paul didn’t mention vultures ('stay calm. this is simply the beginning...' )

'what we all believed is true... none of them are any good...' 

- ian hislop (of private eye) summarises the sentiments of the nation. 

a former work colleague of horsemouth’s has summoned the guillotine (that most useful of instruments) and the vulture (that most sagacious of birds) to do the necessary work of riding the world of our venal, corrupt and fecking useless ruling class.

horsemouth had hoped they were going to load themselves into rocket ships and blast off in search of new markets to conquer (but no such luck). 

he had hoped they were going to load themselves into bunkers far beneath the earth and sit out the apocalypse (sadly not). 

ok here horsemouth lies, horsemouth's friend didn’t mention vultures, but they’re a nice touch don’t you think.

the conversation then moved on to the necessity for a guillotine emoji. 

horsemouth (however) cautions against rage. horsemouth pretty much thinks there are two kinds of people - those who are in touch with their anger and can make use of it without being destroyed by it and those who are not in touch with their anger and are destroyed by contact with it. 

horsemouth thinks of himself as being in the later category - if he loses his temper then he loses, is his belief. consequently he tries to go about everything calmly and carefully (however angry it makes him).

'stay calm. this is simply the beginning...'  

last night he watched small prophets the latest detectorists sort of thing (and very charming it was). michael palin appears as a senile old man in a nursing home. 

horsemouth had a dream where he was on south wales railways and he lost his rucksack.  

'the brightside of the planet moves towards darkness...'

yesterday horsemouth was being useful (he does like to be useful).

he has agreed to be useful again (if that would be useful). 

faced by a choice between everest and K2 the expedition thought it might be better to start on a smaller mountain. 

'the brightside of the planet moves towards darkness, 

and the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour...' 

- czeslaw milosz, the separate notebooks. 

horsemouth has been reading station eleven by emily st.john mandel (from whence the milosz quotation).  it is a disease apocalypse novel written before covid (published 2014) -  the disease hits. millions die. technological society collapses. 

in the front cover photograph by theo gosselin is of a deer wandering through a deserted mall car park. theo's other photos all seem to be hippie roadtrip.

and it's getting dark. has horsemouth closed up the garage? he'll need to go and check. 

wes streeting seems to think he can get out in front of the mates with mandelson thing and be a credible candidate to replace starmer. but he needs to get going soon, before angela raynor because getting out from under her hastings flat debacle will take time. 

horsemouth thinks sir keir can stretch it to may (but he could be wrong he could be gone today). maybe the gorton by-election will finish him off (or maybe it will consolidate his power). 

rabbit on the lawn this morning. a greyish morning but not actually raining yet. 

in honour of the black cat and its visits

nothing now from kilvert until the 12th. 

horsemouth (the split-tongued spirit) has been getting his head around things

there seem to him three options;

1) agree to it as it is and work out how to pay for it

2) work out what can be done for less and do that.  

3) abandon the whole thing and start again from scratch. 

horsemouth is a two man. but, who knows? others may be one or three people (or some combination of all three). 

he doesn't know (yet) how much room for manoeuvre there is. he doesn't know how other people will see this. he should probably email/ check. 

horsemouth always likes to think out loud i.e. write it down. he likes to see what he is thinking. 

---------------------------------------------------

horsemouth watched most of benico del toro's the wolfman (which wasn't very good). in the day he posted the opening clip from leo fulci's the black cat starring mimsy farmer (but not as the black cat you understand). 

horsemouth did this in honour of the black cat and its visits. 

thus does horsemouth (the split-tongued spirit) speak in code

'sat up late writing some blank verse in honour of daisy.' - kilvert, diaries, on this day in 1872.

phew. so the visit from mum's friends is done (it was good  to hear laughter in the house). 

horsemouth has survived again

oh dear the grand scheme of things has had contact with the world of reality and (once again) it looks difficult and problematic and as if the grand scheme of things may not survive. the costs are in and (as usual) they are higher than envisaged. cloth may have to be cut differently or a whole new route to the summit of K2 attempted. 

thus does horsemouth (the split-tongued spirit) speak in code.

'do you want to learn about rainwater harvesting?' asks an advert in horsemouth's feed. 

horsemouth looks out of the window at the falling rain and laughs. 

yes he does want to learn about rainwater harvesting (thanks for asking). 

'... in the time we went through together.' 

it is strange to think practicalities was written in 1987, that it is already nearly 40 years old, and yet it feels timeless.

3 adjacent paragraphs; the first sentences from two of them and the last line from the third

 'horsemouth is up. it's 8am ish. he's drinking his coffee...' 

outside it is a grey rainy horror of a day. (today and tomorrow rain).

7th february 1872 kilvert walks to hay 

(plommer does not mention what he was up to yesterday).

'the bridges were at home, gave us tea and showed us all their poultry, the white brahmas, the golden-pencilled and silver spangled hambros (horsemouth assumes kilvert means hamburg chickens), and that ferocious white beast the silver pheasant who has at length been tamed by having his long spurs cut...'

(you'll pardon horsemouth. he doesn't know much about chicken breeds or pheasants for that matter).

'the peas were peeping above the ground in bridge's garden but the mice appeared to have eaten many of the young shoots off as soon as they appeared above ground.' 

horsemouth has heard that mice are particularly fond of pea plants. this should remind horsemouth to get on with the growing of things. 

 

3 adjacent paragraphs; the first sentences from two of them and the last line from the third

 in the chapter house and home in practicalities by marguerite duras, 

'the house a woman creates is a utopia...

at neauphle I often used to cook in the early afternoon... 

all I had to do was prepare the vegetables, put the soup on, and write.'

this is what is so great about duras - it's that mixture of abstract and particular, of thought and deed. 

'the house a woman creates is a utopia. she can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but the search for it. as if the search were the point of the whole thing...' 

'at neauphle I often used to cook in the early afternoon. that was when no one else was there... it was then I saw most clearly that i loved them...' 

above duras at her house in neauphle (a beautiful old farmhouse and barn). it must be cold in winter thinks horsemouth. 

has horsemouth had his second go at the coffee pot? or is there more coffee downstairs? let us see. 

the fact that it rains

today (friday) mum has friends coming to visit. 

meanwhile horsemouth is unsure what he will be up to. 

the fact that it rains

it does indeed (rain horsemouth means). he's trying to work out if this amount of rain is typical (whether we will have just experiences the driest january on record)  or if it is raining more than usual (the wettest january since 1849 etc.). 

ok herefordshire seems to have gotten off comparatively lightly (150% of averages) compared to somerset/ aberdeen etc (200% of averages) but still.

horsemouth suspects it is a wetter winter than usual and he blames this on global warming - warmer air can hold more water vapour and thus we have more rain (and thus we have more flooding also). 

of course this can be followed up by drier, hotter summers and water shortages (horsemouth fully expects a water shortage in the summer). 

yesterday the rain is kept him locked up in the house (ideally he would have been off to ewyas harold in search of the hereford times). he tried to work out whether it was worth it or if there was something else  that would have been good for his head (besides writing that is).  

ok it was decided. he went

he'd talked his mum out of getting the bus in (leading to lots of pointless hanging around for the bus back) instead he went on his own. his mum wrote an endless list of foodstuffs that they desperately need before next wednesday. 

and then he was back. he thanks the driver who gave himself and the neighbour a lift back when they were walking along the road (horsemouth had decided the road was the safer bet going back having fallen in the mud on the common a number of times). 

the grump is leaving him. he's beginning to feel the benefits of having done it. mission accomplished - tick. 

no bell-ringing last night. they did it early and then went to watch the rugby (horsemouth is not a rugby fan so he thought he'd give it a skip - was this wise? he doesn't know yet). 

there's the usual mandelson, starmer, mcsweeney fall - but this faction within labour also included wes streeting (perhaps he will get lucky and escape it) but can he now stand knowing that the matter could be raised?

who is the alternative?  

is angela raynor too compromised by the brighton flat thing to go forward? do they really want a re-ron with wallace and gromit (aka. ed milliband)? do they really want a re-ron with andy (will he? won't he?) burnham?

what's the game plan? 

gorton and denton by-election 26th february (3 weeks) - horsemouth assumes there's no optimist who can be found who thinks that labour will mount a successful defence of it. defeat - heads must roll.

but then there are the 7th may local, sennedd and scottish parliament elections. these are 13weeks away - is this long enough to depose starmer and have his replacement in place? the timetable for these things can be as short as 6 weeks (2 weeks warning/ 4 weeks voting) or (in corbyn's case following ed milliband's defeat in 2015) 4 months. 

whoever gets in they have until 15th august 2029 to move the dial.

lots of rain in the night. let's see what the morning is like. 

horsemouth the retiree (true tales of american life)

so horsemouth retired

there was no realisation that it was time and that he was ready to go 

there was no sudden life changing event.  

horsemouth supposes that covid killed his job. it prevented the main business of his employer from going on and, at the same time. it revealed that the unit was not profitable (the workload was always pretty variable). 

and bingo his job was toast.  strangely the middle management who redundo-ed him and his co-workers did not self-liquidate in this process also. 

initially he retired because he could afford to do so at that moment. there was a redundancy process. then a works pension process (and a cash sum process) but because horsemouth was only enrolled at the last possible moment into his works pension (and because he never earned very much money in his years of work), these sums were not great. 

had the work continued he would have continued working. instead horsemouth was faced with the option of working self-employed (and getting paid less for doing it) or jacking it all in.

he chose to jack it all in. 

however, because he was having fun with the communal endeavour he did not end up moving to the sun or somewhere cheaper than the wen or such like but just continued on with his lackadaisical life.

only later was there a major change in horsemouth's life

and then his father got ill and died and it became clear that his life was going to be out in the wilds. 

quite what horsemouth is supposed to make of all of this he does not know (as usual none of it was planned). 

true tales of american life

a friend remarked;

'I used to hear paul harvey on the radio when I lived in the states in the 90s. he was a peevish blowhard unlike the great studs turkel who came across as a generous and decent guy documenting american life without any judgement...'

horsemouth replied that he'd never heard of paul harvey until horsemouth researched the quote (see previous posting). by way of similarity all he was able to offer up was paul auster's true tales of american life.  

his friend recommended studs turkel's book working. 

horsemouth thinks the truth of things resides in their particularity, in the small scale everyday actions of people. further to this he has pulled steven roger fischer's a history of reading out of the stacks to go with alberto manguel's a history of reading. 

he's just been reading about architect gregory ain and his park planned homes in altadena (and the effect of last year's LA fire on them). 

the good news is that some of them survived.

the bad news is that some of them were destroyed.

of course horsemouth went off down the modernism in LA rabbit hole. books, podcasts, exhibits and all. 

it's good to see people with strong ideas about community and to see it coming to fruition (if not full fruition).