let's try that again shall we

'if you can see, look. / if you can look observe.' - the book of exhortations

good morning! good morning!

it is a beautiful morning (here in the salt marshes). the coffee smelled great as it brewed in the stove top pot, the morning sun shone right to left diagonally onto the whitewashed  backwall of the garden (cheers sten). the sunlight is bright (but it is still relatively cool).  horsemouth has got his coffee, returned to his room and opened the window.  he feels the slight nip in the air. 

yesterday a not very productive day. as it leaves his body the acetone (which is what the alcohol is converted into)  makes horsemouth anxious and depressed. it took him a while to shift the actually fairly mild headache by which point the day was too hot to be dealing with. he snoozed a while unable to find anything that motivated him to read. 

evening and afternoon he ventured out. he wandered up to the powerscroft road book box (past a dead fox cub lying by the roadside and the children playing) and from this point on the day started going right. 

there he found a copy of blindness by josé saramago and a nice fontana copy of the master and the margarita by michael bulgakov. now both of these horsemouth has owned before and read before, both he has lent out in an excess of enthusiasm (indeed there's always a danger that he actually still owns one (or possibly both of them) but that they are just lurking in the stacks somewhere. 

the master and the margarita is in michael glenny's translation in a pocket book edition with a disreputable looking (and armed) black cat on the front cover. (michael glenny is the father of misha glenny - ah that makes sense)

horsemouth went and sat in the park and read those great page-and-a-half paragraphs of saramago's where various different people start speaking and it is not separated out. someone's thoughts about what will happen when their wife comes home is interrupted by their wife coming home. what are you doing sleeping there with those flowers in your lap. that sort of thing. the sight has gone from people's eyes (to be replaced by a milky whiteness) there is a pandemic of blindness someone just driving their car stopped at a traffic light can just lose their sight and be unable to drive off. there is a kind of omniscience to it a gabble of voices so that you can't initially tell who is speaking. 

the later the silence (where people will not vote) is set in this world.

reading blindness originally was of course a result of horsemouth's read portugal mission (antunes, eca de queroz  but mainly saramago the history of the siege of lisbon novel and guidebook). similarly (but much earlier) the master and the margarita was the result of horsemouth's read russia (and eastern euriope) mission. horsemouth may have re-read blindness as part of his read the pandemic mission (sontag, camus' the plague etc.). 

similar sorts of things to blindness are going on in minority report  a spielberg take on a philip k. dick short story.  there is an emphasis on seeing also. there are twins (there are always twins), there is a female part of the assemblage . there are lost parents/ lost children. time can be overcome and love recovered (as long as there is enough running around and shouting). everything is all right in the end. this is of course not very phildickian (it's much more spielbergian). 'choose' the voices exhort us to freewill against the world and its determinations. 

horsemouth aims to do better today. see he is back on form (writing and reading away). he has a project. monday the week relanches (yet) again. 

well so much for the fall of boris.

horsemouth held out great hopes for it and it turns out to be as dull as ditchwater. 

it's the worst of all possible worlds - boris is still in downing street and still we have to deal with the unseemly battling of conservative chancers who want to be leader of the conservative party (and thus prime minister). the determination of this will be made by the conservative MPs, and be validated by the conservative party membership. it will then be imposed on the UK electorate (they will not get a say in the matter). eventually we too will be invited to (obliquely) validate it (excepting for EU citizens and refugees living here and a significant minority of people who are, for various reasons, disenfranchised, those who do not choose to vote/ are excluded from voting).