Twenty-Three

Yesterday I dreamed about a person who looked like a teen and but was really 23- and last night I was that person myself. "I'm shouting." I yelled at my parents,"Because I'm a teenager (though I'm really 23) and don't like to be ignored!" The place where this was happening was my childhood home, 23, Croham Valley Rd.

I woke, got up, went to the bathroom and when I came back glanced at the clock. I had a pretty good idea what I was going to see. Yes: 23:23.

Grounded

We were supposed to go up to Greenwich today but we've been grounded by an illness that seems best treated by doing very little and taking naps. Ailz says it's our bodies saying we've been going a little mad over the past few weeks (relishing our new-found liberty) and it's time to slow down. We've ordered testing kits and will find out tomorrow whether what we've got is Covid- not that giving a name to it is likely to speed recovery. Symptoms include stiffness and headache but myappetite is unaffected and I'm currently eating (plant)-buttered crumpets.

I've been researching the number 23. It's a prime number of course. There seems to be agreement across the esoteric world that it has significance but not what that significance is. William Burroughs wrote about it and so did Robert Anton Wilson. Early 20th century Americans used to say "Twenty-Three Skidoo" instead of "Scram" or "Fuck Off" but no-one really knows why. One suggestion is that "Twenty-Three" was what the tricoteuses chanted as Sydney Carton went to the guillotine in a popular contemporary Broadway adaption of A Tale of Two Cities.

We know we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. We had hoped it might be done through the application of conscience and sweet reason and the phasing in of new sources of energy. What we didn't envisage is that we'd be forced into it by a war in the Ukraine.