so said the voice phenomena child's voice last night. horsemouth woke up immediately (the child was supposed to be in the room upstairs).
obviously horsemouth's brain is parallel processing something.
he's in a hotel (that never happens). at a conference (ditto).
in a second he goes down to second breakfast (and to begin the day).
ok he's got to go and be sociable and mingle and try and learn things.
good morning! good morning!
horsemouth has had a day off from blogging caused by drunkenness and then (the inevitable) hangover. he did not do anything too bad (he doesn't think) but as usual he feels remorseful.
he mostly retired to bed when he got home. at some point he got up and had a restorative wander round. in the book box near the tower .he found pereira maintains by antonio tabucchi (a novel set in lisbon in the 30ies by an italian - a kind of honourary portuguese book). yes there is a sepia photo of a tram on the front cover. the book goes along keenly.
in between he distracted himself by watching the news (more trouble every day) and a piece by the outlaw bookseller on colin wilson's attempt to write something for the cthulu mythos producing a carleon set shocker (in the style of arthur machen).
later today horsemouth is off to a conference (that's him for the weekend). he will walk over (he's getting a lift up) maybe he's back early enough on sunday to go to a museum. the first few days of next week he's cat-sitting. he will try to dress respectably.
last night his flatmates were clumping things about and tracking in shit from the back garden. horsemouth has had a quick mop round (he will now put his shoes back on and go and finish off the coffee). the binmen have been (hail the binmen).
tragedy! it looks like the kettle has died.
horsemouth dreamed of going to a festival up in the mountains. (in theory he's meeting friends tonight) and at the weekend he goes to a housing conference.
last night he watched an interview with gary stevenson an ex-trader (with various bits of paper from LSE and oxford) which made a lot of sense of the current predicament. 'the plan is to make you permanently poorer' remarks gary (and he's not wrong).
horsemouth's recent efforts in housing have probably just been fucked by recent and incoming interest rate rises (which were probably coming anyway but have been intensified by government ineptitude). gee thanks government. horsemouth is interested i the way that current government policy fucks the middle classes. he is fortunate (himself) in that he collectively owns property (such is the nature of a co-op) or rather that he has low rent housing. the strategy of the rich is to buy assets (with their free money from the government) and to live off those by charging the poor rent to use them - this way the rich stay rich the poor stay poor. (so that's all right then).
horsemouth realises he is a very vulgar marxist for liking this.
the interviewer and gary spend a lot of time fiddling with their noses (don't do this dudes it makes you look like you are on drugs).
TG was just on the phone (they have their walk booked).
'wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbours off from innsmouth... on the landward side' - h.p. lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth (repunctuated by horsemouth).
horsemouth has been reading the shadow over innsmouth which is an early example of the death of cities motif (hello detroit, hello 'inner city', hello 'racism', hello 'urban blight'),
all bound together with early ecological concerns,
'... this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. the change, it was said, came simultaneously with the innsmouth epidemic of 1846 and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. actually it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way for waves of windblown sand.'
he has finished reading sins of my father: a daughter, a cult, a wild unravelling - take home message don't be a bad dad (don't join the raj neesh).
good morning! good morning!
horsemouth is up. he used the alarm on his phone. he is waiting in for the electricians.
he should explain that there is an electricity outage at his house affecting the upper floors, the kitchen and the boiler (the boiler is modern and gas fueled and so requires electricity to run). the house was bought getting on for 20 years ago what it probably needs is double glazing (as was planned two years ago but the pandemic prevented) and probably a rewire. whilst it a looked very good when it was bought horsemouth suspects it was just a good painting and decorating job. for example the downstairs has laminate flooring which horsemouth suspects covers the original floorboards in their pretty much rotted condition.
anyway the power tripping out is a not infrequent event.
this moves us on to the problems with decarbonising (reducing the carbon produced by heating and lighting) victorian jerry-built housing. british houses are notoriously leaky and poorly insulated and getting to net zero emission with this kind of stock is going to be difficult (if not impossible). one problem is that (as how buildings learn points out) changes made can have unintended consequences - you make the house more draught-proof, it makes it harder for moisture to get out and you end up with damp problems (so you have to take ventilation measures to mitigate the damp and round we go again).
horsemouth was interested to note that a friend in the czech republic was familiar with external insulation (insulation cladding the outside of the building) wheras in the uk it is still a rarity. but when you mention cladding that british ears prick up because what they do know is the effect of cladding the grenfell tower - essentially the british government had a perfectly workable and well respected set of building regulations and a testing regime for building products and destroyed it by means of privatisation and deregulation.
and as a result 72 people died in a fire. (as people had died earlier at the lakanal house fire and where the coroner investigating those deaths that had been promised a change in the regulations. this never happened because they never got round to it given the prevailing direction of privatisation and deregulation).
to be frank much of the retro-fitting of cladding to these social housing blocks was less about energy efficiency and more about hiding the presence of the poor in the middle of a prosperous west london neighbourhood by making the housing look more modern.
in any event despite initial appearances the government guidance on what constitutes value for money in insulating social housing up to the EPC C standard appears to point away from exterior insulation. what the government want are quick wins (and for housing providers to pay for the bulk of the expensive measures to enable it to meet its treaty commitments). there is (of course) some government money to get it going.
there is quite a bit of time available before these decarbonisation goals have to be reached, insulating the properties and reaching those goals(or if not getting close) will be a decades long journey. king charles' head will appear on the money, king charles will probably die, go do-lally or retire before it is done.
and here horsemouth sits in the sceptered isle (well on his bed actually) preparing for another round of deregulation, privatisation and (this time) decarbonisation. there are (of course) some contradictions here.
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the electrician has been and gone (outside light with broken cover tripping the earth/ neutral). horsemouth waits to see if he'll get a call from TG. if not the gas safety check is due to occur today 12-3pm (this reminds horsemouth to turn the ignition for the cooker back on). ok the gas safety check dude is here. that's it done for another year.
it loos like another bright sunny autumnal day out (indian summer).
'he cannot even be honest in his memoir' - lily dunn on reading her father's journal. in sins of my father: a daughter, a cult, a wild unravelling.
it was the wild unravelling that caught horsemouth's attention, peeking out from under another larger book in the book box (powerscroft road). he has transferred his attentions to it after reading lovecraft's the rats in the walls (in volume 3 of the omnibus).
it goes well with the auto/biographies theme (the ethics of life-writing). rather than father and son (gosse), we have father and daughter and the father has run away to join the bagwan... where did it begin? she asks herself.
hers is a literary family - her father wrote science fiction under the name saul dunn and was a book salesman before becoming the writer and publisher of heavily illustrated new age texts, for a while he ran a publishing house publishing books by the likes of brian aldiss and harry harrison from the basement of the islington house he shared with his wife and kids. his wife was arguably the more successful author , the author of a noted biography of mary shelley (moon in eclipse).
they were a gilded good-looking couple, but his good looks gave him plenty of opportunity to play away and was soon enough off to join the bagwan shree rajneesh. now the way the teachings of the bagwan are portrayed is as a DIY course in psychopathology ('I am responsible for my happiness. You are responsible for yours'). then there's the well-nigh gangsterism of the oregon adventure and then there are the multiple 'safeguarding failures' at the retreats. the whole thing is looked at from the view of the people left behind.
ok an electricity outage problem requires horsemouth's attention. later.
it is later. horsemouth has just blown out a walk with TG (and is regretting it).
'suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be two fold' - joseph curwen in the case of charles dexter ward.
h.p.lovecraft a racist for certain.
the documentary horsemouth watched tried to pretend that his short-lived marriage to a jewish woman and time in new york had humanised him (but horsemouth sees no evidence of that).
BUT take the case of charles dexter ward. possibly his best. other than the necromancy it is semi-autobiographical - young man retires from life to a world of antiquarianism and self-publishing (lovecraft). the book necromancy to the list. here he makes the key villain (joseph curwen) a slave owner and points out the existence of slavery in the north (providence, rhode island) in colonial times (and after). in doing this the book cannot help but argue slavery is a bad thing. (whatever lovecraft himself might have thought).
lovecraft is a kind of american trascendentalist (like emerson or thoreau) but his is a kind of bad transcendentalism - beyond the world of visible nature are spirits but sadly they are absolutely fucking evil. in at the mountains of madness (think the thing crossed with scott of the antarctic's diary) the scale is altogether too cosmic for anything human to intrude - we are but animals to be dissected for research purposes in such a world. ward would work as a kind of southern gothic (bad things left over from slavery and colonialism and the murder and extirpation of native americans) except that it is set in the north (where people do not care to be reminded of such times).
horsemouth is currently missing volume 2 of the omnibus but volume 3 has 'shadow over innsmouth', 'the dunwich horror' 'the whisperer in darkness' - all the classics. his source was the book-box on the borderlands just over the border in walthamstow on the way to the aldi - horsemouth always thought he could find another copy (having got rid of previous editions unread at his last remove).
yesterday the drama of the mooseheads moved to a conclusion (after one of the neighbours complained about the smell of rotting meat). horsemouth is calling them mooseheads for the sake of comedy. in any event the problem is on its way to solution.
horsemouth (as you may have noticed) makes use of his power to be two fold. he does this not because he is honest but because he is dis-honest, rather than face his pains and sufferings he has tried to evade them by being two fold. willie nelson (in the documentary on loretta lynn) points out that by writing songs about painful things they strangely start to be less painful, he then quotes the stoic seneca.
the sun shines in horsemouth's window (it has made it up over the houses opposite). yesterday it was pleasant and hot. horsemouth sat out on the front step reading and sunbathing and said hi to the neighbours as they went past. the solar gains are good this time of year.
yesterday was bandcamp friday (once again horsemouth had forgotten)
once again horsemouth recommended people purchase sproatley smith's great river wye suite named after the river that flows through horsemouth's home county of weirdshire (and to be fair some of wales too (the land of horsemouth's granny) through powys and monmouthshire ). the water flows by where she moved to - on a tributary river the lugg. in the rolling leominster farmland.
the wye is in danger ladies and gentlemen they are poisoning it with excess chicken shit run off from giant chicken sheds, the environmental protection agencies cut to the bone.
yesterday was also the birthday of judee sill (of whom you have heard horsemouth tell).
last night he watched a documentary on loretta lynn. he should probably watch coal miner's daughter. there was a bit in the documentary when old loretta is being interviewed at her home when there's a knock at the door and her daughter arrives with a tour group of canadians (loretta has her own theme park built round her house)- the canadians pretty soon start singing coal miner's daughter at her (she compliments the guy who starts singing on his voice and helps the old lady who takes over out with the lyrics). the tour is abandoned the canadians back out the door with tears in their eyes well satisfied that they have met a star.
horsemouth's gaff does not have a smart meter. (the company head (main fuse) is of an old metal type with asbestos padding that would need replacing by whoever handles such things before the youngster the power company sent round would be comfortable fitting a new meter - curiously the electrician who replaced their fuseboard seemed less bothered.
anyway - this (horsemouth guesses) prevents horsemouth from taking part in a scheme his electricity company is running where you get paid twenty pounds a week to reduce the electricity you use between 4 and 7pm (peak demand time - when everybody gets home and cooks their tea). of course this, and differential pricing of the electricity depending on when/ where you use it are the advantages that smart meters bring (that and being able to identify expensive items to run and switching them off).
poor people will thus be able to sell their underconsumption to richer people (ain't life wonderful) - in this way the resilience of the network to extreme events can continue to be cut to the bone and still give the appearance of adequate operation (until things go bad).
friday horsemouth was in the meeting for people who want to access government money to insulate their social housing. horsemouth's main worry is that (suspicious creatures that they are) people will balk at the hoops they have to jump through to get the money (submitting anonymised energy bills for example).
next week horsemouth goes to a conference for such things. he wants to enable people (himself indeed) to be able to keep the home warmer in winter - we're all getting older, horsemouth has no desire to return to the bad old days of cracking open the fireplace, burning skipped wood and coughing out his lungs all winter.
there is some comedy in this. the housing that is the coldest and most difficult to heat cannot be helped under the scheme because the measures that would lift it up from an EPC E to an EPC C rating are too expensive and not considered value for money under this particular government scheme, examining the government value for money advice what they are prepared to pay for is the minimum and cheapest measures that lift the property up to an EPC C (but not beyond particularly), all the property that is already at EPC C (just above national average) cannot be helped under the scheme.
furthermore it appears that this saved carbon can be sold to people who have not saved their carbon and used to generate loans to pay for the carbon saving works. again horsemouth remarks ain't life wonderful.
today it is supposed to be sunny. horsemouth will hang his washing out on the line. he will read more of charles dexter ward.
