Tardy self-diagnosis.

 If – instead of having my tonsils
and adenoids removed in 1948 –
I had been given TRT (alias ART).
I might have gained the energy,
stamina, muscles and memory
that other boys had, and which,
in my case, have diminished more
and more with my advancing years...
...might not have had a shut-down
for a decade...might not have been
a slow-on-the-uptake slow thinker...
might not now have brain-fog,
high blood pressure & cholesterol,
a Pacemaker, fatigue, poor balance,
deafness and ringing in my ears.

I have no pain whatever, it must be said.
I'm sometimes just a bit lame.
No way will I die in a hospital bed.

Fiction, prediction.

There once was a writer 

who wrote far too much.

and didn't really want to be read. 

He didn't like people too much,

and most of the time he sort-of

wished he was dead.

His name was not Kafka

nor Borges, nor Beckett.

It might have been Fred.

My latest piece of 'folk-art'.

65 centimetres wide and placed
in the little niche on the other
side of the street from my house
(my smallest piece of garden),
this limestone sculpture of a
wild boar and his family
(sold by my friend, executor and
brocanteur David Poirier,
at a very reasonable price),
has no provenance, but is likely to have
been chiselled somewhere in Quercy,
Rouergue or the Albigeois, SW France.

from Twenty-nine Things

You can Do with a Penis.

Quixotic or idiotic ?

Had it been possible
I would have written a letter
of appreciation of his short stories
to Kafka, and of praise for his portraits
to Vincent van Gogh.  As it was,
I wrote to blind Borges, blind Tolkien
(secretaries replied)
and to the splendid Alice Neel
not long after she died. 

Portrait of John Perreault

In the evenings

only
I feel so good after dinner
and a modest measure
of wine, that my socialist
disposition makes me want
to share the pleasure.

The Fall.

Adam and Eve
dropping from a Tree
in Autumn.
Among withered leaves
and a sloughed-off skin,
no tomb,
Fall Guy and Fall Doll.

'If computers can surmise, can they surprise ?

Can Artificial Intelligence
be creative ?

Memoirs aren't improved by total recall.

Is Artificial Intelligence
capable of curiosity ?
(a faculty largely suppressed in humans)

It can't have fun, 
enjoy, regret, or suffer,
or incline towards impetuosity.

The times they aren't a-changing

 very much. 

Leigh Hunt (who might even now be called a seditious agitator, and be arrested for supporting the Palestinian cause)
was sentenced to two years in prison for libel against the odious Prince Regent (later George IV), after publishing a critical article and satire in his newspaper, The Examiner, in 1812. 

In gaol from 1813 to 1815, he continued to engage with
literary figures and maintain a vibrant intellectual life.

ex-Prince Andrew (the youngest of the Mountbatten-Windsors),
and almost never in line for the throne)
was arrested the day before yesterday = 213 years later...
and was soonish released.
He will not go to prison.
Although he has rubbed shoulders with literary as well as deeply-unpleasant and vile figures (some of them also literary)
he does not have a vibrant intellectual life,
and, partly because of his sad sexual adventures,
not even a current wife.

© Wofl McGonagall, MMXXVI

COTERMINOUS [adj]

 – as when Lent and Ramadan
endure for the same forty days,
or as nearly as dammit.

Though not necessarily when
Israel starts a religious war
at the al-Aqsa mosque
built on the site where
the earth was last trod
by M'hamed.

I Bought a Second-hand Dogma

(don't we all in this vale of dark deceit ?)

It belonged to a lady with good taste
and slender wrists just like mine
(in contrast with my spathulate
thumbs that are not smartphone-friendly).

I wanted it to be (since, unfortunately,
I am not) black, elegant, easy to read -
o which end I took out its third
(seconds) hand, removing all guarantees
that might ever have been attached to it
as it was attached to its dead owner,
who is now even more of a loner than me...
now dog-less for five years

'Junior Dogma Quartz Original
Vintage Cr 3231-88', from the late seventies.

Width: 19 millimetres

The Future

means nothing
until it strikes,
arrives,
or sidles in.

Surely the Chinese are not really this stupid ?

They sell music-box mechanisms on eBay
(hundreds of them)
without informing us of the tunes that they play !

George Sand:

"Always resist those
who say Work hard
to live badly."

This is the state of social involution.

Laurent Binet wrote:
"Sport ?
A fascist conspiracy."

No fence:

No fear.

*

Right-minded
is left-leaning.

Would you believe

that my Fair Trade
coffee from Rwanda
is harvested from trees
tended by happy, trained
mountain gorillas ?

How I would like to !

Malcolm (64) has had a minor stroke.

But he's better now.

Another near-extinction.

The extraordinary whistling dogs are falling silent...

Their reddish fur and wolf-like features might fool you into thinking they’re foxes.

Their long backs and slender limbs might suggest a close relationship with cats.

They can’t bark, so surely they can’t be dogs… right?

But these are in fact the utterly adorable - bordering on unbelievable - Asiatic whistling dogs: the dholes.

And almost no one has heard of them, which is a true tragedy.

Because while they may not be able to bark the way domesticated dogs do, what really sets dholes apart is the noises they can make.

Clucks, screams and whistles cut through the forest as they carefully coordinate a hunt. These specialist canines are expert communicators as well as extremely social creatures, living and working together in tight-knit teams where each member plays a crucial role.

But their intimate families are being torn apart.

Across the globe, dholes are disappearing at a horrifying rate.

One by one, vicious snares see their whistles become whimpers, and humans introduce deadly diseases into their close communities, causing their clucks to go quiet.

These beautiful dogs are fading away.

In some areas, such as Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, snares litter the ground. These cruel devices trap the limb of any poor dhole unfortunate enough to cross their path, tightening mercilessly as the helpless dog fights desperately to escape. But, more often than not, it’s already too late.

There are now fewer than 2,500 mature dholes left in the world. They are hurtling towards extinction.

If we don’t stand up for them now, we could soon lose them forever - they are in urgent need of your support.

And so are we.

We need your help to get essential equipment into the hands of those that need it most – to buy a ranger a fresh pair of boots, a new raincoat or a sturdy rucksack to replace those worn out by thousands of hours spent patrolling through challenging landscapes like the Cardamom Mountains, painstakingly sweeping and removing snares as they go.

Dholes are one of the world’s most extraordinary canines – together, we can ensure they don’t fall silent.

SAVING WILD DOGS IN CAMBODIA

 

Please help save dholes. If everyone reading this donates just £3, you could help get the rangers all the equipment they need to help bring these remarkable creatures back from the brink. Thank you.

    I DID.

 

DONATE NOW

 

You are receiving this email because I thought you should read it.

My relatively-small

environmental footprint
is not only a hundred thousand
times the size of the footprint
of a hunted hare,
but many hundreds of times larger
than that of a persecuted wolf or bear.

Big-power Bully

Pusher of Christian Values

Deprives Valentine

Of 1,800 years

Of sainthood

No society

that has to be policed
is worth perpetuating.

As for democracy, the Athenian
experiment was hardly worth the name,
run by mono-ethnic, high-born 'citizens' –
all of whom were males with military
training and experience
who eagerly suppressed Free Speech
as taught by Socrates.

Fairly far from the madding crowd,

the pogroms, the hate and the greed.

Golden Jackal, Jordan.

 

"It's happening round the corner.

 … Right now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced into something they don’t want to do.”

– Tracy Emin, artist with bed.

Life without a bladder is “pretty heavy”, she tells me. Today, for example, when she got in the shower, she had a lot of bleeding from her stoma. Then there’s the whole business of the bag, which needs emptying into a loo maybe “every 15 to 20 minutes, or it might be OK for an hour. For a lot of people with urostomies, they don’t go to theatre, they don’t go to cinema,” she says. If you can’t get to a loo in time, it can overfill and burst, which isn’t great, especially if it happens in a public place. If she wants to do something as simple as take a nap at home, she says, even that’s tricky. “It wakes you up because of the pressure” and, worst case, “The bag will just fly off, and then all the urine will go everywhere. It’s 500ml of urine in a small bag, which doesn’t sound like much.” (It sounds like plenty, to me.)

She has bowel problems on top of everything else. “You’ve got the blood, you’ve got the shit, you’ve got the pills – it really can get you down, because you can’t be free...

Family Portrait

by Conrad Felixmüller.
How I love the German Expressionists
and the Weimar Republic! It was possibly
as Advanced as Civilisation will ever get.

'Glass Squid'

with upright tentacles folded.

Schmidt Ocean Institute

 

Splendid Acronym.

SOMNOT

Smelly Old Men Not Welcome.
I was not invited to lunch.

Faint odours of piss and scrotum
and fennel or camomile, or even vetiver.
are a good way, I firmly believe,
to reinforce social exclusion
– though social exclusion
is wonderfully easy to achieve.

Brothers and Sisters,

Let us give praise
to the Pharmaceutical Industry.
Amen!
Our sacred Serenity Pills are addictive,
and thus we are gratefully condemned
to Lifelong Contentment.
Amen!

And now let us sing in gratitude
Psalm One and Only:
Big Pharma in the sky,
Easing All Anxiety... 

Gisèle Pelicot

on her superbly brave decision
to have the trial of her vile pimp-husband rapist 
held in open court :

She said that if she had been 20 years younger: “I might not have dared to refuse a closed-door hearing.

“I would have feared the stares. Those damned stares a woman of my generation has always had to contend with, those damned stares that make you hesitate in the morning between trousers and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned stares that are supposed to tell you who you are, what you’re worth, and then abandon you as you grow older.”

Meanwhile in another part of the wood:

France makes international appeal over ex-teacher accused of raping 89 children.

Police search for more possible victims of Jacques Leveugle, whose alleged crimes span many countries and date back to 1960s.

It would be better

to learn from
rather than merely
tolerate each other.
But for our petty brains
it's too much bother.

All eyes are on the happy parading planets.

 What will they be wearing ?

Unaccountably,
Planet Earth has been banned
allegedly for its more than sixty thousand
uninterrupted years
of sheer human nastiness.

'The Gaiety of Nations'.

There's not much of it about
not even in peaceful, super-democratic,
quadralingual, multi-ethnic
Switzerland.

We are amazed

by the ignorance of Germans
of what was going on
in the concentration-camp next door.
But do you want to know
what is going on
in the nearest abattoir ?

You don't even know where it is.

The old folks at home

in Mississippi now
remember with pleasure
the days of Jim Crow.

photo by Anuwar Hazanka

 

Obviously,

capitalism demands
conformity, not liberty
– let alone equality – 
and fierce competition
rather than fraternity

for all eternity.

America burning ?

No, just a scary sunset,
some derricks,
and a statue of hypocrisy

photo by Charly Triballeau

The Genital Olympics.

 

 Read all about it...

'The best books

make you rethink
how you relate to the world.'

– Tracy Chevalier

My literary life - so far -
has roamed for eighty years
from Little Grey Rabbit
to Raising Hare.

Perhaps –

apart from the 'enslavement
in Babylon', the expulsion by the Romans,
the ghettoes, pogroms, Shoah,
mass-muggings, unending insults
and forced usury –

it will transpire
that the worst thing to befall the Jews
will have been
the recent seizure of Palestine.

False spring.

The crocuses and violets are blooming.
When I insert my hearing-aids
I hear the kettle
(but no birds)
sing.

'The tears of the world

are a constant quantity.'

- Estragon, in Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

(But it's the quality that matters, says the priest.)

I don't much care for mirrors,

for when I've looked in them
I have never seen more than
an image, a curious simulacrum
no more real than a photograph,
a life-like puppet, a trick of light. 

For women they are less often
a source of self-admiration than of anxiety.
The last time I looked in mine
I saw that I had my pullover
the wrong way round and inside-out.

But they are useful
for beard-trimming,
for watching pilferers in shops...
and they were once slightly helpful
in treating my teenage spots..

I don't believe I ever looked as cute as this!

Fame is not a virtue.

Famous people
are not necessarily
worth knowing

any more than are
'hard workers'.

Sun-bear and butterfly.

 from Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

photo by Mogens Trolle

The Romantic Fallacy.

Kissing is a very small part of life.
So why does it feature
in almost every movie ever made ?

The original romances – derived
by troubadours through Courts of Love
(really courts of mutual respect)
in the 11th and 12th centuries
from Sufi Islam, e.g. Rumi – involved
no carnality, not even kissing.
Romance that spellbinds
was marriage of minds
long since degraded
to sexual compatibility.

More Senility.

My lycracrylic long-johns
are so warm and cosy
that it was only when
I was about the leave the house
that I noticed I had no trousers on.
But if you think that's silly,

yesterday I put my long-johns on
the wrong way round
and deprived myself
of access to my willy

though I mostly sit down to pee.

A Wall in Wales.

The Ultimate Reality

is not death
but solitude.
Available even now.
First month free.
Cancel any time.

 

Indoor pollution.

I should have died long ago from
some pulmonary condition
because I have always lived with
an open coal (now closed wood) fire
and spent most of my adolescent winters in a room
heated by an Aladdin paraffin stove
(of the old wick-burning type)
I could cook on. Now I have the more advanced
(equally-smelly) injection
kind for winter mornings. (Needs electricity.)
For twenty-five years I smoked a pipe.
Since 1970 I have cooked with gas,
and only during Covid and in a crowd
put on a mask - insofar as spectacles
and hearing-aids and claustrophobia allowed.

But I have hardly ever had a chest-cold,
let alone asthma, emphysema or bronchitis.
Most old people die of pneumonia.
I'll probably die of pudibonditis
turning me into unpleasant
human detritus.

'Normacorc'

In no way are plastic bottle-stoppers 'green'.
What proportion of them is actually recycled ?
They are an insult to, a weapon against

the ancient cork forests
of Eastern Portugal 
soon to be facing ecological collapse
due to climate-change and plastics
which cause climate-change
- and easy screw-top caps.

One of the nastiest words in English.

BANTER.
The bane of my school years
and one of the reasons
I avoided pubs, sport and other
unpleasant masculine situations.
'They're only teasing.'
I 'went mad'. Nearly was expelled.
To a tree-loving Aspy
they were very dis-easing.

*

The most celebrated banterer in Europe.