Donald: Flippant and Factual.

When I was searching Google Images for pictures of dear old Quas, I came across this:

  

So, be honest, who does Charles Laughton look like in this picture? I mean no disrespect here, but… well… he does, doesn’t he? And so I’m tempted to be flippant and ask two questions of Americans:

1. Does the White House have a bell tower (with gargoyles)?

2. Has Melania ever been known to stifle a shriek when Donald swaggers onto the stage?

So far, so good; this is just an innocent bit of fun. But on a more serious note, I gather that Donald is forever boasting about what a high IQ he has. Well, from what we’ve seen so far, that seems highly unlikely. But if he has, it can mean only one thing: as a person and a President he’s seriously under-achieving.

Proving Madness.

I read an interesting statistic this morning. Last year in the UK, 67,000 people were detained under the Mental Health Act. That’s very nearly one in every thousand of the population. So in a city of, say, half a million people, approximately 500 of them are mad.

And then it occurred to me that if I got detained under said Act, I would find it very difficult to protest my innocence since the powers that be would only have to produce my blog as evidence for the prosecution and the jury would declare: ‘this man is as mad as a March hare on LSD. Tie him to a tree in yonder wood and let the crows gorge upon the corruption that is his being.’ Or words to that effect. And I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on (not that you need one if you’re tied to a tree, but you know what I mean.)

(The first two sentences of this post could have led to a discourse of great depth and substance, but it didn’t.)

And I was reminded again tonight that there are few sights more compelling in this grey world made winter by the grip of psychopaths than that of a beautiful woman riding a horse at speed (which isn’t the same as a beautiful woman on speed riding a horse.) And such is especially true if her hair is long and streams in the draught to mirror the flow of the horse’s tail.

I had another post to make today but I’ve forgotten what it was. I think it might have been connected with hats in some way, but that’s probably because I’m still in thrall to the sight of a ghost walking past my garden with two women companions. I swear it was wearing a hat, and I had the oddest notion that it was a Paddington Bear hat. In all my life I have only ever once seen anybody wear such a hat. The memory of it is etched in gold (or blue to be precise) and stands unmoving and unmovable in my mind while everything around it crumbles to dust and is transmogrified into countless sibilant insects scurrying hither and thither.

And on the subject of hats, here is a picture of the only hat I possess (apart from the woolly winter type):

  

I have to point out, however, that at no time in my life did I look like the guy wearing it. This is closer:

 

Ah, if only I had the hair... And while I’m at it, you might as well have a picture of Esmeralda, aka She Who Shrieks.

You can see why I'm sans hope, sans charity, sans everything, can't you?

Being Bored.

English villages aren’t what they used to be. If, as a stranger, you’d come down my lane a hundred or so years ago – having passed the gibbet which I speculate stood at the top of the lane where the road has three branches – you would probably have had a few pitchforks pointed at you by men in smocks chewing bits of straw and smelling of stale sweat and toilets.

Nowadays you’d probably be ignored completely by professional people driving their children to be schooled in the Little Englander factory (which was going to be the subject of a post but I decided against it) in new or newish prestige cars, mostly black. And whereas the bucolic bastions of yesteryear voted Tory because the local bigwig told them to, the latter-day incomers still vote Tory because they believe that might is right and might is money. Oh, and the local witch isn't frightening any more, merely irritating.

The romance is missing. Oh for the smell of stale sweat and toilets. Or maybe not. And I am exaggerating slightly because today was singularly uneventful and I needed to write something. But it’s partly true.

I kept wanting a sandwich again tonight. I had a rice cake instead. Next up is beer, scotch and buttered toast, but first I have to get wet.

Delius: Man and Music.

I watched the first half of a BBC documentary on the composer Frederick Delius last night. I sometimes wonder why the lives and minds of composers fascinate me so much, and why I’m drawn to documentaries on them more than almost any other subject – especially when the composer under scrutiny belongs to the English Late Romantic School.

I suppose it’s because the subject of music itself fascinates me. Music is very important to me and I regard it as the foremost of all the creative disciplines. The others generally need, at least to some extent, to be passed through the filter of the mind in order to be appreciated. Music has the capacity to go straight to the heart. And what intrigues me about music is this:

The standard chromatic scale has eleven notes. Just eleven. And yet composers somehow manage to keep on finding new ways to arrange those notes into an ever growing catalogue of melodies which have never been heard before. Many of those melodies can touch and sear the heart with tremendous power, leaving the sensitive soul breathless and tear-ridden. If I were to write a melody it would reach the bottom of a trash can without touching the sides. How on earth do they do it?

And they are endlessly inventive in finding new ways to present those melodies with colour, harmony, structure and a variety of accompaniments. More than that, they go on and on finding new ways to broaden the scope of the whole subject. May it be speculated that music has no limits, that it is a rare example of something that is truly infinite? Maybe a mathematician might know the answer to that one, but I don’t and so the concept fascinates me.

One documentary interviewee, himself a composer, was asked what he thought made the music of Delius so special. He replied: ‘oh, undoubtedly its sensuality.’ And that, I think, is true of all the music of the English Late Romantics; it all has one form of sensuality or another at its core. In Delius’s case, at least in his early works, there is much of the carnal form. Sir Thomas Beecham, a conductor who was an early champion of Delius, called him ‘a goat.’ And Poor Delius spent the last ten years of his life blind and paralysed from the effects of syphilis. It seems that what drove a great composer could also punish him quite horribly. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Sunday Notes.

You know, the more I read and hear the words of those who control our world, the more I’m becoming convinced that wisdom is the exclusive preserve of children and mad people. Maybe that’s why Shakespeare had Lady Macduff’s son spouting wise words in Macbeth, a possibility which seemed to escape my English teacher judging by her pejorative comments regarding Lady Macduff’s son.

It surprises me to note how many people don’t talk to me any more. I suppose I could put it down to my looking like a fictional French bell ringer, but most of the people who used to talk to me don’t know what I look like (the one who does may be forgiven) so it must have something to do with my personality. Maybe it’s too excessively vibrant.

I think I saw a ghost walking up the lane past my house with two women this evening, but I couldn’t be sure because my view of them was too brief. Whatever it was, I think it was wearing a hat. Comments like this get you noticed.

A Fridge with ESP.

I went into the kitchen earlier to make a jug of coffee and noticed that the fridge motor wasn’t running. Now, I do realise that fridges aren’t supposed to run all the time; they switch on and off under the control of a thermostat. I do know that, and yet I’m still a little neurotic in the matter of fridges having had issues with them over the past few years. But just as I was feeling the first hint of the old neurotic tendency, the motor cut in and off it went.

I went over to it, patted it affectionately and said ‘Thank you for reading my mind.’  That’s the kind of Artificial Intelligence I like.

Kiss My Ass, Corker.

How amusing it is to see the President of the United States and one of America’s top politicians trading childlike insults by tweet, and being apparently unconcerned that the world is reading them. I suppose it’s an American thing – like placing your right hand on your heart when the national anthem is played – and the kind of candour for which we should all be truly grateful.

The Allure of the Sandwich Maker.

I was thinking about sandwiches earlier (I do sometimes) and it occurred to me to wonder how long it is since anybody made me one. Making somebody a sandwich is a nice thing to do, isn’t it? You sometimes hear the line in movie scripts:

Are you hungry? I could make you a sandwich if you like.

How sweet…

I couldn’t be sure how long it is since anybody made me a sandwich, but given the history of my domestic circumstances and the proclivities of various partners, I'd say it must be at least twenty seven years. That’s a long time, and so I decided that I could grow quite enamoured of a person who made me a sandwich (but only as long as that person was female, preferably on the youngish side, pleasant of appearance and disposition, and someone in whom I could invest a high level of confidence that their hands would not be contaminated by the residue of any sort of bodily function. Even bell ringers have standards.)

Needing Amplitude.

Over the past few years I appear to have developed a certain level of gluten-intolerance. Whether it’s a high or low level I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never been gluten-intolerant before. Nevertheless, I am aware of it and I know that I could opt to change to a gluten-free diet. I decline to do so because:

1. Gluten-free products are considerably more expensive than their normal equivalents.

2. Gluten-free products aren’t as nice as their normal equivalents, and having something to eat which I actually like is one of the few positive prospects left to a reclusive person who is, coincidentally, also starting to look like Charles Laughton wearing lots of gruesome make up, only I don’t need the make up (just the bells and somewhere to hide from Esmeralda.)

3. Changing to a gluten-free diet is taking the straight line approach. Not changing to a gluten-free diet is the up and down approach. I’ve always been an up and down sort of person and I intend to stay that way for as long as I can. I gather some bi-polar sufferers decline medication for the same reason.

The up and down type

Indictments.

At one time the most valuable people in society were those who could make and build and repair things. They were the bricklayers, the woodworkers, the stonemasons, the wheelwrights, the carpenters, the blacksmiths, and so on. The most valuable people in modern economies are the consumers, those with lots of money to spend, along with the innovators who can dream up new things for them to spend it on, and those who pride themselves on being able to persuade people to do so.

And isn’t it a sad indictment of human nature that the fastest growing industry is probably the phishing scam?