William Essex
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Solitude

18/12/2011

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Going by the light, it's still early morning. But the clock says it's already seven. Must be the shortest day soon? The weather, these past few mornings, has developed a trick of bringing heavy black cloud across the sky from above me, thus down over the window, like the spaceship at the beginning of the very first Star Wars film to be seen (number four now, I think). That was impressive to see for the first time, in a cinema, not long after release. I remember an interview with, I imagine, George Lucas, talking about how he had wanted to create a "used future", and how all of it was new then.
    Pity to lose the sense of newness. It's all new, or let's treat it so. A week of solitude just passed, whole week: resting mother and baby gone, presumably rested, then the family onto the train to Bath for a pre-Christmas week of shopping (taking bicycles). Spent the time at the laptop in the kitchen (keep the dog company), but also walking, chopping/sawing logs, restoring the tarpaulins on the shed roof. Got them secure now, although everything inside is thoroughly rinsed. Perhaps a secure tarpaulin is a charm against any more wind and rain this year. Got out of bed this morning and wondered if I'd aged ten years in the night. No, but using my new sledgehammer in the splitting of logs - I have previously undiscovered muscles, and they ache.
     Interesting week to have the radio on in the background. The drama about the veto in Europe and the impossibility of a "wait and see" stance in politics. Everybody arguing from a position of indignant certainty, even while using "could be" rather than "will be". And arguing from an unquestioned assumption that their "road not taken" would have been the right road. No sense of irony or absurdity. As if one lot of politicians were efficient saints, and the other lot dangerous incompetents. The radio is where you hear people talk about "ordinary people", as though there are two kinds, and say things like "we must". Who's "we"?
    That Boson thing has been sending out signals again. The Higgs Boson. Soon, we'll have established its existence or non-existence. The toolkit from which "Reality" was made has (not) a Higgs Boson in it, right there next to the spanner. Great. What does that tell us about the owner of the toolbox? Change goes on, stays the same, journey brings us to our beginning, brings us here, all is well.
    And yesterday evening, I bought the complete works of Dickens on my Kindle, for 99p. Voices raised in Russia. Storms. So much. "They fall, and falling, are given wings." Rumi, from memory.
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    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. 'Can I Quote You on That?'

    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.

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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.

    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.


    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.


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    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
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    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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