'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.

Over-confidence

is a serious symptom
of optimism.

Some days

I devote several hours
to getting my head
together, gathering
my wits in one place.
Then it's time for bed.

Since today is

let us consider the greater holocaust
perpetrated by Europeans
in the Americas,

and smaller ones all over Africa
and in Australia.

Let us not forget the other genocides
all over the world, including Armenia,
Cambodia – and holocausts of hunger
as in India and Soviet Ukraine.

And now the offspring of offspring
of holocaust survivors
are venting ire and fire on Palestine.

Dating Questionnaire.

Question 3.

In ten words or fewer, describe yourself.

Thanks be to the Welfare State, I'm
an octogenarian, vegetarian
Marxist Oblomov.*

Oh, sorry ! that's 12 words plus two commas.
Does I'm count as one word ?

*A book I haven't got round to reading.

Homeless in Oklahoma.

photo from The Guardian

 

On the upward escalator.

photo by Mark Wilkins

 

In most modern societies

the stress of hypocrisy
is a 'major cause' of illness.

Suburbia, Atlanta, USA.

 

The sad thing about cinema

is that it got so quickly taken over
and almost submerged by
ruthless and ugly
Jewish-American heterosexuality.

Vincent's Ear.

A report on Vincent van Gogh's damaged ear
by the handsome Dr Félix Rey (left)
sent to Irving Stone in 1930.

Following weeks of living in poverty
with the ego etc. of the insufferable Gauguin,
Vincent committed the symbolic act
and rushed to the local house of transient
pleasure, where he handed his bloody ear-lobe
to a maid called Gabrielle Berlatier -
whom, unfortunately, he did not celebrate in paint,
nor the bordello.
But he painted this one in Arles, in 1888.

To put it mildly (and succinctly) :

I have for decades understood
that evil often begets evil,
but good rarely begets good.

Is an illustration really necessary ?

 "I'll show you my Pacemaker
if you show me yours..."

The 'Greenland Shark'

 

But...

Joseph Maclise,

an anatomist born in Cork
liked drawing male genitals
and, assuredly, regarding them.

He drew them well.

 

Ruthless optimism

enables ruthless capitalism.

Palestinians

  "will be allowed to exit Gaza,” 

 said the Israeli prime minister last year.  

– in the same way that Jews who could pay
were allowed to exit Germany
in the mid-1930s.
Though the scale of its evil and hypocrisy
is tiny in comparison with Hitler's Germany,
who would have imagined
60 years ago
that Israel could become a
vicious little power
(with useful concentration-camps)
in alliance with
illiberal autocracies
to assure its Lebensraum ?

So much for democracy !

from 'All the Tattered Stars'.

... just before the gate to heaven

is yet another hole to hell. 

– Richard W. Halperin

God bless ye

who, like my mother
and me,
smile without baring
their teeth !

There's none so authoritarian

as a modern 'libertarian'.

The selfless
tend not to be noticed.

Only by freeing capital
do you 'free the world'
- for ruthless take-over.

Best not to be noticed.

"Celebrating the rottenness,
that's freedom." 

(John le Carré : 'The Night Manager')

Best not to be noticed.

Today's Book Choice

from The Guardian. (scroll down when you get there)

The Ice Pool

 Watercolour by Andrew Wyeth.

Old and current news.

When I lived briefly in Denmark in the 1960s
 – ten years before the birth of the present prime minister –
it was hardly on the geopolitical map, a small NATO country
composed of islands, a peninsula and alleged hygge –
remote and almost exotic to a sheltered Northern-Irishman.  

It used to be quite a power – owning Norway,
Southern Sweden, Iceland, Schleswig-Holstein,
Northern Estonia, Coromandel* the Gold Coast
and some Caribbean islands for the slave trade.
Now only Greenland remains.

While I was enjoying myself on dreamy Bornholm
learning heterosex in candlelit hygge
and eating smørrebrød and kryddersild,
labskovs (known in Liverpool as scouse),
boiled cod fresh-landed and stikkelbærsgrød,
Danes were doing to Innu Greenlanders
what Russians are today doing to Ukrainians : snatching
native children to turn into Proper Danes
eating with knife and fork and being
hyggelige.  The fork was invented
only a century after the Inuit arrived on the world's
largest island from the western continent.

Now Greenland is a Prize Territory and,
apart from the Faroe Islands, the only overseas part
of the ancient Kingdom of the dithering Prince.

I was brusquely dumped by my Danish girlfriend.
I have never had one since.

Nor been to Denmark.

We are all now familiar with
Greenland's national flag.

from Wikipedia:
                             Since 2025, the United States has engaged in hybrid warfare against Greenland;^[30][31] as a result, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service included the United States as a potential hybrid threat to national security alongside Russia and China in its threat assessment that year.^[32][33]

* So it may have been, as Osbert Sitwell wrote:
On the coast of Coromandel
dance they to the tunes of Handel.

Such a pity!

 

Lucky Iranians ?

If France did the same,
perhaps I would have
a less stressed existence.

I refused to fill in the Census form online,
and insisted on the paper version.

(Roll on Le Pen and/or sidekick ???)

*

ON A DIFFERENT, MORE CHEERFUL NOTE :

Even though ...

1. Fatberg the size of four buses likely birthed shit- balls that closed Sydney beaches – and it can’t be cleared.