poliphilo

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Politicians mostly play the game. They play it competently or incompetently, ethically or unethically- but they recognise the guidelines and more or less keep inside them. Once in a while though a politician comes along who doesn't give a damn for the rules....

And has whatever it takes to carry all before them (at least for a while)

Such people are extraordinary. They change the world. In the past two or three centuries we have seen....

Napoleon

Hitler

Gandhi

Mao

And now there's Trump.

Does Trump really belong in that category or does he seem larger than he is because of a trick of perspective?

I guess that depends on how long he lasts.....

I've seen it suggested- by a couple of people now- that the little contretemps at the White House was theatre- a piece of improvised drama in which all the players- including Zelensky- knew what they were going to do. A deal- involving mineral rights- had been hashed out in private and this was a bit of distraction to make us think the Ukraine war was ending with a bang and not a whimper. If so, this is a reversal of the way things are normally done- with the shouting and intimidation happening behind closed doors and the public then being treated to the handshakes and smiles. Please note that I'm not saying this is definitely what happened (because who- apart from the players and their stage hands- could possibly know?)- but that politicians are politicians and expecting them to play things straight is like expecting a worm not to wriggle....

Zelensky now has an interview with the King of England. I think he is being ushered off the stage amid fanfares so as to save his face and the faces of all his supporters. He is too closely associated with the war to be allowed to remain in office under the new settlement.

But everything is theatre, isn't it- and this is just a play within a play.....

"The equinox is jut a few days away"

"Seems much less that half a year ago that we were anticipating the other equinox."

"Time is speeding up. And it's not just because we're old. The young people are noticing too."

They released the first sheaf of Epstein documents the other day. I flicked through them. Nothing there we didn't already know. And, actually, who cares any more? Epstein seems a very long time ago- what with the way historical events are racing past. Epstein is so Clinton-era- which seems scarcely less distant than the Nixon era or any other political era you care to name now that Trump is president and doing politics a little differently....

Time was when US prsidents knifed foreign politicians in the back secretly (using the CIA or whatever, funding their opponents sub rosa) but here were Trump and Vance giving it to Zelensky full frontal with the cameras turning. "Great television" indeed. I thought of the conspirators closing in on Caesar, egging one another on, bloody rags flapping in the breeze. That was another man- of greater stature admittedly- who was done in by his supposed friends.

I don't judge. I observe.

And try to stick with the pace.....

Of course, it's the first of March! How could I have let it slip my mind?

While I date the beginning of Spring from the appearance of the earliest daffodil, the first of March makes it "official". Feburary is a Winter month and March is a Spring month and that, he said, is that.

I had a dream I was at a political rally. George Elliot had just given a speech. I leaped onto the stage- which was all squidgy like a mattress, the crowd was roaring and I shouted, "The leader is outside, doing his great work, let's sing a song for him"- and found, to my embarrassment, that I couldn't remember his name.

Picture Diary 83

1. Buzzed

2, Ex Cathedra

3. Teacher and Pupli 1

4. Teacher and Pupil 2

5. Pilgrim

6. Trip of a Lifetime

I was never one for bouncing out of bed first thing in the morning. I always preferred to wake early and lie and doze for a good long time, mulling over my dreams and maybe indulging in a few more. What has changed is that where once I'd have been alert when I finally got up, now I'm not.

And where once I'd have started the dozing period at- say- seven o'clock, now I start it at five- and find it impossible to lie in bed much beyond six-fifteen....

I tell myself that if I could only get a proper, full, long night's sleep I'd wake up feeling like I did at seventeen....

Yeah, of course I would. Dream on....

What did political satire ever achieve?

My friend says it's a safety valve, but I think it also banks up resentment and frustration- and the one effect cancels out the other. "I have observed that the president's hairstyle is really silly so how come he's still in power? Grrrrr."

I was listening to a clip of Alan Watts talking about Lao Tzu talking about politics. Both- at a distance of several thousand years- thought an obsession with politics, on the part of those who are not actually playing the game- was a waste of vital energy and a diversion from the true business of living. A politician has an important social function- and so does the person who cleans the toilets- and why make more of a fuss about the one than the other? "Render unto Caeasar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" Oh, look. Jesus thought exactly the same.

Over at the site where I muck about with AI a popular image maker has announced that he/she (such a sign of the times that one doesn't know which) is giving up doing what we do because of the fear and loathing s/he feels every time s/he logs onto the site.

I suspect everybody who does any kind of creative work- no matter how humble and obscure- feels something of this when faced with the absence out of which one has to conjure some sort of presence. Put into words (inadequate of course) one is thinking "Suppose I can't do it today, suppose I can't do it ever again- and if I do manage to produce something suppose it is hopelessly sub-standard- and I disappoint myself and everybodyelse who makes up my "public?"

If the symptoms get too alarming the sanest thing is to walk away- as the AI artist has done. Or is it? Can a person who has once tasted the sweetness of creative work ever live happily without it?

You move one piece of furniture- and there's a knock-on offect- and you end up rearranging the house.

Sej has stopped sleeping in a cot- because he can climb out- so I disassembled the one we have here and replaced it with a bed.

We inherited my mother's drawing room suite and it wasn't comfortable- and my proudest moment yesterday was manhandling the settee- very big, very heavy- through three doorways and out into the garage. We've kept one wing chair and replaced the others with poangs from Ikea.

This morning we turned our shared desk round, and this has created a clear passageway across the book-room to the sliding doors that open into the garden.....

I have a discriminating appreciation of erotica, you, I regret to say, have a dirty mind and he is a porn fiend.

We got into a discussionof/argument about pornography at the Meeting House yesterday. It was frustrating. We weren't engaging with one another; but rather- each of us- beating up on our own personal demons as projected onto the person opposite. And it struck me that most contentions- not just on this topic- are like this- from your shouting match in the street to all out warfare between nations. We don't hear one another or see one another but are in effect fighting with ourselves- on a battlefield defined by childhood trauma and psychological quirk.

Mary was photographing flowers for a school project. We pointed her at the daffodils. There are five of them now.

We went to the oriental buffet. Now I'm no longer pretending to be a vegan I can do more than look wistfullly at the salt and pepper prawns.

One of the charity shops we went into had a recipe for a Bloody Mary printed on canvas, mounted on wooden stretchers for hanging on your kitchen wall. They wanted £2.00 for it, so how could I resist? I bought it and gave it to Mary. Ha!

(This entry is out of sequence, not that it matters. I should have posted it yesterday, but forgot to carry it across from LJ.)

It's warming up. I've stopped wearing fingerless gloves and a scarf indoors

We met Mike and Su and Sej at the Nevill Crest and Gun at Eridge- which is close to being halfway between Greenwich and Eastbourne. Sej thought it was a great game to gather up handfuls of gravel from the pub car park and post them down a grid. he was so happy we didn't exactly discourage him and just hoped no-one was watching.

He was going on about Irene. "Who is this Irene he is so besotted with?" I wondered. Eventually it was explained to me he was actually saying "Ice cream".

When it came to the ice cream course he wound up eating a good half of my raspberry sorbet.

The Nevill Crest and Gun is in my top ten of great names for pubs- or would be if I had one. The Nevills were/are the big landowners in those parts- and the gun references the fact that the Kent and Sussex Weald was a centre of of the late mediaeval/early renaissance arms industry. Weald=forest=charcoal=founderies=guns. I read that there was one particular gun they used to keep in Eridge and haul out and fire on public holidays. I don't see why this wouldn't be true.

I don't normally dream about politics- not that I remember, anyway- but last night I dreamed about Zelensky. He was passing through an airport having returned from a conference where he had been told by the bigger players that his presence was surpus to requirement. It was as if he he'd had a stroke. The right hand side of his face was lifeless, expressionless, like. the face of a wax doll, but the left hand side was terrified, with the eye rolling in the socket and the white visible all the way round, like that of a bull calf that knows it's on its way to the abbatoir.

A chap who came to measure up for our new stair lift asked Ailz what religion her husband was.

I was wearing one of my topis which makes me look Turkish or something along those lines

I suggested she should have told him I was just a Victorian- but that's not a religion- or is it?

I bought a couple of new topis the other day. These two are particularly decorative.

And they have tassels.....

Picture Diary 82

These images were all generated from the same prompt. So call them Variations on a Theme. The theme is androgyny.....

When our neighbours first got a dog we'd hear them shouting shouting "Car Park, Car Park!" in the dusk of the evening. Funny name for a dog, we thought, but original. Eventually we worked out that what they were really saying was "Go ta-ta"- a cutesy way of telling it to hurry up and do a shit.

And the dog's actual name is Woody

We were disappointed.

The other night I had a dream in which Car Park meant something doggy in a foreign language. Lots of dogs were called Car Park. It may even have been the name of a breed.

If I ever get to own a dog- which is highly unlikely- I shall call it Car Park for old time's sake.....

It's Spring today but it could be Winter tomorrow and then again Spring the day after. There are transitional times in the year when it's not very clearly one season or another. In fact much of the year is like that.

Which makes it pretty meaningless to set dates for the beginning and end of a season. So far as I'm concerned Spring begins when I see the first daffodil. Last year Spring began in late January; this year it's a bit later. Today, as it happens, the actual weather is backing me up. The sky is blue, a bit hazy and there's warmth in the sun....

We have a fox coming to the garden. A vixen we think. Once in a while we catch glimpses. She's been digging in one of the flower beds, gets to a certain depth, then gives up. Is she trying to make an earth for herself? If so she's not trying very hard. I backfill but then she excavates the self-same spot and stops at just the same depth. This morning I found one of the gladioli bulbs she'd displace sitting on the patio. Obviously she'd picked it up and carried it there in her little sharp teeth. Why? As a peace offering? A gift? I presume she knows what she's doing.....

The other morning, very early, in the gloaming, there was the most unearthly screeching going on. We're not schooled in fox behaviour but we think she may have been making love.....

The trees talk to one another, says the book I'm reading- and not just locally but across continents. The trees are a collective, a unity- and if we hurt them too badly, by trashing the Amazon rain forest for instance- we could lose them all- everywhere. They'll know they're not wanted and take themselves off. And the answer isn't to plant new forests wholesale, dibbing the saplings into the ground in lines, industrially, unfeelingly, bang,bang, bang- but for us as individuals to plant individual trees with love. They need to be shown we care and we need to make a heart connection- to our mutual benefit- with these- our elder brothers and sisters.....

Quakers practice an extreme form of democracy (though oddly enough they don't call it that) in which everybody's voice is heard, there are no winners and losers- and nothing gets done without the whole Meeting being in accord.

It is time-consuming, devilishly hard- requiring levels of patience, forebearance and detachment that stretch human nature to breaking point- and quite often doesn't work.

Then drama happens.

And don't we just revel in drama!

All the same, I can't think of a better way of regulating human affairs.

We are not, worthy, we are not worthy- and yet......

....Perhaps we can be.

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poliphilo

March 2026

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