Bob Dylan reimagined, Donald Trump for real, and the climate crisis

25 January 2025

On Sunday, I went to the cinema and saw a film nominated for 8 Oscars, loosely based on Bob Dylan’s early life, ‘A Complete Unknown’ (words taken from Like a Rolling Stone).  It’s not biographical but it’s a representation of his early life as a chancer up to when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band.

All the real-life characters are brilliantly cast although Dylan asked that Suze (pronounced ‘Suzie’) Rotolo’s name didn’t appear.  She was an established artist and a political activist with her own ambitions and ultimately escaped to Italy to make her own life because she didn’t want to be known as Dylan’s muse.  In her memoir ‘The Freewheelin’ Years’ she comes over as a lovely, independent and talented person who deserved, and got, better than Dylan.  In the film, she’s sort of represented by a character called Sylvie Russo but ‘Sylvie’ seems feeble and more compliant than Suze.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, whom he treated just as badly (listen to Baez’s later song Diamonds and Rust), and Barbaro gives an very good impression of her voice;  Edward Norton is sensitively avuncular as the folk purist Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook plays a small role as Johnny Cash, lightly revealing the problems he had with alcohol.  Dylan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand but references to his use of other drugs are played down.

Even with such strong support, the film belongs to Timothée Chalamet’s as Dylan, performing all the songs himself.  He gives a subtle but totally believable interpretation of the Dylan who was becoming famous and moving towards the first of many new directions he was to take in later years, not really caring about other people who had helped him on the way, like Seeger and Baez (who says to Dylan “You’re really kind of an asshole”).

Dylan himself approved the script but didn’t influence the final cut, probably because he doesn’t care what people think about him and was happy to see the legend further confused.  There’s a lot of online discussion about whether he suffers from Aspergers and has no way of knowing how other people are feeling, which would be consistent with some of the casual cruelty the Dylan character shows in the film.

Scenes from his life are mixed up and conflated – the cry of “Judas” was actually recorded in Manchester on his British tour but was put into the film’s Newport concert.  Although it now grieves me to admit it, I felt similarly betrayed at his London concert on that tour and by hearing for the first time some of the electric songs in the second half, which seemed particularly shocking after the acoustic first half he had just played. 

But I got used to them and now accept his broken voice doing little more speaking the words, backed by a piano, a cello and some subdued percussion, and I’m happy to accept a recent song whose title he borrowed from Walt Whitman:  “I contain multitudes”.

Other news this week included Donald Trump on Monday, with his left hand on a Bible, saying “I do solemnly swear that I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Within hours, he had forgotten his oath and pardoned 1,500 violent criminals who had been properly convicted for their parts in the 6 January 2021 insurrection that Trump himself had encouraged by telling them to “fight like hell”.  In doing this, he described attacks on police officers as “very minor incidents”, even though hundreds of police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol Building and nine people, including police officers, died as a result of the attack.

Pamela Hemphill, 71, refused to accept the pardon, saying it was an insult to the police officers who she credits with saving her life after she’d been knocked over and trampled on.

Trump then signed various racist (second-generation birthrights given by the Constitution), isolationist (Mexico and WHO), transphobic (only two genders), dangerous (climate crisis denial) and other executive orders that descended to the ridiculous (renaming the Gulf of Mexico and an Alaskan mountain).

Shortly before this, JD Vance, a former Marine who had accused Trump of being a white supremacist and compared him to Hitler but changed his tune when he saw his own future at stake, was sworn in as Vice-President.  And Pete Hegseth, who believes government should be subordinate to Old Testament laws, was made Defense Secretary.  (I thought the OT was originally Jewish and adopted by Christianity but Hegseth is obviously closer to God than I am.)

I’m also beginning to wonder if Melania has hidden shallows.  No normal FLOTUS-to-be would have dressed for a funeral and worn a hat that prevented her husband kissing her at his inauguration.

Trump obviously wasn’t affected by a recent study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, published in Nature Climate Change, which had measured changes in 200 sites between 1990 and 2020. Too many long words perhaps.

The study showed how Arctic forests, wetlands and tundra are being transformed by the planet’s rapid warming.  Since before the last ice-age, these ecosystems have held immeasurable amounts of carbon in the permafrost but, as temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, tundras unfreeze and more CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.

Their analysis shows that 30% of these lands are now releasing the carbon they’ve been storing for tens of thousands of years which is, in an understatement by the lead researcher, “a pretty big deal”.

GBNews has quoted the Telegraph’s report that “an Israeli official close to the negotiations” had said that “if Hamas adhered to all the rules set out in the new deal, Israel would leave the strip”.  I wonder if they should have said “ … what’s left of the strip” because Gazans returning to the devastation will be left to guess where their house was and where some of their missing relatives probably still are.

J F Kennedy 61 years on

23 November 2024
Sixty-one years ago yesterday, American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot.
It was a truly shocking event and, as younger people remember where they were when they heard Lady Di had died, older people remember where they were when they heard he had been shot.
He was the youngest American president ever to be elected, and the youngest ever to die in office. He was also the first Roman Catholic president and was part of what Americans don’t call an ‘upper class’ family. He was good-looking and he was married to Jacqueline Bouvier, also good-looking, from another ‘upper class’ family.
Even today, his name is still remembered (who can name the three presidents who followed him? Or his three predecessors?) and his undoubted charisma has led to an image that has persisted into this century.
After rupturing a disc in his spine playing football at Harvard, Kennedy concentrated on politics and international affairs but his entire life was plagued by health problems and he was frequently in pain. He was awarded a purple heart when a Japanese destroyer sank his PT boat and he led the survivors of his crew to swim some three miles to the nearest land, helping another crewmate who’d been badly burnt.
While he was convalescing from another back operation in 1955, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history, and he subsequently became active in politics.
In the 1960 election, he narrowly beat Richard Nixon and gave birth to a whole new era in American politics, most of it progressive. Although he had authorised the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to oust Fidel Castro, he then called Russia’s bluff in 1962 over their missile bases in Cuba, leading the world to the brink of World War III, which frightened the hell out of people everywhere; but he won and Khrushchev backed down.
Kennedy then argued that the confrontation showed how important it was to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and this finally led to the 1963 test ban treaty.
He formed the Peace Corps of volunteers who worked all over the world on projects in education, farming, health care, and construction and he was active on equal rights and proposed new civil rights legislation in the belief that all Americans, regardless of their skin colour, have the same rights to a good and happy life in America. He also introduced the Equal Pay Act in 1963 so women were entitled to the same pay rates as men and he was an advocate of income tax cuts but his premature death meant this legislation wasn’t enacted during his lifetime.
Then, on 22 November 1963, he and Jackie were being driven slowly through Dallas, waving at the cheering crowds, when a bullet hit him in the back of his neck and exited through his throat. As he fell sideways, another bullet removed a piece of his skull. His head landed on Jackie’s lap and she cradled him as the motorcade raced to the hospital.
She later refused to change and, still wearing the pink dress covered in his blood, later stood beside Lyndon B Johnson as he was sworn in, saying she wanted people to see what they had done.
Because the person believed to have shot him was himself shot two days later, there was nothing to stop conspiracy theories springing up, including one theory that there was a second shooter on ‘the grassy knoll’ in front of the car and another that the person believed to have shot him had been trained and/or set up by communists, or some conspiracy or secret organisation.
Coincidentally, his murder was filmed by a supporter, Abraham Zapruder, and frame 313 of his film shows Kennedy’s head jerking backwards as the first shot hits him. The conspiracy theorists believe this shows the first shot came from in front and knocked his head backwards; others believe that the head automatically jerks backwards if one is hit hard in the back of the neck.
The 888-page report of the Warren Commission concluded that no evidence had been found that the killings were part of any conspiracy. This naturally fuelled rumours that there had been a conspiracy that had been covered-up.
After his death, it became public knowledge that he’d been a philanderer and had several affairs including, most notably, with Marilyn Monroe, and there were rumours of the Kennedy family’s links with organised crime.
These appear to have arisen because JFK’s younger sister Pat had, in 1954, married Peter Lawford, one of the infamous ‘rat pack’ of entertainers and, through them, JFK had met and become friends with Frank Sinatra (who first introduced him to Monroe). However, JFK’s brother Robert had written in his 1960 book The Enemy Within that organised crime was the greatest danger facing his country and he began a public and sustained attack on gangs when he was appointed JFK’s Attorney General.
Sinatra fell out with JFK after the latter was advised that maintaining close links with Sinatra, who was believed to have links with the mafia, might damage his reputation, and Lawford himself was subsequently excluded from rat-pack activities.
Thus was the saintlike president de-canonised and made human but it’s worth reminding ourselves that he was the right person at the right time and, peccadilloes aside, he led America through some huge societal changes and his legend lives on.
In many respects, he was a ground-breaker and it would be interesting to know what he would have thought of present-day America with another bout of Trump, this time with Elon Musk, only a couple of months away.
Nancy Friedman, a “Customer service consultant” (by gosh some UK companies could do with one of those), wrote just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, about a kakistocracy, which she described as “government by the shitty”. ‘Kaka’ is of course a word commonly used by children in many countries as a not-very-rude way of referring to ‘poo’ though the word ‘kakistocracy’ itself goes back to at least 1644.
It’s roughly the opposite of ‘aristocracy’, based on the Greek ‘aristos‘ meaning ‘best’, which has come to mean government by people who, in the absence of any supporting evidence, consider themselves to be the best.

Exploding pagers, twisted minds, Ig Nobel prizes, Atlantis and the climate crisis

21 September 2024

Tuesday’s simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah killed dozens of people and injured thousands more.  Israel seems a likely suspect but hasn’t yet accepted the blame.

In order to carry out this attack, small amounts of an explosive would have been added to each of the units with some sort of trigger device.  Their manufacture involves components and assembly lines in many different places and, because similar devices used by other people didn’t explode, it seems probable they were doctored after Hezbollah had acquired them but before they were distributed to their operatives.  Perhaps they were delivered to Hezbollah by a transport company called Mossad Logistics.

The whole thing was made even more sadistic by introducing a few seconds’ delay between the beep and the explosion to give people time to lift the device to their ear so it was more likely to explode next to their head.

It also needed somebody to make the decision when to press the button that would set them all off and 3.30pm local time seems a particularly cruel time to do this because so many people would have been in streets and markets, surrounded by innocent women and children.  What sort of twisted mind do people need to plan this, or implant the explosives, or to send the trigger code?

Other twisted minds belong to Mohammed Fayed (the ‘al’ was self-awarded) because it turns out he was the screw specialist in Harrods’ hardware department, and Elon Musk, now thought likely to become the world’s first trillionaire (why does my stomach turn over as I write that?)  Musk obviously feels threatened by the singer Taylor Swift because, after she came out as pro-Kamala Harris, he tweeted “Fine Taylor, you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

Isn’t this assault which, at least in English law, can be threats without physical contact?

Curiously enough, yet another mind with faulty connections posted this ‘first’ message (not in response to anything) last week on our local Nextdoor network:  “What’s happened was no bugger no apart from the boats working dollars sign’s on them and they are budgeting for the luxury toilets rolls lolx” (I’ve redacted the name of the sender for obvious reasons but I did wonder if lolx was a misprint for bolx). 

Which naturally leads to the announcement of this year’s winner of Ig Nobel prizes.  The awards were first introduced in 1991 and prizes are awarded to those who, in the opinion of the judges, highlight some of the quirkiest projects reported during the year.  Winners receive an award and 100 trillion dollars.  The only slight disappointment for the winners is that the dollars are not USD but Zimbabwean dollars with a value of about 40 cents.

The value of the researches considered can be judged from last year’s prize for medicine which was given to Christine Pham and Bobak Hedayati who pulled the hairs out of people’s nostrils to see if there are an equal number of hairs in each one.  Before you start squirming, you should know that they probed cadavers’ noses.  (Imagine having to ask relatives if it would be OK to pull all the hairs out their late grandfather’s nose.)

This year, prizewinning research included one project carried out by James Liao at the University of Florida who investigated the swimming abilities of a dead trout and a Swiss, German and Belgian group which demonstrated that placebos used in clinical trials are more effective if they cause pain or other unpleasant side-effects.

Japanese scientists also investigated whether oxygen pumped into the bums of mice, rats and pigs would help with respiratory problems by supplementing the oxygen absorbed from normal breathing.  This was inspired by a different study that had discovered loaches can use their intestines to breathe; yes, I too had to look them up – they are of course benthic or bottom-dwelling (geddit?) freshwater fish.

As far as I know, the study didn’t include any increase in the emission of inflammable farts but there is more logic to the idea than is obvious at first sight:  some medicines are given as suppositories rather than pills – more commonly I believe in France than Britain – and are absorbed through the walls of the rectum.  So why not oxygen?  There must be a way of producing an oxygen-rich solid that will stay in place long enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream.

A trial is now taking place with human volunteers with respiratory problems so, if you’ve got asthma and go for an annual check-up, don’t turn your back.

What wasn’t considered for a prize was the latest claim for the site of Atlantis.  The legend is attributed to Plato but its fate seems similar to that of Sodom and Gomorrah as written in the Talmud and later incorporated into the Bible.  All were destroyed by God(s) because their peoples were enjoying themselves (I oversimplify slightly here).  The cities were just destroyed but the island (?) of Atlantis sank under the sea and some people think its ruins are still out there somewhere.

Researchers have recently found an undersea mountain and some people believe this is it.  It’s a huge mountain rising from the seabed north of the Canary Islands that sank millions of years ago leaving its peak thousands of feet underwater.  Anybody worried about the different timescales involved, join the club.

A more recent landslip occurred in Greenland this time last year when the top 25m cubic metres of a 1,200-metre mountain collapsed and slid down into the twisty fjord below, triggering a huge tsunami.  This dissipated quickly but water continued to slosh around for more than a week because it was almost entirely contained within in the fjord by a sharp bend 10km downstream.

68 scientists from 40 institutions around the world who combined seismic data, field measurements, on-the-ground and satellite imagery, and high-resolution computer simulations of tsunami waves took a year to work out how the entire Earth had continued to vibrate for nine days.

The mountain collapsed because so much of the glacier in the fjord below had melted there was no longer enough left to support the mountain.  Global warming?  Utter piffle.

Heatwaves, politicians and badgers, Scandinavian gods and assisted dying

24 July 2022

Last week saw the end of the UK’s heat wave with record high temperatures recorded all over the country and a number of houses in London destroyed by a fast-moving grass fire.

Travel was also disrupted.  Asphalt on roads has always softened in hot weather but last week was hot enough for local councils to send out gritters full of sand to stabilise road surfaces.  We stayed at home behind closed curtains but it conjured up pictures of being able to coat the windscreen of a car following too closely behind with a fine mixture of sand and tar.  (Those of us who lack charitable feelings for drivers who follow so closely you can no longer read their numberplate in the mirror make a point of driving through puddles and it always works:  the car will slow and back right off, especially if you can find a really muddy patch.)

Railway lines used to come in short sections with a one-centimetre (½ inch) gap between them so they wouldn’t buckle when they expanded on hot days – hence the distinctive ‘diddley-dee diddley dah’ sound that trains used to make as their wheels crossed the gaps.  Nowadays, they use welded rails that are hundreds of miles (well, metres) long and travel is much quieter, but they were only designed for normal UK temperatures and last week there was a risk they could get hot enough to distort and derail trains so many services had to be cancelled or run more slowly.

With its customary dedication to impartial and unvarnished truth-telling, the Daily Mail reported on Monday that “snowflake Britain had a meltdown” on a “sunny day” and somebody called Stephen Robinson, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “speechwriter and consultant [for] companies operating in the energy sector”, condemned the Met Office (which he described as “woke” and “alarmist”) and the BBC for becoming an “all-singing, all-dancing amen choir for the climate alarmist ‘Blob’” and saying “In Africa, real men would wear shorts and safari jackets and hydrate by ordering another few beers”. 

Its editorial view went further and said “Listening to apocalyptic climate change pundits and the BBC, you’d think Britain was about to spontaneously combust”, thereby neatly encapsulating much of the paranoia of the right wing about climate change alarmists, the socialist bias of the BBC, and those ghastly ‘woke’ people.

By Wednesday, the Daily Mail had moved on a little and was talking about “a near post-apocalyptic scene with gutted houses and burnt-out vehicles”.  Always open to new ideas the Mail, at least if their preference for long-held prejudices over facts is so suddenly exposed.

Then, on Thursday, they reported that Boris Johnson “crushed his puny critics with customary wit and eloquence in what could be his final Commons appearance as PM” after a particularly egocentric, repetitive, irrelevant and untruthful speech saying “we got Brrexit” done in the face of the known contribution of tariff barriers and the bureaucratic delays it caused to trade that have contributed to increases in the cost of living, the Ireland problem and traffic gridlocked at Dover.

When a prime minister makes their last appearance in the House of Commons, it’s customary for everyone on both sides to stand and cheer them out but Johnson has been so unrelentingly disastrous a PM that nobody on the opposition benches stood. Theresa May did, but very slowly, and didn’t clap.  I suddenly found myself warming to May for the first time ever.

Now we find ourselves waiting for paid-up members of the Conservative Party to elect our next prime minister from a list of two, their MPs having kindly reduced the list from 11 to make the choice easier for Bears of Little Brain.  I said last week that there were 175,000 of them but this week’s estimate is 160,000.  And falling?

The party is unsurprisingly cagey about the demography of its membership but educated guesses are that our next prime minister will be chosen by 4 out of every thousand people (0.38%) eligible to vote in general elections and these will be primarily male, pale and stale:  70% are men, 97% are white, almost half are over 65, and 55% live in London and the south.  (Their average age is 57 but the average age of Labour party members is 53 so perhaps the whole idea of any party membership is less attractive to younger people?)

The inews website said the choice was between “batshit and the billionaire”.

The two contenders are now trying to woo voters.  Rishi Sunak criticised Liz Truss saying you can’t fund tax cuts by borrowing although he had done precisely that to fund his “whatever it takes” approach to the Covid pandemic.

Truss herself has vowed to scrap all existing EU regulations within 16 months.  These include laws protecting employment and the environment agreed by all the EU nations and she will have to introduce new legislation to replace most of them even though the civil service has been significantly reduced in size.  Good luck with that.

She also remains committed to the mass slaughter of badgers despite a paper published in the Veterinary Record earlier this year that concluded the culling of badgers over the previous 9 years had no significant impact on bovine TB in cattle.  If new licences are issued, people who enjoy killing things will have to go back to killing peasants – sorry, pheasants – that have been bred just so their lives can be sacrificed to the worrying motivations of shooters.

One of those irritating little teasers popped up on my computer the other day when I was looking to see where my VPN had found an available processor that day because it told me it was raining;  the answer was Oslo where a forest fire advisory notice had been issued so perhaps the Scandanavian gods are more effective than ours, or maybe Thor was just having a strop. 

Whatever, the teaser’s headline was about a Bengal cat being hit by a celebrity and invited me to open a site called Daily Motion for the full story.  Yes, really.  Perhaps it specialises in today’s shittiest stories.  I didn’t open it to find out.

A EuroMillions jackpot of £195m has been won by a ticket bought in the UK.  Does anybody else think the maximum prize should be £1m, enough to change all normal people’s lives?  It would also increase punters’ chances of winning by 200 times and allow almost 200 tickets to win £1m.  Mind you, I know people whose life would be changed beyond recognition by ‘only’ £10,000 so why don’t they give a prize of £10,000 to each of almost 20,000 people?

But I have to end on a sad note.  Graham Mansfield cut his wife Dyanne’s throat while she was sitting in a chair in their garden and said he’d do it again to give her peace.  They’d been married for more than 40 years when they discovered she had terminal (stage 4) lung cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and she asked him to help her end her life when the pain became too much to bear.

He then took an overdose of pills himself and tried to cut his own throat and wrists but woke 12 hours later and rang 999, saying he’d killed his wife.  When paramedics arrived, he begged them to let him die.

The police said they had to charge him with murder because she hadn’t signed the suicide note and there was no independent evidence she had agreed to it.  (As the law currently stands, it’s legal to go to Dignitas to end your life in Switzerland but nobody’s allowed to help you so, even if you’re unable to do it yourself, anybody who helps you buy a ticket will be breaking the law.)

A cancer specialist estimated Dyanne would only have survived between one and four weeks more.

In court last week, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder and the judge imposed a two-year suspended sentence saying the killing was “an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering”.

Mansfield has said he’d learnt that, if you ever do something like this, you should make sure you video your agreement.

The general reaction of people commenting on websites shows a large majority in favour of changing the law to allow assisted dying in the UK.  Even the BMA supports this but politicians are scared of losing votes … 

Dear Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, please amend this law as soon as possible.

Cognitive disconnects, naughty French words, nine-tailed vixen and simulacra

13 March 2022

A bunch of lorry drivers who had been demonstrating against the pandemic restrictions in Ottawa decided it was such fun that, even now the restrictions are being eased, they’ve broadened their demands so they can continue ‘demonstrating’ against other things and drove a convoy round the Washington beltway (ring road to English speakers).  Next week, they’ll be demanding free Hershey bars for overweight truckers.  I had a Hershey bar once and was very disappointed:  they’re nothing like proper chocolate.

We saw another cognitive disconnect in Vladimir Putin this week.  A lot of Ukrainians want to leave Ukraine because they don’t want to end up under Russian rule again.  Putin originally offered to protect escape routes but only into Russia and Belarus, thereby ensuring that all malcontents would be in ‘his’ country where they can cause problems for him.  Surely it would be more logical to let them out to anywhere except Russia or Belarus so there’ll be a border between him and the people who don’t like him?

But who does?  Ukraine claims Russian invaders have killed more civilians than soldiers and, over here, the Disasters Emergency Committee set up an emergency humanitarian appeal for Ukraine that raised £150m in its first week.

I loved the earlier reports of a 30-mile queue of Russian tanks waiting to invade Ukraine.  What idiot thought that was a good idea?  As we know from the M25, when the front vehicle starts to move, it takes a couple of seconds before the second follows, and so on down the line to the last vehicle that doesn’t start moving till next Tuesday (and the traffic jam moves backwards round the motorway).  It would have worked like that in Ukraine if the fourth tank’s battery hadn’t gone flat and held up the entire convoy.  Sheer logistical brilliance.  How did the people who thought this was a good idea get promoted to positions that allowed them to do it?

Did you know that the French have to transliterate his name differently because ‘Putin’ is pronounced like ‘putain’, which is, in French, a naughty word, so he’s ‘Poutine’ (which, in English, sounds a bit like a repository for solid personal waste, though I suppose ‘poutrine’ would be more obvious).

At the United Nations security committee on Friday. The Russian representative read a list of spurious accusations that Ukraine was committing all sorts of heinous crimes from developing chemical weapons in medical research laboratories and breeding more soldiers in maternity hospitals and kindergartens, and educating Russia’s next president in a psychiatric hospital, implying this justified bombing them.  Everyone, from the Albanians on, accused him of spreading false propaganda and, though I didn’t hear it, the French probably said “putain de merde”.

In America, Donald Trump suggested in a speech to Republican donors that the US should cover F-22 jets with Chinese decals, “bomb the shit out of Russia” and then say “China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it” and they could have a war of their own.  A sense of humour isn’t one of Trump’s more obvious qualities so we can only assume he thinks Russia wouldn’t say “oh look, here comes a fleet of American F-22 jets”, they’d say “hey, look at the decals, it’s China, let’s go and bomb the bastards”.

The appearance of dark forces is also being feared by more gullible people in Japan where a famous rock has suddenly split in two.  Legend has it that an evil, nine-tailed vixen (she’d have been a bugger to towel down after she’d been out in the rain) called Tamamo-no-Mae manifested herself as a beautiful woman, got involved in some sort of skirmish between local warlords and her spirit got imprisoned in this lump of volcanic rock which was reputed to kill anyone who touches it.  And it’s been conclusively proved that it does in fact do so since we all die sometime anyway and the legend didn’t include a time limit.

Boring old experts have pointed out that cracks had appeared some years ago, water would have got in, frozen and split the rock.  I prefer the beautiful nine-tailed fox theory.

I once found a simulacrum on a beach, a small black jagged pebble showing, from one angle, the face of a devil with a hooked nose and three small quartz intrusions for its two eyes and its mouth.  It was definitely spooky if you were ‘sensitive’ to this sort of thing but I no longer know where it is.  (I have a photo somewhere if anyone would like to see it.)  I have another of a friendly owl which is on a shelf here beside me.  No nine-tailed vixens though.

This week’s entry is mercifully short because I haven’t got Covid.  My wife has been basically OK but I’ve had the symptoms for her despite testing negative on lateral flow and PCR tests.  I feel like death warmed up – aching, coughing and subject to overwhelming lassitude.  (Q:  What happened to that raggedy old bone?  A:  Lassitude it.)  (For younger readers, Lassie was a dog in an old TV series.)