New Words

 I've learned some new words:

Physicalism, physicalist.

A physicalist is a person who believes the physical world is the ultimate reality. His/her opposite is an idealist- a person who believes the physical world is an illusory projection of consciousness.

I have always been an idealist myself- though 20th century Anglican theology (John Robinson and Don Cupitt) pushed me close to physicalism for a while.

I would like to revise my vocabulary and- in future-  use physicalism and physicalist instead of materialism and materialist.  The new words are free of perjorative overtones, less judgemental- and one should try one's best to be kind to one's enemies...

Three Dreams

 Dream No 1: I was attending one of those Super Churches they have in the Southern States of America. The old guy sitting next to me was wearing a purple robe with a hood, and just to make his affiliation entirely clear the hood had KKK printed on its side. " Have you decided to join the party yet?" he asked- and I understood him to mean the Republican party. "But I'm English," I explained, "And I'm going home tomorrow." At this point a number of his friends showed up, including a snippy young guy in a wifebeater. I was hoping things would pass off without unpleasantness  but then the snippy young guy made some snippy remarks and used the "N" word- twice...

Dream No 2: Was borderline lucid. I was looking round a house which I knew was my house- but which wasn't this house or any other in which I've ever lived. I looked out the windows and saw a very nice garden, and hints of a landscape that I knew was somewhere in Sussex but not our part of Sussex. There were two framed prints on the wall, with a lot of text (not necessarily in English) and line drawings of trees. My father had just left and I wanted to get round to the front of the house to see if I could see him through the windows....

Dream No 3: A friend showed up hungry, harrassed and unsteady on his feet. He'd grown a beard and moustache since since I'd seen him last.  He said he'd eat lunch with us but it needed to be chicken. I opened a bag of what I thought were chicken nuggets but they turned out to be pork. Preparations were underway for a feast. Guests were arriving- including Ailz's parents. I found a silver tray that had been hammered and bent out of shape and several kitchen implements- ladles and serving spoons that had been broken in two. Clearly the children had done it. I asked Alice why (for the purposes of the dream she was a teenager) and she gave me a rationale that made sense but which I now forget. I told her I'd have to commandeer her savings to pay for the damage- knowing, even as I spoke, that I'd never carry through on my threat....

Who Exactly Was Jimmy Savile?

Who exactly was Jimmy Savile?

By what hidden process did a charmless oik with questionable talents as an entertainer come to own the keys to every door in the kingdom- from Broadmoor and Leeds Royal infirmary to Buckingham Palace and Number Ten?

I didn't watch the BBC drama-doc with Steve Coogan- because I didn't think it would answer these questions- and, from what I've read, it didn't. Instead I watched a video in which Shaun Attwood the former drug smuggler and Jon Wedger the whistleblowing former cop indulged in speculation.

Wedger sketched out a timeline in which Savile first edged into the underworld as a guy who ran clubs in Leeds. There he got into the habit of corrupting policemen and found a niche- as a paedophile himself- in pimping children to people too grand to go trawling the streets and railway stations themselves. Somewhere along the line he found himself servicing the needs of Louis Mountbatten and other very important people- gathering information of a kind the intelligence service covets and for which they'll trade impunity and protection.  He was smart, he was intrusive, he was a fixer- and eventually there wasn't a string in the cats cradle of association and dependency that makes up the British establishment that he couldn't tweak....

He was the British Epstein. Unlike Epstein he hid in plain sight- which may have been a better strategy than just hiding- as witness their comparative longevity...

if only we could be sure of the facts...