Thursday 31 December 2020

SO England Leaves


                                        So England has left Europe


         Thank you Gove, Farage, Johnson and the rest of the Tory Shits.

          The Trouble with the U.K. Has always been and is that it thinks

ITS SHIT DOESNT SMELL

SAD



 

Monday 28 December 2020

WHAT I LIKE

 



Things I Care For

Books – Of all kinds – Biography, Letters, Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, History, Rare books…

Reading

Writing

Friends

Cats

A good Claret

A succulent piece of roast pork

An attractive ass

A walk by the sea

Cognac

A quiet room

Silence

Caius College

Opera

Some early music

Jazz – classic

Libraries

A warm jacket

Sailing

Walking

Cricket


Wednesday 23 December 2020

MUSING ON AGE

 


What is my life now?

A husk, a diminished fullness-And what shall I be remembered for?

 In the words of Prufrock-"No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be

Am an attendant lord one that will do 

To swell a progress, start a scene or two...I grow old I grow old..."

 

And so, I age and ponder what will be said of me if anything is even said.


Tuesday 15 December 2020

WHAT I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

 


WHAT WOULD I REALLY LIKE FOR CHRISTMAS


I would like to be able to travel again without fear of the La Peste

I would like to visit Paris

I would like to go to the Paris Opera

I would like to go to London

I would like to stay at my Club the Oxford Cambridge

I would like to enjoy a brandy and cigar on the Library Terrace

I'd like to see my Cambridge Chums

I'd like to go to Commemoration of Benefactors at Caius College

I'd like to walk without a mask

I would like to go to NYC again.

I'd like to go to the MET for an opera

And I want Trump to disappear and take his venom with him

             I'd like to do all these things before I die

Sunday 29 November 2020

Weekly Aphorism

 


The Aphorist


This week’s Aphorism –

 

What we have loved best is often what we have lost.

 

To unsubscribe from this feed replay with “Delete Me”

 











Wednesday 18 November 2020

THINGS I DONT CARE FOR

            THINGS I DON'T CARE FOR

BREXIT

BORIS JOHNSON AND HIS MISTRESS

TRUMP AND HIS TWEETS

TRUNP'S CURRENT WIFE

TRUMP'S OLDER SONS

FOOTBALL NEWS FROM THE UK

ANYTHING ABOUT INANKA AND JERROD

ANY ASSHOLE REPUBLICIAN

WITCHES IN SALEM MA

WHETHER GUYS WEAR BOXERS OR BRIEFS

Q-ANNON OR WHAT EVER IT IS CALLED

THE 70 MILLION BIGOTS AND RACISTS WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP

SCOTT ATLAS AND HIS FALSE SCIENCE

THE NFL

NEWS OF CLEBRATIES - ANY OF THEM

GOLF TURNAMENTS

EVENGALICALS OF ANY SORT

ALITO

AMY CONEY BARRETT

BRET KAVANAUGH

ULTRA CONSERTIVE ROMAN CATHOLICS

FLORIDA

THE LOUISANA PURCHASE

GEORGIA

NEIGEL FARANGE

STEVE BANNON

RUDY GUILIANNI











Tuesday 10 November 2020

LOVE AND MEANING - INSPIRED BY KNOWIN J

 


Love and Meaning – a Life’s Journey

Who is love, What is Love, Where is love, When is love, why and how is love?  I guess I have been asking these questions since forever.  Along the way on this quest I have found a number of possible answers – some more satisfying then others – some disturbing – some leading to ecstasy and a kind of peace – but all transforming.  I have put my questions to literature, to philosophy to art and to experience and living. I am not sure I have all my answers but I have some I can share.  Perhaps you have asked these questions so consider my epiphanies – they may help you answer these questions.


Wednesday 4 November 2020

BROKEN WORLD - FALSE WORLD - LOVER

 


“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”


Tuesday 3 November 2020

 




                                            THE IMPATIENT LOVER

Monday 2 November 2020

 

                                                THE APHORIST

                                                             


 

                   Perfection is seldom a virtue but often a curse…


Sunday 1 November 2020

The APHORIST

 



                                THE APHORIST

  This week’s Aphorism –

 

                   Perfection is seldom a virtue but often a curse…


Saturday 31 October 2020


                                                              ELY -

By Chris H


Ade Havilland Dove ascends from a still-commissioned
East Anglian airfield and shakes its small
wings at all the damaged and marooned
Lancaster bombers. I watch it fly
until it is even higher than Ely cathedral,
an alp in this flat land.
Sky tries to sustain the little dove
a while longer and the two towers
swap sunrise and sunset. Afternoons
are flat, also, and grey: memorial services.
Cromwell and Co. hacked the noses off
shelved medieval saints. Our modern world
hums quite happily, like the de Havilland,
over the nave just now.
All my life I have loved the sun
and the colour of honey. Now I long for the dark
to crouch and soar in; with you, my grave, my cathedral.

Thursday 22 October 2020

MUTABILITY AND LOVE



WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be

 

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

 

Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,

 

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;

 

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

         5

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

 

And feel that I may never live to trace

 

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

 

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

 

That I shall never look upon thee more,

  10

Never have relish in the faery power

 

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore

 

 Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

 

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

 

                                            Keats


Friday 16 October 2020

Tuesday 6 October 2020

ON GROWING OLD -

 

                              IN THE YEAR OF PLEAGUE


"It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies"

S Townsend Warner

Thursday 10 September 2020

SEA FOG CLOUD

 

                

A large body of water

Description automatically generated             Smoke coming from it

Description automatically generated   

 

A large body of water

Description automatically generated

 

                     Sea Sky Fog

                   Awaiting Storm

                Seeking safe harbour

Monday 31 August 2020

PROTESTS - Political Statement






Decry VIOLENCE

FOR A SAFER WORLD DON'T DEFUND POLICE

BUT

TAKE AWAY THEIR GUNS

Sunday 30 August 2020

MATHEW




BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD.

Friday 28 August 2020

STATE OF THE UNION - STATE OF AMERICA





THE POLICE NOT THE FREE PRESS IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE


POLICE LIVES SHOOT - BLACK LIVES DIE

Thursday 13 August 2020

Sunday 26 July 2020

ON READING MONTAIGNE



   STEFAN ZWEIG ON READING MONTAIGNE’S ESSAYS

 “There is a select group of writers who are accessible to anyone, at whatever age or stage of life – Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy – and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until a particular moment. Montaigne is one of these. In order to recognize his true worth, you should not be too young, too deprived of experience and life’s deceptions, and it is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought coveys the most precious aid. Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch where war, violence and ideological tyranny threaten the life of every individual and the most precious substance of that life, the freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are required to remain faithful to his inner self in the time of the herd’s rampancy. Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to maintain one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm. Only once he has endured the necessary doubt and despair within himself can the individual play an exemplary role in standing firm amidst the world’s pandemonium.”

A TROPE FOR OUR TIME


Tuesday 14 July 2020

ON LOVE LUST YOUTH AND AGE



Marvell

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Apt line in the time of La Peste

Sunday 12 July 2020

Friday 3 July 2020

AMERICA'S BIRTHDAY




I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Walt Whitman


Thursday 25 June 2020

SALEM




SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE

REFLECTION ON COLLINS COVE

The cove on most days, except for hot summer days when the regular beach goers congregate, is a solitary place where we can touch the sea's pulse, feel its immutable power and contemplate our place in nature. Such notions call to mind the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne in his, "Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore" where he wrote, "When, therefore, the yearning for seclusion becomes a necessity within me, I am drawn to the sea-shore, which extends its line of rude rocks and seldom-trodden sands, for leagues around our bay." Living not far from Collins Cove, it is likely this native son walked this cove's shores contemplating the life of Salem found in his writings. 

Sunday 14 June 2020

Musings from the Cloister - 14-06-2020



Cesare Pavese Stock Photos & Cesare Pavese Stock Images - Alamy


"The greatest misfortune is loneliness. So true is this that the highest form of consolation - religion - lies in finding a friend who will never let you down - God. Prayer is giving vent to one's thoughts as with a friend..."
Pavese - Diaries - 15 May 1939

Monday 1 June 2020

REPUBLICAN CHANT Heard in the Cloister











We are the hollow men...
Our dried voiced, when
We whisper together 
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rat's feet over broken glass...
T.S. Eliot

Oh Mitch, Lindsay, Rubio, Scott, Paul 
How phoney - how senless

Sunday 24 May 2020

VERSES FROM THE CLOISTER



FOR MY FATHER AND UNCLES

Decoration Day


Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
  On this Field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
  Nor sentry's shot alarms! 

Ye have slept on the ground before,
  And started to your feet
At the cannon's sudden roar,
  Or the drum's redoubling beat. 

But in this camp of Death
  No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
  No wound that bleeds and aches. 

All is repose and peace,
  Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
  It is the Truce of God! 

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
  The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
  Your rest from danger free. 

Your silent tents of green
  We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
  The memory shall be our

Longfellow

Tuesday 19 May 2020

A TROPE FOR THE TIME OF LA PESTE _ FROM THE CLOISTER



A CAUTIONARY SONG FOR OUR TIME


The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold - Dover Beach
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