Mary went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror.She no longer feared to see Satan; compared to many living  or  dead human beings he seemed almost an angel.
Her hair was standing on end; she realised that it was one thing to buy a box of 24 combs from Amazon, but quite another to use one.
Ah, well, Stan preferred it wild, she told herself.But that was a long time ago.It was no longer thick and wavy.That stopped men singing,”O Sole Mio”  when she passed them while they were painting a neighbour’s house.They probably didn’t know what it meant and neither did she.
Why am I looking into the mirror, she wondered? Maybe I am lonesome.But who to visit?Who to invite for tea?
Emile pushed the door open.
Are you alright, mother, he mewed piteously?
I am not your mother, Emile, she said to her little cat, being overly pedantic about every aspect of human life.
Ok,grandma,  he continued.I see the Yodel van outside. He probably has something for you or me.
Now, Emile, I’ve told you before, call me Mary even if I am your grandmother.
Who was my mother, he asked? Did you adopt me?
Your mother was my mother’s cat “Arabella Stuart”.We called her Bella.Your father was a total mystery.
Presumably a cat, Emile pondered wonderingly
Why, did you think it was an animal of another type?
How about Stan.Was he not my dad?
In a metaphorical sense,he was, she murmured shyly.
He loved you very much.And so do I.
When we watched the dreadful news on TV I was wondering if any animals had been killed by the fire.Nobody has said.I doubt if they would keep dogs up there but cats might have been allowed.
Oh,dear, I have not thought of that.It was so terrible seeing people waving from their windows holding their phones.Saying,  “I love you “to their parents or children.
And now the Chancellor says it is illegal here to use that aluminium cladding.
I bet he is going to try to oust Theresa May, Emile told her.
You men, you only think of one thing! Politics and fighting and sex and hot sinners.
Do you mean dinners, the intelligent cat asked her?
No , hot sinners are harlots.
But how do we know it is a sin.To cats it is normal.We don’t pay of course.
I don’t know.The word  “sin” is no longer heard as it is not politically correct
Whereas letting 58  people burn to death is politically correct as long as we don’t call it sinful.And all the others will be sick for years.
My God, you are getting clever, Emile,maybe you should  be runingn  the country!
But now Mary and Emile are sad seeing the quarrelsome lunatics in  charge of our little island,  which will never rule any waves again,éxcept in people’s hair
Should Mary and Emile emigrate?
Who will take them?

Read more in “The Cats Times” on sale in all good pet shops

I  love Picasso, it’s his  line,you know
How he evokes the movement fast or slow
The sundered parts arranged in  a new form
The  image still and yet depicting storms

The  unexpecting vision threw me down
My mind was blown and I  lay on the ground
I  heard no sound except for music lite
For I was in a shop,not an art site

I did not think I’d  see great art in there
My fences bypassed by  such beauty bare
The light of art  burns into  human souls
May shatter or fragment,  create new wholes

Noone ever knew  the  blow I took
When I saw with no intent to look

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/10154775

 

“Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.

“Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.

“There is no sense of conventional limitations and you can see this in their work. Take Salvador Dali, for example. He certainly saw the world differently and behaved in a way that some people perceived as very odd.”

He said businesses have already recognised and capitalised on this knowledge.

Some companies have “skunk works” – secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business.

Chartered psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon says an ability to “suspend disbelief” is one way of looking at creativity.

“When you suspend disbelief you are prepared to believe anything and this opens up the scope for seeing more possibilities.”

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/8gdygp/healing-soldiers-with-literature-427

Extract

“Gunners in Sevastopol, Ukraine, had unhinged the gates of hell on a battalion of British troops. On October 25, 1854, cannonballs flattened dozens of men a pop, and warhorses sank to their hocks in the splatter. When the smoke cleared 110 were dead, making the Battle of Balaclava one of the most notorious suicide missions of the Crimean War.

Six weeks after the massacre Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Britain’s poet laureate, hailed the soldiers’ valor in 55 lines of verse and enshrined them in legend. A tragic ballad with a biting sense of futility (“Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” became the ambivalent banner cry of this and so many subsequent wars of questionable cause. But Rudyard Kipling’s postscript to the poem, “The Last of the Light Brigade,” written years later, went nearly unnoticed. His largely forgotten effort considered the battle’s forgotten survivors, who, “limping and lean and forlorn,” had inherited from their country nothing but shell shock, pained deformity, and crippling unemployment. Though Kipling wrote the essential poem about Crimea, Tennyson wrote the crowd favorite, as the public wants the battle but not the aftermath, like a child loath to clean up its mess.

If the war poet Frederick Foote has a mission, it would be to unite Tennyson’s gift for elegy with Kipling’s sense of debt. His debut collection, Medic Against Bomb, has enjoyed considerable acclaim since its quiet release last fall, receiving the Grayson Books Poetry Prize, earning applause from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress, and being named by the Progressive as a best book of the year. An account of Foote’s time as a US Navy doctor in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book is a tonic for the genre. A relic of the sickbay rather than the battlefield, it prefers the guts of war to the glory, lamenting the wounded on both sides with Hippocratic impartiality.

Like Kipling, Foote knows he is here not to eulogize but to heal. And his interest in the intersection of art and war doesn’t end with his poetry collection. After studying humanities at the University of Chicago, Foote trained in neurology at Georgetown and Yale. When he returned from Iraq and Afghanistan he dedicated himself to finding new ways of treating veterans beset with brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. His approach has been auspiciously atypical. With military funding, Foote founded the Epidaurus Project, which researches and advocates the use of holistic medicine throughout the armed forces, and his writing group, the Warrior Poets Project, puts verse at the center of this practice. In other words, his writerly endeavors are inseparable from his pastoral care, devoted as it is to the therapeutic power of art. If his work as a poet focuses on the literature of medicine, his work as a doctor focuses on the medicine of literature.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2018/may/01/sajid-javid-and-the-strange-science-behind-power-poses

 

“And yet the myth of power poses remains, as we saw this week from Sajid Javid. I attribute this partly to TED not removing the talk from their website, and partly to the general principle that you can’t put the lid back on the can once the worms are everywhere. I don’t know why government advisers don’t know that social media roundly mocks this particular stance (unless they are deliberately trolling their employers, which seems unlikely), but you don’t actually need to debunk Cuddy’s power pose research to know politicians don’t get perce”ived as confident, powerful entities simply by standing with their legs splayed.”

I am myself and noone else is me
And yet we have a  contemplative soul
With my own eyes I look and wish to see

We each desire but wish to pay no fee
Becoming all we are will make us whole
I am myself and noone else is me

To God so many make a silent plea
With history  like ours, it’s rather droll
With our own eye, we look  but cannot see

To all  the world we needs show charity
Reciprocated lest it take a bitter toll
I  am  some self but know not who is me

Would I were a butterfly or bee
To take my bliss from pretty little flower!
With our own eye,we peep  then  we may see

 

As I look out from my wooden tower
I see hills far away ,oh nature’s treasure
We each desire but wish life to be free
I’ll be myself  for noone else is me