William Essex
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All the mornings after

21/1/2017

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Cold, grey morning in Falmouth. Sky a uniform grey. Not a cold with any drama to it, just a silence of no colour. Stillness, I mean. The sea, earlier on, was ruffled a little, but there wasn't really a wind. Thinking about the homeless man who was ejected from his encampment behind the waterfront pub. Gave him a blanket one morning. He turned up in the entrance to the library and was ejected from there too. The guy who sleeps in the entrance to the Methodist Church is always up early, hugging himself for warmth. Central European, I think. Very neatly tucked away inside himself. We exchanged greetings.
     Turned on the radio: earnest discussions of how it could all go wrong for the new President. The striking factor is not what's happened - he won; we're leaving - but the huge volumes of hot air extruded into the atmosphere by commentators. All the talk. It's a factor. I remember, may years ago, a time of my life when I used to attend regular inter-departmental meetings. The trick to appearing well-informed was to frown. To imply negativity. Not to smile, or nod, because that meant you weren't thinking hard enough. Frown, and thereby look as though you knew something big enough to be bothering you.
     Not that I would queue to get stuck in a lift with the man who - if legions of highly paid political reporters are to be believed - spent his first night in the White House last night, but I wonder whether gloom is habit-forming in the reporting business. You need to look as though you know what's going on, so you frown. And talk about what "could" go wrong. And all that negativity is infectious. We're watching a guy with negative qualities and - it's even hard to say this - positive qualities; a guy who is (at least?) as fallible as the rest of us. Sure, it could go wrong, but isn't the culture clash - the media-political establishment versus that guy, with that background - the real point of interest?
     We go from <Why him? Why now?> to <What will happen to the old ways? Who will "win", and what wisdom will we receive from that?> Mind you, the transition has started - media teams moving their story to this year's elections in Europe - so maybe the sign-off "should" be: One Thing Is Certain: The World Goes On.
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    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

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    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    There's a page for this, but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


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    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

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    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

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    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

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    Abuse
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    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

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    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


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    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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