The writer's road

                                                

Mine has been fairly long, vertiginous and with various pot-holes but I've definitely got to a happy destination with Tartarus Press.
Londonia, is now live on their site - link below. I feel proud to be one of their authors and to have my story enclosed in one of their elegant cream book bindings.
The novel can be pre-ordered on their site, and we will be holding a launch in March. Details to follow.

                                               
This incredible painting by Karl Fitzgerald has been chosen for the cover.



http://tartaruspress.com/hardy%2c-kate-a-londonia.html

Trump is an environmentalist

Madness. I know. But after looking at what he has achieved in the last few days, and everything else he has contributed to our only home's future (no, we are not going to go and colonise another planet - or at least 99.9% of us are not) I wonder if perhaps his real agenda is to completely break everything down. Utterly. For the planet to heal without humans digging away at it, adding useless bits to it, turning the oceans' waters into plastic particles. Maybe, he realises it's the only way. Smash it all down. Start again.
Perhaps leave a few golf courses though, just for nostalgia and the occasional putt - him shuffling around the green in his recycled flax all-in-one regulation garment clutching a hand-carved peasant niblick to then climb back onto the donkey-powered golf caddy.
No. Not really . . .  It's evident he, and the others of his ilk, don't give a shit. More than that they only give a fleeting, money-god shit; one that will last until their miserable sad lives fade away and their new existence in a Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell begins to play out.
Hoo.
I need a cup of tea. And I have to fill in the application forms for French nationality. Thanks Cameron, Johnson, etc.
But on a quieter note . . . what to do when rankled by all this madness. Walk, look at the real stuff, create a small wilderness if you are able to, or even a mass of pots on a balcony for the bees and birds. My NY resolution. To do more of this. When we move, I want to buy a house with an oversized piece of land and let it do its thing; help it do its thing without creating too much unwanted intervention.
I admire writer Paul Kingsnorth for many reasons; link below to an interesting Youtube on his theories about re-wilding amongst many things.
Happy New Year, btw.
One of my strongest memories from that usually busy, food and drink filled day of the turning year will be stopping in a motorway services to stretch our legs. We had watched a robin flit about the little patch of woodland that had been left to re-wild itself between the whirr and grind of traffic and mass consumption within the ugly services building housing a million things that none of us need.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_s8Vo00Xug&vl=en

In the light of

the extraordinary news that many, many people in the UK think that Boris Johnson and his bunch of . . . friends, are a good thing to reinstate after the last ten years or so of excellent governing, an extract from a terrifying (very occasionally, ludicrously hilarious) film (the Brig) by Jonas Mekas which won the Venice Film Festival prize in 1964.

Hieronymus Bosch's 'Vision of Hell' in moving black and white. If he'd had the equipment in 1504.

No great link other than in a dream I experienced last night Dominic Cummings features appeared superimposed onto one of the guard's faces.

Mmm.

The merging of shopping festivals

My yearly festive twaddle rant.

In this fracturing world where nearly everyone must surely be aware that things are not heading in a good direction - especially environmentally - one might think that the amount of consumerism could be on the wain . . . manufacturers taking a bit of responsibility, or more likely, jumping on the 'ecologic' band-wagon/bus/trolly, bike, whatever. But, no. Certainly no evidence of this in our local cathedral of shopping.
I went in to get A4 paper, a bag of prunes and a bit of cheese but must have spent five minutes just gawping at this years Christmas displays of chocolate. It was definitely worse than last year. Ferrro Rocher marked their territory with a sort of pathetic golden cardboard arch under which you have to pass to get into the main actual food area of the shop. Other brands - mostly Lindt, it seemed, had been arranged in a huge block - a red and gold battleship ploughing its way between pasta and frozen foods.
People were loading their trolleys with a polite frenzy. Why? It wasn't even December. Then I noticed the Black Friday/weekend signs. All festive chocolate 30% off in celebration of this . . . event. We might as well just have Black Century and be done with it. The weekend has already spread to Black Week.

                              

I did look up the origins of all this madness.

According to a site called History Stories, the first recorded use of the term 'Black Friday' was applied after a major financial crash on September 24, 1869: specifically, the crash of the U.S gold market Two Wall St financiers worked together to buy up as much of the nation's gold, thus hoping to drive the price sky high and make astronomical profits. The outcome was discovery of the conspiracy, stock market free fall and massive country-wide bankruptcy.

Apparently ten people have died in crushes over cut-price goods. The first in a Wallmart. A shop worker was trampled to death while opening the doors to a flood of eager people, another during a shooting incidents over goods in Toys R US . . .

I don't actually recall Black Friday being a thing until a few years back. Mad folk waiting in sleeping bags outside Harrods in January for various sale unmissables, yes, but crazed shopping on a Friday in November?

Anyway, I did get my prunes, paper - no cheese as there was a queue like the M25 around the counter - but I did fall slightly under the festive shopping spell, or perhaps it was a pine-needle/roast dinner/ho-ho-ho spray drifting down from the sprinkler system forcing us into goodwill to all food manufacturers.
My purchase, a very small box of 30% off After Eight mints. Just for nostalgia of the 70s reasons.

                     

                     

Cake number . . . 2,392

I like these sort of calculations: how many months might I have spent standing in postoffice/tax offices/supermarket queues/waiting for a tyre to be changed; how many months in bed - or years, rather; how much time drinking tea? how many weeks listening to The Four Seasons while waiting to be connected to insurance companies/banks/electricity providers, etc.
Then there are the more interesting calculations: how many times must I have walked down our road into town and back? in thirteen years - say four times a week, on average - 52x4 =208, thirteen years  =2,704, probably round it up to 3,000. Considering the previous house-owners reckoned they had done the meander around fifteen times in eighteen years (they were very fond of their BMW) - I think we're doing pretty well, walking wise.
And onto Mark's cakes, at least since I've known him - twenty-three years.
Probably on average (very vague calculation following) he makes a cake twice a week.
104 cakes a year x twenty-three years = 2,392 . . . cakes. Not to mention all the bread, Parkin, flapjacks, etc.

This was one of his best, but then I often say that - they are nearly always amazing.




The only two failures I can recall: a beetroot cake and a Neanderthal version of a Battenburg.

Visualising a billion

I've never intended my blog to be political but I felt I must try and write down a few facts on the wastage of money over this thing called Brexit.
I imagine most folk have difficulty imagining what a billion, for example, would look like or represent in real terms - especially if, like me, you got grade 5 in maths (ability to write ones name at the top of the paper).
Politicians do have a tendency to throw monetary phrases about . . . how many millions/billions/squillions they have/would have/will/should have spent on various building schemes, plans, roads, rail, hospitals, schools, or in the case of the present bunch of maniacs, how much was spent on the celebratory 50 pence piece (figures not available in this case - shame as it would have been fascinating to know) and the marvellous 'Get Ready for Brexit' campaign - A hundred million on posters that told the population to get ready for something as useless as getting ready for a mass seance to contact Churchill and ask his advise on how to get out of this pointless, time and money-wasting stalemate.

I just looked up some info on what Brexit has actually cost, as far as anyone can make a stab at the amount. sixty-six billion . . . or 1,000 roughly for every person in the country within the last three years.
So, what is a million or a billion in visible terms?
Say, imagining the amounts as hospitals, placed on a governmental, countrywide Monopoly board. A small one in Cornwall that was completed recently cost seven million, where as the reconstruction of St Barts in London cost around One billion. So, if we are talking about fairly expensive hospitals, say a billion a piece that would be sixty-six hospitals. Sixty-six hospitals, or many more schools, public swimming pools, new trains - versus Brexit. And not even Brexit. Lots of talk and hatred created by one word.
Still having difficulty imagining these amounts?
What about an MIR scanner - 895,000. Ah, that I can visualise. So, instead of Brexit we could have had . . . err, I couldn't work it out but enough scanners for everyone to have their own personal one had they have needed one.
What about a school? Very, very roughly, thirty million. Solar panels for every roof: 6000,00 or so for each house. New posts in teaching? An average salary is apparently about 70,000 per year. That would be worth investing in and relatively, a minuscule amount of money.
Anyway, the point being that astronomical amounts of money seem to be be magically available for spurious ferry companies, Brexit commemorative coins, parties, poster-splattered buses and a thousand other things when even fractions of these amounts could make such huge differences to education, infrastructure and above all tackling the climate nightmare.
Personally, I don't think this marmite, double-breasted blazers, cricket, crumpets, straw boaters, good old pint of British beer, Spitfires over the cliffs of Dover idea will ever actually happen - just a series of delays, transitions, arguments and more money-burning until Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and any other pissed-off county/region have split themselves from the mother rock and the UK is left on its own, complaining slightly about the weather and the price of tomatoes.

Buddhism and boot sales

Vide grenier, in this case - literally, empty your attic. I've blogged about these events many times as they figure quite high on our list of activities. Not quite so much lately as I'm in a bit of a purge phase feeling a move may be on the horizon . . .
Anyway, we did go to one this morning, and quite exceptional it was in its leafy, sun-dappled autumn way - held on a piece of ground next to the rugby stadium which has thoughtfully placed ancient plane trees for shade.
Sometimes on approaching a Vide Grenier I have an overriding sense that it will be a waste of time - an ocean of plastic and baby garments; this one had an air of possibility. Lots of great clothes, which we didn't have time to rummage through as Mark had a rehearsal in the afternoon, but within five minutes we had deniched (uncovered) several bargains.
Little worn Italian leather boots for two euros, a selection of videos including three volumes of Betty Boop; Casablanca, Grease and a bio-pic by Clint Eastwood and an excellent Paul Auster novel all for ten euros, and a beautiful unused Japanese metal teapot with stand for three euros.



Such joy.

So, the Buddhism bit . . . or Stoic, or anything else that encourages us to live in the moment. I equate the Vide Grenier experience as being similar to walking - except walking is healthier and generally requires no money being spent unless one happens upon a tea shop (unlikely in France) - in that one enters a small space of time where general worries and planning disappears as one peruses other humans' weird and wonderful/not wonderful collections of stuff. Of course there are moments (for me anyway) of: Holy shit, look at all this stuff - landfill, panic, there is no hope, etc, but on the whole it's a gentle, harmless and lazy Sunday morning activity which swages the desire to consume and recycles otherwise neglected things which would probably have headed to the bin.



re-homed teapot with its new companions.