The 'How-are-you', 'Ça va' ? thing

that Aspies hate.

I startled my rarely-seen
never-visited, closest neighbours
as they passed today
by replying that old age
was turning out to be
surprisingly, sexlessly joyous,

though I had forgotten their names.

Mens sana. Corpus sanus.

from The Guardian ten days ago

"We’ve been together 14 years now, seven of them married,
and our sex life is still thrilling and still open.
Our golden rule to prevent jealousy is that neither of us can sleep with a member of the opposite sex,
though we’ve both experimented with same-sex partners,
together and apart.
The fact that Miguel is comfortable enough with his sexuality
to be intimate with other men – that’s so hot to me.
We still have sex together alone a couple of times a week,
and it often begins with him telling me
about what he got up to during a recent liaison."

A Sculpture at an Exhibition

 in Abidjan.

To-day I heard my first cuckoo

of 2026, while out collecting
nettle-tops for my nettle-and-hummous
omelette-without-stings
this evening - I eat simply.
And water-cress from one
of the village's springs.

In the Unreal World

this insulting monstrosity
is worth one million
euros, and has been won
in a charity raffle for €100.
In the (my) real world it is worth
maybe €10 for the hideous frame.

Descent to the Dark Web*

dear Publius Virgilius,
is all too easy
with a VPN and the Tor browser.
*(Should I call it the Plutosphere ?)

There are nice pictures to make your heroin
purchase pleasant:

Fishy cocaine is pretty cheap, considering.

You can buy even more exciting
drugs, of course,
though an exiting drug
can be a bit pricey.

(An easy death at a chosen time
is not for the poor.)

The difficult bit is buying
Charon's Bitcoin

which is not for the faint-hearted
or the agèd.

Buy MDMA, Buy LSD, Buy Weed,  Buy XTC, Buy 2CB, Buy Heroin, Buy Ketamine, Buy Pills, Buy Xanax, Buy Weed, Buy Pain Killer, Buy Codeine syrup, Buy covid card, Buy Covid Certificate, Buy sychedelics, Buy Medication, Buy Oxycontin, Buy Nembutal, Buy Pentobarbital Sodium power, Buy Fentanyl.....

What else can you expect from 'Consumer-capitalism' ?

Worth reading:

Holy Christrump!

Isn't A.I. miraculous ?

Not many people know

that progress is an abbreviation
of
progressive infantilisation.

I cleaned the bath today

for the first time in two years.
I never use it anyway,
nor the shower.
And I finished my new
self-help book, called
Hygiene Without Tears.

Another benefit of authoritarian socialism ?

In Beijing streets there is birdsong in the air.
Most of the traffic is new and electric.

about a mile from Tiananmen Square 
we heard a woodpecker.

Our Eternity

is so miserably cramped
that Eternity would snigger
even if it noticed it.

Are Google Statistics Baloney ?

(Baloney = Bologna = a type of American sausage, I think.)

Recent views of this little blog. Did I go viral ?

 

from a formulaic interview:

What keeps you awake at night? 

Wondering why I can’t sleep.

'What's in a name ?'

Having a meaningless Christian forename
(Antonius/Antoninus)
I have always admired Nordic ones such as
Stone, Sun, Bear, Wolf, Womb,
Life, Star, Darkness, Mist...
I had an Albanian friend whose name means
Earth-spirit. 
And of course Alma means Soul
and Almina Little soul.

Ozone.

As would any mastermind,
the sun has found a loophole
in our atmosphere.

Seriously endangered, of course.

 

Hello Moon!

 

Hello Earth!

My mis-spent youth.

 

When I was a student, I somehow got a Christmas job at Belfast’s most up-market tobacconist, an impressive emporium called Leahy, Kelly and Leahy, right next to where the original English castle of Belfast stood, at Castle Junction, where most of the trams and buses passed.

I served behind the counter, selling tins and packets of pipe tobacco (plug, sliced and ready-rubbed) such as Three Nuns (which I smoked), St Bruno (which I and a friend smoked), Condor, Escudo, Ardath, Erinmore, Mick McQuaid, Murray's Mellow Mixture, Walnut Plug, mouth-numbing War Horse, St.Julian, Dunhill, Balkan Sobranie, Rich Dark Honeydew.  Some of these were made by Gallahers in Northern Ireland, others were made by Carrolls in Dundalk on the other side of the Irish border.  They were blends of tobaccos such as Burleigh, Latakia, Shag, Truffle...Some were grown in Turkey, some in Yugoslavia (Bosnia & Herzegovina).
Many had rum added, and sometimes other flavours.  If tobacco dried out, a slice of apple in the plastic-lined leather pouch or tin revived it overnight.

I sold hundreds of packets of cigarettes, and once escorted a customer to the Cigar Room, where Mr Leahy and a humidor on an impressive mahogany table received him.

I also dispensed snuff to old women in black shawls.

Business was brisk at Christmas and, though I was always bad at counting and doing sums in my head, I think most people got the right change.  But snuff had to be carefully weighed in a delicate old-fashioned balance with weights and a pan.  Ever sympathetic to poor ‘shawlies’ I gave them generous amounts above the quarter-ounces they asked for.  I liked being carelessly generous at the expense of a thriving business.

But of course, a day of reckoning was bound to come…when a shawlie refused the services of a colleague and asked for me personally, telling her shawlie friend that she always got good measure from the man with the beard and glasses.

So I was dismissed, having relieved the august establishment of several pipes, several ounces of tobacco and a handful of half-coronas.  The old women missed me.

I gave up pipe-smoking in my forties, but occasionally now, in my eighties, I savour a wonderful American mix generously donated by a friend, calling itself Black Truffle. I follow it up with mellow cognac, and continue reading my book.

The unforgettable Joseph Stalin was a heavy cigarette smoker, but he thought pipe-smoking would add to his stature.

So he took up the pipe. filling it with cigarette-tobacco, which he probably and heinously inhaled.

Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson also used his pipe to great effect.

Old tin and my current meerschaum + amber pipe.

Belfast's Castle Place in the 1950s
with two types of tram, trolleybus and diesel bus.

Leahy, Kelly and Leahys emporium
on left, somewhat earlier.

Ad from New York's  Saturday Evening Post in 1942

Word of the Day.

Prebuttal,
as in
'But the longer Melania went on, 
the more this sounded like a  prebuttal 
of allegations that may be about to break in the media.'

- The Guardian, 10th April 2026.

Another curious word from the same publication:

"...an estimated 35,000 people turned up to a protest helmed by Magyar."

As geopolitics change from day to day,
so does the English language!

Charles de Batz-Castelmore

is not a ear-catching name,
but re-cast by Dumas as
The Fourth Musketeer,
I read about his exploits
and those of his pals, 
and his pals' children
and the Queen's necklace...
before graduating to Balzac...
and Zola and Flaubert and
de Maupassant.  (I had little interest
in English novels apart from
Eliot and Hardy...but I digress.)
Here he is, the Fourth Musketeer
D'Artagnan, under the erstwhile altar
of a church in Maastricht, Holland.  

I doff my feathered hat.

A nice knick-knack - Murano perhaps ?

The yellow bit is the important one.

Photograph: cirp GmbH

 

3D-printed model of the clitoris based on the work of Ju Young Lee.
 Yellow structures are the nerves.
Green and purple are erectile tissue.
Red and blue are arteries and veins.
Proper manipulation is the issue.

 

Muslims and Jews excluded.

Fresco in the church of Matamorisco
(translatable as Slaymoors) in Palencia
(North-Central Spain), showing
the Weighing of Souls by the Archangel Gabriel,
with the saved to the left and the damned to the right
where shadowy demons lurk, maybe with Satan himself.
But the unbaptised and heathen went automatically
into limbo, so do not feature.

Bring on the dancing girls!

 

Coldrife on a warming planet.

It was 27°C yesterday.
I still wore my thermal 
winter underwear. 
But the bullfrogs this morning
are clamouring
for me to remove
at least one layer.
I am only slightly shivering.

Dogged.

An ancient, blunt
multi-tasked word
Bitch
(much older than Cunt)
can easily switch
from noun to verb to adjective
much used, much deplored,

and which I, raised by women,
loving dogs,
have always abhorred.

Memory lane.

 Scores of Easter Mondays ago
my mother and I would break and eat
our Easter Eggs (hard-boiled, not
the chocolate obscenities) at dolmens
or standing-stones.  About fifteen
years ago M. and I rolled our eggs
down Saul Hill, near Downpatrick
below a massive Mussolini-esque
grey statue of the saint.

Today here, near the village of Laramière
in south-west France, where I had also
brought M. and my long-deceased
and under-rated poet friend Tom Matthews,
I broke and ate my Easter Egg alone within
the chamber of a long, low dolmen
with massive roofstone: La Peyra Levada,
pictured beside my Peugeot 106 for scale.

In Ireland, some dolmens were inhabited.
Under this massive3-metre roof-stone
a small family of refugees could squat
and not be rained on,
though water would flow around their feet.

"Spoiler Alert"

If a disclosure of the plot
spoils a book for a reader,
then the reader or the book
is a bottom-feeder.

A Picture for Easter Sunday

to commemorate the 1916 Rising in Dublin
which Sir Roger Casement hastened futilely
(by German submarine) to prevent.  

This is a view of a lime-kiln
at Murlough Bay, county Antrim, 
in whose churchyard
Casement the hero, traitor and paedophile
wished to be buried, but never will.
His celebrated bones decay in Dirty Dublin, still.

0

The Trick Briefcase and the Persistence of Resistance.

 “I perfected a trick briefcase,”
my hero Jean Genet recalled,
“and I became so adept at stealing books
that I could conduct sleight-of-hand with great courtesy
right under the noses of the booksellers.”

My short imprisonment for
shoplifting 'household items'
was rather more genteel than Genet's,
involving lots of tea and toast
and an excellent prison library
run by a young dopesmoker.

Last week I completed my latest picture
with a musical-box mechanism which plays
Für Elise.  It is the story of teenagers opening
the door of my never-locked car and removing
two faulty CDs which they hurled on the lane.
I picked up the bits.
It is called  THE PERSISTENCE OF RESISTANCE
OR DADA. Of course, like Genet, I never had
nor consciously missed a father.

NOTE: this blog will discontinue very soon
for all prisoners of the moon.

In the far-off

Cold War days, Marcusians
and other far-left agitators who ignored
big and small realities surrounding
the Soviet Union, declared
that Israel was the USA's 'puppet-state'.

It's such a Topsy-Turvy World... 

Mutual grooming.

photo by Toby Meville.

We added numbers

to language
in our defence
against reality.

The thing about socialism

is that it arose out of
protestant puritanism
which made work
the only path to heaven,
so socialists worship work. 

April can be a cruel month

especially for budding fruit-trees
and vines. This year it's a good month
for ploughing.

Detail of 12th century tapestry
of Girona in Catalonia.

Wine

is notoriously variable
but more reliable

than people.

Why not eat the tasty lean bits ?

 

Apart from other considerations

my would-be-poems are depressingly-judgemental
and probably, like myself, under-developmental.

Being 'a failure' isn't a lot of fun
(for billions) -
but my species is a much direr one
when all is imagined, said and done.

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There was a famous-in-Scotland warlord

who hid in a cave and watched a stationary
spider, which taught him patience. Such a spider
adheres to my stairwell wall. I will not insult her
with a name. In the room below I attach myself
to the world-wide web of human utterance,
which depends upon an oceanic web of cables,
hundreds of thousands of miles of them
along the ocean beds,
most of them privately owned
by a few abominably-rich Americans
who are entangling us & trussing up the planet
with our shrieking insignificance.

Candle weather coming.

  

The above-normal temperatures in France so far this year have led to many vines budding early. In the early stage of budding (débourrement), the vine is extremely susceptible to colder temperatures, and in some cases severe frosts can wipe out a whole vineyard’s harvest overnight.

To protect their vineyards against spring frost, many French winemakers still rely on the ancient technique of using candles (bougies antigel) to warm the vines. Thousands of candles – usually metal pots filled with paraffin wax – are placed throughout the vineyard in order to raise the vines' ambient temperature. 

Winemakers are recommended to install about 500 candles per hectare, which can help raise the temperature of he vines by 2 to 3C, according to figures from the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne, the official industry organization for Burgundy wines.

Farther east and south, in my Gaillac area and around Bordeaux it will, however, be warmer.

Doors of Perception.

Consciousness is a World Tree
of many branches, twigs,
leaves, flowers, seeds and roots,
not to mention parasites and lodgers.

But perception is the problem.
We perceive peculiarly,
through the lens of quantity
rather than of quality.
Our minds inflamed by number,
ever-number saps our sensibility,

carved cuckoos inside clocks.
we're trapped by sequence, narrative,
and contrapuntal melody.

'I saw one ship

go sailing by,
sailing by,
sailing by;
I saw one ship go sailing by
at 10 o'clock in the morning.'

Strait of Hormuz

The devil in the details.

'God forgive me!'
It is a bit off
to correct dead good men's books,
but the august John le Carré
seemed to think that women
were imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs
rather than in Holloway.

Assisted Dying, unassisted smoking.

Nick Auf der Maur was a Montreal politician, activist, newspaper columnist and career drinker who, in his youth, had been arrested for performing poetry in the street naked (with a gin and tonic in hand) and getting into a bar brawl with Jack Kerouac, who, he said, was a racist. He was also a heavy smoker. The lump that developed on his neck turned out to be throat cancer, which spread to his brain. When radiation didn’t work, he underwent an experimental procedure that cut out part of his throat and tongue, leaving him unable to eat, drink or talk properly. At home to visit him, Auf der Maur picked up the landline to make a call and heard her father’s voice on the line to a friend. He was saying he wanted to end his life, and he wanted help doing it. She put down the phone and then, later, spoke to the friend. If her father was going to end his life, she wanted to be there.

Strange quotation, strange man.

Ernst Jünger,
humanist-fascist.

'Le suicide fait partie
du capitale de l'humanité.'

sounds les strangled in English:

Suicide is part of human capital.

On Painting.

To create decent authentic art
it is essential not to care
a tinker's or other despised person's fart
if nobody comes to stand and stare.

Nostalgia.

My first 'sound-system'
which I played in the attic
in the late 1940s
looked exactly like this.

I played Grieg's piano concerto
recorded by Benno Moiseiwitch
on at least 4 old 10-inch records
with worn needles.

What better introduction to 'canned music' ?

Unsurprisingly,

I have been completely wrong
and probably crass
in my socio-genetic-anthropological
assumptions.

Progress.

As we have moved out of a period
where International Law largely applied,
so the Law of Unintended Consequences
has become the Law of Totally-Predictable
and Dire Consequences.