottery.
We are well and I hope you all are also.
All the Best,
John

Sounds of Spring

Heard our first Hoopoes today - the first Cuckoos can surely not be far behind.

P.S.  Yes, the first cuckoo came three days later!

Mapping the Past

When we lived there Mottingham was a forgotten finger of Kent poking into the boundaries of London, now several local government reorganisations later, it and much more of Kent has been absorbed into Greater London.  A dairy farm abutted the length of our garden with fields sloping down to the little river Quaggy and the Sidcup Road (A20) just beyond.
Most of the water courses in that part of Kent had been confined to tunnels and concrete culverts during the first half of the 20th century, especially just after WWII when the big housing estates were built for those displaced during the Blitz.
The Quaggy emerged from a tunnel at the bottom of our lane, King John Walk, and then ran free between banks burrowed by water voles and covered with bushes where I once saw a kingfisher flashing past.  We waded the stream catching sticklebacks in our jam jars and bravely searching out the rivers destination.  After a mile or so the river crossed under the A20 and was constrained by concrete again.  We fearlessly pushed on through Lee towards Lewisham where the culvert was roofed over with concrete again and iron gratings fitted to exclude inquisitive little boys.

I have since discovered that our part of the stream is in fact know as the "Little Quaggy" (No.7 on the sketch above) and had we been able (and brave enough) to explore further we would have emerged into the Thames opposite the Isle of Dogs.

An Internet posting of 2015 describes my little bit of the Quaggy at that time as:
"... close to how the stream would probably have looked like prior to suburbanisation – a pasture covered with buttercups. It is not some semi-rural idyll though, just a narrow strip of green used by a riding school, with heavy goods vehicles from the Channel Ports thundering past, 20 metres away, towards inner London and the Blackwall Tunnel – very close by there are high average nitrogen dioxide pollution and occasional high levels of particulates – it is not a place to linger."
However it's not all bad news.  Through the heroic efforts of local conservationists a flood relief scheme for Lewisham that would have encased even more of the Quaggy in concrete was successfully replaced in 2003 by an enlightened proposal that actually opened up the river again.  The river was restored to a more natural condition in Sutcliffe Park and wet lands created to absorb any flood waters.  The scheme has been a major success creating new leisure amenities and wildlife habitat, as well as preventing flooding, all at a lower cost that the original plan.
For a more complete history of the Quaggy see In Search of the Little Quaggy and The Quaggy and its Tributaries.  I'm especially grateful to Ken White for his sketch map of the watercourses which has recreated so vividly in my mind the landscape of my childhood 65 years ago, the little hills and valleys that we traversed on foot or bicycle, the fields where we played, the streams where we fished and the ponds where we searched for frog spawn.

I WAKE UP STREAMING

It’s official — I’m superfluous!

I’ve been a film critic since dinosaurs roamed the earth. But now the theaters are shuttered (temporarily, we hope), so nobody needs to know my opinion of a movie they can stream from the privacy of their own couch. It’s not like they have to pay to get in!

So my newspaper column is suspended until further notice, and my Rotten Tomatoes page will not be updated for awhile. If we, as a town/state/country/ planet ever achieve normalcy again, I expect to be back on the job, but who knows how long that will take?

In the meantime, I encourage housebound film fans to boldly go into the archives of the  product-delivery service of your choice — Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, You Tube, Viewmaster, whatever — and explore titles from over a century of vibrant cinema.

Silent films, for instance, are astonishingly creative!  Check out anything from about the turn of the last century through the 1920s, back when the pictures were first learning to move, and they were making it all up as they went along. You’ll be amazed at their ingenuity!

Then there are Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Film Noir, MGM musicals, French New Wave, Hitchcock, Fellini, the Marx Brothers; they’re all out there, just waiting to be discovered.

Be adventurous! If something doesn’t grab you in the first 20 minutes, dial up something else. There won’t be a quiz, and there isn’t anywhere else you have to be.

Me, I’ve been catching up on movies I missed the first time around. The other night it was The Greatest Showman, an utterly berserk fantasia on the imagined life if P. T. Barnum, staged as a Hollywood musical. Famed 19th Century opera diva Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) sings a power ballad. Keala Settle as at the Bearded Lady leads a chorus of Barnum’s circus sideshow attractions in an empowering Millenial-style anthem.

But, hey, in the midst of it all, there’s Hugh Jackman in the top hat and ringmaster’s outfit, singing and dancing up a storm. I’m home alone — I have to have some fun!

Sure, I’d much rather be watching movies as God intended, on a great big theater screen. And I fervently hope all this enforced home viewing doesn’t signal the end of the neighborhood movie house, somewhere down the road, as viewers get even more accustomed to not interacting with each other in public.

Still, there’s something to be said for watching a move with a cat on your lap — as long as she doesn’t mind the occasional popcorn kernel bouncing off her head.

Small victories in the long haul

Sometimes it seems as if life has shrunk to just the coronavirus battle, it dominates the media and, I must admit, my thinking.  It's not that we are battling the infection (thankfully), but the struggle to avoid contagion and stay healthy, fit and sane dominates our lives.

A couple of days ago three policemen (who weren't adequately socially distanced) passed our door on rue du Rouvis, it seemed like an inappropriate use of resources to me, but probably they just wanted to patrol a low risk area for a change.
Now the Dentelles are officially off limits to all so we have been forced to adopt avoidance tactics.  Now we only hike the more remote footpaths that are too narrow for vehicles, or three policemen.  No, no, just a joke officer, of course we're obeying all the rules!

Dismayed by the ever-mounting numbers of cases I have decided that shopping in the aisles of Carrefour is just too risky so I have signed up for the "Carrefour Drive" service - you order on the Internet, they assemble the order and you pick it up by car at the back of the shop.  Sounds good but not so easy to do!  In hindsight it is obvious now that when I attempted to sign up on Tuesday their site, and maybe the local Internet, was overloaded to breaking point, nothing worked, no pickup slots available for a month and online payment systems broken.  However after some hours of frustration (and I suspect some serious IT help at Carrefour) things got much better and we are now all set for pickup this afternoon.  So, well done Carrefour, note I also checked out Auchan and Super-U whose sites were much worse!

I've also had a first "tele consultation" with my rheumatologist, it didn't actually work on my Mac, although it does seem to work on my mobile, still we didn't really need the "tele" bit as phone & email did the job.  I think it will be a while though before the French abandon paper prescriptions.

In a dream last night I attended 'World Covid Day' sometime in the future to remember the one million people who had not made it through the pandemic, happily we had.

Uncle Arthur, ferrets and a gypsy girl

My Aunt Mabel and Uncle Arthur lived in a tied cottage on Tregantle farm near Torpoint Cornwall. Aunt Mabel, as I always called her, was my mother’s cousin so not really my aunt and of course Arthur Lobb, her husband, could hardly be called a relation at all, yet he remains one of the dearest and gentlest of men that I have known. My mother thought a great deal of him and now, when I look back, I wonder if there was a little more than just affection between them, whether at one time they suppressed their love for one another, as many did in those days because of circumstances and loyalty to others.

In this photograph of my mother’s wedding, Arthur stands behind her tall and handsome. I wonder what he is thinking? I have no idea if Arthur and Mabel were married then or still courting; she sits third from the left sporting a wonderful hat and a huge bouquet of flowers. She was more like a sister to my mother and sweetly petite.

My father had met my mother in Devonport during the First World War when he was billeted there before he went to France and fought in the Somme and Passchendaele. They corresponded throughout the war, as much as they were allowed to in those times. There is so much in this photograph for me, so much left unsaid, so much forever a mystery.

  

I am sure that my mother and father were perfectly happy; they like many of that generation stuck together through thick and thin; there was certainly plenty of that in their life. Certainly they were loyal to each other to the very end and after my father died my mother’s life seemed to lose all its sparkle as if a light had gone out of it.

Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mabel never had any children. I sensed that he, himself would have loved children of his own, because he showed so much love for myself and my brothers and sister.

He had the typical rolling gait of a countryman. I realise now, how little I know about him, other than that he was gentle, kind, had a wonderful sense of humour; that he loved golf and during the time that he was a greenkeeper at Crafthole Golf Club he won many cups; I still have one now that I treasure. What I do  know of him though is infinitely more important than the unknown; that he filled me with happiness whenever I was with him; that I owe so very much to him; that he touched my life in no small way.

I can still picture him walking up the lane towards the beach, an old black kettle hung on a stick over his shoulder. I would slip my arm through his, as we made our way, as a family to the beach.

Often outside the cottage in the lane he would fetch an old tin and we would play cricket, his heavy studded boots skidding as he ran to fetch the ball. Sometimes the ball went over the tall hedge and disturbed the chickens laying their eggs in the field. We knew exactly where each nest was and were able to collect the eggs sometimes easing a broody old hen off her clutch to much protesting. On a Sunday we would go with him and call in on Bill Sparks, who worked in Devonport Dockyard, and go hunting for rabbits, with Bill’s ferrets but first we would sit in the kitchen by the stove with Bill’s mother and have a cup of tea, a dark cosy place.

One day a gypsy family with horse and wagon arrived on the field behind Bill’s cottage and I was made aware of a dark beautiful girl of my own age. We must have made conversation of some sort and walked together, although I have no memory of what we may have said to each other; probably very little for we were both shy.  She waited for me outside the cottage many times, which gave Uncle Arthur much fun in pulling me leg.

You might say that it was my 'Cider with Rosie moment'. One day she was gone, as her parents moved on, and I was left wondering; perhaps it was just as well!

Those days will stay with me for ever. How lucky I was!