Hooray for Ségolène Royal

Today is finally the time that Fance will vote, it seems to be a long time coming — they've been revving-up for ages. It might not seem too earth-shattering to some, but I'm rooting for Ségolène Royal. I am very impressed by the way she behaves. And the fact that she's a woman is important: I'm turned-off by the very french chauvinism that normally is overwhelming from France. The best things about her are She's not a dinosaur, and she is gorgeous! Compare her with the opposition: Nicolas Sarkozy, a racist rightwinger cliche-male.

So, come on Ségo !

An Imperative Meme

I have been tagged to say which books influenced me (well, that's how interpret this phrase). So, the two that became me, the two that inspired me are "Mathematical Models" by a pair of educators from the 1950's called Cundy and Rollet, and the first Moomin book by Tove Jansson, "Finn Family Moomintroll":

I love Tove's pen and ink drawings — and I learned to read because I was so intrigued by what the pictures suggested. And her outlook is so pleasing (in fact I have worn out three copies of this, mainy because English bookbinding was so poor).

The probably surprising other choice is Cundy and Rollet's Mathematical Models comes from a masterstroke by my Dad, he noticed that my maths were falling behind the school's trammelled and classist expectations of us the 'bottom group of the year'. The first I made was a dodecahedron and I was just amazed:


(no silly joke should be made of by the fact that this shape is classed as a "Platonic Solid"!). I subsequently discovered the huge world of Archimedean Duals, although my maths didn't improve, but I was suddenly empowered to make these purely wierd objects, and just the hypnotic pleasure of these crystaline objects — objects of perfection that I, I had made this!! The teachers behaved with utter disinterest and disdain that I was producing these more and more complicated models: from the 12 facets of a dodecahedron to the 72 facets or more of the more outlandish Polyhedra was not to be encouraged: Something I thought would have been the strangest and notable thing to them about me.

No curiosity, no "But why would this scrawny little oik be talking Greek to me?"
If I'd been their teacher I would have been fascinated to engage in his progress.

Trees in springtime England

As promised, Beech trees!

St George's day

Its not just Taurus that I associate with, it is Shakespeare and a mysterious saint who was perhaps from Turkey:

guardian teddies

This my version of Ikebana . . . . Happy Birthday to me . . . . Happy Birthday to me (tomorrow)!

A hard month

15th March: go into hospital.

28th March: outa there!

15th April: still limping along...

today, there is no change for the better:

•Exhaustion
•No balance
•Indwelling catheter (makes my clothing so smelly, and uncomfortable), a temporary measure until 29th May operation for a Superpubic Catheter.
•Inability to concentrate on anything.
•My hands are barly able to sense movement or to be able to feel, with no accuracy.
•Speech is limited by this illness, and how fully interested others are.

All the while the boys from Duke are able to escape justice, they MUST be given a chance to reflect on their behavior, a prison is a good place to do this reflection.

And I must add, all the while the british press are moaning on about Iranian treatment of '0ur side' for venturing too far into Iran, mainly on about the fact there is 'human importance' about the idea that this team was headed by a woman. This 'news' blanked handily the current atrocities in Iraq : which need I add, have been created by the dogged support of britain of America's vile criminality.

Despite my MS, I will not forgive you Blair.

I'm not as easily distracted.

John Galsworthy and PEN

I recently read about John Galsworthy's life; rather than trawling through his epic Forsyte Saga which I remember being on British Telly when I was a child, mixing it up with the almost interchangeable (and the interminable?) "The Flambards" by K M Peyton, and god, lest I forget , the class obsessed "Upstairs, Downstairs" because they all had that period-drama ethic, the result made me weary -either that or wary- of the genre. It made these all these roughly coinciding Edwardian-era melodramas one long, big turn-off to me (well, I was a typical boy, please bear with me)....

I was generally so bored (is that the start of disgust?) that there was little focus on the catclysms of World War One if it ever did, it was fleetingly so, as described by The War Poets like Rupert Brooks and Wilfred Owen and a Comic magazine of the 70-80's (no, not that sort of comic[!], to borrow a crap running-joke from "Hotel New Hampshire") mainly of writer Pat Mills' and artist Joe Colquhoun's work for what I knew as 'Battle Action!', mainly because of the deeply touching Charley's War:


I think it is important to remember that the early-fascistic Art movement called Futurism was contemporary with Galsworthy's; the era couldn't be expressed more differently by the fetishistic exhilaration and addiction to 'Speed', the 'Fusing' of Man and Machine, and faux-revolutionary 'Iconoclasm' to the world of Forsyte.
Nowadays, the futurists are 'fondly remembered' for their 'eccentricities', what is forgotten is quite how awful the consequences, for instance, was what they were proposing really so dissimilar to a draft for the actual Nazi bombing of Guernica just a few years later? And then there's the closely related Modernist/Anti-Semitism of Wyndham Lewis and T S Eliot.

It is a relief to see that John Galsworthy didn't bury his head in the sand - unlike the originally patronising picture that I had as a youth of my elders:
He founded International PEN with Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, and HG Wells, to lobby for writers under threat of imprisonment, Orhan Pamuk is a recent case.

Now I'm much more tolerant of 'period dramas': rather than 'charmed' by the quaintness, the writing is just as relevant as it was — it astonishes me how the pressures applied by others on an individual are so damnably the same as now. How clearly this was percieved all the way back then is so impressive to me. The protagonists have become metaphors to us in the 21st century, yet the relevance is somehow constrained again, this time in an "Empire line frock".

But they always were.