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The Summer Solstice- and it's going to be another in this run of very hot days.

Yesterday we drove across the County to buy the intensely local cheese they make in Rudgwick up against the Surrey border. The cheese is called Sussex Charmer and I've been eating it at the Long Man Inn. The outlet in Rudgwick has a cafe alongside where the speciality is toasted cheese and just about everything they serve is finger food. Where are the knives and forks? we wondered. But, of course there aren't any. This fed into the dream I had last night where I was working at a school and my job was to give out cutlery to the children then collect it up at the end of the meal. It was a peach of a job (though it entailed early rising) and I got on wonderfully with the kids.

Rudgwick has a church. I thought it a very average sort of a church. The pictures I took of it were very average too (the sort of uninspired, documentary pictures I've taken in a hundred different places: view of the tower from the south-west, check, close up of tower, check, view looking eastward down the nave, etc.....) so I wasn't particularly upset when I got home and found I'd been snapping away without a memory card.

We hadn't seen Joyce in something like 30 years. No problem. It could have been 30 minutes. We just carried on as we always have done. Friendship never ends (that's Yeats again) or as I said to her (and it's one of my favourite things to say) "Time is an illusion."

She's been visiting Eastbourne with a bunch of "wrinklies" (her word) on a coach holiday. Yesterday she spent the morning with us at the Meeting House. Our Quakers were lovely with her. They're a friendly crowd.

She's had good weather for it. Temperatures in the mid 20s.

I've had Maxwell's Silver Hammer popping into my head for weeks now.

It's a song the other Beatles hated- mainly because McCartney took it so seriously and made them work overtime to get it right.

They thought it was a throwaway bit of Granny music, but it ain't. For one thing it's about a mass murderer, for another it treats its subject with unbecoming levity. It's nihilistic but cheerful with it- in the best tradition of Mr Punch and the English music hall.

And this morning I stumbled across a piece of info that pulled everything together:

Macca had been taking an interest in Alfred Jarry, That's why "pataphysical"- a Jarry coinage- crops up in the first verse.

Jarry, you may or may not know, wrote a play called Ubu Roi- about an obscene little fat man who murders his way to the throne of Poland. It is absurd, scatalogical and an affront to all the decencies. Yeats was at the first night in 1896, cheering it on, but then went away and was sad because he knew it meant the end of the Celtic Twilight and all that greenery-yallery stuff that was his stock in trade and he'd have to toughen up if he wanted to survive in the new artistic environment. "After us," he wrote, "The savage gods."

Ever since he erupted onto the political scene I've thought of Donald Trump as Jarryesque. He's the living image of Pere Ubu. The savage god come into his own at last, or- Yeats again- the rough beast prophesied in "The Second Coming."

So here's the whole lineage: Mr Punch, Pere Ubu, Maxwell Edison, Donald Trump....

Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a song for our times.

Picture Diary 95

1. You called?

2. What are you doing here?

3. Through the Stargate

4. Friends

5. Treat it with care

6. Lotus

A few more days and we'll be half way through 2025. Six more months and we'll be in the second quarter of the century.....

The 20th century was a drag. At least towards the end it was. Year after year after year- and the Millenium still such a long way off! As Ray Davies wrote at some point during that slow, slow process, "I'm a 20th century man but I don't want to die here...."

But now the 21st century is flying past.....

"Should I know any of these people?" asked Ailz from the next room

"Which people?"

"The people in the photograph on the mantlepiece."

"There is no photograph on the mantlepiece."

"Yes there is. Come and see...."

And indeed there was. I hadn't put it there, Ailz hadn't put it there. I asked Carolina and she said it had been there when she entered the room and she'd carefully dusted round it.

Here's the photograph. I knew the image but I hadn't known we possessed this particular print. It shows a bunch of young people in fancy dress posing with some elders who have moved beyond that kind of frivolity. The only ones I can certainly identify are my grandmother and her three sisters- Ethel, Kathleen and Joan. Violet, my granny, is in the back row just off centre holding a parasol. My guess is she and the other parasol carriers are dressed as the "three little maids from school" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Joan, my favourite great aunt, is the kiddie in the foreground in the feathery hat holding what I think is a toy trumpet.

("For, God's sake, someone take it off her. She'll deafen us all!")

Did granny put the photo on the mantlepiece? Did Joan? Did they conspire together? What are they trying to say?

That they're still around?

Well, of course they are.

The Landlord, who we hadn't met before, said the only place he could seat us was out in the garden, but the waitress made protesting noises and said, "No, no, no; they're regulars"- and he changed his mind and nodded us towards a seat in the corner of the bar area which had a notice on it saying "Drinkers Only". This was all very gratifying.....

"Now I remember why we used to like coming to Tonbridge," said Ailz as we traipsed from charity shop to charity shop. Tonbridge High Street has so many of them. She bought a dress for herself and one for Wendy- who had treated us to lunch- and I bought a straw hat (made in China, of course.)

"Traipse" is a word I like to use. It has weariness built into it. Traipsing is so much more tiring than a good brisk walk over the same distance would be.

Yesterday was hot and still. I felt I needed that hat to keep the sun off. Oh, how my feet hurt and my legs ached!

They promised us a thunderstorm. It would blanket the south-east, they said. Lots of banging and flashing. In the event we got some flashing but hardly any noise. This morning's weather is hot, damp and oppressive.

Yesterday's weather, building up to the storm, was sunny and still. I pursued my resolution to ground myself by going round without shoes and socks. It's nice to feel the grass underfoot. Towards evening as it grew cooler I got the lawn mower out. For that I put some shoes on.

You gotta be careful round lawn mowers. Last year, first time I cut the grass, I wasn't paying attention and tripped over ithe mower and almost certainly broke a rib or two. I didn't tell anyone because I hate to make a fuss, but there was pain for several weeks- and I had to steel myself every time I turned over in bed.

Back to the grounding. There was a period of my life when I was Nature Boy and all but dispensed with shoes. Memory tells me I once walked the mile or so into town barefooted in the snow but surely Memory is lying......

"Does Israel have the right to exist?" asked the interviewer.

And the interviewee- who was Palestinian- replied "Israel exists".....

Meaning the present state of Israel is a political fact that it would be foolish to deny but the rights of the matter are something else entirely.....

You had have the same exchange about any piece of real estate on earth. The geo-political map is always in flux. Nations blink into existence, blink out again. Empires come and go, their boundaries in a state of perpetual change. Look at a political map from a hundred years ago and it'll be hopelessly out of date.

Forget Israel- that's so contentious- and let's look at the status of a territory that's a little less so- though who knows?- California. it has existed inside it's present boundaries since the 1500s. Before that it was a patchwork of tribal territories. According to Dick Allgire- who was giving us his take on the present unrest in L.A.- it is stiil- on paper- which isn't worth a great deal- the property of the King of Spain. When Spain lost its grip on its American colonies, California passed to Mexico, but only briefly- and then to the United States. Each one of these transitions was marked by violence. Does the United States have a "right" to hold onto it? Only for as long as it can. The protesters in L.A. who are waving Mexican flags have a point....

Every name on the world map is a notion, an idea, a dream.

In 1579 the English pirate Francis Drake landed somewhere north of the present City of San Francisco. He got on well with the local tribespeople and claimed the area for the English crown, naming it New Albion. This colony of his persisted for about as long as he remained in the vicinity- and if King Charles wants to reaffirm his right to the land he would first have to ascertain exactly where it is because people no longer remember....

Brian Wilson died.

And my brain is looping the single phrase "God only knows...."

The garden was beginning to look shaggy, so I got out the long-handled shears and the short-handled shears and trimmed it a bit. It was late afternoon and the sun was on the slide and the light it was giving was mellow. I sat on the grass, snipping away and a sense of well-being stole over me that lasted for the rest of the evening.

I believe this is called "grounding". I should do it more often.....

Most weeks we get a food delivery from one of the big supermarkets. This week Ailz went with Waitrose- which is a novelty- and for the first time since Covid we had a delivery man who didn't just hand over at the doorstep but carried his boxes through to the kitchen. I told him how impressed I was and he seemed surprised- as though he'd never known any different.

I thought, "Finally things have returned to normal" but, of course they haven't. Since Covid the world has changed- but this was an odd little flash of how things used to be.

Talking about how the world has changed- but in a different register- I notice that journalists are using the term "Civil War" to describe what is going on in L.A.- where anti-ICE activists are now facing off against the Marines.....

I'm not going to go mad with bands of the 80s that never existed but should have, but couldn't resist visualising this one.

The very wonderful....

Spacey Jim and the Pleiadians

We spent most of yesterday playing at being Quakers. We were at our own Meeting in the morning and over in Uckfield (careful how you say it) for the Area Meeting in the afternoon. Ailz breezed into the hall and told the clerk, "You can start now, Eastbourne's here!"

The clerk was having difficulty with her acronyms. It became a sort of running gag. The one she mostly kept stumbling over was BMHWP- which stands for Bexhill Meeting House Working Party.

The Bexhill Meeting is down to three or four, can't attract new people and occupies a fair-sized, mid 20th century building which isn't generating any income. Is this a luxury we can afford or not? That's what the BMHWP is tasked to "discern".

The second part of the afternoon was spent on an exercise called "Why do we keep on coming to the Quaker Meeting?" with people standing up, one by one, as moved by the Spirit, to give their reasons. I was tempted to say, adapting Churchill on Democracy, "Because it's the very worst of faith groups apart from all the rest" but in the event said something less facetious instead.....

And here's the fence as it appears this morning.

I was afraid the guy would trash the shrubs and other plants that are up against the fence line but they seem untouched- so, well done, him! Now we just need them all to grow six feet tall and hide the naked wood.

I lay in bed this morning, half awake, thinking up cool names for 80s rock groups- in consequence of which I give you, for the first time ever on any stage.... Guinevere and the Broken Knights!

Picture Diary 94

1. Azrael

2. Guardians

3. The Holy Hill

4. Knight of the doleful contenance

5. The Red Desert

6. The Elephant House

The couple next door wanted the shared fence renewing and we agreed because we're good neighbours. It's happening as I write.

I like the way it looks without the fence- and the two gardens united. I said so to Alison next door and she agreed.

At six foot the new fence will be higher than the old one; that's higher than my head.

Personally I'd rather have spent the money on something else- like dinners down the pub....

Big, big rooms,

Raw concrete walls, no natural light, no natural air.

I suppose the intention is that nothing should detract from the art on the walls, but, oh Gawd, such a setting does, it does.....

This is the Towner, Eastbourne's very own, prize winning art gallery. I want to love it, truly I do, and the brightly painted outside is jolly and the corridors, with their big windows looking out over the tennis courts are jolly too, but the actual mid-level galleries are like some bunker constructed to house politicians in the event of war. They depress the spirit. The art would have to be very bright and life-affirming to assert itself in such a space. Leonardo might cope, Turner might cope, Picasso might cope.

But Eastbourne can't afford to show the big names....

And the exhibition we went to see- of modernist English art- much of it small scale and soberly coloured- doesn't stand a chance. Pictures that would look really nice on somebody's living room wall are defeated by the setting. They look unambitious, tentative, sad....

I'd had to do my elder thing on one of my Friends because his long, rambling, off-the-point interventions in Meeting for Worship were annoying people- including myself- and people were getting "triggered" by his references to witch-burning, the Holocaust and other upsetting subjects This led to exchanges that had me fearful we'd fallen out permanently. But he turned up at Meeting for Worship yesterday and was as friendly as ever. Good. He's someone of whom I'm genuinely fond.

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poliphilo

July 2025

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Sussex Charmer

After 30 Years

The Savage God

Picture Diary 95

Unreal

It's A Mystery

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Traipsing

Nature Boy

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God Only Knows....

Grounding

The Old Normal And The New

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