horsemouth has survived again ('a despot clothed in dissident's garb')

as the ernest borgnine (2nd in command) character remarks at the end of the final battle scene in the seven samurai, 'we have survived again.'  and he falls to his knees as he does so.

horsemouth has survived again. he makes it to one of the secret turning points of the year. 

nearly four years ago horsemouth and howard played a duo gig in support of the as yet unrecorded musicians of bremen volume three (and because it is horsemouth's favourite thing to do). this was effectively a pay to play gig but horsemouth accepted it because he wanted to play (and in particular he wanted to play the new material). 

it was a harmonium and ukulele (for howard) and guitars (for horsemouth) gig. they went on first, rocked the spot and then left and then sat in the park drinking with a few friends. 

the broadband where horsemouth is remains buggy (or something). 

yesterday horsemouth was feeling angsty. it was a can't do anything today must wait for tomorrow kind of day. horsemouth went out for a couple of prowl arounds. in a normal year horsemouth would deal with such anxiety by retail therapy (keep his apocalypse stockpiles of coffee, museli, rice, pasta high or go browse for second hand books) but in the conditions of the pandemic he is trying to avoid this. 

as far as horsemouth can see the covid figures are on their way back up (in the three categories - cases reported, hospital admissions and deaths - you would expect each to take about 2 weeks to feed into the next). 

that said horsemouth is having a busy social whirl today. first a meeting with howard (a walk and a talk), then a barbacue and key handover (maybe) up in the hills of walthamstow (the cloud forest), and at some point horsemouth has to get in the regular sunday phonecall to his mum  (instituted as a result of the pandemic). 

oh well it's just got easier the barbacue (about which horsemouth was being anxious, well anxious about doing two things in a day) has just been cancelled (now horsemouth is disappointed - he'd started looking forward to it). 

so yesterday horsemouth was telling you about boltanski and chiapello and their new culture of capitalism and what should appear but a blog on the NLR about agile firms and agile software design that references it. now horsemouth wears two hats - he is a 'despot clothed in dissident's garb'  - on the one hand he is with the workers against the evil exploitative capitalism, one normally best resisted with a thoroughgoing shveikian inefficiency, and on the other hand he likes the romance of development, one that calls for the melting of solid things into air.