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Mainstream
2026-03-07 10:46 poliphilo
There was a time when I could identify all the major figures in world politics and rather looked down on anyone who couldn't but since I stopped mainlining mainstream media my ability to put names and identities to faces has declined. This morning I was scanning a cartoon by the Guardian's Martin Rowson- who I used to like a lot- and I could identify the US president and little Bibi and took a punt on a third character being Pete Hegseth but there were two other people in the frame- both female- and I hadn't the foggiest who either of them were. Also there was a dog. Now what the fuck was the dog supposed to represent?

Talking about mainstream media I see the Telegraph- my parents' pablum of choice- has been bought by a German. There was a time when this would have mattered- and the retired colonels of Tunbridge Wells would have been fulminating- but who cares about the Telegraph now?

Or, indeed, cares about any of the newspapers that were once so powerful? Maybe the Mail still has some heft. Maybe.....

Not So Simple
2026-03-06 10:53 poliphilo
He'd come to us because it was Purim and there were certain things he needed to do but couldn't do for himself because they would constitute work and he knew that Quakers were welcoming to all faiths and would understand and help him out. He'd have gone to a rabbi only he couldn't locate one in Eastbourne.

Heretofore I've only known liberal Jews. We had a long conversation.

He's a Zionist but not a Nationalist. If the Nationalists hadn't hijacked the state of Israel, he says, the Jews and the Palestinians would live in peace. He has served in the IDF and loves Israel but his heritage and sensibility are European (specifically German) and he finds Israelis "loud". He detests Netanyahu and thinks the current war is being waged- like the string of ones before it- simply because the constitution says a wartime Prime Minister can't be prosecuted for his (alleged) crimes.  He lives in Manchester, supports Liverpool and is gay.....

Like everyone else who's not directly involved in the cockpit of the Middle East I've been tempted to simplify the issues. I reckon I know better than to do that now.....

Signs of Spring
2026-03-05 17:36 poliphilo
That was a mild winter. But very wet.

And now I'm moving into my lighter clothes- though in the expectation- but not the hope- that I may have to revert from time to time. The sunny weather makes me want to be doing things in the garden, but only things that aren't too arduous. Yesterday I surprised myself by proposing a visit to Hilliers- the garden centre on the further side of Stone Cross.

Also yesterday a bumble bee got into the bedroom and had to be helped to escape. Bumble bees have been active for a week or more now. Bumble bees are precious......

Moonset
2026-03-05 10:23 poliphilo
I moved to raise the blind.

"You'll like what you see." said Ailz, who had already looked out the window in the spare bedroom.

And I did. The moon, just a shavng past the full, was hovering over the hills. In the light of the rising sun its colour was a very pale apricot.

"Did you arrange that just for me?" I said.....

Picture diary 124
2026-03-04 21:08 poliphilo
Picture Diary 124


1. Occlusion



2. Flier



3. Promised land



4. The forbidden room



5. Blood moon



6. We try to possess things we don't understand

Picture Diary 123
2026-03-04 18:24 poliphilo
Picture Diary 123

1. We're through



2. Inner sanctum



3. The dome



4. It almost looks real



5. Playing the game



6. Translucent

Picture Diary 122
2026-03-04 15:31 poliphilo
Picture Diary 122

1. Tidings of great joy



2. Self-created



3. Temple of souls



4. Talking about my generation



5. Where are we going? Why?



6. Wish you were here

An Explanation
2026-03-04 15:28 poliphilo
A few weeks back Nightcafe- the site I go to to make AI images- said it couldn't afford to go on being so nice to its free users so it was going to cancel all the credits we'd amassed.

(To be fair to NC they have always been very generous with credits- awarding them for all sorts of reasons- and at the time of their mean decision I had something like 2,500 in the bank. To be fair to myself I'd plead that I'm a hobbyist not a professional and I'm not making any money from my work)

Whoops, I thought, I'd better use up all these credits fast.

So I went on an AI binge, making pictures much faster than I chose to post them here- with the result that there's a backlog.

Which I now mean to clear

And that's why the next few posts will be Picture Diaries....

Eventually Nightcafe realised it was making itself very unpopular and decided we could keep our credits after all- and they'd discriminate against us in other ways, like making us wait longer to have our prompts processed, which I'm not going to shout about because it's fair that people who pay for the service should enjoy some privileges.

Anyway, bear with me while I get myself up to date.....

Bye-bye Blackbird
2026-03-04 10:29 poliphilo
I dreamed there was a crow lying on the lawn. Maybe it was sick or dying. Anyway I picked it up and carried it around on my shoulder. And maybe it wasn't a crow but a raven or something even bigger. It was friendly and let me stroke its horny beak. Then it wasn't there any longer. At the same time exotic birds we'd never seen before were coming to the bird feeder- parrots, parakeets, multi-coloured finches.....

Yeah, I get it. Out with the old and in with the new. Let the old go with a blessing....

Unblemished
2026-03-03 10:44 poliphilo
When you don't sleep too well you don't sit up or set alarms or squander any time you might spend asleep so I didn't catch the blood moon.  The one time I got up, for other reasons, I looked out the window and the full moon was still shining at the top of the sky like a silver sixpence.

Unblemished.

Parp, Parp
2026-03-02 12:18 poliphilo
I don't know what to make of Elon Musk- except to say I don't trust anyone with that much money.

And not wanting to get moralistic, which of course is exactly what I'm doing, he does figure in the Epstein files.

One sees a lot of Teslas on British roads. A few months back Ailz and I started calling them Noddy cars. It's a private joke but it would be fun if it caught on. I don't think we do it because we're jealous of Tesla owners. Would we think of getting one ourselves? No. A Tesla is not just a car It's a statement- and we don't like what it's saying.

Anyway why would we when we already have this?



Which, besides, was a whole lot cheaper

No Longer Winter
2026-03-01 10:51 poliphilo
March begins wet and windy, but it's no longer winter, right?

There's a pigeon somewhere out there in the gardens singing, "If you think I'm sexy..."

 Israel and the USA were reportedly gunning for Ayatollah Khamenei- him in person, nobody else-  and the news this morning is they've got him....

Current Affairs: A Dialogue.
2026-02-28 15:54 poliphilo
O what wild things the internet has been telling me! For instance it says that the US aircraft carrier, Gerald R. Ford.....

Hang on right there, who in their right mind would name the pride of the US Navy after Gerald Ford?

I dunno, but that's not the point.

Seems pointed enough to me. Gerald Ford was the most forgettable US President in recent history....

So maybe they felt sorry for him. Anyway, getting back to what I was saying, the Internet was telling me that the USS Gerald R. Ford has been deployed to the Middle East with its decks running with sewage.

The symbolism is deafening!

Quite so, but there's more. This may not simply be a systems malfunction but something the crew themselves have brought on themselves by stuffing things down the toilets.

Why on earth would they do that?

Because they've been at sea for nearly a year and they're sick of it and want some shore leave.

Wouldn't that be mutiny?

Shhhh.  Anyway that's not the end of it because if they reach the Middle East they may find it hard to find a port that'll take them.

Because they stink?

No. Because all the nations round there have been pissed off by Ambassador Huckabee's cheerleading for a Greater Israel. Or, in other words, taking scads of their territory and handing it over to Mr Netanyahu.

Why would he do that? Isn't it undiplomatic and isn't he supposed to be a diplomat?

Ah, but above all else he's a Bible-believing Christian. And God promised all the land between somewhere and somewhere else to the children of Abraham. I'd look it up but I can't be bothered.

So maybe it wasn't so clever to appoint him to such a sensitive post.

Exactly. But you may have noticed who's in charge....

Ah....yes....Him. But at least he's not as forgettable as Gerald Ford.....

Last Day Of February
2026-02-28 10:56 poliphilo
Suddenly (it seems, though it's not really sudden) we're no longer getting up in the dark but in daylight. And today is the last day of February.

A mosquito has been pestering us in the bedroom. Yesterday evening I decided it had enjoyed a long enough innings and tracked it down and clubbed it to death with a folded bath towel. It left a splash of blood on the wall.

Picture Diary 121
2026-02-27 21:23 poliphilo
Picture Diary 121

1. Breaking glass



2. After a couple of pints



3. Pink



4.  Everything you believed in is a lie



5. Theagony



6. Witness

Gorton And Denton
2026-02-27 12:39 poliphilo
The Greens won in Gorton and Denton.

They won with a 34 year old woman who works as a plumber.

It was one in the eye for Farage's Reform party- who thought they had it sewn up.

And it humiliates Labour- whose ex-MP was forced out for being an entitled arse.

The values of the Green Party align fairly well with my own so I'm pleased.

The media- including the bloody BBC- insist on treating Farage like he's a Prime Minister in waiting, but I can't see it and never have done.

1. Because his lot have never performed well in elections

2. Because the only other "names" in his party are ex-Tory sleaze merchants and incompetents.

3. He is associated with the American president- whom the British people loathe and despise and find funny.

The media talk him up because they are owned by people who would find a far-right dictatorship agreeable to themselves and amenable to their aims and because he's a card.....

I sort of know Gorton and Denton- or did. Whether I would recognise it now I'm not sure because it has undergone several makeovers down the years. It used to be Coronation Street, then it was gangland and now, I gather, it's becoming gentrified. Lots of students and Muslims.

Farage says there was cheating.

O fuck off, Farage.....

Mothman
2026-02-27 11:03 poliphilo
You've heard about Mothman right? Back in the late 60s a whole bunch of weird things happened in a short period of time in a small West Virginia town called Pleasant Point- and then the bridge that connected it to the other side of the Ohio river fell down- during the rush hour- and killed 46 people. After which the weirdness stopped. It's as though the disaster had torn a gash in the fabric of Reality- but one that only stretched backwards in time- if that makes any sense. The phenomena included UFOs, men in black, odd entities of various different kinds and- most famously, a tall winged hominid with blazing red eyes that used to shoot up into the sky vertically like a helicopter without ever stirring its leathery wings. This was Mothman. None of these things ever hurt anyone, simply scared, perplexed and befuddled them. It was all totally bonkers. Disasters were prophesied, but not the one that actually occured. It's as if some paranormally enabled trickster or bunch of tricksters had spotted the rift in the space-time continuum and had come muscling through it with the sole intention of messing with people's minds.

There's a book, there's a film. And Pleasant Point dines off Mothman these days. He's a tourist lure. There's a museum, there's a statue. Wikipedia files him under "folklore" but like many other things that get similarly dismissed he was real enough (though "real" may not be quite the right word.) If you were there at the time you didn't treat him as quaint or funny.....

I was listening to a podcast about Mothman yesterday evening but wouldn't have have bothered to write about if it hadn't then switched over to my my AI art site and there- first thing I saw- was a fellow user's picture of the chap himself in all his looming, red-eyed glory.

Coincidence? Bah, there's no such thing......

Pointless
2026-02-26 10:52 poliphilo
Suppose the world doesn't make sense.

And that's really the point of it.

Pointlessness is the point.

Pointlessness is the point is pointless.....

And so on.....

One could develop this in two ways. Either go, "Oh, what a bloody waste of time...."

Or take a deep breath and go, "Phew, well that's a relief....." 

Icons Of Power
2026-02-25 12:59 poliphilo
We were at a golf club the other day- one with Royal in its title (not the sort of joint we normally frequent) And halfway up the stairs was a copy of this portrait (though not with gettyimages printed accross it



It's Charles Mountbatten-Windsor in all his glory, but  relaxed and at ease with his authority. Look how many medals he's won, and yet how approachable he is. This is exactly how the Mountbatten-Windsor dynasty wants us to see them.

Here's a more informal picture, but one that still conveys the desired message.



Oh, but who's that chap in the identical get-up with whom the monarch is on such good terms?

Could it be this fella?



Power curates its image very carefully and pictures like the above

Or like this....



Undo all the good work.....

Nature Notes
2026-02-24 11:22 poliphilo
Our daffodils are coming into their strength. I planted a load in '24 and a load more in '25. They're my favourite flower- at least in part because they start appearing in the wintriest time of the year. I see the first daffodil and think, "And now it's Spring!"

We've had no snow in Eastbourne- we rarely do, but we have had lots of rain. We were driving up Seaside on Sunday and there was water mushrooming out from an overtaxed drain and flooding the road.....

We've floated the idea that Wendy should take over our garden and grow vegetables. It would be a win-win arrangement. We need someone to take the garden in hand and she needs somewhere to grow things. I'm not a gardener. I plant shrubs and bulbs and then more or less let them get on with it. Also I cut the grass- but I'd be happy for there to be less grass to be bothered with. So long as she leaves the daffodils in place she can have a free hand.

There seem to be fewer pigeons about. Maybe they're off sourcing nesting sites. There are however rather more gulls because Roselands with all its chimney stacks is a nesting site. I love pigeons, I love gulls, I only wish we attracted more of the smaller birds than we do.....