Light Of The World

 

I have administered over 100 flu vaccines this winter but of course did not bother to get one myself. So, guess what? Yep, I have the flu. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. Here I am surrounded by enough Pseudoephedrine to start my own Crystal Meth lab and I’m as high as a kite on overdoses of Vitamin C – raspberry flavoured effervescent Vitamin C. Where has this elixir of the gods been all my life? I’m working on recipes for Vitamin C cocktails. This is the drink the world has been crying out for, albeit sotto voce 🙂

The flu has has been triggered by the unnatural amount of fresh air I’ve been imbibing, walking everywhere. That wretched stuff combined with exercise will kill you, I’ve always maintained that and now I have proof! It didn’t help that I went Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve, something I’ve avoided for years. I won’t make these mistakes again, no sirree. People were being their usual crazy selves in the shops – apparently not getting that last pack of M&S turducken slice would spell eternal doom. One of the assistants in the chocolatier I visited told me they are open till 10pm. Seriously, where is the urgent need for luxury chocolates that can only be met by keeping shops open till 10pm? Totally ridiculous. I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t bring you this year’s epitome of what Christmas is not about. It’s the Christmas tree at the Emirates Palace hotel in Dubai which has been festooned with £7 million worth of gems. It has its own security guards, of course. At least they have the excuse of not being Christians; what’s our excuse?  I searched high and low for Christmas cards showing anything except Santa, Victoriana, or obscene jokes. I did find some of the the wise men but they of course are bearing gifts so that’s OK.

Peace was restored by the magical carol service I attended. So, if you can’t find this year’s must-have trinket or bauble, fear not. In 100 years, it’ll all be landfill anyway. Find a carol service and escape the madness for an hour or two. I leave you with a couple of verses from one of my favourites:

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold!
Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heaven’s all gracious King!
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

In honour of the Light of the World, here are images from an incredible installation at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles (most appropriate 🙂 ) Yayoi Kusama’s ”Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away”

Have a peace-filled week. Pip pip.

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Beyond Parody

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A week of absurdities. First off the mark is the revered, indeed reverend Tony Blair informing us that he is ready to get back into politics, planning his comeback as an ‘insurgent’, to right all the wrongs which have accumulated since his much-lamented departure. I fear that reality and Tony are now complete strangers. However, looking at the tip-top job he has done as Middle East Peace Envoy, making the whole region so peaceful and utopian, it’s everyone’s first choice for a holiday spot, I can only say, ‘You’ve got my vote, Tony. Your people need you!’ Those whom the gods would destroy……

Much less amusing was the announcement that £370 million has been allocated for repairs to Buckingham Palace in the week when a 36-year old homeless man froze to death on the street in Birmingham. Of course the richest, most pampered family in the land should have its plumbing fixed by the general public. Scraping by on a meagre £40,000,000 a year, who can afford to fix the roof? Luckily, there are countless people living lives of unremitting luxury on £20,000 per family who are thrilled to give generously at this time of need. That’s the Christian principle in a nutshell – take from the poor and give to the rich. It’s what Baby Jesus would have wanted.

Elsewhere, I have been surrounded by anarchists this week. There was the fellow churchgoer (a pillar of the AV system team 🙂 ) causing havoc as my poor vicar tried to expatiate on the message of Christingle. Asked what the shape of the orange which symbolises the world was, she replied ‘Square’. Then there was the memo from a cabinet meeting between the PM Theresa May, and the cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, stating that there were too many leaks from cabinet meetings and laying out the dire consequences for anyone who dared to leak anything in the future – starting with the sack, tarring and feathering, before the culprit is hanged, drawn and quartered. The security forces i.e MI5, MI6 etc etc would be watching everyone like a hawk, downloading their emails and phone logs etc etc. Eek! You guessed it – someone promptly leaked the letter to the papers 🙂 I am an anar-chist! It warms the cockles of the heart to see such subversive behaviour in high places. Maybe we aren’t quite ready to be twinned with North Korea yet…..

I leave you with a couple of gloomy poems which always make me smile. The first was written by the incomparable Dorothy Parker:

Resumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
The second is by Stevie Smith:
To an American Publisher
You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.
You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.
Have a fabulous week, one and all.

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For All The Saints

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A truly horrible week in what had already been a seriously trying year. One of my favourite aunts died suddenly this week. So suddenly that we never even got an official diagnosis for her illness before she died. I had lost touch with her for a long time because she moved far away from the family to a rural part of Nigeria but I had spent years asking after her with nobody apparently knowing where to find her. We finally reconnected last year but I never got the chance to see her again. She was just the most wonderful person; she wasn’t perfect, none of us is, but I thought she was terrific. She had that rarest of qualities – true kindness, and she was never anything other than nice to me. How often can any of us say that about the people we know? Aunty Olu wanted nothing but the best for me and never had any hidden agendas -I can count the number of people I know who qualify for those criteria on one hand and still have fingers left over.

She was a superlative cook; seriously, you have no idea. I learnt to cook from her as much as I did from my Mother. Her fish pasties and fairy cakes are the stuff of legend. I cannot express how much colder and older the world feels without her. I try to console myself that I did what I could for her when I could, but it seems inadequate somehow. Still I know she rests in the everlasting arms; ‘ I am the resurrection and the death. He that believes in me, even though he dies, yet shall he live. And he that lives and believes in me shall never die’. The death of Fidel Castro in the same week led me to ponder about the legacy that we leave and to compare the effect that these two deaths have had on the people connected with both the deceased. To have crowds celebrating in the street that you have died – what a testament to a wasted life. So, we redeem the time because the days are evil, and they are short. I guess the lesson is to do all the good you can for all the people we can because we will not pass this way again. A healthy, life-affirming week to you all.

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Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head

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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells………

That John, what a wordsmith, eh? Is there anything better than arriving back at a toastily-warm house after walking home from work on a dark autumnal night? Not going to work in the first place? Slackers, each and every one of you! I actually took the feature photograph on my way to work a couple of weeks ago. Not too shabby as a way to start the day, non?

Anyway, lovely as autumn is, I have been rained on walking home every day this week. And I mean rain, not drizzle. Why don’t you get an umbrella, I hear you ask? I have an umbrella; in fact the last time I checked I possess at least 4 of them. Problem is, I hate them so much I’d rather get wet. I hate the dripping, I hate their seemingly perennial dampness, I hate the wretched spokes that never seem to behave themselves. So, I get wet instead. Before you ridicule me, I share this disdain for brollies with no less a personage than Albert Einstein. There’s a great story of him leaving a lecture hall and walking out into pouring rain. One of his students rushed after him, aghast that the great man might get drenched, and asked if him if he did not have a brolly. He replied that in fact he possessed several but never used them as they made him anxious. If he took a brolly home, he then worried that the next time it rained, he would be at work with no brolly. The converse applied if he took a brolly to work. ‘Why don’t you leave an umbrella each at home and at work’, his student asked? ‘Oh, that is even worse’ he replied. It meant that more often than not, both umbrellas ended up at the same location and he forgot about them. The next time it rained, he was usually at the umbrella-free location. See what I mean? It’s a nightmare!

What I really need is a car, and pronto. This time I need a car that does not necessitate immediate speed-dialling of the RAC as soon as I buy it. Watching those delinquents Clarkson, Hammond and May on the Grand tour hasn’t helped either. Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz…. 🙂

Speaking of Albie as I like to call him, here’s his excellent way of explaining his theory of general relativity: If you are at a party talking to a beautiful woman (this was pre gender-fluidity, bear with me…..), an hour seems like a minute. If you are sitting on a hot stove, a minute seems like an hour. If that’s not crystal-clear, I don’t know what is. Have a dry and toasty weekend.

 

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Potato,Potahto

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Well, I warned you- change and mayhem. With the world reeling at the prospect of President The Donald, I hope my offering of puppies and rainbows and peonies will calm you down somewhat. The recent US election campaign has been incredible. It’s the most honest campaign I’ve ever seen because for the first time ever, the game has been laid bare. The electorate was offered only 2 choices- worse or worser, to coin a phrase. This has been going on for decades but it has never been so transparent before. The people saw right through it and decided to give the establishment a bloody nose. However. no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. Doubtless, they’re already regrouping to see how they can manipulate someone much less malleable than Hilary would have been. Still, man proposes and God disposes. We shall see what we shall see. He doesn’t need money, fame or success. He’s already been exposed as a male chauvinist pig and there is no reputation to protect. I am very interested to see what he might be tempted to sell his soul for, unless of course it’s already in hock in which case it’s a simple matter of collecting a debt. Conspiracy, ahoy 🙂

IMHO, people didn’t so much vote for Trump as against Hilary and what they perceived rightly or wrongly as a seriously corrupt establishment class. This class never learn and constantly underestimate the anger of the general public because of course, they have little or no contact with that public. It’s the same reason why people voted for Brexit and look what’s happening there – they’re trying to nullify 33 million votes and saying that the votes of 650 people can overrule the referendum. If they don’t get the result they want, they just resort to skulduggery and cheating. I’m always amused when we send observers to elections in developing countries. Talk about ‘Physician, heal thyself’. Sooner or later, they’ll attempt to do away with democracy because too many people are wide-awake now. Things are about to get very interesting indeed. If I were President Trump, I would invest in some top-notch independent security. He should ask Hilary for some numbers; the mercenaries they’ve been using in Syria and Iraq (sorry, ISIS militia) could be just the ticket 🙂

And if you’re worried about The Donald, we’ve had worse in the past. Who could forget Danforth Quayle with his ‘potatoe’ and Dubya with his ‘Some of our children is not learning’. A Yale education, natch. Oh and by the way, just in case anyone cares, Guantanamo Bay is still open with business as usual. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. For the more frivolous, I offer the following advert outside a taqueria:

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For the even more delinquent among my readers, I offer the following courtesy of my brother Wolix:

 

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C2H5OH. You know it makes sense (hic! hoc!!)

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