Generations

 I can't keep track of the generations- and where they begin and end.  I think they're coming and going faster than they ever did- and we're more conscious of them than ever before. Or the media is, because, as I've said, I can't keep up. X, Y, Z have flashed past and now it seems we're back to A again- or should it be Alpha?

But they're real things; I don't doubt it. And we need, or at least crave, the company of members of our own particular generation because only those born within a narrow time frame are going to have passed the same cultural and historical markers on their journey into adulthood- undergone the same initiations into the same lodge and know what the handshakes are.  I was born in 1951- which makes me a boomer (I think.) Tail-end, perhaps. And, as Al Stewart, a fellow boomer but from the front end of our generation, wrote, "Sergeant Pepper was real to me."

More real than he could be to anyone a few years older or a few years younger.

I had a an experience over Christmas that brought all this home to me. My friend is 81- so less than a decade older than I am- but lives in another mental universe. I was demonstrating how easy it is to find things on the internet (about which he is clueless) and suggested he name a song- any song- and I'd dig it out for him in double-quick time. I was prepared for Elvis. Maybe Sinatra. Maybe even Kathleen Ferrier. But what did he come up with? He came up with Al Jolson singing Swannee...

Jolson, I ask you- in full, unironic blackface...

Baby, It's Cold Outside

 Little white specks have been floating about on the breeze. The first snow of the year? Only if you're prepared to stretch a point- but I suspect places further inland may have been copping for it good style. According to my instruments the temperature is 2 degrees Celsius. 

I've been reading Stevenson's short stories. He's a great story teller- and that's a treasurable gift- but he's also subtle, subversive and funny- with a dry, straightfaced Edinburgh wit. His fiction regularly features ethically challenged but fascinating people- the most famous of whom are Long John Silver and Alan Breck Stuart...

I'm also reading Paul Wallis- the Australian archdeacon who has discovered- through discriminating and unbiased translation- that the Old Testament isn't about God at all but about technologically advanced alien colonists who came to Earth in the distant past and mucked abouut with humanity. This is so far from orthodox opinion that to state it baldly invites abuse and cancellation, but I think he's right.  For one thing it explains why Yahweh habitually behaves like such an absolute bastard...