Day: November 21, 2025

Cheap therapy

Digital art  by Katherine

I think the tide is on the turn.

Yes I saw that ship come sailing by

Are you going to be on your own for Christmas?

No, I’m going to my cleaning lady’s.

Don’t you know anybody else? do you actually want to spend Christmas in a stable?

I thought it seemed more Christmas like to be with the humble and the poor. I will buy the food of course but she will cook it. I don’t know if she’s got an oven but we can always have something like hamburgers on garlic bread with a side salad for one or two only one pound fifty in John Lewis . To be honest I prefer Weetabix to Turkey and I prefer the humble to the rich.

Make a Weetabix stuffing then. Just some sausage meat parsley and some mashed up Weetabix stick it in the turkey and Bob’s your uncle. Don’t you have to cook the turkey then?

Not if you’re an eagle.

Do people eat eagles in other countries? 

Well I’ve never heard of it yet but I suppose if there’s nothing else then they will try but the eagle may eat them or at least kill them and then we have the vultures coming.

I thought we were talking about Christmas

Well it’s a bit like psychoanalysis you start talking about whatever is in your mind and you don’t know where you’re going to end up.

What would a psychoanalysts think of me talking about eagles?

It’s impossible to say unless they’ve got to know you very very well and they realize that eagle represents your starving child self driven mad by rage.

I think that’s unfair on eagles actually.

Well they don’t know, do they?

But it might get back to them. Then what would happen if you live in your London suburb?

I don’t think there are eagles in the Chilterns

But what about Whipsnade Zoo though?

I know they’ve got tigers but I doubt very much that they have eagles in there

It makes you realise though doesn’t it how wrong it is to have a zoo

Donald Trump likes eagle soup so they tell me m

What rubbish you’re thinking about mock turtle soup

Do you love eagles?

I don’t know any  but I know Terry Eagleton.

He believes it was a mistake to publish iris murdoch’s poetry that was found in the attic of her house in Oxford

Once you’re dead you have no control but why didn’t she destroy it? I suppose she didn’t know it was going to get dementia and when she had that then she wouldn’t have been able to do anything sensible like destroying her poetry

Now there’s a thought at least she didn’t publish hers on the internet

I don’t think she had a computer it would have been anathema to her. She would want to feel the pen moving on the paper and that would connect to some part of her brain

Will Terry Eagleton change his mind or will Rose Mather win the booker prize!?

I have never heard of her before

Neither have I

You must have heard of her or why would you have said her name?

I’m just making it up as I go along

You could say the same about God sometimes.

Oh dear what can the matter be?

Trump’s got Zelensky strung up on the judas tree

Oh dear what can the matter be

Do you think we need Tony Blair?

Loving each other:science and poetry

sun fire hot research
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry/2016/06/love-affair-between-science-and-poetry

Extract

Frontiers in Neurology reported that the expression of science through poetry could enrich and better kids’ understanding of science education, in schools. According to the research, it encouraged use of their imagination to deconstruct and reconstruct their learned knowledge. Critiquing and analysing thus could facilitate learning.

Emily Dodd, aficionado and writer of scientific poetry and screenwriter for CBeebies science programs tells me: “There’s something to be said for communicating science creatively and seeing how much knowledge is retained or if people are interested enough to look for more information afterwards.” What she wants to know is why we lose that desire to understand and how we can bring back that desire and the joy that comes with discovery.

This very tendency to reduce things to their minute components is science’s premise and so it is sometimes criticised for losing sight of the wholeness and larger human meaning. John Keats, who trained as a surgeon and apothecary before committing himself to poetry, famously said:

“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.”

This roughly translates as science ruins the beauty of things by dissecting it into its components. It’s worth noting, though, that Keats was a part of the Romantic era wherein poets were confronted by the Industrial Revolution and the idea that science and technology would pave the way for the future was for them, terrifying.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is perhaps the biggest exception to the norm.  A German, and born in 1749, he was a writer and a scientist but he always regarded his contribution to the science of colour far greater than any literature he wrote. His work includes poetry written in a variety of metres and styles, prose and verse dramas; memoirs, an autobiography, literary criticism, papers on botany, anatomy, and colour and four novels.

One of his biggest passions was the study of clouds and in an act of pronounced love and respect between a poet and scientist, he wrote a poem about each of the different classifications of clouds (nimbus, cirrus, cumulus and stratus) and an ode to the scientist who devised them, Luke Howard, as a declaration of his admiration for Howard’s scientific skills.

“To find yourself in the infinite,
You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.”

Stan takes in a parcel

Stan was leaning over, cleaning the new bath.When the doorbell rang,he rushed downstairs and opened the double front door.
“Will you take this parcel in for the lady next door?” The postman asked wearily.
“Oh,fine Stan stuttered.He was trying to avoid Annie but here she was,coming down the road of superior semi detached houses suitable for ex-headmasters ,small businessmen,econometricians,surgeons,pie salesmen and theologians.
She was wearing perfume, and green sandals from TK Maxx,light khaki tencel cropped combat trousers with a purple silky over-blouse, not to mention her matching raspberry and cream underwear .Round her neck hung a miniature grandfather clock on a solid gold chain,and she had three imitation gold and silver watches on each of her three wrists making a total of 333 watches according to Carnap’s theory of logic and Russell’s terrible handwriting. Stanley didn’t know that she had a mobile phone stuffed into her bra—one advantage for the larger sized woman.In fact she had 4 down there in her raspberry coloured glamour bra,as she had a phobia about their batteries running down all at once
The more she had the lower the probability of her being without a phone whilst out and about the town and countryside.So she reasoned in her womanly way. Just then one phone rang.She rummaged around to the consternation and turmoil-uation of Stanley and the postman.She plucked out a pale blue phone.
“Hi,it’s Annie” she murmured.
“Hi Annie it’s Dave the paramedic with carpentry skills. You’ve not rung 999 lately so we were wondering if all was well!”
“Oh,I’m terribly sorry.I’ll try to phone later on.Thanks,Petal.That was Dave,our ex-transvestite converted paramedic”,she informed the men.The postman galloped off on his donkey, his bags full of undelivered males.It’s a tough but interesting life in Knittingham. Would you like a male delivery?Contact Parcel Force without delay.
Annie went into Stan’s house and demanded a cup of coffee.
“Won’t it make you put weight on” Stan quipped ironically.
“Do you think I’m too plump?” she responded anxiously..
“Too plump for what?” he quipped amiably.
“To attract men,of course!”
“No,my angel,you are just perfect”he quacked definitively.”Nor are you an angel,strictly speaking,as I have good reason to know.Thank you,my beloved for services rendered so generously and freely.”
“Oh,my goodness I must get home to render the fat from the beef and to make some gooseberry jam.” Stanley looked uneasy.
“I wonder why babies are left under gooseberry bushes?
The thorns are so big it’s quite dangerous getting them out,or so Mary told me when Lyra was born. She was covered in scratches and wouldn’t come near me for months.”
“Why don’t you come upstairs to look at our new purple bathroom suite.Since the Royal Wedding it’s the in colour.The gold taps were expensive but they do go well.”
“My God,let me out.” she bawled,”It reminds me of the Vatican and that’s no place for a lady”,
“Not even a gay lady?” Stan muttered parsimoniously, as he licked her eyelashes gently.
“Stop that.I’ve got my Yves St Laurent mascara on.”
“I prefer the taste of the Chanel,”he disclosed privately in an internal secret memo.[available in 50 years]
“Why not lick my neck instead?” she enquired curiously as she tripped over Emile the cat, who had slipped into the bathroom as usual to see what they were up to,you know what I mean, you catch my drift?
She fell floppily into the bath and banged her head on the taps.
“Oh,gosh,better ring 999” Stan said to Emile.
“Have you got your catphone warehouse mobile on you?”
“Yes ,it’s in my y-fronts”, the cat amiably miaowed.
“Hi Dave,this is Emile.Can you come quick.Annie is unconscious and what is worse,she has scratched the new bath.”
In fact it was Emile who had scratched the bath that morning but since Stan had not noticed he hoped to, callously, pass the blame onto poor Annie.How cruel can a cat be? Ask any mouse! Still in the end God made all of us and what a terrifying and beautiful world it is.

Losing?

It might be good to lose weight or to lose your prejudice against certain other people

But it’s not so good to lose everything.

What would it be like to lose everything?

It’s nice sometimes to give up smoking or taking lots of painkillers 

It’s not good to give up completely. On the whole

It’s good to take up a new interest unless it’s gambling

But maybe not so good to take up with the wrong sort of people, whatever that might mean to you

Sometimes they say why not get a new interest like going to an art class

But don’t start stalking somebody however interested you may feel in them.

Sometimes we just long for more things especially on black Friday

But as the Bible says

What’s the point of gaining the whole world if you have to lose your own soul in the process?