Category: Thinkings and poems

Mary goes shopping

I am going shopping today, Mary informed Stan.I have decided to buy a corset.I am getting fat.
I hope it’s not a whalebone corset, Stan teased her. gently
Are they still allowed to use the bones of whales? she asked.One whale must have massive bones.Why not use dog’s bones?
Well, Stan said, you may be plump but don’t torture yourself for beauty.I love you as you are, sweetheart.
Mary got onto her bicycle and rode into town, passing some lovely magnolias and forsythia.She locked her bike to the church gate as sinners cannot be trusted especially just after Confession.
Hello, I’m looking for a whalebone corset, she informed the lady in the lingerie department.
What!We don’t have them anymore.They ran out of baleen which is horny material in a whale’s mouth.
Was it their teeth , asked Mary tremulously.
Eeh, I don’t know said the assistant. Anyway, now we have shapewear.It looks like underwear but it’s elasticated.So it keeps your curves in like those minimiser bras
Mary burst out laughing as she imagined wearing an elasticated vest which would push all her fat up round her neck or down onto her bum .Or an elasticated pair of knickers which push the fat upwards. onto her waist.And furthermore, how easy would it be to get them down in the bathroom? Worse still, if Stan took her to a restaurant and she could not pull them down for a wee…should she take some scissors?
Mary stopped laughing when she saw all the staff staring at her,
Are you alright, madam? one asked rather ferociously.
Yes, it’s my dwindling hormones.They make me laugh hysterically from time to time.It’s better than getting those hot flushes ,in my view.
Why not have HRT? the lady replied.
Excuse me, said Mary, but I do not wish to discuss my health matters in public but thank you for your concern.She was rather pleased with that having just read
“A woman’s guide to compassionate self assertion.”
Although she did wonder why it was addressed only to women.Emile agreed when she discussed over milk and cat niblets which Mary had to eat when she ran out of food.
As Mary stood in the Shapewear department she remembered the time she tried on some denim jeggings as they seemed to be in fashion.They looked very nice but she had such a hard time getting them off she thought she would have to buy them and cut them off at home.
So all of a sudden she picked up her Mondrian PVC shopping bag and her green handbag and ran out of the door into the button and wool department.
My, you look hot, her friend Gail said.I am buying some merino wool for neckwarmers.Do you ever knit nowadays, Mary?
Only with whales bones, she murmured.And it’s so hard to find them now.
Well, whales must still have bones, dear, otherwise they would collapse.
Surely you don’t expect me to catch my own whale.Mary cried in fear.
And how about Jonah?Suppose I find a prophet inside the whale?
That could be just who we need, Gail said.Someone who can tell us what God wants us to do.
Would people listen, Mary asked Gail tremulously
Only if he went on Twitter I suppose.
Could Donald Crump be a prophet? Mary muttered
No, he’s too big for a whale to swallow even if the common people swallow his nonsense.He sounds as if he’d like to treat women the way they do in some countries like Saudi Arabia.40 lashes for taking the morning after pill.
It could be hard to have,”the night before” in a place like that.
The two women gazed blankly in front of them trying to remember their youth and their long lost love affairs.
Let’s go into the Cricketer’s Arms and have a drink Gail said.
I’d rather have coffee,Mary replied.So off they went arm in arm humming
“I believe in angels “very loudly to frighten off any evil spirits from the lingerie department.We know the Devil loves bras and suspender belts with lace trimmings as he is, in fact, the god Pan who was a goatherd with a horn on which he played his music to tempt the weak; some even say he was half goat half human but we never did that in the maths department.
We only studied shapes and forms and symmetry.Well, I know it sounds suggestive but we only dealt with it in an abstracted manner.That’s why you see mathematicians with all sorts of undies hanging off them as it’s the geometry they need to learn and how better than on a field trip to a department store. Anthropologists go to Samoa and mathematicians go to Sex and Undie shops.They have no choice.They need to see those conical bras.Conic sections!Ellipses.You get my drift

Bewildered by the roads

London is bewildered by its roads
The Circular, the North,the South, the Codes
The Morse and the Enigma, Turing broke
So now we have new bicycles with spokes

Once we had the A to Z in hand
Turn it upside down and you’ll be grand
New technology has made great strides
Carrying us to Eden ,what a ride

The motorways are empty for tonight
God decided we had too much Light
He taught the bare cheeked Moon on Jesus’ Mount
To turn the other side when love’s about

I liked to use a compass and a map
But now, my dear, most everything’s on tap
I crouch beneath my sister as she drives
In the dark on the M 25

But if it’s closed, we are completely foxed
We left the old Road Atlas in a box
Along with all my ex’s underpants
And naturally his principles of Kant

We may be in Watford or in Bucks
I often wonder what will rhyme with luck
We may be near St Albans, we can’t see
The car ran up the trunk of an oak tree

We rang 999 and they are here
A fire engine filled up with Kentish beer
A ladder for the ladies to climb down
Now they are just women on the town

London exists no more as a real spot
MI 5 are joining all the dots

Give and take

Too much talking wears the listener out

Keep silent then until you feel no doubt.

Learn how you can take in what they say

But don’t reply until another day

Incontinence in)2 speech can overwhelm

We can drown the other with our tongue.

If you go dumb because you feel deep grief 

Emulate the insect on its leaf

Your words will not destroy your

 anger’s good.

Chew your meat, for you will taste no blood

Vasily Grossman: Loser, Saint | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vasily-grossman-loser-saint

There are echoes here of the sclerotic cruelties, mass killing and frightened conformity of Putin’s Russia, which makes Life and Fate especially compelling now. But Grossman’s portrait is timelessly relevant. Tolstoy refused to describe War and Peace as either novel or history; it explained an era. Grossman does the same, illuminating why people are moved to savagery or sacrifice.

Nobody should be sacrificed to transcendent ideals

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/31eccf72-8878-11ed-bb21-8f4d97ec7b02?shareToken=b3787d72ca6dcbc58cf2648d4ab28891

D

Ikonnikov’s fierce conclusion is that there are no transcendent schemes for which people should be sacrificed. These ideals are delusions. “Those who most wish for the good of humanity are unable to diminish evil by one jot.”

There are echoes here of the sclerotic cruelties, mass killing and frightened conformity of Putin’s Russia, which makes Life and Fate especially compelling now. But Grossman’s portrait is timelessly relevant. Tolstoy refused to describe War and Peace as either novel or history; it explained an era. Grossman does the same, illuminating why people are moved to savagery or sacrifice.

Mental lexicon

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

His mental lexicon was full of words

Though very few of them were ever heard

He made up sentences inside his head

Before he went to sleep in a strange bed

But no one ever shared his own bedstead m

He might have wished for marriage, never said

He was extremely shy so we observe

H never got the happiness deserved

Don’t assume you know what speech is for

is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought.

Wilfred Bion

Psycho analysis is not a science and never can be

“It is very important to be aware that you may never be satistied with your analytic career if you feel that you are restricted to what is narrowly called a ‘scientific’ approach. You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable.” ~ Wilfred Bion

Qqqq

Dumped again

I didn’t know that love could die so soon

I didn’t know you would leave me lone

I was still humming that special tune

I didn’t know love could die so soon

Without you here I hate my room

We can’t even talk on the telephone

How was it love when it went so soon

I didn’t think you could leave me alone 0

Triolet

Rondel (Triolet)
By Jean Froissart (1337-1404)

Love, love, what wilt thou with this heart of mine?
Naught see I fixed or sure in thee!
I do not know thee,–nor what deeds are thine:
Love, love, what will though with this heart of mine?
Shall I be mute, or vows with prayers combine?
Ye who are blessed in loving, tell it me:
Love, love, what wilt thou with this heart of mine?
Naught see I permanent or sure in thee!

Why is there still anti-semitism?

https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-how-the-origins-of-historys-oldest-hatred-still-hold-sway-today-87878

The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspi.The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspiratorial enemy of Christian faith, spirituality and redemption, was … shaped to serve as the scapegoat for [the ills of] secular industrial society.

Lincoln Cathedral

From the miles of flatness and the fens

Comes to the hill where this Cathedral stands

Everyone can see this floodlit site

When the moon is out and there is night.

I saw it through the window as I turned 

It’ struck me down with beauty never learnt.

As I lay surprised upon the stair

I absorbed the beauty I saw there 

Should we worship beauty such as this?

It strikes us with a hammer not a kiss

Where to start with: Sylvia Plath

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/27/where-to-start-with-sylvia-plath?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Plath was at her core a poet. Poetry was where she expanded her imagery, her address, her ethos and her dramatic self. Her poems use language to drill into the deepest layers of consciousness, and occasionally makes the reader uncertain: what is the poem really about, what is really happening within its sphere? The Collected Poems offers a unique opportunity to spot the writer’s growth into a risk-taking poet who, step by step, pushed the limits of what is possible 

Child poverty in the Guardian

that more than a third of children in England already receive free school meals. A third! That might sound generous, as if reaching quite far up the earnings scale. But no. To be eligible, a family must be on universal credit, earning less than £7,400 a year. This is an astonishingly low threshold, showing how many children are living in very poor families. Next

The scandal of social care in the UK

A

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/15/health-expert-jeremy-hunt-fix-social-care

It’s not just beds: many sitting in hospitals needlessly await care packages at home, but domiciliary care services are collapsing. Many wait for NHS services in the community, but the number of district nurses halved in the last decade. The IFS this week produced an alarming report on declining productivity in the NHS. One key reason, it said, was the failure to “discharge patients into the community or social care, which further clogs up the system and acts as a drain on staff resources”. Far from integration, there’s a tug of war, or tug of blame, between the NHS and councils.

Eden for 1-hour

I remember everything you said

As we lay together in our bed

The light of joy lit up my heart and soul

I remember everything we did

On the happy night that we were wed

Fulfilment in our very bones is bred

And from our minds the devils have all fled

As we’re taken back into the fold.

For one small hour in Eden we were glad.

The hatred and the pain for now are shed

With love and hope our lives can be more bold.

Even now when you have gone from sight

Rondeau | Poetry Foundation

“Originating in France, a mainly octosyllabic poem consisting of between 10 and 15 lines and three stanzas. It has only two rhymes, with the opening words used twice as an unrhyming refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/rondeau#:~:text=Originating%20in%20France%2C%20a%20mainly,the%20second%20and%20third%20stanzas.