A Place Of Light And A Place Of Darkness

 Our friend was in fine form yesterday afternoon. You wouldn't think she'd spent a day under anaesthetic having much of her body rearranged.

She's at the Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead- a storied place- in a ward named after one of the surgeons- Ross Tilley- who did pioneering reconstructive surgery on badly burned aircrew in the 1940s. There are pictures of WWII aircraft in the corridors- and we passed memorials to Tilley and his boss McIndoe and another to the Canadian fliers who passed through the facility. Our friend isn't particularly psychic but she was seeing orbs when she went down to surgery and caught a reflection in a mirror of someone walking behind her who wasn't actually present in her reality.

Our road to East Grinstead and back took us past Hamilton Palace- the folly de grandeur which Nicholas Van Hoogstraten began in the 1980s and then abandoned. I glimpsed its copper domed central cupola and the scaffolding that is still in place around its walls. Hoogstraten- who is still alive- is very rich, has a criminal record going back to his teens, was a "friend" of Robert Mugabe and seems to have gone out of his way to create a legend of extreme unpleasantness. Exactly what goes on at Hamilton Palace these days is unknown- and anyone who tries to venture onto the estate is met with barbed wire, blocked paths, intimidating notices and menacing henchmen.

What Drives The Bosses

 Two guys (who are probably famous in their own right though I've not come across them before) are interviewing the great Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail, and the three of them are in agreement that the sort of people who end up running the world are driven by their appetite for three things- money, sex and power- and that operators like Jeffery Epstein thrive on catering to those tastes- and using them to apply blackmail where necessary. Who the likes of Epstein are working for is an even murkier story and we won't pursue it....

So, money, sex and power- these are the great motivators and points of vulnerability- but, says one of the guys, there's a fourth- and it's legacy. Excellent point! The boss classes are concerned with how the future will remember them. They're as scared of the historian as they are of the investigative journalist. They want their place at the high table and their bank balances and their under-age lovers but they also want their statues in the park. The politician who is happy to be remembered as an absolute toe-rag is a rare beast- and has possibly never existed.