QUOTATION MARKS - Song on Cultivating Openess

So openness is the great root of the world
This maybe symbolised by bamboo:

Dealing with events directly,
Dealing with the world adaptably
Managing the mind with flexibility
Managing the body with calmness
This is like the resilient strength of bamboo

Forgetting emotions in action,
Forgetting thoughts in stillness,
Forgetting self in dealing with events
Forgetting things in adapting to change -
This is like the inner emptiness of bamboo

Establishing certain resolve,
Keeping the mind free from doubt,
Completely pervading inside and out,
Unchanging beginning to end -
This is like the endurance of bamboo.

Widely calling on adepts,
Visiting enlightened teachers everywhere,
Synthesising Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism-
This is the clustering of bamboo

Add to this seeing the basic, embracing the fundamental,
Minimising selfishness and desire,
Tuning the breath, exercising sincerity,
Observing transformation, knowing return-
Who can do this unless utterly open?

Responding to the time and people,
One rests the spirit of openness,
Acts in openness,
Reveals the state of openness in speech
When openness reaches the point
Where there is not even any "openness",
Then all logic ends.

When you plunge into openness,
Heaven and earth come to you.
With open heart and upright bearing
Be like the green bamboo;

This is the foremost device
For cultivating openness.



13th Century Taoist Master
Edited from The Book of Balance & Harmony
Translated by Thomas Cleary, Published by Rider 1989.

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1984 - Das Testaments Des Mabuse by Propaganda

Why does it hurt when my heart misses the beat?

The same year as Frankie Goes To Hollywood hit their peak with Two Tribes, Propaganda released their first single, Dr Mabuse on ZTT Records. This is Trevor Horn, their producer, at his most magnificent and magisterial. On this ten minute seventeen second extended mix, Das Testaments Des Mabuse, it sustains this grand melodrama and cinematic sweep. From the opening sound of a spinning coin rattling, the discordant synth wave, and the female voice whispering 'Dr Mabuse' we are off on a symphonic style of pop extravaganza only the 80's could produce.

What is most noticeable is that its chock full of tiny catchy details, knowing references and straight borrowings in the edit and production. The keyboard riff, the thumping bass synth, staccato strings and the incantations to - sell him your soul - never look back. They keep you forever interested in how the musical weaving of this tapestry is unfolding. 

Horn largely left the Propaganda album A Secret Wish in 1985 to his protege Stephen Lipson. Though this gave them there one and only hit, the song Duel, I don't think anything on it is quite in the same sonic league as Dr Mabuse. And within a year or so the Zang Tum Tum big production bubble had burst anyway.

The Propaganda you hear here, is a fantasy version of them, but nonetheless a beautiful piece of musical alchemy by Horn. Taking elements of German cinematic expressionism and experiment, to re-present what was only a potential within the band. But Horn is taking the risks no ingenue pop band would, and pulls off a truly cracking track they never quite equal themselves thereafter.

SCREEN SHOT - Moonfall

Imagine that one day everything is simply hunky dory, except for this one little bitty thing that is something of a concern. The human race has just discovered that the moon is not after all made of cheese, but made by aliens. All these millennia of human history; of looking at it, walking on it, exploring it, and now we discover the moon, its hollow, its hostile. Who would have guessed that? Its actually a giant lunar computer, space craft or something fabulously techy and really really impressive. 

But it's got a virus, in the form of a swarming black snake of shards of silica or glass. Well, whatever it is, its mean, and its attacking space craft, and its making the moon shift out of its orbit so that its heading straight for the Earth. As you can imagine, this is causing some alarm, and a moderate to worrying level of peril. About two hours worth of it. What we need in such a time is a conspiracy theory nerd who basically understands what's going on. Because if you do understand what the hell is happening here, you really do have to be bat shit crazy.

Now, Roland Emmerich has a substantial movie record. And I do mean substantial, he has real form in the production of implausible, yet remarkably successful, disaster movies. Something he executes with great aplomb and generous amounts of CGI generated cliff hangers, on many occasions even literally hanging cliffs. Usually this also involves the destruction of iconic places and monuments, because what communicates a worldwide disaster better?  I mean how many times has the New York skyline been flooded, frozen or shattered into tiny bits, the White House wiped off the face, or huge gaps opened up in the ground that swallowed the entire San Francisco integrated transport network? They are blockbusters that have generated cataclysmic amounts of money for all involved, and been popular. I watch em, several times.

Now, I don't mind a bit of implausibility, just so long as it romps along and doesn't take itself or the giant plot holes too seriously. Its a mindless bit of adventure, and who doesn't want a bit of that from time to time? To be rendered utterly mindless. But here Emmerich has excelled even his usually astutely placed low bar. If you want your credibility to be taxed, well here it is. Moonfall is not just hokkum, its preposterous high hokkum, ludicrously stupid, silly hokkum that anyone with one brain cell intact would shake their head wondering how on this imperilled Earth did this shit get made? 

Awards all round to those actors involved for keeping a straight face and resisting the impulse to take the piss out of it. That was some effort I know, but I just wanted you to know I recognised it, valued it and saw it for what it was -  truly heroic. May I suggest though, to surreptitiously omit this from your CV.

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8

 

ARTICLE - Understanding & The Complete Reality School

I was brought up in a Methodist family. Both my parents remained chapel goers all their lives, but in a habitual, sometimes rather disheartened manner. I think as they got older they found the evident decline of it essentially disillusioning, but it felt too late for them to jump ship by then. Myself? I started gradually drifting away from Methodism and Christianity in general from my mid teens onward.

Whilst at Art College I was a rather diffident agnostic, who couldn't quite believe atheism had enough to offer. Similarly my affinity with punk music at the time, sat on the fence. I could never bring myself to rebel, anarchy feeling like the very definition of pointless. More a reactive two fingered gesture than a belief system one could devote one's life to.

Once I left college and entered for the first time the dreary reality of daily work, it hit me hard. As a bit of an idealistic daydreamer, I had a rather difficult time with myself and my broken aspirations for a while. It took many years for me to actually find my feet. I'd lost a sense of direction in my life. Then I read Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. 

I was that insecure person, a disillusioned thirty year old,so the title alone got me. How could insecurity be wise? Watt's book revealed a different way of having a life with purpose. One that didn't require you to believe in a godhead, but nonetheless had spiritual meaning, aspiration and intent. Taoism for a few years was the embryonic focus for my first steps in spiritual awareness and self understanding.

The Complete Reality School was a movement in Taoism founded in the 10th century that attempted to return Taoism back to its fundamentals. At the same time highlighting the shared common ground with Confucianism and Buddhism, looking for syncretism being a very Chinese desire. The central importance of the metaphorical imagination of spiritual alchemy was also fully restored.

I was then a naive young man, inexperienced in any other eastern approach to religious practice. Apart from Watts, Lao Tzu and Chung Tzu, I read two translations from The Complete Reality School - The Book of Balance & Harmony and Understanding Reality. Very thoroughly apparently, judging by the copious amounts of blue pen underlining in my copy. So I left an impression of getting something from it. I've always found imagery from the Western Alchemical tradition unaccountably exciting, it fires up my imagination in a way not many things do. So, spiritual alchemy, bring it on.

By then I'd read enough about Taoism to know that confounding expectations and wrong footing mere theoretical understanding was all part of the Taoist approach.  The Tao that can be spoken, is not the eternal Tao. My appreciation for the writings of Dogen. a Soto Zen Japanese Buddhist from a similar period as The Book of Balance & Harmony utilises a similar poetic paradoxical and teasing style of discourse. That he echoed some of the form of Taoist discourses, may explain my somewhat instant embracing of his teachings.

On a personal level I knew, even then, that just reading about Taoism would never be sufficient. To get further I'd need to become a practitioner. This was in the late 1980's, where finding out if there was such a thing as a Taoist temple in London, without the internet or zoom, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.  If it wasn't in Time Out or City Limits, it didn't exist in the UK. And so, I assumed that was the case. Today the internet informs me that the British Taoist Association was formed in 1996. Whether there was anything before that is anyone's guess.

I read The Book of Balance & Harmony in 1989 enthusiastically and knew something in it was useful, but just couldn't decode all of it. The ornate, convoluted metaphors of Taoist spiritual alchemy appeared to this spiritually inexperienced novice unnecessarily obscure and obscuring  My desire for a context for spiritual practice, did eventually find a home when I became a Buddhist in 1993.

2022 some thirty years later, an older and more spiritually experienced practitioner returned to re-read The Book of Balance & Harmony. Just to see if something in my old enthusiasm for Taoism was worth picking up and re-engaging with. The paperback has yellowed and aged a bit, as have I. Whilst much of it still remains intricately bound up in the complexities of alchemical language and concepts, some of it now isn't. Reading it in 2022 is an entirely different experience.  I can see that the teachings about practice I was searching for in the late eighties were actually in there. Twenty five years as a practising Buddhist means I'm now able to recognise them as such.  It is as much a meditation manual as a treatise on Taoist philosophy.

What is spiritual alchemy.? Well, in brief, it adopts the language and forms of physical alchemy. The aim there being the transformation of basic elements inside a crucible into The Philosopher's Stone in the Western Alchemical tradition, The Golden Pill or Elixir in the Chinese. Spiritual alchemy utilises this type of symbolic metaphor to describe elements and stages in meditative practice. The crucible here is ones own body, as energy, essence, mind and spirit transform human consciousness into one fully in alignment with the Tao. I personally still find it meaningfully evocative and imaginatively rich. But here is an extract to give you a flavour for it:-

"Just apply your attention to the point where you rouse the mind and activate thought, concentrating on this constantly - then the mysterious pass will spontaneously appear. When you see the mysterious pass, then the medicinal ingredients, the firing process, the operation, extracting and adding, all the way to release from the matrix and spiritual transformation, are all in this opening.

Gathering medicine means gathering the true sense of the essence of consciousness within yourself. This is done by first quieting the mind to still the impulses of arbitrary feelings; when stillness is perfected, there is a movement of unconditional energy. This is the energy of true sense, and its first movement arising from stillness is called the return of yang. This is to be fostered until sense and essence, energy and spirit, are united. After that, withdraw into watchful passivity, because if you persist in intensive concentration after the point of sufficiency, your work will be wasted.

Thus the cycle of work goes from movement to stillness to movement to stillness. With long perseverance in practice, there takes place a gradual solidification, a gradual crystallisation, which is the stabilisation of real consciousness. This is described as non substance producing substance, and it is represented as a spiritual embryo. This is called completion of the elxir."***

What do I feel about all this now? Well, a lot of it resonates with my present approach to practice and what encourages and supports it. I am not a practitioner motivated much by the exegesis of abstract theory. My practice has been more driven by experience, intuition and faith. Inspired by finding connection and understanding through poeticism in visual or written forms. This still speaks to that instinctive aesthetic knowledge side of me, that was once encapsulated in the epithet Vidya.

*** Taken from The Book of Balance & Harmony, Translated by Thomas Cleary, Publisher Rider.

QUOTATION MARKS - Looking At It, You Don't See It.

"When you look at it, you don't see it;
When you listen for it, you don't hear it
This is called the Tao.

Looking at it, you don't see it,
yet never are you not seeing it;
listening for it, you don't hear it
yet never are you not hearing it.
To say it can be seen and heard
does not mean it is within the reach
of eye and ear
it is only seen by the mind, heard by the will

And now that I have said all this to you
you should not cling to the words;
just savour the meaning thoroughly
and search out the root source.
If your mind opens up at a word,
it will not be hard to enter
right into the realm of non contrivance.

But there is still a mechanism beyond,
which is not easy to set forth lightly
- you should seek it outside words."

Written by a 13th Century Taoist Master
 of The Complete Reality School.*

* Taken from The Book of Balance & Harmony
Translated by Thomas Cleary 1989, Publisher Rider.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal May 2022

I've come to recognise there are surface signs, indicating a feeling of being overwhelmed because everything is sitting atop an underlying depressive mood.  I tend to prevaricate over making decisions, organising appointments or just getting to grips with an ordinary day to day life issues. I keep putting things off.  I lose an active sense of purpose, initiative and drive. Everything becomes a humongous effort.

This is never helped by my sleep being poor. But what is disrupted inconsistent sleep but a manifestation of psycho-physical unease? Throw in a persistently bad back and there you have it, the signs are all in the crippling. One sentient being suspended in mental and physical tension. The obvious solution to prevarication is to take small steps towards whatever needs doing, to break it down into more manageable elements. Gradually change the energy. But I can even prevaricate about doing that.

 As I am coming up to my 65th Birthday next month I've had communications plopping onto our door mat about pension pots that mature this year. All asking what I want to do with my very meagre savings, delay taking them, or what type of pension I want to set up. I read all the stuff they send, it seems full of baffling issues, pitfalls and consequences that I don't know if they apply to me. So I just walk away from it. There are deadlines attached,  to tell them what to do before my 65th birthday next month. Someone else's clock is ticking.

The longer I delay the more the delaying itself takes on a self punishing cast - of how pathetic and typical this is of me - is the milder version. I can also see that the things I'm not taking action on are also loaded with end of life, mortality issues - pension, wills, physical decay and infirmity. I then stumble across a You Tube video by an American psychologist Emma McAdams, on her Life in a Nutshell site. It was all about avoidance, as one symptom in a depressive tendency.

She uses the metaphor of a thin rectangular piece of paper to represent our emotional range. Whenever we encounter difficult emotions we can get into the habit of avoiding them, tearing them off and putting them aside. If we keep doing this we end up with a very small bit of paper with only a small range of permitted emotions on it. But, the problem with emotions its all or nothing. If we don't fully feel our sadness and disappointments then we don't fully feel our joys and successes either. Difficult emotions are not something you can opt out of. As the socially permitted emotional range of the average male can be pretty narrow in the first place, you can see what a mess this could potentially create. Avoiding dealing with an issue, prevarication, if it goes on long enough, ends up in the emotional paralysis of real clinical depression.

So feelings about death and everything leading up to that, hover around my prevarication. Plus a dislike of engaging with official paperwork and gobbledygook, that make it all loaded with a discomforting finality.

Almost as a form of light relief. I've been reflecting on avoidance of emotions and experience as a tendency we take into the spiritual life. I'm sure Buddhist teachings were never meant to encourage avoidance. But teachings about identifying hindrances in meditation, and the use of antidotes to counter them, can easily slip into avoidance of experience. There are a range of feelings and thoughts that pop up in our daily practice, and instead of gently and kindly moving our attention away from them, we either try to exterminate them, or do the next best thing, actively suppress or neutralise them with a proprietary antidote. 

Somewhere in our being we start perceiving our feelings and thoughts as a battleground. Failings, obstacles, hindrances are lying in the way of our becoming a better spiritual practitioner, to becoming enlightened. Let's get rid of them. I was introduced to the hindrances and their antidotes as a relative novice, so the potential for misapplying them was huge. I certainly remember my enthusiasm on discovering there was a way to deal with the difficult emotional world that I was struggling with at the time. At last I had some tools to sort them out with. This mechanistic approach appeals greatly to men in particular, its like someone presenting you with a box if spanners, a car manual, and a car. Go get 'em boy! You'll soon have your spiritual engine humming and ticking over more efficiently. The road to Insight is clear, here we go.

Renunciation can be another misused practice. Stop doing these spiritually bad things that cause you to crave, feel attached, lustful or intoxicated and you'll be enlightened by the end of the month. Its as though you hear the message - some judicious pruning will help stimulate plant growth - and before you know it you're lopping off entire branches and felling trees. Its hard to keep it in proportion and not go all fundamentalist on it.  Taoism distinguishes between there being 'real knowledge' and 'conscious knowledge'.  Though the 'conscious' is only a reflection of the 'real', it is incomplete, not really the 'real' thing. So it's important not to act as if it is.

To truly renounce anything you need to have had some insight into its 'real' nature, in order to be really happy to let it go. You can't avoid experiencing the full spectrum of your 'conscious' feelings surrounding a habit or issue. Its how, with kind awareness, you'll eventually come to a 'real' understanding. Anything else could well be a form of  premature renunciation. Or worse, a crude form of self denial, in danger of castrating your emotional experience. So, careful where you wield that axe Eugene.

Meanwhile I'd better dig out that pension stuff. Oh boy I hate official paperwork. It scares me to death.

POEM - The Waxing, Un Travesti, & The Waning

The Waxing

I was a historical child
the more ancient the Pharaoh
the deeper the love, the machinations and cruelties
that all right royal regals seemingly beget,
was all the grist, French nobs
lording it over Saxon peasantry
the hustling and the vexing 
of pigs and their swine, whether
spoken of as cow or le boeuf
houses rose and fell amidst
the corruption of their civility, the intransigent brutality 
of the puritan impulse, imperial
England has these in its veins of involuntary
subjugation, carved into 
the ships of its future empire 
painstakingly retouching
what it inherits from its past with faux restorations 
for a cleaner and more suitably
ennobled mythology

Un Travesti

Ardour ages into parody, respect
is on the cusp of decline, though still in pursuit
of the inheritance from our history
I research the folk origins of ermine drag
my mock love is for the allure 
of conspicuous diamante
my resolving self that is emerging
finds a reflection
in the resplendent camp, of queendom
sceptred and orbed
the garishness of its insignia
and emblems,
yes, there is decadence there, something
empty headed and vulgar
in the opulence of this baroque goddess
as yet untarnished by any magnificent deflation
in her universal bosoms, but
no one is rushing yet to remove
a glorious queen so
lavishly bedecked 
and encrusted with jewels of irony

& The Waning

Avoid
the street parties, break
every commemorative mug 
I will not, just wave things,
put up ludicrous lengths of bunting
and erect a facile glee upon my face
however it is dressed, in fondant icing? 
well, maybe, perhaps monarchies 
are a mind altering drug
dowsed in saccharine, making it palatable
to flow sentimental patriotism
through sclerotic arteries 
becoming a royal addict is a tradition
and a state that diminishes all
genuflecting ourselves to
a sovereign,  to be a subject, 
or something beyond that
where the tidal forces of convention, are resistable
kiss no finger
with an oversized bauble on it
do not pimp yourself
for a monarchy on the way out
re-branding itself
as this unifying solution
to a problem that its existence helped create
if they are just like you and me
why are they mega rich?

written May 2022 by
Stephen Lumb

ARTICLE - Five of the Best from Eurovision 2022

Israel
Some of the best bits of Eurovision never make it past the semi finals. Its a shame then that the Israel entry I.M didn't make it further. Well danced and performed, with a catchy song. But he was on second in the song roster which is apparently death to anyone's ambitions. Its very camp, I think this gentleman might be 'player of the pink oboe.'

Norway 
There is always plenty of weirdness at Eurovision and Subwoofer's - Give That Wolf A Banana is one of the best executed bits of techno dance music with its own peculiar logic and humour. 

Moldova
Oh the dear Moldovans, I just love them.  Always coming up with something catchy, wacky and ever so slightly tongue in cheek. This is also great fun and uplifts the spirit. Here we have a song that's an ode to a train line the Trenuletul - as they tell you in the song - the train's route is East to West Chisinau to Budhapest!

Serbia
Now in terms of oddness nothing quite beats  Konstrakta - In Corporea Sano. It opens with the immortal line - 'I wonder what is the secret behind Megan Markel's healthy hair - I think that deep hydration is what it is'. Apparently the song is an expose of the appalling state of Serbia's health insurance. 

Spain
The key to an exhilarating performance at Eurovision is when song and routine come together and produce an all out blinder. Not only is Spain's song SloMo a corker, Chanel gives it 100% The dance routine is absolutely fantastic, it goes the full Beyonce and beyond. It's spellbindingly good.

LANDMARKS - Beeston Priory

Beeston Priory is tucked away in a far corner of the older part of Beeston Regis. Well nestled behind a flank of trees, protected from the full effect of wind and sea storms by the sheltering mass of Beeston Bump. This, and a ready source of water, were no doubt aspects of the topography that brought the original monastic builders of the Priory to this spot in the first place. Surrounded by a stream and at the time low lying fen like landscape. Here the priory was built and evocatively dedicated to St Mary of the Meadows. 

Norfolk was once viewed as a wildly pagan, an untamed, unchristian place. From the 12th century onward Christian monastic missionaries were sent out into East Anglia. Which is why Norfolk has the greatest number of medieval round towered churches in one county, and was once also peppered with many small local priories. The earliest Castle Acre Priory was founded in 1090 by Cluniac monks, Binham Priory founded by the Benedictines in 1091. Weybourne Priory was founded in 1200, South Creake Abbey 1206, Beeston Priory 1216. Indicating a strong focus in this area to provide resources for an evangelising ministry. 

Augustinian Canons were the founders of the last three of these Priories. Financial patronage for Beeston came from Margery de Cressy, from a highly influential Anglo-Norman family. It was in the nature of the Augustinian monastic rule that they didn't live completely isolated from the host community, but actively engaged with it. Beeston Priory provided alms, preachers for local churches and ran a local boys school. 

Weybourne and Beeston Priories both appear to have never had much more than four resident monastic canons. But it would be a mistake to think they were therefore insignificant foundations. Beeston over the centuries accrued extensive agricultural holdings, built a smithy, brewery, bakehouse and fishponds two of which survive to this day. This size of monastic estate would have required a substantial lay brotherhood in order to run it. Probably between three to four times the number of canons.

The ruins today, shorn of their architectural flourishes, paintwork and ornament, show you only a skeletal bone structure. The Priory consisting now of the barest of walls, blocked in windows, all severely fractured like broken teeth. On visiting you have to work hard imaginatively to envisage the substantial building complex that was once here. One that had a central economic role. as well as being the religious hub for the locality. 

At its dissolution in 1538 the priory's lucrative agricultural lands were sold off. The ruins themselves providing an easily accessed source of dressed stone for local farmhouses. Its unsurprising then that much of the priories original ground plan has subsequently been robbed out. The size and layout of these buildings can only be conjectured. Parts of the priory church chancel show signs of once being roughly re-roofed, and adapted into barns for agricultural and livestock storage. This would explain why it survived depredation to its present height and level of preservation. Many larger and wealthier monasteries in East Anglia having been reduced to the mere stubs of a foundation outline.

Though humbled and diminished in status, the ruins of Beeston Priory nevertheless has a fascinating attraction.  Their hunched smallness, secreted away, their lack of alluring beauty, the muted rustication of their sacred spaces, so seemingly lacking in flashy charisma, hold great warmth in their humility and human scale. They possess an approachable poignancy, a echo in the present of the simple caring ministrations of an institution that once thrived and fed the secular and sacred sustenance of its surrounding community.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 61 - Querulous Birds

28th April
As April moves towards its tail end, there is a weariness lingering around my ambitions for the year. Today I am tired. Like a small querulous bird, I feel myself inwardly flustered, flying around, colliding with window panes, in a direction less desire to feel free of imagined limits and constraints. But find myself boxed in by a whole morass of things that need attention, infected with necessity and time constraints. Plus all the things that are way beyond my control.

External circumstances, like the weather, have turned chilly and damp in the weeks following the much milder and light flurry of Easter. The impulse to put the heating back on has to be constantly checked on principle. Less of an economic imperative, though that is a consideration, but as a defiant resistance of the concept of creating warmth artificially. We are nearly into May, god damn you!

So, yes, tiredness, emotional tiredness specifically. The daily striving just to keep our business kicking, whilst all around us political and economic crises, pestilence and war conspire to neutralise or put in doubt the efficacy of all our efforts. We keep plugging away at it, and its definitely a practice for us both to cultivate resilience and trust that with applied energy and resourcefulness we can find our way through even this. One way or the other, we will be fine. 

Yet this keeping spirits up can prove exhausting. Its not as though we can look forward to an identifiable time when we know things will become hunky dory and settle down. Times are both turbulent and at the same time there is the whiff of stagnation, of repugnant decay. At present I know I'm in a state of profound pessimism, of burnt edges on crumbling pages. All I currently can envisage is more and more of the same, stretching out before me. And yet, even this is impermanent. The desire for something other than this is currently rubbing both me and reality up the wrong way, and the cuckoo of discontent has moved in.

May 1st
Who knows what the future has up its sleeve. It might get worse, it might get better, it might surprise us, but it feels all completely out of anyone's control these days.  Control reveals itself to be an imaginative conceit, one you'd like to believe was true, but isn't. I'd like to believe I can vote in a democracy and effect change, but I'm sixty five soon, and I'm still waiting. Having reportedly regained its sovereignty, our government has turned it into something resembling a one party state, with its own state endorsed media. Any broadcast media who dares to hold the government to account has their funding squeezed or is threatened with being sold off. We have a PM, who despite the amount and stench of his own shit he wallows in, appears incapable of being shoved out of office. Our country has rapidly declined, lost its way and all credibility as a nation. I find myself disgusted by it, ashamed by it. There are days when I simply despair, because I no longer see how this will ever change for the better.

May 4th
As if on cue, yesterday my back acted up. In one moment, whilst I was standing, sanding a piece of wood in the workshop, it suddenly shifted from a small discomforting niggle to causing me to wobble around like a penguin in vertically compressed agony. There is always a judgement to be made with back pain, over how much sitting and resting and how much movement you do. Not too much of either, but enough to alter the physical dynamic regularly. Stasis is deadly.

That this arose into my experience was not entirely unexpected. I've known, for weeks, of too many knots and resistances being bound into muscle and nerves. And then, unusually for me, I slept completely through the night two nights running, my body being quite unfamiliar with this state. Of relaxation mixed with a pert alertness. The psycho physical poisons of anxiety, stress and stoicism, thus finding themselves in conducive circumstances, approved their release and bodily spasm. But as yet my physical response, built on the preservation of bodily integrity, is still asserting a tightly clenched degree of constraint over the whole physical process of release. I still await the dissipation, the dispersal of the energy and angst radiating out to the extremities. Oh the bliss of it all. 

May 7th
Hubby and I have been regularly engaged with watching Interior Design Masters on BBC1. As a format its beginning to be past its best, as it ventures further down the route of valuing character over genuine talent. That said I was extremely pleased when Banjo won. He was just this very sweet, likable guy, with an instinctive genius for colour. He also has a fertile imaginative mind that comes up with back stories for who the clients are who he's designing for. His most hilarious creation was Laurence Llewellyn Bowen's sea dog sister Florence :-

"I've actually designed this place for his sister, Florence Llewelyn-Bowen. She's a rough fisher woman. She loves sea shanties and getting on the beers with the girls by the campfire. Yeah, she's got sailor tats, she's weathered. She's a salty sea dog. She's the opposite of Laurence and they hate each other."

200 WORDS ON - Monarchy

Once upon a time being monarch was a role conferred on you by your tribe. Based on strength of leadership, fighting prowess or possessing a semi-magical lucky charm. Monarchs came to a swift end if famine, pestilence or humiliation befell their people. Executed, buried alive in a bog or ritually dismembered to pacify the wrathful displeasure of the gods.

Overtime who was monarch became a hereditary position. It ceased being conferred on an indfividual by the people, but was 'divinely appointed' to one family. This self serving slight of hand made the monarch, as ‘god’s annointed representative,’ unquestionable.

From Magna Carta onwards, history details the protracted efforts to contain royal power and prerogative, putting boundaries around their 'authority to rule'. Increasing parliamentary sovereignty adjusted the monarchy into a constitutional role. Whilst retaining power through its wealth and as symbolic head of church and establishment.

In terms of a people’s right to chose this was a fudge. Leaving in place the monarch as the representative upholder of enshrined privilege. Its clear the only way citizens of a 21st century democracy could remove the monarch, would be to dismantle the whole hierarchy of self entitled elites of whom she sits as head.

FINISHED READING - Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay knew she was adopted. Her wonderfully open hearted Scottish parents, liberal minded, left wing, and active campaigners were fine about informing her of all they knew about her birth parents.  Jackie was happy with her adopted parents,finding out more about her birth parents seemed not to be an issue. She'd found her voice and become a successful poet and novelist. Everything appeared OK.

But this changed, the need to fully understand her origins, became more pressing. How was she conceived? Why couldn't she have been brought up by them! What sort of persons are they? What have their lives been like since? What had she inherited from them! Would she like them as people? Will they like her? Will they even want to meet her?

Red Dust Road is carefully constructed, like a mixed media collage of Jackie Kay's life, and how the desire to meet her birth parents affected it. Moving back and forth you learn about Jackie Kay's circumstances, encounters with racism, assumptions made about her, coming out as a lesbian, and learning the true nature and cost of her birth parents relationship. She found her Scottish birth mother relatively easily, a mentally fragile woman not entirely able to rise to being who Jackie imagined she was or wanted her to be. 

Her father proved a much more challenging person to meet. A renowned African biologist who, out of guilt over his previous sexual behaviour, has since discovered god, but doesn't want his family to know about her. She recounts their first truly bizarre meeting in a hotel room, brilliantly capturing the ludicrous hilarity of it, and at the same time her depth of distress. This was after all her father. How on earth could she develop a meaningful relationship with this man?

This deft mixing of hilarity and pathos is one of Red Dust Road's striking qualities. Kay is also unfailingly frank about her own failings, her naive expectations, the joys of being brought up by her Scottish parents, as well as the bitter sweet discovery of her true origins. Offset by the culturally rich ancestry she now found herself part of.. How this in itself challenged and changed her view of her own persona and life. 

CARROT REVIEW 6/8