Dear Christmas Diary

Albert has taken charge of decorating the house and is driving us all mad, quoting Dickens’s “that pretty little German toy, etc.” After all, he says, “it was Victoria’s Albert who...” Yes, we KNOW, Albert.” Steven has gained a temporary post, posturing as Mr Claus in a local mall, and he hates it so much that he anticipates being in PTSD for the next six months. Marcia is set to while away the Christmas and New Years hours in her care home post, and I? Well, if there is anything worse than eating turkey, it is watching other people eat it, which is why I, a pescatrian, am vacating my so-called hospitality post for a while. Happy holiday and see y’all in 2023.

Christmas 2022

How do we know it’s Christmas? Let me count the ways. We know 25/12 is fast approaching when celebrities begin peddling their bottled non-scents on television screen and off magazine cover. Ye shall know it’s Christmas when queues to access the basics of life everywhere, i.e., banks and post offices, supermarket checkouts and loos lengthen to proportions not seen since the days of Iron Curtain rationing and all while electronic carols jingle merrily in the background. Ye shall know it’s Christmas when the most banal of merchandise acquires, by virtue of a twist of foil wrapping paper and a sprig of holly, a decided aura of magic, when the super-brands’ mini-movies begin to air on TV, when criminally slender models extol the virtues of rich and creamy chocolate, when designer-dressed party-makers imbibe on alcoholic brew, yet remain upright enough to dance the night away. We know it’s Christmas when every hit tune for the past five decades is dredged up and served as a component in a compilation album, e.g., The Twenty Best Soft-Shoe Shuffle Hits, Twenty Songs For Granny To Rave To, Twenty Orchestrations For The Dog To Howl At, and ye shall know that Yuletide is upon us when the sanest of citizens begins to prance about in red and white, fluffy Santa hats, when the whole world becomes an insane cauldron of buying and selling, eating and drinking, boozing, carousing or simply snoozing off the toxic after-effects. Whichever part you play, have a wonderful, wonderful, time.

Why I’m cracking up

Never thought I’d see the day when eggs became as rare as hens’ teeth, but here we are. Following much foot-slog, I finally got my mitts upon a coveted carton, the precious nuggets nestling like jewels in their cardboard compartments, snug as bugs and smug as rugs at having finally attained food-superstar status. Ah, Fabergé knew exactly what he was doing! And I? In my state of egg-streme distress, I rue not having followed the career path of breeding hens, now surely the Golden Goose of domestic animals. I shed tears over all the times I have cracked open one of the little darlings and did not bother to scoop all of the white from the shells. Or let the white drip upon the kitchen counter. Or neglected to prise all the cooked stuff from saucepan or frying pan. And it brings tears to my eyes remembering those times in the supermarket when I have rejected a carton because just one happened to be cracked. Or the set of six looked less than what it, you know, what it should have: talk about the chickens coming home to roost. Now, every one is a treasure to be cosseted and canoodled; that golden yolk colour cannot be a coincidence. The problem is: what to do with my casket of eggs? Every fate seems just too banal, too final, too horrible. Omelettes? Too colloquial. Eggs Benedict? Don’t like. Cakes? Not eggy enough; my dears, I want to see the precious pearls as I consume them. Every one of the ovoid beauties has attained the status of smoked salmon, fine wine, the rarest of rare cheeses, and deserves to go out in style. Really and truly, they deserve their own show, possibly an online animation of Jack and the Beanstalk, with gold-sprayed eggs taking starring role. How about it, animators, how about it?

You’d better fear…

It’s the most wonderful time of the year
Old houses are daunting
The ghosts are a-haunting
The bats are a-flapping
And ghouls are a-tapping….and you’d better fear….’cos I’m here….wooooo-oooooh!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
The staircase is creaky
The rodents are squeaky
The attics are musty
And basements are dusty….and you’d better fear….’cos I’m here….wooooo-oooooh!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
The dark nights are scary
You’re right to be wary
‘Cos banshees are screeching
Long fingernails reaching….and you’d better fear….’cos I’m here….wooooo-oooooh!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
The werewolves are howling
And phantoms are prowling
And zombies and witches
Eat corpses with stitches…. and you’d better fear….’cos I’m here….wooooo-oooooh!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
With skeletons dancing
And ghost horses prancing
With Gorgons a-glaring
And their eyes are a-staring….and you’d better fear….’cos I’m here….wooooo-wooooh!

Monster Week

No, I am not referring to the Westminster antics, rather, the glorious fright-fest about to unfold on the Blaze channel. Beginning at 8 pm every night and lasting into the small hours, it’s all very timely in the run-up to Halloween: vampires, Cyclops, Skinwalker, Mothman, big cats, big bears, giant hogs, and the biggest big of them all, Bigfoot – ah, what’s not to love? Monster Week kicks off tonight at 8 pm with a prog about our very own, very beloved Nessie. See ya there, folks!

Pieces of Eight

“Suffering sharpens the wits and misfortune makes one resourceful,” read Albert. ‘Ah, Ovid, he does one good at a time like this.’
Steve: if what he said was anyway true, we would all be in possession of razor wits, and resources – as you call them – the size of Africa. (S. opens the fridge door and takes out a cheese sandwich, whose sides are already crimping upwards.)
Me: Ovid must have known what he was talking about, having been pitched from genteel Rome into semi-savage Scythia.
Steve: then why are we all sitting around here, without the heating on and eating the leftovers from your (Steve looks at me) restaurant?
Marcia: you’re terribly grumpy tonight, Steve.
Albert: he would be, Mars: he’s just been turned down by another animation studio.
Steve: (his mouth still full of sandwich) Really!
Albert: (to Marcia) Yes, really: he was to work upon the animation for a short about seventeenth-century pirates. (Steve doesn’t reply.) And that gives me an idea: how about it, you three?
Me: how about what?
Albert: To become pirates, silly.
(here, I’ll add that ever since his success with the rain dance, yet failure to get on television, Albert has been insufferable, spinning out one daft idea after another.)
“I can’t swim.”
“I’ll lose my DBS.”
“I get seasick easily.”
“Nah! I mean, for us all to become professional pirates and perform at parties. Halloween is forthcoming, is it not? I’ll be the great Long John Silver – aye, me hearties! Steve, you be Jim Hawkins. Marcia takes on the role of the great Ann Bonny and you (he points at me) can put on your skeleton suit and be Jolly Roger.’
“Er, the skeleton suit belongs to Marcia.”
“And Ann Bonny was a real person, not to be confused with fiction.”
“We don’t have equity cards.”
Albert throws up his hands. ‘Does no one besides me want to get out of this life?’ he asks, looking about at the cottage?
And do we? Friend, that is an episode for another day.

Dear Diary: oh, what a shaman!

A curse upon the house of (James) Frazer! Ever since Albert’s rain chants have succeeded in bringing down torrents of water, fire and air upon our heads, Albie has been insufferable, comparing himself with every ancient luminary, real and mythological, from Albertus Magnus to sky-god Zeus himself. He has taken to painting a zig-zag across his forehead (too Harry Potter, I tell Albie) and wearing a garland of oak leaves (courtesy of Corn Dollies) upon his head. To crown it all, he insists upon creating booming sounds by slapping Marcia’s motor-tarp across the wall, at intervals.
“Why bother with the tarp?” asks the less successful shaman, Steven. “The larder is filled with baked beans." Actually, beanus haricotus is the extent of our diet nowadays, so intent are we upon gathering the wherewithal for a house deposit. Marcia herself is working 25 hours a day in her care home job, with barely time for a comfort break. And I? Gentle reader, do await the next entry.

A Tribute to the Magnificent Whale

On Sunday night, the Legend channel (formerly Horror), aired the Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) as part of its Vintage Vault series. When I had finished screaming and hollering with delight, I concluded that BOF is one of the best little movies to emerge from Hollywood in the past 100 years. From its opening moment, the plot veers on a roller coaster from the heights of sublimity to the depths of ludocrity, and back up again. Overall, it is a feast of visual jokes, gothic cliches and an array of characters worthy of a Dickens’ novel: the rather pompous Henry (changed from Victor) Frankenstein (Colin Clive), who is desperate to be seen as the victim but really is the instigator of all of the mischief. Valerie Hobson plays his beautiful girlfriend, Elizabeth, while Dr Septimus Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) is the new evil genius. The irascible servant Minnie (Una O’Connor) delivers marvellous comic asides and needless to say, the inimitable Boris Karloff sparkles darkly in his original role as the misunderstood Monster. Highlights include the tender scenes where the all-too-human Monster, longing for food, warmth and friendship is drawn into the cottage of a blind old man and bonds with him, the fabulous steampunky apparatus that elevates the female cadaver to the lightening storm, and the moment she emerges from her bandages, her hairdo a combo of Egyptian queen and Marge Simpson gone wrong. We even get to meet the ghosts of Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester), her husband the poet Percy Bysse Shelley and their friend Lord Byron. When the Bride rejects her intended spouse, the Monster’s bitterness is palpably human. But I won’t spoil all the surprises: do see this masterpiece of classic cinema from the magnificent Whale.

Cracking down on...

I don’t know who first coined the phrase or whenever it fell into common currency, but according to the received wisdom of the English lexicon, “crack down” is a phrasal verb that means “to take severe action against”, a subject, presumably a person or organisation that is engaged upon activities of a dubious or criminal nature. But nowadays, the phrase has become the go-to term that expresses the merest rumblings of personal discontent, every bellyache and grumble with life, to grave political issues. While in the supermarket, I heard a woman stating that she was going to crack down on her partner’s excessive use of toilet paper. I ask you. When my brain had finished its 1001 boggles, it set about a whistle-stop tour of those finer verbs, more subtle in intent, that could be used in place of the insidious CD: discourage, explore, investigate, inhibit, modify, prevent, probe, question or simply offer an alternative. Best wishes to my consumer companion and her tissue issues.

Dear Diary: sympathetic magic

Sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell; sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell...
With the straw bonnet perched upon his head, and the black chevrons painted about his eyes, and the straw kilt spinning about his waist, and the bone of an indeterminate animal clutched in his hand, Albert has never looked so cool. In time to his rhyme, shaman Steven shakes the pebble-filled beer can.
‘Sun, sun, go to hell,’ he intones together with Albert. Steven too wanted to don a straw kilt and bonnet. But the store “Corn Dollies and Other Follies” had run out of stock before Steven arrived. “Got to wait for this year’s harvest to be woven into men’s desires,’ the forlorn proprietor told him. So, the shaman had to settle for a pair of tartan Bermuda shorts and Marcia’s old gardening hat. And that worthy was herself skipping about in a black bodystocking, imprinted with white skeleton markings, left over from last Halloween, no doubt.
‘What do you want to wear that for?’ I asked, when I saw it.
‘It’ll bring us closer to the spirit world: isn’t that what we want?’
As for the origin of Albert’s animal bone, don’t ask.
Plan A had been for us gals to rush through a lush meadow, clad in broderie anglaise and chanting the name of an innocuous flower, just as in a certain Marc Jacobs perfume ad. But the continuing drought means a dearth of lush meadows. So Marcia dons her skeleton kit and I sit cross-legged on the scorched grass, a dish of the scarce commodity placed at the crux of my limbs. Albert’s chanting continues, us all hoping that between us, we can generate enough spirit energy to bring the heavens down to earth.
Sun, sun, go to hell; bring to us a rainy spell...
Personally, I blame James Frazer, (1854 to 1941) you know, that Victorian geezer who devoted his life to detailing tribal and local customs the world over. In his book, The Golden Bough, Frazer writes much on the meaning of sympathetic magic. Basically this involves creating a simile or likeness of a desired happening and placing it significantly to bring about the desired effect, thus my dish of water. For example, if you wished a newly-wed couple to conceive a child, you presented them with a doll on their wedding night. North American Indians drew a likeness of someone they did not like in sand or clay and then pricked with a stick or some other sharp instrument the area of the drawing, arm, head or leg, in the belief that the subject would suffer injury in that area. And among some tribes, if that year’s crop failed then the king was tossed off his throne or even killed. Here, do not smile unless you have NEVER torn up a picture of someone that you did not like or told an adversary to ‘get lost’ or ‘drop dead’. Back in the present, the chanting and prancing continues until a pair of eyes looks over the hedge.
‘What are you doing here?’ demands a male voice. Albert stops in his tracks.
‘We are doing this for you,’ he says, ‘to make the crops grow and to feed your cattle, else you will go out of business.’
But the man interrupts him.
‘I have just bought this property and I am going to build upon it and you people are trespassing. GET OUT. Now.’
Sheepishly, we leave the field and I empty my dish of water in the hedge as we do so. Well, it’s precipitation of a sort. Later, we cut our losses. You see, if the rain dance had worked, we were going to use it to enchant a magic money tree. And it hasn’t rained yet.

I’ve got my eye on Synecdoche

We use synecdoche daily, hourly, many of us never even knowing the name of this quirky, life-enhancing art. We have all referred to champagne as ‘bubbly’, and the colours of fruits like oranges and lemons are the names of the fruits themselves and the juices derived there from. We routinely talk about the head when referring to the principal teacher of a school. Or taking a matter to the top. Or going shopping with plastic. Or shaking our heads sadly for a friend who is not on wheels It is all delightfully post modern, yet synecdoche has been enriching our speech for centuries. At the time of the French Revolution, the peasantry was referred to as the sans culottes, meaning that they didn’t wear the same kind of trousers as the men of the upper classes. In England, sharp-witted cartoonists drew hordes of rampaging French males with only long-tailed shirts to cover their nether bits. Revolutionaries were referred to as bonnets rouges, because of the characteristic red hats they wore.
In the nineteenth century, synecdoche came into its own through the pen of Charles Dickens. His novels are overflowing with verbal images like the Black-eyed, Aged Parent, and the Mercuries (footmen). Dickens himself was often – and still is – referred to as The Inimitable. And ordinary folk are often referred to as – jokingly, I trust – the
Great Unwashed. Right now, I am going to put on the kettle and then spend the evening with my feet up, before going to bed.

Confession of a snowflake

Odd weather in which to talk about snowflakes, I know. But a recent comment by an MP suggesting that those of us who simply want to slow down during this Siroccan weather are snowflakes left me seething. When I cooled down, I pondered: wherein lies the insult? Did said MP actually intend his likening of us to these beautiful, magical flakes as a compliment? Because the more I think about it, the more I liken a collection of snowflakes to the human race. On the surface, a ball of snow is just a ball of snow. Looked at under a microscope, the snowball is a collection of beautiful and precise crystals, each one as unique as a fingerprint. On its own, a snowflake melts in a heartbeat. Collectively, snowflakes form a carpet on the earth’s surface, modifying global warming, providing a facility for snow sports and inspiring creative works, from Old Master paintings to Christmas cards and songs. What snowflakes don’t do is fly the flag for rugged individualism: perhaps this is what our politician friend is missing?

We’re havin’ a heatwave...

Something about extremes of heat lends an air of unreality to everything. Heat blunts the edges of longing, softens feeling, heightens colour. It is no wonder that during certain illness, the body turns on a fever to take away the harshness of the symptoms. Or that many people flock to the warmer corners of the world when on holiday, to add another dimension to the experience of getting away from it all. A wonderful experience and yet, the effects of heat are too like those of opiate drugs, effects that make it too much of a good thing. This heady cocktail of muted colour, hushed sound and somnolent emotion can act as a wanton siren, calling one away from one’s focus, the cutting edge of purpose.

Dear Diary: family planning

The summer ploughs on; the dog days are upon us and our desire to climb on board the property ladder grows ever stronger. I turn over our conversation to you.
Albert: (looking at his phone) a government minister says that if we need more money, we got to find better-paying jobs.
Me: why didn’t we think of that before?
Steven: I did find one, actually, in an animation studio, but it is in London, where rents are higher.
Marcia: your own fault for getting a Mickey Mouse degree: why not go back to college?
Steven: And add to my student loans?
Albert: are we going to admit defeat?
Me: more research is needed, methinks.
(Six nights later and as always, Albert takes the chair.)
Albert: findings on the table, everybody. (deafening silence) Alright, I’ve just found out about the plans for fifty-year mortgages.
Me: what does it mean?
Albert: It means that we can now take out a mortgage and pay it back over fifty years instead of the normal twenty-five.
Steven: so, the payments will be lower?
Albert: you got it in one, me boy.
Me: but we might not live that long?
Albert: no problem: our children will pick up the tab.
Marcia: but we haven’t got any children?
Albert: What a bright bunch I live amongst. (winks at Marcia) Let’s get going on the breeding programme.
Steven: a great move, since it says here (looks at phone) that they are going to tax the child-free.
Albert: (winks at Marcia again) Then, we’d better get to work, quickly.
(to be continued)

Dear Diary: feeling the difference

Dear Diary
It is six months since I quit the Big Smoke for woodsmoke and boy, don’t I feel the difference that it has made! I no longer wake up in the morning, dreading the thought of the Underground. Instead, I walk across a stretch of stony ground to the teashop where I work: yes, I have found a job. I wait on tables, serving English breakfast, all day long. And heaps of sandwiches. And mountains of scones. And rivers of jam and clotted cream. And in the evening, I walk back along the stony ground, to the house in which I room. It is occupied by a number of people such as me, all rooming cheaply in order to save money so that we can buy our own houses. How exactly do we save money? Let me tell the ways.
First, we save on electric because no washing machine is plumbed into the house. Because of this, clothes’ washing could be a problem but we have the option of rinsing our towels and undies in the bath, or in the stream that runs past the back of the house, or using the local laundrette. I opt for the latter since Albert is ever lolling in the bath. And copious rodents occupy the banks of the stream. But I offset my lauderette fee against what I would have spent on electric and come out with a profit of – 2 pence. As they say, every little helps. Nor do I spend money on wastefuls such as food: Moll, the teashop proprietor, hands over the unsold sandwiches every evening, plus scones and cream and jam. I can just about subsist on this diet until about 2050, when I reckon to have raised a house deposit. And we can all manage without Netflix TV, since infotainment is via phone. But it gets better. One evening, the ever-enterprising Albert called a house meeting in which he outlined a plan by which we could buy a house sooner. Instead of the five of us trying to buy separately (he said) let us pool our pennies and buy a house together. And to help pay the mortgage, we need not bother with a plumbed washing machine or Netflix TV. And we can live on leftover food, just as we do now. I trust we will feel the difference.
(to be continued)

From Adam to Art Deco

One of my favourite places in London has ever been that facade along the Thames, on the North Bank, from roughly the east side of Hungerford Bridge to the west edge of Waterloo Bridge. I love walking along that esplanade, absorbing the jaunty, day-out-in-town atmosphere with other out and about people, and watching the boats weaving along the river. This atmosphere is helped, of course, by the glorious mix of classical and modernistic architecture on the built side of the road. And my favourite building of all is the Adelphi. Regular readers of this column will know my penchant for art deco and all that it encompasses. And this modernistic style owes its existence, in no small part, to the success and fame of Robert Adam, eighteenth-century practitioner of architecture and of the decorative arts. Though we associate art deco with modernism, the decorative friezes and moderate dimensions of the Adelphi are a nod to the Adam style.
Robert Adam was born in Edinburgh and in 1754, he set out on that requisite of every eighteenth-century gentleman, the Grand Tour of Europe. He gravitated naturally towards Italy where he met architects like Charles-Louis Clerisseau and Giovanni Piranesi, who practised in the wake of the excavation of Herculaneum. This was the sister-town to Pompeii, buried by ash and lava in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Robert was impressed by the simplicity of Roman architecture; the elegant interiors and striking wall paintings of the villas in carefully-planned streets. He returned to England in 1758 and together with his brothers, James and William, settled in London and established himself as an authority on neoclassical architecture and interiors.

From the word go, he was besieged by clients, both from the nouveau riche and the inner circle of the aristocracy, with commissions for interiors and buildings. In 1761, he gained a post as Architect to the King's Works. Classical proportioning is evident in the building at 7 Adam Street (a short distance from the Adelphi) in London, the rustications of the ground floor differentiated by blocks of cream-painted stone, with red brick reserved for the upper stories. The new Adam vocabulary eschewed the severity of the traditional Greek style, adding decorative elements in bas relief to the coursings running vertically and horizontally on the front of the building. Robert Adam had succeeded in creating a new vocabulary of architecture, while drawing from traditional sources. But it was with interiors that his firm really made its name.
The Adam interior is typified by delicacy and symmetry, unifying the rooms and echoing the classical dimensions of the house. Most particularly, Adam redefined the fireplace, with typical decorative coursings running the perimeters of the chimney place. By 1768, the Adam firm had begun their speculative scheme to build twenty-four 'first rate houses' on the north bank of Thames. But in the 1780’s, a national credit crisis put paid to the venture, and the brothers were forced to sell the plot to stave off bankruptcy. However, the Adelphi survives today in the form of the elegant art deco building on the original site. Art deco parallels the work of Adam in that it refers to ancient cultures, Mayan and Incan as opposed to Greek and Roman, and the resulting highly decorative surfaces are applied both inside and outside a building. The difference is that while Adam-style decoration makes much use of colour, art deco emerged for the electric age: witness the effects of light and shade playing upon upon the Adelphi monochrome surfaces. To appreciate the way from Adam to art deco, do take that walk along the North Bank.

The Logic of Luggage

Reader, I used to love airports, the entire razzle, the excitement of packing for a much-anticipated trip, the glorious entry to the rarefied atmosphere of a hub of a thousand airlines, it seemed, before jetting off into the skies to whatever destination. Several decades and countless trips later, I have to wonder: what has happened to those halcyon days? I am not complaining about security procedures: we all want to travel safely. Besides, I rather enjoy sashaying through the electronic portal; modelling dreams fulfilled and all of that! It is the illogical attitude of the “cabin-sized bag” that many airlines seem to favour that is sending me into over-drive.
Friend, I ask: what is the point of a checking a cabin-sized bag into the hold, a facility that many airlines provide for free? Surely, the whole point of a cabin-sized bag is to take it into the, er, cabin? And wherefrom the attendant logic of charging the passenger through the nose for checking a “normal” suitcase into the place that it was designed to travel in? What has happened to the days when every paying passenger was allocated a baggage weight and only charged for the extra weight? Here, I will try to answer a few of those questions; there exists a slice of population who seem able to break a law of fundamental physics, and stuff as much gub as would last a family for a month into a so-called cabin-sized bag. I bow to their super-powers certainly, but I kick my earth-bound heels at the effect this talent has upon an ordinary mortal like me. I once helped such a person wheel her well-stuffed, cabin-sized bag to the airport. For all the wrong reasons, it was a memorable experience. It was like trying to balance a lead weight on a bendy twig. If I lost concentration for one second, the bag element of the luggage wobbled out of control, taking its own course and threatening to take me with it. And as for lifting the thing, the weight was such that my shoulders ached for days afterwards. I ask another question: what is the point of living in the air age if we have to be built like Neanderthals in order to avail of air travel? Why can’t I travel in the company of my taller, slimmer, much-easier-to-handle suitacase without having to pay half the ticket price again to check it into the hold, in both directions? In summary, why am I being penalised for what should surely be an facility intrinsic to travelling? Can anyone tell me why?

The Seven Ages of Man

Time, time, time: never enough of it, is there? As a species, we haven’t used our alotted years too badly. Just look at our collective achievements in the past, er, 15,000 years.
Nomadic Man
Man, as a species, has definable cultural and historical markers. In the beginning, we had nomadic man, the hunter-gatherer. Humans moved in groups from place to place, hunting and foraging. Agriculture came into being roughly 10,000 years ago. With man settled, and living in towns and cities, and producing and consuming goods, the need for a sophisticated form of information exchange was born.
Classical Man
Cuneiform, the earliest form of script writing, emerged in Sumeria about 3,000 years ago. The power of the word gave birth to the Classical age. Man, know thyself, said Socrates, who lived between 469 and 399 BC. From this cauldron of thought came the notion of man as a thinking entity, one that could actually know and improve himself, as opposed to being merely the plaything of mythical deities. Great world books, like the Bible, followed. Christianity was born of the merging of the Old and New Testaments, while the verses of the Koran were produced by the prophet Mohammed between 610 and 632 AD.
Medieval Man
By the Middle Ages, religion was firmly in place. Europe was dominated by the Holy Roman Empire and faith was at the centre of everything. Centres of learning and medicine were attached to monastic communities, and were administered by monks and clerics. Schools and hospitals, as we know them today, stemmed from this collection of information. Belief in the supernatural was the world, and the world could only be understood through God. But by the 1400s, the winds of change were already blowing through the western world. Renaissance Man
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. This quote of from Julius Ceaser, by William Shakespeare, was first performed in 1599. Although the Bard peppered his plays with gods and monsters, the age of magic and superstition was over. The sixteenteenth century had been the age of exploration, scientific discovery and technological advance. With Galileo's development of the telescope in the early 1600s, stars were now objects to observe and quantify, not deities that ruled man.
Enlightenment Man
I think, therefore I am, wrote Rene Descartes (1596-1650). By now, the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance had come to fruition. Man accepted that Earth was no longer the centre of the universe, and that it traveled around the sun with the other planets. The old, ecclesiastical model of the universe had been vanquished forever and replaced with a new mode of thinking. A ‘mechanical’ model had been propounded by English scientist and mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton. His studies of time and motion led to his publication of the Principia Mathematica in 1687, a work of reference that is still in use today.
Communication Man
Until the early nineteenth century, men of learning were deemed to be 'natural philosophers'. But with the emerging disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology, the word 'scientist' was now in use, and the older phrase was consigned to history. One of the defining traits of humanity is our adeptness at amassing and communicating information. By the nineteeth century, the technology was in place for the age of mass-communication. It is arguable whether this began with the penny post (1840), or the development of the telegraph (1837), or Guglielmo Marconi's utilising of radio waves (c. 1901).
The Twentieth Century
Roughly speaking, mass communication - and travel - has been with us for the past one hundred and fifty years, facilitated in the twentieth century by telephone, television and the Internet. Our ability to communicate as individuals and en masse, worldwide and at any time, has behoved us to scrutinise our humanity. There are very few differences between the various tranches of humanity, apart from the superficialities that we acknowledge; race, colour, religion, social standing. Mass communication makes us all at once very individual, and yet supremely able to think and act in unison. It is this paradox that points to the next age, one in which we will once again be nomads.
Cosmic Man
This solar system and all of its planets will not endure forever. This does include planet Earth. Now and again, a team of scientists, somewhere, discovers an Earth-like planet in our galaxy that may support life - and as we know it! We are on the verge of moving into the cosmos. This means putting all of our petty differences behind us, and working as a team. It will mean developing and utilising the talents of every man and woman, regardless of whether they occupy 'celebrity' status. It will be a tough undertaking, fraught with challenge and danger - but remember what John F Kennedy said about our forays into space travel: not because they are easy, but because they are hard....

Dear Diary....

31 December: I have made a decision, a resolution, in fact. The time is come. This is the year. I am going to give up (all this extravagant?) living and buy my own house. This includes Netflix-gazing, coffee-drinking and hair washing, you know, all of those things that we DON’T REALLY NEED. This will save a fortune. I’ve told my friends to try this too.
21 January: Good news. Money has been pouring into my bank account. I have saved £25.71 since the beginning of the year. Bad news. My boss has given me notice. Sales have fallen since January 1. “Don’t people drink our exotic coffees any more?” she wails. “We can’t sustain the marketing department - I am sorry. You will have to go.”
I am sad, but I see this as AN OPPORTUNITY.
1 February: I have removed from the Big Smoke to a TINY VILLAGE. But living there was draining all of my resources and anyway, I was fed up of all of that urban posturing and pretentiousness. No one here will notice that my hair isn’t washed. And even though I don’t have a job, that £25.71 will go a long way towards keeping me until I find one.
6 February: It does: at Ye Little Olde Village Shoppe, I spend it all on a stick of artisan bread and a jar of exotic pasta sauce. But why be down? The man in the shop is friendly and good-looking. Like me, he is down from London. “Came down a year ago,” he says. “Trying to save money. Want to buy my own house. But I am not lonely. I know five hundred other people here like us, trying to buy a house. Half the village population, by the way. Oddly, house prices have soared here since. My advice: wash your hair, else you won’t find a job. And don’t stop buying artisan bread sticks or exotic pasta sauce. Else, I will be out of a job.” (to be continued)

The Seven Phases of the Year

Happy new 2022, everyone. The year is 11 days old and already, I feel the absence of that first flush of optimism that arises when the midnight bells ring it in. And that is the first phase of the new year. The next phase is the realisation that we are all still in the middle of a cold and gloomy winter, and that three months stand between us and more clement weather. Phase three comes about, at last, as fluffy lambs skip and gambol in green fields and the bells ring again, this time for Easter. Phase four, and the first heat wave of the year sends us all scudding for the sun block and the straw hats. And phase five is the following, cooler weather when we troop to work and college, kicking up mounds of crisp, fallen leaves as we walk. Phase six sees short, dark days and long nights, tales of ghouls and ghosts around bonfires. And phase seven is Christmas time once more, when the year turns once again and we all anticipate a better (Covid-free?) year, as we hope this one will be. Happy 2022, everyone.