Jeu & chandelle.

When you are 'hard of hearing'
and rely on electronic aids
and lip-reading, the 'game'
of exchanging this and that banality
with people you don't know
(and don't particularly want to know)
is not worth the candle or the L.E.D.

New Glasses!

New Glasses!
My vision now
surpasses
that of a mole,
or of a vole
swimming through
molasses
or guacamole.

The results of A.I.

were predicted
pretty accurately (so far)
in 1909.

https://thehemlockjournal.com/2026/01/29/e-m-forsters-the-machine-stops:
technology-isolation-and-a-dystopian-future/ 

IT'S YOUR ROUND

Being introverted and retiring,
with an escapist love of reading,
BritIrish pub culture
alienated me. I'm a face to face*
person, and am quite afraid of groups.

I only ever wanted half a pint
and never cared for fizzy drinks.

When, at an advanced age,
I had worked out my sexuality,
I discovered with ensuing elan
that in certain pubs and bars
a mere half-pint
(or in France a demi or a coffee)
might secure me at least
a half-hour's interesting scan
for a sweet, bearded and/or exciting man.

*Especially now when I often have to lip-read.
 

One of those jokes.

I never cared for unspontaneous jokes
or their repeaters,
mainly because so many were 'dirty'
or otherwise offensive.
Here is one exception which, being
from Northern Ireland, I rather like.

An Irishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman and an Englishman are on a plane which is going down and there is only one parachute.
The Scotsman says, “Scotland will remember me,” and jumps out to his death.
The Welshman says, “Wales will remember me,” and jumps to his death.
The Irishman says, “Ireland will remember me,” and pushes the Englishman out of the plane.

This comes from a piece in today's Guardian
by Miriam Margolyes, famous actor who once offered me
temporary, irregular residence on the cliffs of Dover. 

You’re brave to open your mouth these days, she writes. 
But there are always blogs...and youTube.

I was raised in Belfast

in the nineteen-forties to believe
that people and governments
and even the police were benign, that
not even Catholics were threatening,
and the Germans had been 'dealt with'.

The Russians, were a long way away
and America was worshipped as benign.
This reinforced my Asperger's perception
that the world is as it seems,
and people who look friendly must be friendly,
just like dogs. 

But dogs are guileless, unlike humans.

I too lived fairly guilelessly
even though I suffered the slight shocks
of betrayal that everyone experiences
but which seemed to me enormous.

I then realised that facial expressions
like language are instruments of guile.
Perhaps every word in every language
like every other smile
has come from Pandora's box.

Now I have no family
no honour, no dignity,
no tribe, no country,
no friend, no misery,
and of course no certitude.
I thought I had some sort
of integrity.

It will soon be possible
to have no name, no past
in futureless solitude.

The Secret Goldfish.

It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anyone
look at his goldfish because he had bought it
with his own money.*

This is the secret USA. 
But the public USA
proclaims the goldfish in neon.

*JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I thought Slime-moulds were amazing enough,

but today, apart from drinking
the strongest coffee I have ever made
to cure a four-day piercing headache
successfully,  

I have been reading
one of the best of many travel-books
I have by chance encountered –

and encountered stromatolites
which made possible
Life on Earth,
much-lauded by at least one species, 

before they were nearly wiped out
by thrombolites.  Both can be admired
on the shores of Lake Thetis.

Cultural highlight for cultural lowlife.

 

I would have been a fan of Esperanto

as Resistance to totalitarian English –
except that it is a naively artificial language
with little scope for nuance or subtlety
and even less for poetry,
born dead and not much more flexible
than Church Latin,
dreamt up by a nineteenth-century
inevitably Indo-European Pole,
with something of the totalitarian about him.

Advertising

has certainly changed
since my childhood in the 1950s.

Lucy Sweet on Substack writes:

As August is a big, useless, boring, hairy perineum of a month, I think we might need an injection of high-octane capitalist junk into our veins to liven things up a bit. And who better to provide that than Temu, which is now preparing for Hallowe'en. 

A painterly sketch-portrait

 taken from a video-screen

of Erin Patterson during appeal proceedings
against her sentencing for triple murder.

Abandonment.

Säben abbey, South Tyrol, Italy.

photo by Roland Reinstadler

The Alphas.

Once one learns or comes
to apprehend, one finds oneself
alone in the world, surrounded by folly.

To apprehend is not to comprehend
(which is impossible) but it enables
us to steer the folly of our lives
with some alertness, awareness
and acceptance through
the gauzy power of solitude.

Mind-mine gobbledygook.

Build whatever you can imagine
in your own infinite world
that's unique in every playthrough. 

Hideous
mental play-dough.
No thank you.
Back to aeon.co

Kafka : Brod

It is likely
that most friendships
are ultimately false.

(I'm treading carefully...)

And Literature
(whether of the scriptural
or socio-political kind)
has 'improved' nobody
and nothing.

It's probably not on phony Tony's mantelpiece

or grand piano.

The priest who preached atheism.

 

https://aeon.co/essays/

I know

that Camus knew
rather little, if anything,
about being an Outsider. 

A fabulous Spanish harpist

at the Basilica of San Prudencio de Armentia, Victoria, Álava.

photo by Fabio Casalini

No antic hay.

Most of us sometimes have the need to get away,

– hence the practice of vacation or extended holiday.

But many are trapped, and the only place to go

is the other side of life: back before 

we were conceived: as everlasting stay-away.

I'll spare you the visuals.

The other day I saw a photo of a man who had returned

to France from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

I thought: 'that skeletal figure looks just like me'.

Then I realised that he wasn't 84, but 33.

Can you taste the difference between a €5 and €8 wine?

Jonathan Hesford, who has a Postgraduate Diploma in Viticulture and Oenology from Lincoln University, New Zealand, writes:

"while there is a huge diversity of wines,
not many consumers have a very diverse appreciation of them."

A Romanesque sea-creature.

One of over a hundred painted panels
on the ceiling of the church at Zillis
(Grisons) Switzerland. At this time
the earth was thought to be flat
and surrounded by mysterious oceans
in which monsters roamed.

photo by Fabio Casalini

Fake Heliolatry

or solar claptrap.

 If it takes such a Hollywood super-spectacular
event to induce 'spirituality' in millions,
briefly,

it's pretty obvious that
there isn't much of it about.

My friend Diogenes reminds me
that billions of lesser beings
without 'souls'
including slime-moulds

were trampled underfoot.

Someone wants to be seen while looking.

A sad greyhound is bored.

photo from St Petersburg by Dmitri Lovetski

Yet another problem

for us humans is that, 

unless we are very strong 

interiorily, we can thrive

only on the approval 

of others in our

restrictive global hive.

Evening on the fourth day of the week لأربعاء , Safar 29, 1448.

Dinner-time :

thirty-one degrees,

a chunk of bread, a glass of wine

and a partial eclipse of the sun

in twilight, invisible

behind the trees.

Bipolar.

This old man
is not much fun,
yet not forlornly silly.
His moods have really
nothing to do with
the total eclipse of his willy.

To be expected.

 

IT'S YOUR ROUND.

Being very inward and retiring,
I quickly  found that BritIrish 
pub culture alienated me.
I wanted only half a pint
to sip slowly.

When, at a relatively advanced age,
I had worked out my sexuality,
I discovered with ensuing elan
that in certain pubs and bars
a mere half-pint (or in France a demi
or a coffee) might secure me
at least a half-hour's exciting scan
and sometimes a quick exit with
a sweet, bearded and exciting man.

In vino aliquanto

یک جام شراب صد دل و دین ارزد

In a little wine
in solitude
is much pleasure, some comfort
and a little insight.

Do not exceed the optimal dose.

در شراب اندک

A drop of wine evaporates –
and with it : you.

یک جام شراب صد دل و دین ارزد

R.I.P. Aspidistra

eliator variegata.
Forty faithful years.

I'm sorry that I never photographed you properly.

In my Irish home from 1980
to 2006.

In my first French house from 2006
to 2015.

In my present home from 2016.

What you need to know about Texas State Law

– and Mars.

For any disputes about services
“provided to, on, or in orbit around the planet Earth or the moon”,
 Texas state law applies.

But “for services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars … no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. 

"Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”

No surprise (again).

Even I can do that.
Gauging human intentions
is much more difficult,

let alone assess their toxicity.

I don't expect you to love me,

but I could easily become attached to you.

NON CONTRA NATURAM

Certainly not against Nature, and much easier
than heterosexuality to practise 'on the spot'
especially in warm climes –

with consensuality much easier to establish,
and associated fun and sport
more diverse and egalitarian,
not to mention
para-polymorphous-perverse –

same-sex erotic activity has surely been
at least as common as, and much more loose
than the procreative sort.

But there's the [other kind of] rub:
'confirmed heterosexuals'
are obsessed by progeny, paternity,
blood-lines, dynasticism 'racial purity' and genealogy
back to Adam, Abraham, Poseidon or Zeus.

Painterly, even so.

 

Rescuers work at the site of a Russian missile strike
in Kyiv on the sixth of August, 2026.

A refugee

on Refugee Camps :

"What's the use of safety
without a life ?"

This is also a good question
for millions who are outside camps.

Solar-powered

Sea-Sheep.

Costasiella kuroshimae

The mathematics of electricity supply.

 AI + A/C = melt-down.

The Drug Problem Explained, 1886.

When machines replaced men

nobody thought of asking them
if they enjoyed their work.

But now that AI is replacing people,
when will it be asked if it is happy
with the jobs it is required to do ? 

Let alone how many times (or even if)
it knows that it has hallucinated...

Help the harmless, helpless tapir.

 

The utter waste behind the Malayan tapir's impending extinction

 

It's the pointlessness of this one that hurts the most. No human-caused extinction has justification, but the ongoing eradication of the Malayan tapir packs a gut punch unlike most others. It is the slaughter of a creature doing no harm, for the benefit of absolutely no one - not even the poachers killing them. The Malayan tapir is about as threatening to humans as its rotund belly makes it look. They have extremely poor eyesight, weigh as much as a grand piano, and one of their main forms of defence is to lie completely still and hope predators mistake them for a rock. Through this bizarre, yet brilliant, adaptation, tapirs have survived on this planet for around 50 million years.  They spend their nights crashing through the jungles of Southeast Asia foraging for plants - always stopping for a midnight nap - and they’re so plump that, as they move through dense forest, they smash open trails which countless other species then use as pathways. But today, those trails are their downfall. Poachers know how many animals use the trails, and have started filling them with snares intended to kill tigers. But, with their terrible eyesight, Malayan tapirs are getting caught in the crossfire. And they don’t stand a chance. Once caught, it’s hopeless. A terrified tapir will pull with all its weight and power, but the snare only tightens. Eventually - often after days of agony - they’ll succumb to the inevitable. When the poacher returns, hoping to find a tiger, the waste of it all becomes stark: in many places where Malayan tapirs live, pig meat is religiously prohibited, and many people are unsure whether a tapir counts as a pig or a horse. And so, the body is simply left to rot. Fewer than 2,500 remain. Their bruised and broken population is now on the brink of collapse. The survivors are isolated, scattered so far apart they are struggling to find each other and breed. If that continues, we could see a spiral of loss from which recovery becomes impossible. But you can help change that. Through your donations, Fauna & Flora is clearing the snares - doubling down on putting rangers into the field to get the tapir’s precious trails cleared, and keeping them that way. And it’s your support - the rations, machetes, boots, camping gear and protective equipment you supply - which keeps rangers moving. Because make no mistake, it is not too late. There are still enough tapirs left that - with your help - we can stop them becoming needless victims of snares that weren’t intended for them. In doing so, you can keep these wonderful creatures a part of our world for generations to come.

 

Please donate now and help save tapirs. If everyone reading this donates just £3, you could help equip the dedicated rangers keeping these enchanting creatures safe. Thank you. https://www.fauna-flora.org/appeals/save-tapirs/

And that's not the half of it !

 

More than half of white* women

in the USA
voted for Donald Trump
twice.
According to research by
prof. Diane Roberts of Florida University.
America may never heal.

How much is due to racism,
how much to grotesque 'sex-appeal'?

*that is to say
a charmless shade
of pinkish-gray.

After breakfast,

a voluntary dose of Reality 
for a doom-addict.
Therapy required.

The elegance of the shark.

Many creatures,

including humans,
look better from behind.

The Cockroaches

in India
are a vibrant movement for reform.

 

In many other places they compose
the polluting Tourist Swarm.

Worzel Gummidge

was a scarecrow
dreamed up for BBC "children's hour" in 1935
by Barbara Euphan Todd, with much of the genius
of Flann O'Brien. 

Like At Swim-two-Birds
it defies illustration and translation
to the screens.  It came out as
the first Puffin book in 1936.

Worzel (a word for a kind of turnip,
mangel, swede or rutabaga)
described himself as a kind of crow,
just as a hedgerow is a kind of row,
or a hedge-sparrow is a kind of bird. 

The note on the pre-title page
is almost absurd,
announcing that it is suitable
for readers of 8 and over. 
I last read, and marvelled at it
it when I was 84¾.

After the Invasion.

Russian, wrote Sasha Dovzhyk,
is my mother tongue,
and Liberation means
ripping it out of my throat.