Oh dear I’m feeling unwell Mary said to her friend Annie as they drank coffee after breakfast.

It’s January when everybody begins to feel unwell even before they catch flu

Annie I don’t know why you make wild generalisations like that.

You are taking it too seriously. When I look at my bank statement ot my credit card bill and look out of the window to see the heavy pouring rain I could say I feel slightly ill but in a metaphorical sense.

My goodness Annie whatever has happened to you? You sound very intelligent Have you been taking an open university course without telling me!?

Yes I’ve been taking great books of Russia and I really like Tolstoy very much.

You sound like a different person completely almost as if you were turning into me!

I hope not because I don’t like your dress sense nor your lack of makeup and perfume. And don’t think that you can turn into me just by wearing makeup because it took me a lifetime to become who I am.

Well I’ve been reading about projection the psychological type of projection and something that you don’t like in yourself you can project it into your friend and then you see it in her and she gets blamed for it all gets criticized for it and you feel totally innocent and wonderful

Blimey if we are both going to be very intelligent and literate it’s going to sound like something off that Melvyn Bragg programme In our time.

That’s an exaggeration.

Well Mary are you going to call the doctor?

Why would I want to call the doctor?

You said you were feeling ill.

I do feel ill with I’m not sure why I don’t have a cough or a cold I have no pain in my chest but i seem to be going to the toilet a lot . It might be the coffee.

No I don’t think that’s the coffee I think you’ve got one of your infections. You keep crying and you see a little bit confused about your appointments it’s in your brain rmmm. How can an infection in the bladder be in the brain?

Oh it’s all to do with inflammation . Mary was amazed at her friend’s observations

Honey are you sure that you are Annie?

Of course I am Annie why ask the cat he will tell you.

Emile looked at them with one eye open and one closed

Yes it is Annie  alright

She is not any more intelligent it’s just that you are more stupid then you used to be..

Emile you are a very wicked cat why have you got no tact and courtesy?

Well you have often told me Mary that in an academic discussion it’s  only truth that matters.

Well you sound like the Pope to me. But ut you’re not infallible 

Now even the cat sounds more intelligent

What is the secret to this increase in the IQ and the general intelligence of everybody in the room?

Even when Mary is ill she is still very intelligent but not as much as she would be when she was well because without energy the brain cannot work abd the heart cannot work to feel the feelings that we need to combine with our thoughts before we can come to a conclusion about anything

Yes as someone once said

Energy is eternal delight

I think it was a poet William Blake who uttered this beautiful sentence many years ago but it is still true today.

And so say all of us

I am doing research into which place people watch TV, the young man at the door told Mary
I rarely watch TV, Mary informed him politely
First please tell me your name and ethnic group .he asked her.We must follow the rules ,if not the rulers. he muttered
My name is Danish so I am a Viking, she told him proudly
OK, that makes you English, he said deftly filling his form
You might as well say that the Romans’ descendents are English, she said in her mellifluous voice
After 2,000 years I think they qualify, he joked
Some were black
I don’t care if they are purple, he said courteously.At some point those born here are English.
What we mean is that there is no such thing as being English,Mary said academically
So true, the poor man John whispered.I am a Celt.Not a cult. You seem a very nice lady.Would you like to go to McDonald’s with me? We could carry on chatting
Do you mean come?
Come or go, give me an answer.do
I know it’s not where you usually go but I don’t earn much.
Yes,I’ll meet you at the bus stop at 5 pm, she answered.I don’t have a car
Neither do I, said John.
I like this bus.The people on it are really friendly
Mary shut the door and wondered what to wear
Annie appeared and tapped on her window with hermanicured hands
You are just who I need,Mary cried with joy.
She explained her problem and her date
I think jeans and a nice anorak with a scarf that makes you look grotesque
Will John like that?
It’s the fashion,Annie said pertly.I am amazed you are going out with that man.You don’t
know who he is.He might be a murderer.
I doubt if a psychopath would take me for a burger… more likely a posh restaurant
Good point, said Annie brightly
Let’s look at my scarves,Mary said.How about this zebra print?
I like this blue one with books printed on it,said Annie
I could wear both of them!~
You could start a trend, her dear neighbour told her
Meanwhile Emile was having a panic attack in the kitchen
Don’t panic,Emile said Mary.We can’t linger in McDonalds
The seats are small and close together
Tell me, which scarf do you prefer?
I like that one with cat’s eyes on it.Wear that and he will know you have a protector.
Honestly, it’s too much bother to decide.If only women had fur like cats,Mary said
What about shoes? called Annie
I’ll wear the green trainers and red socks
You will be a sight for sore eyes if you add some makeup
On hearing this, Mary screamed hysterically.
I think I’ll stay at home

And so will all of us

Your face is etched upon my heart.

I knew you in the morning light

Love is wise but never smart.

We have no need of others charts

In the mornings and the night

Your face is etched upon my heart.

As we waken sleep departs

To see your face is my delight

Love is wise and sometimes smart

Intuition, craft is art

Love is silent, hatred fights

Your face is etched upon my heart

Human Love can see in part

Face to face we’ll see aright

Love is wise love is not smart

Your face is etched upon my heart.

Love is wise but never smart

Is love blind? Who etched the lines?

Sacred, human, love is kind

Samuel Taylor Coleridge | The Poetry Foundation https://share.google/MHmBJ4Z7dnojraKAV

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the rising middle class. As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant companion in the formative period of their careers as poets, Coleridge participated in the sea change in English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads (1798). His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and strangely oracular, put off early readers but survived the doubts of Wordsworth and Robert Southey to become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.

Coleridge renounced poetic vocation in his thirtieth year and set out to define and defend the art as a practicing critic.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton

the volume were composed in Stuart England but published after the onset of the English Civil War. Furthermore, Milton may have begun to compose one or more of his mature works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—in the 1640s, but they were completed and revised much later and not published until after the Restoration.

This literary genius whose fame and influence are second to none, and on whose life and works more commentary is written than on any author except Shakespeare, was born at 6:30 in the morning on 9 December 1608. His parents were John Milton , Sr., and Sara Jeffrey Milton , and the place of birth was the family home, marked with the sign of the spread eagle, on Bread Street, London. Three days later, at the parish church of All Hallows, also on Bread Street, he was baptized into the Protestant faith of the Church of England. Other children of John and Sara who survived infancy included Anne, their oldest child, and Christopher, seven years younger than John. At least three others died shortly after birth, in infancy or in early childhood. Edward Phillips, Anne’s son by her first husband, was tutored by Milton and later wrote a biography of his renowned uncle, which was published in Milton’s Letters of State (1694). Christopher, in contrast to his older brother on all counts, became a Roman Catholic, a Royalist, and a lawyer.

Milton’s father was born in 1562 in Oxfordshire; his father, Richard, was a Catholic who decried the Reformation. When John Milton, Sr., expressed sympathy for what his father viewed as Protestant heresy, their disagreements resulted in the son’s disinheritance. He left home and traveled to London, where he became a scrivener and a professional composer responsible for more than twenty musical pieces. As a scrivener he performed services comparable to a present-day attorney’s assistant, law stationer, and notary. Among the documents that a scrivener executed were wills, leases, deeds, and marriage agreements. Through such endeavors and by his practice of money lending, the elder Milton accumulated a handsome estate, which enabled him to provide a splendid formal education for his son John and to maintain him during several years of private study. In “Ad Patrem” (To His Father), a Latin poem composed probably in 1637-1638, Milton celebrated his “revered father.” He compares his father’s talent at musical composition, harmonizing sounds to numbers and modulating the voices of singers, to his own dedication to the muses and to his developing artistry as a poet. The father’s “generosities” and “kindnesses” enabled the young man to study Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and Italian.”

Little is known of Sara Jeffrey, but in Pro Propulo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (The Second Defense of the People of England, 1654) Milton refers to the “esteem” in which his mother was held and to her reputation for almsgiving in their neighborhood. John Aubrey, in biographical notes made in 1681

Happiness is compulsory at this time
Xmas parties,alcohol and drugs
Inebriated,I can never rhyme
I sit and watch the mating of the slugs

But surely nothing mates in winter cold
For slugs don’t own a coat like humans do
Perhaps ,despite appearance, they are bold
Need no injections to prevent the flu.

On balance would you rather be a slug
That lives a life of freedom in the grass
Or do you live because you write and blog
And in the evening play a double bass.?

A slug can’t sing a song nor speak kind words
This idea is foolish and absurd.