Ownership

 The cat and I settle down on the front lawn- myself in a deckchair, the cat at my feet. A magpie- who reckons it owns the lawn- tells us to bugger off or it'll do dreadful things to us. We ignore it.

Warming Up Again

 We had a little rain on Friday, and Saturday was coolish but today the sun is back in strength- and we're being promised another week of temperatures in the high 20s and low 30s. By English standards this is turning into an extraordinarily summery summer.

It would be inconsistent of me to complain about factory farming and how it's killing off the insects- and then complain about buzzy things getting into the house and having to be warded away from food- but... today's strategy for discouraging them is citronella candles. They smell nice but I don't think they're particularly effective. 

The Worst Form Of Government Apart From All The Rest

 The root problem with democracy is that the demos- meaning most reasonably well-adjusted people- has little interest in running anything bigger than a home or a small business- and- so long as it isn't too horribly oppressed- is happy to leave politics to the power junkies, ideologues and bread heads. 

But at least in a democracy the people have some leverage- if they choose to apply it. And the power junkies, ideologues and bread-heads do to a certain extent cancel one another out. The alternative is dictatorship- which means government by a tiny coterie of deplorables or- in its most extreme form- by a single deplorable- a state of affairs that can only be sustained by censorship and terror.