Waymarks

We've cancelled our landline as from today. I don't think I've ever lived without a landline before (or perhaps I did for a while as a student in Cambridge) Anyway it feels like a significant waymark. The world is changing and here I am changing with it...

LJ sent me a virtual gift a few days back to remind me I'd been using the service for 18 years.

I have accounts at LJ and DW. I acquired the DW account during the panic over the servers moving to Russia. I did it not because I mistrust the Russians but because there were people I wanted to stay connected with. Now there's another panic, this time over the possibility that Russia is about to uncouple itself from the World Wide Web. Real news? Fake news? Who knows any longer? Anyway, I'm not dropping LJ unless it's forced to drop me. Russia retreating behind a digital iron curtain would be sad.

The western media, governments, corporations all want us to hate on Russia. I hate the war, I hate the war fever (which is being stoked to keep us angry and frightened now Covid 19 is no longer living up to potential) but I love Russia.

Ghost Stories On The Patio

Our next door neighbour who makes fence posts on an industrial scale is burning his spare lumber. It has been a warm day, with a chill breeze that was about just bearable- and I've been sitting out on the patio, soaking up the rays and breathing in the smoke. Also reading ghost stories. I have a collection edited by Herbert Van Thal which I've owned since I was nine or ten. It's an odd collection because several of its pieces aren't ghost stories at all- and I can't help wondering whether Van Thal may not have compiled it from memory, thinking that stories that scared him when he was a child contained a supernatural element when actually they don't- and not bothering to re-read them to find out. Mrs Gaskell's The Squire's Story is creepy but not a ghost story. Wilkie Collins's Terribly Strange Bed is alarming but not a ghost story. Stevenson's Markheim has a supernatural element but whether the visitant with the wavy outline can be classified as a ghost is debatable. Markheim, by the way, is a very good story- somewhat in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde vein- with a suggestion of Poe about it and a suggestion of Dostoevsky. Stevenson, of course, was a very great writer and a more accomplished artist than either of them....

Great Ghost Stories has pictures by Edward Pagram. They're quite striking. Here's one of his illustrations to Markheim.