So I came out first thing this morning - second thing; it was light - and what I noticed - again; this is (not) getting monotonous - was the clarity of the light. Across the valley from Trelawney Road: the houses, the road downhill, the spire of the Catholic Church. The same in town, looking across The Moor and again on Fish Strand Quay, looking across at the harbour. The air washed clean, I suppose, by the rain and the weather. The other day, that big fat lying-down cloud with choppy wind inside it. The several recent early walks with frost underfoot. It has been cold recently, by local standards, but these mornings. Photography; art. I get it.
     Thinking about thinking about (sic) the politics. To have a view from here (from my/our side of the radio, TV, internet, and I nearly forgot print media) is to be subject to a lot of storytelling and interpretation - obviously, but also insidiously. It's an indulgence. None of it is manifest. But nor is the day-to-day flood of information actually the story. And I suppose what strikes me is that we can't make the story. They're just people, not pantomime villains with an obligation to conform to a narrative. But the narrative gets imposed anyway. What's there? And what are we seeing? What would my world view be, a few centuries back? Perhaps it's media that replaces religion.
     Had the chimney swept yesterday. Required for the insurance. Apparently I have "good quality soot". Felt good about that for a while. And the hippeastrum is flowering now. This time of year, the sun rises to one side of the horizon, so I only get a brief slant of direct sunlight. Gave the hippeastrum its fifteen minutes of brightness. Maybe all the politics is best understood as voting against, not voting in favour. We're not for - what we've got, but we were against - what we had. The day begins.

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.

What strikes me most today - before the big Inauguration - is the wall of expectation. There was once a notion, and maybe there still is, that if everybody was gloomy about the prospects for investment markets, a "wall of money" would build up that had been withdrawn from such markets by nervous investors. If the news turned good all of a sudden, that wall would turn into a tsunami - the metaphor doesn't hold up - that would drive back into markets and turn any tiny upward blip into a significant upswing. Self-fulfilling.
     So many commentators have said so much about the gloomy prospects for the Trump presidency that if the man manages to get through his inaugural address without stumbling over the long words - without perhaps letting slip the occasional wicked cackle - we'll be pleasantly surprised. There was even an item on the radio a few days back about the impeachment process - how it would happen if it was needed. Given the virtues that we would claim for ourselves - open-minded, liberal, rational, et cetera - perhaps we would do well to remind ourselves that the Trump presidency hasn't actually begun yet.

So it turns out that the glitch is on my usual laptop. This being written on my, er, unusual and somewhat elderly Samsung Netbook, which I bought for a reason I can't remember, many years ago. It's survived because I hardly ever use it. Except in the direst emergency, when the tablet and the smartphone and all the other gadgetry just don't cut it. And a pen and notepad are insufficiently connected.
     Today's odd little problem is a persistent difficulty with putting titles on posts. I click the box, nothing happens. I click it again, ditto. Spoke to the help-desk; they couldn't replicate the problem from wherever they are. Arrived by trial and error at a work-around whereby I put up a post, then amend it - the amendment being the addition of a title, which becomes possible after the post has been posted. Then thought (finally): I wonder if it's a bug in the laptop. And yes, it is. The ancient Netbook proves its worth once again. And the laptop goes away for a while.
     On another matter entirely, I've just unearthed a letter from an otherwise apparently sane financial firm telling me about a change of address. They've moved a couple of hundred yards, if my memory of City streets is accurate. They're "really excited" about the move. And my question is, since when did everybody get so worked up about so many mundane experiences? If they're not "really excited" about a new street address, they're "passionate" about what they do - "passionate" about finance, or food, or whatever else they do all day. A questionnaire came in a while back, for a voluntary thing I do, promising to make the volunteer experience "even better".
     Thereby pre-empting any negative comment. Not quite straightforward, eh? I am, of course, "passionate" about volunteering. My heart beats faster as I think of it; my blood pressure rises - and of course none of that's true, because like everybody else I have good days and bad days, et cetera. Some days I'm in the mood; some days I just want to get home. Why do we - sorry, why do organisations talk such nonsense to us? And come to think of it, why do organisations talk such nonsense about us? Come four o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and we're not passionate about the day job. That's okay.
     Turning over the thought in my mind now: to think about the brand, or the message, or the image you're projecting, is to think about yourself, not the customer or the patient or the reader or the target audience for whatever you're offering. To get "really excited" about an efficiency drive, or office move, or other re-arrangement of the deckchairs, is to look away from the customer. Everybody - every organisation - does it, or at least talks that way, and the issue we all ignore, because it's so pervasive, is that we're not being straight with each other.

Not that this is a New Year's Resolution or anything, but it's the 14th. Last time I wrote something here was the 7th, and before that, the 1st. So ... the world goes on. Sun came up this morning red among broken red clouds, slightly to the left of the hotel; it's moving around the horizon already. Wet ground and very clear air; the distance in fine detail. Every recent forecast has mentioned wind, rain, snow, cold. The police evacuated villages on the East coast yesterday - tea and sandwiches in the village halls, then the "storm surge" didn't after all coincide with the high tide, and everybody went home. Further North, the usual British reaction to snow.
     On the radio, further spy-novel allegations about he's-not-even-president-yet Trump, too neatly lurid to be real, while our lot bore on about the Brexit negotiations. And the NHS continues its slow, tragic collapse. Either nothing's happening in the world or the news organisations don't have the budgets to look for anything new. My Amaryllis Hippeastrum Red Lion is now 16 inches tall (and I've found my measuring tape).

So I'm hearing all this stuff from the CIA about the Russians trying to hack the US election, and I'm thinking: of course they did. Don't we all? Either the Russians succeeded and the CIA failed, or the CIA succeeded and the Russians failed. If The Donald was a highly placed Russian mole [Wasn't there a film? Weren't there several?], surely he'd be somewhat less flamboyant? Imagine the secret Russian training camp, somewhere in Siberia, where the brainwashed young property developer is schooled in the spycraft of fitting into the US political system. Those trainers can't be that bad.
     Or maybe that explains - no. Silly idea.
     If the whole point of this is for the CIA to claim the moral high ground, or to mend fences with the Democratic establishment by blaming somebody else for the email thing [Why? Why now?], surely they should start by issuing one of those historic apologies for - let's see now - Castro's exploding cigars, toppling various dictators, wiretapping, more or less the whole of the unofficial history.
     You're spies. There are Russian spies. Deal with it.

There's a tenacity about liberalism. As if we've reached an end-state of enlightenment about how to handle the delegated running of everybody else's lives. But we haven't. Liberal values that exclude people are not liberal values. A democracy of the well-informed is not a democracy. Especially not if we big-talk about democracy as a virtue. History goes on happening, and it doesn't share our principles.