to concern ourselves with our lives, with the levers that are within our reach

it's a monday morning. it looked like sten was out of the door to go to work. horsemouth has already filled in his diary page with jottings.

in a pyramid (well ok a triangle) the rent money from the year is decomposed into 6 month and 3 month tranches (he also decomposes it into the amount he pays per day to sit in the seaside towns, on either 5 day (earning), or 7 day (living) weeks). elsewhere on the page the amount he has in his current account. 

there is a list of chekhov and pushkin short stories also (indeed he has conflated chekhov and pushkin into a list). but these have gone on the backburner while he starts bulgakov's a country doctor's notebook (this is bulgakov wearing his sensible doctor's hat). chekhov was a doctor too (and sensible). now that he has more time horsemouth proposes a re-reading the russians campaign (it's been decades since he's read the dostoyevsky).

horsemouth is living out of the cash he got out of the cashpoints at the start of the pandemic (and the cash his housemates give him as their share of the gas and electricity bills). it makes it look like he's not spending any money (er. except in the pubs and except on rent). 

sten is talking about more insulation. this may be a good thing. soon the frosts will come (it's probably time to move the paint back indoors). the power company are bumping up the direct debit, horsemouth cannot move from them until the spring. 

wednesday the anniversary of horsemouth starting to blog (15 years ago)  and bonn ist supreme day, thursday astral travelling day, saturday 30 years since the death of harry everett smith day.

we the people (who should know better). 

horsemouth thinks one of the reasons why the UK is famously stable is because none of the levers of power connects with the actual people. there is the house of commons (a kind of puppet show peopled by rural solicitors) granted (and every 5 years we are allowed to stick a cross on a piece of paper to elect a rural solicitor to that place) but there also is the house of lords and the aristocracy and the royal family (unelected and populated by patronage and heredity), there are the judges, and should things go tits up and properly third world there are the army and the police and the security services, the famous deep state. 

meanwhile in downing street there is the prime minister and his advisors and across town in the city of london the financial institutions and board rooms (unelected  and unrepresentative).

the british ruling class have been at it a long time and they roll in depth. successive ruling classes were not guillotined but fractionated out and confined to particular parts of the apparatus. the existing system is about ensuring representation for different parts of the ruling class rather than the representation of the people.

this is horsemouth's understanding of it.  

of course once in a while the ruling class slip up - as they did over brexit by not just promising but actually having a referendum (and by then letting themselves be bound by the result). horsemouth has to confess it was genuinely popular. the people seized the only lever offered them after a prolonged misdirection campaign by the murdoch press. 

the political moment is strangely fertile in these moments after the end of history (but not in a good way). 

where this will take us all horsemouth shudders to think. the default state of the state is tory. labour are entrusted with it (or with the electable parts of it) only when the tories have debauched themselves. the things can only get better moment may come again (or it may not ever again). 

here we see the young bulgakov and chekov (doctors both, stoic in the face of universal tuberculosis, of the middle ages that exists outside the front door of well-to-do russian families). bulgakov the novelist cannot stop himself from chanting down babylon and manifesting devils in the street but he cannot get published until the thaw.  until then he is known only for his plays. 

horsemouth votes now (he is old). if he had an allotment he would cultivate it.

it makes sense only to concern ourselves with our lives, with the levers that are within our reach.