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The Three Brands
2025-12-28 12:24 poliphilo
Russell Brand the whacked out, rakehell comedian was brilliant,  charismatic and horrid. I didn't like him but I was impressed.

Russell Brand the alternative media frontman, talking truth to power was someone I followed. I even bought one of his books.

Russell Brand the guy in the limo with the perma-grin who can't shut up about Jesus I find rebarbative. I mean, he's just so unEnglish.

What links the three? Excess, Narcissism, some sense that if this person wasn't in the spotlight he'd shrivel up and die.

But the switcheroos are so extreme that mainly I'm bewildered. They feed into my sense that our civilisation has become unmoored, fragmented, atomised. That it no longer feels real. Or serious. Or the least bit important.....

Beauty Pageants
2025-12-27 11:49 poliphilo
I watched a clip or two of Erica Kirk in her days as a beauty queen and wondered how anybody maintains that grin. Don't your facial muscles ache, don't your teeth get cold? I've tried to do it- and it's so unnatural; the body just doesn't want to go there.

I was watching Kirk because beauty pageants are in the news- more specifically the ones the current President used to run. O so tacky, O so banal, O so locker-room.

These things keep falling out of the sky, like debris from a volcano. They fall on the American President and the circle of similarly tacky and banal old men- some dead, some not so dead- who have been identified as existing in the orbit of Jeffery Epstein.

First the ash, and the red-hot cinders. Then the pyroclastic flow......

Christmas Day At The Meeting House
2025-12-26 11:03 poliphilo
"I think that was worth doing," said Ailz as we drove away- and I agreed.

Basically we did what we normally do on a Thursday: half an hour's Meeting for Worship, followed by socialising and lunch- only with Christmas trimmings. People came and went- not all of them Quakers. And those who sat down to lunch were a miscellaneous group of people who would otherwise have been at a loose end. There was much too much food- and I'll be eating leftovers for several days- but that is also traditional. It was fun and it was tiring....

Merry Christmas
2025-12-25 12:01 poliphilo


Here we are in our holiday gear
Because it is that time of year.
The wind is sharp, the world is sere
Because we're Quakers there won't be beer.

Oh dear.

Christmas Eve
2025-12-24 18:41 poliphilo
The sunshine is deceptive. Step outside and there's a biting breeze and you step back inside pretty smartish. Does it feel a lot like Christmas? Not where I'm sitting it don't.

Sej was playing a game last night into which he co-opted me. We were in a rescue helicopter being chased by a ghost. He phoned whoever it was we were rescuing.  "The ghost is coming, but don't worry; we are on our way." Mike broke it down for me. The helicopter comes from Peppa Pig, where it is piloted by the omnicompetent Miss Rabbit (Sej's favourite character) and the ghost from his recent experience of Halloween. Sej loves Peppa Pig; I watched some episodes with him at breakfast time and hated it-  for the very reason he eats it up- because it's so mundane. Little kids adore the mundane because to them it's all new and exciting and they're on a mission to make sense of the world. When I was his age my favourite TV show was a thing called The Woodentops which featured a boring family of dolls doing bone-achingly boring things- and preferred it to shows like Andy Pandy and The Flowerpot Men- which had a touch of the fantastical. By the same token Sej would rather watch Peppa than In The Night Garden- which is weird and wonderful and representative of what  adults think the child should want. Older children love magic, but it's an acquired taste. For the toddler it's sufficiently magical that s/he has teeth to brush and hair to comb....

Sej and his parents have gone now. The sun is setting. By this time tomorrow we should be winding up the Christmas carry-on at the Meeting House.

This And That
2025-12-23 14:36 poliphilo
The dream recorded in the last post seems to be saying, "Move over, Grandad. Let the younger generation take over." Something, as it happens, I'm very happy to do.

YouTube is sending me lots of little filmlets dedicated to the proposition that the President of the USA is an arse. Well, I've known that for years- so I mostly ignore them. I wonder whether if I were Maga I'd be getting lots of little filmlets telling me how he's the greatest President ever....

The day before the day before Christmas is mild and grey. Mike and Su and Sej are visiting this afternoon and staying overnight. Our cleaner is down with the flu so the house isn't as shiny as I'd like it to be.

I've been blowing up inflatable reindeer antlers and inflatable rings. They're for a game of seasonal hoopla. You put the antlers on your head and people try to throw the rings onto the tines. Here's Ailz modelling the look.

Last Night's Dream
2025-12-23 11:15 poliphilo
Last night's dream:

A young boy is behind the wheel of the car and I'm in the passenger seat. I let him move the car forward a few feet.

"That's enough" I say.

Then I'm driving.

But  I have to go very slowly and carefully because the lane is crowded with children walking home from school....

A Quaker Solstice
2025-12-22 11:44 poliphilo
November and December seem to have raced by- and now the Solstice is behind us.

We were at the Meeting House twice yesterday. After the morning meeting some of us went back into the Meeting Room and sang some carols. Ali is a piano-teacher- and the electronic keyboard that sits in the corner is getting some use at last.

And in the afternoon, as it grew dark, some of us gathered in the Meeting Room and sat in silence by candllight. We had so many candles!

Quakers don't observe festivals- only they do. Just as every member is a priest so every day is a holy day: that's the thinking and it's all very high-minded but we're only human and where's the harm in having fun? Note that only some of us carolled or did the candlelight thing. Friends don't fall out over inessentials- like beliefs and customs.

I'm not a Christian, only at Christmas perhaps I am. I doubt there was actually a stable and a star and shepherds in the fields and travelling magi, but that's not the point. This is myth and it's grand and glorious and it comes from a depth the rational mind can't plumb.

One Of Those Dreams
2025-12-21 11:30 poliphilo
One of those dreams. I take it as a response to the mood I was voicing yesterday.....

Grave stones, flowers. The usual. The landscape of the inner planes...

And then I meet the old woman. I say "old" but in fact she presents as younger than I am now. It's just that she's wiser than me. My senior. I have a name for her- "Hypatia"- though I haven't encountered her under that name for decades.

What is she? The goddess? My guide? My higher self?

Whatever.  Names and labels are immaterial.....

What matters is she's back.

"How have you been?" she asks and I tell her.

"I'd like to introduce you to my friends," she says.....

The Wild Bells
2025-12-20 13:00 poliphilo
Dust and ashes.

The old year is ending in dust and ashes.

I've been trying to identify the heaviness I'm feeling and I don't think it's personal because others feel it too. And I don't think it's fear because what is there to be afraid of?

No, it's grief.

Grief, sadness, remorse- everything in that particular bundle of emotions.

it's not just the drip, drip, drip of the Epstein files that's causing the grief but they're very much in our face so let them stand for the whole.

We're being told that our rulers, our cultural icons, the rich, famous and powerful are a bunch of shits who get together with other shits to behave shittily. This isn't exactly news, but it's harder to ignore than it ever has been. And we who have voted for them, bought their product, bought their lies, idolised them are part of the picture. They are everything we value and admire, so what does say about us?

Ring out wild bells.....

And what are the wild bells saying?

"Must do better, must do better, must do better..."

"Must"?

No, let's change that to "will"

Will do better, will do better, will do better.....

Jordans
2025-12-19 11:39 poliphilo
Stephanie Meier (not to be confused with the person who wrote Twilight) visited Eastbourne Meeting House earlier in the year and has sent us a copy of her novel about early Quakers as a sort of thankyou for being so welcoming.  It's called Jordans, it's set in the 1680s and it's pleasant, gentle and easy on the brain. I'm reading it as a break from amazing Marcel Proust and his amazingly long sentences.

Jordans is a real place- one of the earliest custom-built Meeting Houses. We've pledged that in the new year we'll go on a visit. It's situated in the Chilterns, just outside Beaconsfield, not so very far away.

Meier, drawing on published sources (which are copious because the old time Quakers loved to pamphleteer) has her people speak a wonderful lingo heavily dependent on the King James Bible- and in particular the Book of Revelations. They don't say "Jesus" they say "The Lamb". 

Ignorant And Heathenish
2025-12-18 11:34 poliphilo
Two posts back I was complaining about the cost of a postage stamp and here I am at it again. £18 for two takeaway portions of curry and chips? No way!

I'm not a cheapskate, really I'm not, but that's just not value for money.

This was in Crowborough. Crowborough is swish. It wasn't always. Up until the late 18th century the land south of Tunbridge Wells- the High Weald- was sparsely populated by charcoal burners and subsistence farmers- "ignorant and heathenish" people according to the local landowner who built a church to improve their manners. This injection of organised religion started a process that led to the town- which occupies the second highest land in East Sussex- being marketed to the late Victorians as a health resort. "Scotland in Sussex" is what they called it.  (Thank you wikipedia for the forgoing information.) Arthur Conan Doyle was an early adopter and spent the last quarter century of his life in residence. There's a very bad modern statue of him in the town centre. When he drove past we noticed it was dressed in a little green jacket and an elf hat.  I wish I'd taken a picture but there was nowhere to park.

Following Sir Arthur a lot of famous people have owned or own property in Crowborough. Dirk Bogarde, Tom Baker, David Jason, Cate Blanchett.....

Cate Blanchett may be happy to pay you £18 for her chips but you wouldn't want to try it on with an ignorant and heathenish charcoal burner......

Bulbs
2025-12-17 11:37 poliphilo
I had a game going with the local fox. It was digging up the daffodil bulbs I have planted in a tub at the front of the house and I was digging them in again. To begin with it grubbed around promiscuously but then it became scientific and took to unearthing a single bulb- the same one every time. This hasn't happened for a night or two now so perhaps it has accepted the futility. Or perhaps the movement-sensitive light we have just installed by the door is scaring it off.

I notice bulbs all over the garden are beginning to send up their fleshy green spears. 'T'ain't even Midwinter yet and the world is coming back to life. Yes!

Christmas Cards
2025-12-16 14:41 poliphilo
£3.40 to send a Christmas card to Switzerland!

I remember when we'd send 30-40 Christmas cards thither and yon. Who can afford that now? Well maybe Elon Musk, but apart from him....

We're sending four this year. All to people we need to communicate with- like the lady in Switzerland who very kindly sent us a copy of her book.

The Christmas card was invented (if that's the right word) by Henry Cole in 1843. The design he commissioned from his artist friend John Calcott Horsley shows a scene of wholesome revelry flanked by images of people performing good works.  All very Pickwickian.



Will people still be sending cards when the bicentenary comes round in 2043? I very much doubt it.

Lee
2025-12-15 13:10 poliphilo
I don't like biopics. They isolate, simplify, betray. This is true even of what I take to be the greatest of all biopics, Lawrence of Arabia. Want to know about Lawrence? Don't start here; so much is wrong. For starters Peter O'Toole is very tall and Lawrence was very short.....

Ken Russell had the right idea. He didn't do cradle to grave. Cradles were for rocking madly and graves for dancing on, both to the music of whatever composer he was having fun with.  He reduced the life of Tchaikovsky- in his own words as I remember them- to the story of a homosexual married to a nymphomaniac. He reduced the life of Mahler to the story of a Jew married to a Nazi. He turned the life of Lizt into a psychedelic, headbanging rock and roll circus (with added Nazis.) His films isolate, simplify, betray- and don't pretend otherwise- but by God they're cinematic!

Last night we watched Lee. The biopic about Lee Miller. Who was Lee Miller? She was a model, a muse, a photographer, a war correspondent, a drunk, a lady of the manor. The film can only hint at much of this. For instance she was a friend of Picasso- and he was the first person she went to visit when she entered Paris with the US army.- but he doesn't appear at all or even get a mention-  but then how could you reduce him to a walk on part in someone else's life story; he was too big, too dominant, too mythic. Where the movie succeeds is as a story about war and the effects of war.  As I watched it I had two thoughts, one after the other: firstly that I avoided this god-awful mess by a mere six years, secondly that war is so bloody, bloody stupid.

Lee was a witness who fixed her memories by photographing them. She saw the Yanks use napalm against German positions at St Malo, women who'd slept with Germans having their heads shaved in liberated Paris, railway carriages and storerooms piled up with corpses in Buchenwald and Dachau. When she got to Berlin she blagged her way into Hitler's flat- then being used as a kind of clubhouse for American officers- and had herself photographed soaping her back in his bathtub. No wonder she suffered from PTSD! But then so did that entire generation- my parents not excluded.....

After the war Lee boxed up her pictures and stashed them away in the attic of her farmhouse. Her son didn't discover them until after her death- or really have any idea till then of who and what she'd been. They can be found online at the Lee Miller Archives, thousands of them, all higgledy-piggledy- fashion shots next to portraits of Picasso next to images of Dachau next to family snaps.  Quite extraordinary.

O Dear, O Dear
2025-12-15 11:35 poliphilo
He keeps popping into this blog but I disguise his identity and make no attempt to link his appearances. Over a course of three years- or something like- we (because he attends the Quaker meeting) have seen him devolve from eccentric to psychogeriatric. He craves help but refuses help. Self pity has eaten his brain. He still has his moments of lucidity- when he can discourse with apparent cheerfulness on renaissance art and politics- but mainly now he paces and mutters. "O dear, O dear". Most of us have heard his story by now but if if someone new comes by he'll corner them if he can and perform his ancient mariner act. We apologise to one another for going out of our way to avoid him....

Doone
2025-12-14 17:26 poliphilo
Doone turned up in my dreams- not the woman herself but just her name. It was attached (in the dream) to someone rather different.

As a first name it is possibly unique. And I have remembered it right. It's Doone (as in Lorna). It may have been a stage name because Doone was a dancer. A professional dancer- who performed in Monte Carlo- where she met Leonide Massine- and in the chorus line of the London production of My Fair Lady.

She lived next door when I was in my teens. She had a husband called Gervaise. My parents didn't care for him, though they had them both over to dinner once; they thought he was a bit of a wide boy. They might even have used the word "spiv".

I looked Doone and Gervais up on line. and found a brief notice of their marriage. After that Gervaise fades from the record, even though he is described as a writer. Maybe he did write but never published. Doone, though, carries on. She had three children after the time I knew her, one called Lorna (of course), one who became a businessman and a third who is currently rector of a parish in Bexhill- just up the road from here. This parsonical son is the kind of Christian who thinks Tai Chi is of the devil.  Doone herself went on to become a mainstay of a local community theatre. She was alive in 2013- and will have turned 90 if she's still around.

Doone matters to me because she was one of the few adults to take notice of me at a time when I was isolated and lonely. Also because she involved me briefly in am dram and gifted me with the role that represents the peak of my acting career- having me deliver Jacques speech on the Seven Ages of Man- that great essay on Mutability- from the stage of the village hall. I can still- though now positioned somewhere between the fifth and sixth age- recite most of it by heart. 

O Cat!
2025-12-13 12:33 poliphilo
The cat is an old, old man- older than I am to judge by his behaviour.

He shouts a lot. I think the caterwauling translates as "Where am I? Where are you?"

Perhaps even, "Who am I?" Who are you?"

And, of course, "Isn't it teatime yet?"- because, although he grows lighter and bonier, he hasn't lost his appetite.

He hangs close. And you can hardly move around the house without falling over him. You think he's asleep on one of his cushions and you step out regardless and find you've trodden on one of his paws because he's somehow materialised right in front of you and you go "O, cat!"

A View From My Window
2025-12-13 10:56 poliphilo
A quarter to eight in the morning.....

Pale blue sky, pink clouds

The moon in its last quarter

Silver

Very high up a pink plane trailing pink vapour

Very low down, on what was once marshland- and still is underneath- a thread of mist lying below the house tops

It's A Faff
2025-12-12 14:58 poliphilo
The recycling centre is just across the road. It takes me about a minute to walk to the gate where they admit pedestrians.

Only I'm not walking there as often as I did because they've instituted a booking system- and you can't just turn up. Instead you have to go online, sign up for a time slot and it's a faff.

Is "faff" recognised as a noun by tthe gatekeepers of the language?

Yes it is. I just looked it up.

Why did they bring in the new system? Presumably to stop the queue of cars that used to build up along St Philip's Drive at peak hours.

Was that something that was worth doing? The official mind which abhors untidiness obviously thought so....