Christmas 2015

Not finished yet, still not enough chocolate

What better way than to start the new year than with a resolution you will forget as soon as the wind changes direction. So here is a list of things I will promise to do and then forget as quickly as possible.

1. Get up at seven o'clock every day
2. Eat more fresh fruit
3. Eat at least some fresh fruit
4. Substitute a banana for the 5 kilos of chocolate I eat every week
5. Stop smoking (this one should be pretty easy)
6. Levitate
7. Write a best selling novel and then donate all the proceeds to acrobats without frontiers
8. Meditate on the futility of every reaching an understanding with any public body
9. Throw my telephone away
10. Go out on my new bicycle a second time (recycle more)
11. 
    

Garden and a bit of house

Am currently replacing a couple of the upstairs windows. The only two that now need replacing. Bought them from a DIY shop and they look quite nice. These correspond to the two upstairs windows that overlook the garden. So, if the eyes are the windows of the soul, windows must be the soul of the eyes and since everything is green at the moment, the outlook is good.

Float or Bounce

 Good glasses. They help you to not see anything. 

A pic from two years ago; "Cathedrals" beach 

Pretty summery at the moment over here. Are we in winter? Is the earth really warming up? Yes and yes! Loads of stuff is flowering in the garden but it's half past eight in the morning and it's still black as pitch outside.

Across the bay is where I work

Still love my job thanks, in no small part, to the absolute liberty I have to organize everything I do and the fact that all of my classes have been compressed into the morning. 

Now it's Christmas and time for a poem. 

Come to me in the silence of the night; 
Come in the speaking silence of a dream; 
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright 
As sunlight on a stream; 
Come back in tears, 
O memory, hope, love of finished years. 

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, 
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, 
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet; 
Where thirsting longing eyes 
Watch the slow door 
That opening, letting in, lets out no more. 

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live 
My very life again though cold in death: 
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give 
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: 
Speak low, lean low 
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Yin yang

This is a quicky. Acceleration means that everything is beginning to look like a long haired lovely in a wind tunnel. There are lots of issues and stuff in the potentially explosive cupboard.

1. Court case for custody; has just been suspended for the second time. The reason now was that my lawyer didn't show up. The procurator told me 24 hours before the hearing. The lawyer didn't even bother to tell me herself.
2. School contract stuff; partially resolved. Have signed the contract but there are still one or two issues, namely that I should be being paid about 47 euros a month more. I am looking into ways to address this situation. I love my job because I am given absolute freedom to do more or less whatever I want and, I only work in the mornings. And it's mega fun.

Now that's a garden

    3.  Health. good with a few caveats; back, infections, ebola, typhus, typhoo and PG tips.
    4. Number four is a question mark which is difficult to address. Or name or blame or abstain. So I           won't.

Jacob is going to be with me this weekend which is fantastic. He is the little boy in the picture. He is the smile and I am that gruff frown. It's strange, but when I am at school I am completely different, laughing and joking, doing strange and silly stuff all the time and every day. It's not a facade either. It just suits me well, like an old well worn jacket.

out of focus

Today's poem:

Poem 6

It's tight and taught
And terse and fraught
Much, much too short
To be but nought.

It reads right through
My bloodless glue
cursed versed yet true
The poem is you.

September

Exploding into activity. Vibrant, distorted, overly enthusiastic and a trifle reckless. This should be the attitude for September.

Bleeding cherry

I feel as follows however;

September has swaggered into the breach, like a veteran officer oblivious to the shells and shrapnel. How does time do that unperturbed, relentless charge towards nothing?

Jacob should have started school on Thursday but he didn't appear. His teacher asked where he was. I had to tell her that he was in his mother's house and well but not at school. He didn't come today, Friday either. I rang again and could hear him playing. She said he was ill in a tone which clearly meant he wasn't and that she didn't care. I have spoken to the social services coordinator in the school so everyone is aware of the situation.

Grass is looking good though

Can't avoid the differences that define you

So much beauty concentrated in one small geographical spot

   That's enough for now. All is basically well. I feel like a fifteen year old. And probably have even less common sense. Still the school is treating me with a certain warmth.


Poem:

Give All to Love

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-fame,

Plans, credit and the Muse,—

Nothing refuse.

’T is a brave master;

Let it have scope:

Follow it utterly,

Hope beyond hope:

High and more high

It dives into noon,

With wing unspent,

Untold intent:

But it is a god,

Knows its own path

And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean;

It requireth courage stout.

Souls above doubt,

Valor unbending,

It will reward,—

They shall return

More than they were,

And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;

Yet, hear me, yet,

One word more thy heart behoved,

One pulse more of firm endeavor,—

Keep thee to-day,

To-morrow, forever,

Free as an Arab

Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;

But when the surprise,

First vague shadow of surmise

Flits across her bosom young,

Of a joy apart from thee,

Free be she, fancy-free;

Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay,

Though her parting dims the day,

Stealing grace from all alive;

Heartily know,

When half-gods go,   

The gods arrive.

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The last two lines are beyond beautiful

Half-life

Clause 4              

Every person, perkin, chappy has the right to arm bears. Everyone needs a gun, even bears. Everybody can pack a shooter. When you go to the bank and are hustled and hassled by the teller, pull out your “piece”.  This will encourage polite and efficient service. (water pistols only) please!

Apples

Grapes; a certain racial harmony, from white to black

Clause 5

              

There will be a National Ombudsman with the power of a panel of high court judges and a budget equivalent to 0.5% of national GDP. The sole duty of this figure will be to protect the rights of individuals. Like an all-powerful Citizens’ Advice Bureau. It will have powers to fine large multinational companies and force abusive companies to indemnify individual citizens when there is an abuse. For example; the telephone sector is basically an oligopoly in which there is tacit collusion. There is price competition but all the companies know that it is in their best interests to make it as difficult as possible to unsubscribe. So that’s what they do.

A brief aside. Recently, I had this problem with one such company, and they had no physical address or fax number. I guess the holding company did, but I didn’t get that far. So, in order to unsubscribe, I rang the company to notify them of my intention to immediately do so. They said, of course, that I should ring such and such an extension number. The number was a high-tariff per second number that just left you on hold with nobody answering. This kind of thing has happened to me a million times before so I just get frustrated and report the company to the Consumer’ Rights Association. But imagine some poor old lady receiving endless bills and phone calls from a faceless monster. Who’s protecting people from this kind of abuse? Nobody.    

Clause 6              

All hairless persons are exempt from tax.

Amendment 1. With the exceptions of budhists, sinead oconor and new age vagrants

Clause 7

People will be dyed different colours according to their respective professions.     All teachers will be dyed pink, obviously. Lorry drivers fuchsia, Politicians and bankers black, taxi drivers puce and civil servants varying shades of grey. 

Clause 8

Tail-gating will be a capital offence

Clause 9: 3 sloths (analyze the cunning, or not so, play on words)

Clause 10

At 12 o’clock every day, everything will stop for 15 minutes. Nobody will speak, people will just relax, put down their phones, turn off the music, the TV, stop walking driving etc, no reading, no eating nothing, zilch.

Amendment 1:  special dispensation might be available for parachutists, heart surgeons and pole-vaulters. 

In  rut so here's the poem:

Valentine:

Not a red rose or a satin heart.


I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.


Here.
 
It will blind you with tears 
like a lover.

It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.


I am trying to be truthful.


Not a cute card or a kissogram.


I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.


Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.


Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

A New Constitution

Here is the new constitution.

1. All men are born with the same rights

    i. Amendment the first: You can lose some of these if you do bad things.
    ii. Amendment the second: You can lose some of these even if you do bad things by accident.

In practice, everybody should have access to food and shelter. They should be able to live a peaceful life without being subjugated or tortured or killed.

Gilty tests the water by the river near the house

 Gilty dictated the new constitution to me in a dream. It was a holy revelation. However, for reasons obvious, I have omitted all the parts that concern dog-biscuits and dog-rights abuses.

2. The Global Reeducation Internment Ministry (GRIM) will make people nice. Individuals will be "reeducated" when

a) They fail to smile at least 5 times a day
b) Don't say hello
c) Stop dancing in the kitchen
d) Say they don't like something they have never even tried (special dispensation for kids and vegan guests at cannibal eat-all-you-like drive throughs)
e) People who announce they are going to be horrible by saying, "I always say what I think" as if this were a kind of licence to be abusive
f) Anybody who is convinced he is right
g) personae /gits eating with their mouths open
h) Teachers using a lot of photoshop

A teacher using a lot of Photoshop

Reeducation will involve playing hopscotch naked while singing the Japanese national anthem.

What price a hug?

It's a rhetorical question.

3. All those in political office at whatever level, will be obliged to publish all of their patrimony and possessions and that of their immediate family every year. An independent auditor will scrutinize this data. 

Look at me! I'm transparent. 

Here endeth the first part of my sturdy constitution.

Today's poem:

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.

Many a road and track

That, since the dawn’s first crack,

Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers,

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

Here love ends,

Despair, ambition ends;

All pleasure and all trouble,

Although most sweet or bitter,

Here ends in sleep that is sweeter

Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book

Or face of dearest look

That I would not turn from now

To go into the unknown

I must enter and leave, alone,

I know not how.

The tall forest towers;

Its cloudy foliage lowers

Ahead, shelf above shelf;

Its silence I hear and obey

That I may lose my way

And myself.

Jacky on the beach with sandcastles

July has been relaxing, but one's mind generates such a disproportionate wodge of white noise that taking a step back and inhaling deeply becomes more complicated than it should be. The beach helps, the garden soothes, the dogs shadow protectively and Jacob enlightens. 

Mera

It's been a nice July. I feel I should say relaxing and "chilling out" but that's not really true. It's been frenetic in an oxygenated time capsule.

My new garden table, covered in linseed oil

 Garden tables make good dens for little boys and a happy source of shade for thirsty dogs.

Teamwork

The dogs are happy to be going on walks and don't mind when they are sat upon, chased, bombarded with mud or sticks or even fed with grass.

The 11 mill walk, just by the house

Velocipede

No millstone round this boy's neck!

Look back in hunger?

Basically just a few pictures. And why not?


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Today's poem:

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.