poliphilo

Combing Down His Yellow Hair

2026-06-07T06:49:32Z

Here's a song you don't hear much any more- Bobby Shaftoe.

When I was a nipper we used to sing it in and out of school. Pretty little tune, easy to sing.

I came across a version on Youtube yesterday- performed by a couple of Geordies calling themselves Blaydon Aces. They were pictured on the banks of the Tyne with the Baltic Gallery in the the background. Sweet!

"Funny," says Ailz, "It's clearly a woman's song but it's always performed by men".

But it's a sailor song. And your average 19th century sailor didn't suffer too much from gender anxiety. Besides, where would you find the women to do the singing on board a Tyne Collier?

One thing that always bothered me was the "silver buckles on his knee."

I thought that sounded painful. I mean, how were thet attached? With staples perhaps? Poor Bobby.

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I Wish

2026-06-06T14:36:16Z

It's raining hard. The wind is blowing. The Met Office says expect gusts of up to 39mph.

In my childhood we used to take jig-saw puzzles with us on our seaside holidays so we'd have something to do on days like this.

I wish I had a jig-saw puzzle with me now.

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Scammed

2026-06-06T06:59:36Z

I got scammed yesterday. It's an occupational hazard for anyone who stands front of house in a place of worship. First comes the sob story and then- oh, by the way, could you lend me the money for the train fare to X? It's urgent and you're my last hope. Afterwards one notices the inconsistencies and improbabilities and kicks oneself, but in the heat of the moment one's sympathies override one's critical faculty. Ailz consoled me with the reflection that anyone who goes to the lengths these folk go to in their yarn spinning must really need the money- and could almost be said to have earned it. This one even had a confederate who backed up the initial phone call with another from (allegedly) the Isle of Wight.

I dreamed last night that we were being bombed by the Germans. The planes angled down one by one in broad daylight and dropped their bombs in a nearby street. There were big explosions.....

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Addition And Subtraction

2026-06-05T07:32:35Z

Life is a process of addition and subtraction. You lose one thing and gain another. You lose the freedom of youth and gain the security of family life- and so on. Of course it's never as clearcut as that. There are gains within losses and losses within gains- and, if you're being properly Zen about it- both gains and losses are illusory.

You think you've found peace in old age but things still keep occuring- and the only peace that you can count on is that which comes from within......

Peace (on Earth, anyway) isn't about the absence of troubles and annoyances but how you deal with them when they arise.

As Kipling wrote (in a poem that's deeper than it seems)

"If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same......"

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A Miscellany

2026-06-03T09:40:32Z

We had planned for the Quakers to walk in this year's Pride Parade with our big new yellow banner stretched across the road, but no-one did anything much about it and the people who might have led the charge have left the Meeting and the parade's organisers have no record of our initial interest and the date is almost upon us- so it's not going to happen. Could we have mustered enough bodies, anyway? Probably not. There are two types of Quaker- the activists and the quietists- and I'm a quietist so was never going to be the one to rally support. I would have marched, though; I'd even bought myself a ridiculous hat (which was featured in a recent post.) I'm quiet, but not that quiet.

**********

"We're not set up for a comfortable retirement" says Ailz

I say "Ah".

"We don't have enough money for it," says Ailz.

I say "Ah" again.

"This is the Daily Mail talking," says Ailz.

I go "Ah" for the third time.

***********

When the wind whistles- as it's doing right now- I go back in thought to my grandparents' bungalow on the cliff at Rottingdean- not so very far along the coast from here- and time is telescoped- and the things that I remember happening there in my childhood could have happened yesterday....

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Wide Screen

2026-06-03T07:51:12Z

The big window in our bedroom that looks out across Eastbourne to the South Downs is one of the things that sold this house to me. I don't get bored with looking through it. The format is wide screen and things are always going on- things like birds, cats, occasionally foxes, bushes, trees, flowers, clouds, patches of sunlight and- at night- the lights of cars travelling the hidden roads or popping up suddenly on the crest of the hill alongside the arrangement of trees that looks at this distance like a little church with a squat square tower, Today we're promised rain- and I expect to spend some time sitting on my bed watching it fall.

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Holy Books

2026-06-02T06:55:34Z

They want to set up an learning/study group at the Meeting House. Great idea. I'm in favour of all such initiatives.

An initial suggestion is that the group should study Faith and Practice- the Bible-sized tome I think of as The Big Red Book- as distinguished from Advices and Queries which I think of as The Little Red Book.

I express approval.

"But you hate Faith and Practice" says Ailz who is sitting beside me.

"Well, yes, but...."

Jacob comes to my resue. "It's rather prescriptive." he says.

"Yes, exactly...."

"So do you have any favourite Quaker books we could look at..." he suggests. Ever so kindly.

I'm on the back foot now. Can I think of any? No I can't. "I don't read Quaker books," I say. And that's true. I don't.

"That's very odd," he says, still kindly (he's a psychotherapist).

"Yes," I agree. "It is odd......"

Had I been all bright and sparkly instead of tired and tongue-tied I might have said- turning a negative into a positive- "But it's one of the things I love about Quakers. that they're not a people of the Book."

Holy books are such a drag. They calcify past movements of the spirit, turning insight into law. I love the story of the newly appointed Zen abbot who was handed the monastery's greatest treasure- an irreplaceable manuscript book in which previous abbots had written their deepest thoughts- and threw it straight on the fire....

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A Breath Of Sea Air

2026-06-01T07:09:31Z

Eastbourne in summer smells of the Easbourne Sewage Treatment Works.

The Sewage Treatment Works is run by Southern Water- a private company. They have a long history of not doing their job very well. Josh Babarinde, our local MP, is reported in The Argus as wanting a law prohibiting the CEOs of companies that serve the public badly from awarding themselves bonuses. Yes, that would be nice, and I don't suppose any Eastbourne resident would disagree....

I'm told Venice smells rather similar- in fact probably worse. Ah, but there's a price to be paid for living in paradise!

The Treatment Works is modelled on the Napoleonic era forts that occur at regular intervals along the south east coast. It dates from 1997- and is not unattractive considered simply as architecture. I have seen it referred to as Castle Poo.

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Dreamies

2026-05-30T07:54:26Z

The cat has gone off his Dreamies (little dark brown biscuity thinga containing "real chicken") so I scatter them for the resident gull who hasn't. Resident gull is pecking away when a somehat bigger gull descends from on high and there is squwaking and beakwork. Resident gull resorts to the pulling of tail feathers but then a third gull (the intruder's mate?) joins in and resident gull is chased away.

One shouldn't judge. One shouldn't take sides. This is just how gulls are.

The intruders clean up and leave. Resident gull returns. I scatter more Dreamies....

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Loud

2026-05-29T07:40:54Z

I got a compliment yesterday on the way I dress. I seem to remember the word "elegant" being used.

It's not one I'd use myself. "loud" perhaps, "shameless" maybe....

I wasn't always like this. For much of my life I dressed to blend in. I didn't exteriorise my non-conformity.

But now- what the hell!- I love colour.

Red braces, worn to be seen? Why not? This is who I am.....

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Stick

2026-05-28T07:14:27Z

I bought a stick with a polished knob on the end. (Tip shop, £3.00). The knob was integral to the stick and we were wondering how it came to be. A fellow shopper explained it to us. "That's formed from the root," he said."And what you've got there is a shillelagh."

When we got home I did some research myself. Shillelagh's are commonly made of blackthorn but don't have to be. There's a whole mystique around them but basically "shillelagh" is just the Irish for "stick". They're for walking with but can also be used for knocking people about.

My shillelagh is just what I need to help me climb Glastonbury Tor- which is something I mean to try to do at the end of June.....

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More Of The Same

2026-05-27T06:43:39Z

The heatwave continues. The company that manages our water supplies is asking us to conserve.

People were complaining about the heat at the Meeting on Sunday- no air conditiong in our 1940s building of course-and I had a flasback to going into an abandoned church in rural Kentucky- something of a Marie Celeste moment this- and seeing paper fans scattered about as if the congregation had been vaporised just moments before. "How about paper fans?" I said- and so we've bought some. They're sold as wedding accessories. Of course by next Sunday the temperatures will have stepped down (or so the forecasters say) with next week predicted to be cool and drizzly.

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Heatwave

2026-05-26T07:05:12Z

We're recording record temperatures for the UK in May. "Don't go out in the middday sun" says the Met Office. "Enjoy this foretaste of thing to come" say the believers in global warming.

As it cools off in the late afternoon I go and sit on the patio in the shade. The sky is a deep shade of blue and the resident gull arranges himself or herself against it, sitting like a gargoyle at the corner of the flat kitchen roof. We take cognisance of one another. High up, too high for me to be sure whether they're swallows or martins, birds of that sort are whizzing about- swoop flutter, flutter, swoop- chasing small insects. I wonder if anyone has ever clocked the mileage they must do. The moon, just a smidgeon past the halfway mark, is rising, becoming clearer, better defined as the sunlight weakens.....

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Grant Allen

2026-05-25T08:26:06Z

I 'm reading The African Millionaire by Grant Allen- a picaresque novel in which a rapacious South African Diamond King millionaire of the title gets scammed again and again (hooray!) by an ingenious con man. Grant Allen, who he? Well I'd never come across him before but a week or two back I happened upon a short story of his about a jewel robbery and it was funny, astute, wry- and very, very clever. His Scotland Yard detective says the criminal always turns out to be the least likely person and, by gum, that's exactly what happens. Had Agatha Christie read Grant Allen's stories? I bet she had, because I'm pretty damn sure that she- ahem- borrowed- the twist in the tail of The Great Ruby Robbery for one of her most celebrated plots.

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a Canadian scientist turned writer of fiction, well known in his day and a friend of H.G Wells and Conan Doyle. He was in at the birth of modern crime fiction and as inventive as any subsequent practitioner. Here he is; what a likeable face it is!

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Picture Diary 132

2026-05-24T14:10:01Z

Picture Diary 132

1. Sizeable object

2. I'll take the high road

3. I have raised strangers

4. Home planet

5. Cottingley 2026

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Stuff That should Be Headline News But Isn't

2026-05-24T06:55:58Z

I gather Pope Leo is going after Vatican corruption- and three Cardinals are under investigation. They thought he'd back down or consent to a cover-up as other Popes have done, but he's a toughie.

The Pentagon has released more info on UFOs. They're holding back the good stuff but letting us know they know. Call it a softening-up exercise. Others are following suit- the Japanese for instance- and the moment is fast approaching when a world leader gets up on a podium and says, "Me and my guys have got something to tell you.... " History knocks on the door- like Jesus in that horrid Victorian painting- the Light of the World- and it's a question who will get there first and shoot back the bolt. Could the current US President bear it if Putin or Xi or Pope Leo beat him to it? I doubt it. Future generations may forget everything else about our era but they'll remember the name of the person who made that particular paradigm-changing announcement.

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Petrichor

2026-05-23T10:41:54Z

Bank Holiday weekend, temperature in the mid 20s, the faint sounds of jollity that rise and swell on the breeze will be coming from the funfair in Princes Park. Later in the day there'll be a Carnival Procession along the front. It crossed my mind that the Quakers should be taking part, but I dismissed it; Quakers and Carnival are not an obvious mix- though we've said we'll participate in the Pride March later in the year.

I bought a hat at the Tip Shop to wear at Pride. I think it may have started out on the head of a Morris dancer.

Damian is up on his roof with his two two stepsons replacing and repairing tiles. I just cut the grass. Since Wendy took over the bottom half of the lawn for a vegetable patch there's a good deal less of it to deal with. Ailz says the scent of new mown grass is in fact the grass sending out a warning to other grass in the vicinity, though how grass is supposed to defend itself I really don't know. Ailz says the name for that scent is petrichor.....

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One Of The Gifts Of Age

2026-05-23T08:16:15Z

They say that when you look back on your life from the other side of the veil it seems to have gone by in no time at all. In a snap of the fingers, a blink of the eye. Probably because on the other side of the veil there is no time at all.

I'm getting a foretaste of that now.

As if my life were a landscape that I'm viewing through a powerful telescope. The events of seventy years ago, fifty years ago, twenty five years are all up close and in sharp focus.

As if there were no intervals between them,

As if they were all happening at once.

Our Quaker study group is going to be discussing ageing tomorrow- and this may be one of the thing I'll choose to talk about....

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Jim

2026-05-22T09:01:41Z

I find myself thinking about Jim Morrison.

He came from privilege, his dad an Admiral, if you can call it privilege to have been dragged around the globe in the wake of an alpha male.

He told the world his parents were dead, only they weren't. He grew his hair, dressed in leather, talked Rimbaud, waved his dick around. A vid I just watched tells me the new persona was fully formed before he found a vehicle for it in the Doors.

Oh, he was so fortunate to happen upon those musicians! They created the sound- the hypnotic sound- the carnival sound- that backed his carrying on. He needed them. Have you read the art he created on his own- the poetry? It's not very good. He'd have been nobody very much without them.

Would he have been happier as a nobody? That's the road untravelled.

As he aged he wanted out of the act. It was making him ill. He wanted to be Jim- only who was Jim? Was Jim even a thing?

There are parallels with Elvis. The King, the Lizard King, two legends built on sand. The Fat Elvis and the Fat Jim of their later years have the same blank moon-face. The face of a Fool.

But we are all fools. If you are a Tarot reader or a Shakespearian you'll know that being the Fool is a good thing.

He stopped showing up for the Doors. Then he went to France. There are reports that at the end he wasn't always drunk or high, but would sit at cafe tables staring into space- scribbling in a note book, writing a new self.

Changing his skin.

As with Elvis there's a theory that he faked his own death. It's not impossible; people do.

You gotta die to live.......

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Parricide

2026-05-21T07:33:36Z

Ah yes, Oedipus: the son kills the father. He does it unknowingly but.... but the overbearing old man on the road is a symbol of the father- and is asking to be killed- only then turns out to be the actual father- and the laudable or understandable act of self-defence is revealed as parricide- worst of crimes.

Why is it the worst? Because the fathers- who are afraid of their sons- declared it to be so.

Every son wants to kill his father. Really? Oh yeah. I wanted to kill mine.....

"Kill" in the sense of rid myself of his influence, get out from his shadow, be free, be my own man....

A son writes to his father, "I need to defend myself against you," The father is taken aback. He hadn't realised he was such a monster......

The sacred king in the grove at Nemi, beating the bounds, sword in hand. He is all but a god, but always in fear of the young man who will eventually step up and challenge and kill him and become king in his turn. An endless cycle.

How to end it? Get rid of fathers, get rid of sons......

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The Tree Of Life

2026-05-20T07:51:58Z

So I'm rereading Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah.

Dion Fortune- aka Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946)- was a ceremonial magician.

Here she is, doing her thing

I don't have the temperament or the intellect for ceremonial magic. I can't remember- or be bothered to remember- all those lists of correspondences. Ceremonial magic ain't spontaneous. And I like spontaneity.

Still, if you want an introduction to Cabala- which is how I prefer to spell it- Dion Fortune is straightforward and readable- even chatty. She was also a Jungian and wrote novels. I'll acknowledge that she's very much out of date- but then I like old books.

She calls the Cabala the "Yoga of the West". It's roots are in Judaism, it was developed and elaborated by Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages- and taken up and made accessible to the modern mind by 19th and 20th century occultists. At its heart is the glyph known as The Tree of Life which "is an attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every force and factor in the manifested universe and the soul of man." It looks like this

The circles are known as sephiroth and represent those forces and factors aforesaid. Malkuth at the bottom is the sphere of earthly manifestation and Kether at the top is the all but unknowable Godhead. The straight lines are paths that can be travelled {which the moderns have identified with the major Trumps of the Tarot) and the entire glypth tells you how things hang together. We used it a bit in Wicca.- and I once wrote a longish poem in which I travelled all round the tree- of which only parts still survive. The rest, the parts I ditched, were superficial and glib because what do I know?

I don't understand quite why I'm revisiting Cabala now, except that a dream seemed to be telling me to- and one must pay attention to dreams.....

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In Dreams

2026-05-19T07:32:29Z

Last night's dream had a lot of talking in it- but I forget what was said. Our taxi driver had taken us to his home where we met his wife and I was impressed by the books she had on the shelf behind her . I remember one of them- a fat volume entitled The Tree of Life

In dreams we go to the astral and do what I suppose you might call inner work. One doesn't have to remember them because the inner work will have been done whether we remember it or not. Still, the things we do remember will tell us where our inner selves are at. Dream imagery, unless we've become lucid, is always going to be a rough and ready translation into the stuff of waking life of apprehensions waking mind would otherwise find it hard to grasp. In dreams we apprehend our real life- the life that lies behind/ transcends the playacting we're engaged in on Earth.

So.....

Taxi driver = Spirit Guide

Taxi driver's wife = Anima or Higher Self

Tree of Life = Cabala

I was very much into Cabala in my forties- and I still have cabalistic books on my own shelves. I think I'm being prompted to take a second look.

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A Cat I Know

2026-05-18T07:02:06Z

We were looking after a cat last week - as we do from time to time. This commits us to a couple of visits a day, hanging out a bit and making sure the food and water bowls are topped up.

Ruby is a man's cat. She likes her male owner better than her female owner and me more than Ailz.

She is getting louder with age- just as our own Marlowe is. Cats don't talk to one another but work out along the way that humans aren't very good at telepathy and mainly communicate by making noises. It's a pity cats don't have prettier voices. Why can't a cat be more like a bird? I don't mean like a gull, of course; gulls and cats sound very alike; I mean, for instance, a blackbird....

The highlight of Ruby's day in to go out into the enclosed back garden and drink rain water out of a big plant pot......

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As The Prophet Says

2026-05-16T07:53:02Z

I dreamed that my son- the one who has recently fallen out with me- gave an hour long lecture without notes. He was just a kid and I was proud of him....

No, "proud of him" isn't the right phrase, just a convenient one. One should be more precise. "Pleased for him" would be better.

In the dream, as I remember, I was hesitant to congratulate him, I suppose because I knew that in waking life he's gone beyond caring for my approval.

And in waking life what I am is pleased not proud. He's a successful man (gosh, all my kids are middle-aged now!) but his success is his own and nothing to do with me. It doesn't reflect backwards. The kind of success he's achieved isn't the kind I've wanted for myself or particularly wanted for him. It's his, nothing to do with me. We're on different paths.

As Kahlil Gibran's Propet says, "Your children are not your children"......

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Making Lists

2026-05-15T07:17:27Z

So, when you're drawing up a list of 100 best novels, or movies or whatever, do you let your heart or your head rule you?

I guess for most people it's a bit of both.

The head has to have it's say. If I'm drawing up a list of great movies I'm unlikely to include some piece of fluff that I love for no better reason than I watched it on a first date. Let's see, I love The Alamo, John Wayne's version- because it obsessed me when I was a kid- and I really, really wanted to be Laurence Harvey- but I'm mainstream enough to recognise that it's not exactly a cinematic milestone.

On the other hand a list ruled entirely by the head would have to include all sorts of things I don't like at all but know to be culturally important. For instance a list of great movies would have to include Battleship Potemkin- a film I consider downright nasty- crudely manipulative, dishonest- and a list of novels arrived at in that way would have to include something by Sir Walter Scott- who I find unreadable.

But the more heart we allow into the equation the more our lists are going to disagree. Subjectivity takes over, objectivity goes out the window.

I've already given you my number one novel. My number one movie is Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale.

So bite me!

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