Hello and quite possibly, goodbye!

Hello bloglander…

I've always found Blogger impenetrable, I'm afraid. Most websites are, to me. I simply don't seem to have the right sort of intuitive powers to guess what the hell all those gnomically labelled buttons mean, and what they do and don't do. And, perhaps more importantly, I don't have the time or inclination to find out. Life's too short.
Once in a blue moon I come across a website that is a beacon of joy. The PLR (Public Lending Rights) site is one. The PLR look after the royalties payable to authors from public library loans. We get 6p a shot… which doesn't sound a lot, but it equals about a half of the royalty I get from the total sale of a book. Three loans and I'm ahead of a sale!
The site is an absolute model of clarity and speed. My 'broad'band trundles along at about half a megawhotsit, so everything takes ages, but zappo!.. PLR loads in a flash, and I can understand everything on it. Why aren't other sites like this? I've never actually asked anyone this question because there is no chance that I would understand the answer, and the information would be useless to me anyway.

Why am I telling you this? Because yesterday 'support' at Blogger sent me a full-page email explaining.. well… I've no idea what, frankly. Except that apparently I'm an FTP user (which I would deny vehemently in court) and Blogger are going to no longer service FTP. What? What?
As far as I'm concerned I click this then click that, and if I'm lucky, I've added a new posting to my blog. 'FTP' don't come into it.
The email then went on to describe, in admirable detail, an awful lot of things I didn't understand a word of.

Why? Seriously…. WHY do geeks send out this sort of garbage when they must surely know (mustn't they????) that not everyone is a tecchie-head, and in fact that most bloggers know very little of the tecchie stuff, and have no desire to. What we, as sensible, busy, and rational people want is a very simple Click This Then Click That list for a few basic procedures.
Want to add a posting? Then Click A, then B, then C.
Want to add a photo? Click D and F.
And so on.

Is that impossible? No... I don't think so. It might take time to design and implement though, as it would certainly involve speaking (gasp) to … 'non-tecchies' (ie ordinary people) to check that 'they' could understand it. Not a lot of chance of that, I would say. 'And tecchie shall speak only unto tecchie, and tecchiespeak shall come to rule the world. And none shall understand it unless he be a tecchie. And so the world shall perish.'
I did reply to 'support' asking for clarification of the email, but the mail was bounced. Well well… That's 'support' for you, I guess.

So… as far as I could make out, Blogger won't be using my FTP any more (so presumably I'll have to sell it, if I can find it and there's still a market for it), but it doesn't seem to tell me what's coming next. Not that I could understand, anyway.
So.. I can only assume that the plug will be pulled some day soon and that my blogging days, few and far between that they are, will be ended forever.

So… probably goodbye, dear reader. I wish you well in all your endeavours. It's been nice meeting you, so to speak, and thanks to everyone who has left a Comment. Always very interesting.

Now I'll get back to the Grand Oeuvre. The end of Chapter 27 is almost in sight. Just three more to go.
Maybe I should sign off with clip from Ch 27 On the Appalling Damage Materialism has Done to Society…

The Arts



I think these two pictures sum up the influence of Materialism on the arts rather well. Both are concerned with death, although one of them might just be concerned with schlock shock. One profoundly moving. One vapid. One a work of extraordinary art and craftsmanship. One involving sticking on sequins. One genuine. One cynical. One worth fifty million pounds. One priceless.
One Materialist. One Idealist. Take your pick.

Woops.. here we go again. The pictures in the text won't upload, and I don't know how to resolve this. No 'Click List', you see…
Try to imagine them: one is of Tutankhamen's golden mask, and the other is of Damien Hirst's diamond-smothered skull.

Bye Chas

Our new Vatican

It struck me this morning that I've not written anything on this blog for a couple of weeks... which almost certainly means several months. Time flies like… mad, doesn't it?

I've not written anything largely because I've not had anything worth wasting your time with, but also because I've been flogging away at the Grand Oeuvre. I can't remember where I was up to last time I wrote anything here, but I'm now trying to sort out how to write Chapter 21, which will be the culmination of all the evidence I've assembled in the previous 20 chapters. I've delved into Magic and The Occult and come out smiling, and have, I hope, showed how Mind differs from Brain. All the while, I've been looking for flaws in the overall philosophy of Idealism… and have not found the slightest trace. (Idealism is the sole and automatic opposite of Materialism. Once you appreciate the fact that Materialism is irrational and unsupported by any evidence at all, then Idealism must replace it as a logical necessity. But don't take my word for it, or anybody else's; check it for yourself.).

And all the while, further elements keep dropping into place. It struck me all over again how science has replaced religion to such a degree as to be almost laughable. Scientists are now the fount of all wisdom. If we see a funny light in the sky zig-zagging about, we turn not to a priest, but to a scientist. Whether we find the explanation of 'a weather balloon' or 'Venus' any more satisfying than 'an angel, my son, an angel', is a moot point.
The parallel is greater. Both institutions speak from seats of power, 'ex cathedra', from either the Vatican or the Palace of Lambeth, or Oxbridge University. Both hold each other in either scorn or bewilderment, and occasionally both wear recognisable uniforms. Above all, both are quite sure that they are right, and thus nobody else can be.

What struck me this morning is that science now has its own brand new cathedral in the Large Hadron Collider. All wisdom will apparently now come from this new building, in a way similar to the heavenly revelations that Church buildings were once associated with.

They are looking for the Higgs boson, a so-far theoretical particle which will, they think, 'explain' gravity, and with luck, take us one step closer to a Theory of Everything.
Surely nobody seriously believes in either of these expectations?

If they do find a Higgs boson, it will not 'explain' anything. It will just pose more problems, and the issue of what caused what will just be pushed one step further back into mystery. Science, by definition, produces more questions than answers. It is a never-ending quest. Hence the silliness of… a 'Theory of Everything'. Even if we admit that the pompous title is an embarrassment, the whole mindset behind it is even more embarrassing.
A few of the things science 'does not fully understand' includes, mass, light, electricity, life, mind, and consciousness. A Theory of Everything would, naturally, explain all of these, plus other mysteries like intuition, creativity, how we see things 'out there' when the visual cortex is at the back of the head, and, a current favourite of mine, how a young man of normal disposition got an honours degree in Maths at Sheffield University in the 1980's while having a brain which amounted to no more than a rind the thickness of orange peel inside his skull. The rest was full of fluid. (Try googling 'Professor John Lorber', the doctor who wrote the case up). I can send you a relevant pdf if you like.

And then we have the problem of how the LHC experiments are to be run. As I understand it, they fire beams of fantastically tiny particles into each other at unimaginably high speeds. The ensuing collision will, they hope, produce a cloud of particles, including the Higgs boson.
What I find baffling is that his experiment is meant to mimic the Big Bang: the exploding singularity which is thought to have produced the entire universe from within its own pinprick dimensions.
Am I alone in thinking that if you wish to mimic the Hugest Explosion of All Time, you should not go about it by creating the Smallest Collision of All Time?

I've raised this issue with a few scientists and have not yet heard a convincing explanation. Perhaps you can help me out?
I'll summarise all responses as soon as possible.

Bearing all the above in mind, I find myself wondering how much longer we as a society will allow Big Science to spend untold billions of our taxes on ever more expensive machinery which can clearly never do the jobs they are designed to do, if a Theory of Everything is the target.
Big Religion used to be in this position, taking by right one tenth of all the wealth of the land. In Tudor times, while peasants were allowed by law, only three courses (including soup) at mealtimes, guess who alone could have nine courses. Yep.. cardinals.
The LHC has so far cost £4.5 billion (that is admitted to). It broke down immediately. The repair cost of £14 million has now reached £24 million. Will it ever break down again?

You could build a half-decent York Minster for that sort of money, or bring a proper education or fresh water to a lot more kids.

I do sense that times are a-changing, and that sooner rather than later we will start asking loud questions about what we want our tax-tithes to be spent on.

Incidentally, have you come across the Flynn Effect? Mr Flynn is a political scientist from New Zealand who noticed some curiosities in the statistics on intelligence. He did his homework and concluded that human intelligence is increasing at the rate of some 3% per decade, or approx 10% per generation. This is NOT directly tagged to education, nutrition, or culture, and is, frankly a mystery. His figures are accepted as accurate.
What does this mean?
I hope it means that as we get smarter we will demand more rational expenditure of taxes, and greater principle in government policy.

It might, of course, mean all sorts of other things as well.
Exciting times lie ahead, perhaps…

Carpe diem.

On economics

Economics has been called the 'dismal science', and is something I know nothing about. What is eminently obvious to me though, is that nobody else knows anything about it/them either, or the Crash of 1928 and the Mess of 2008-and-counting would never have happened. Would they? These wonderful bankers (the collective noun for bankers, as in, say, a 'pride' of lions or a 'gaggle' of horse-flies, is 'wunch', I'm reliably informed) kept telling us that they needed to pay each other vast amounts because you need to pay top dollar '…to get the best brains'. These 'best brains' have just applied their top dollar expertise to bringing the world's economies to their knees. How did they pull off this remarkable feat? … more in a minute.

Meanwhile, what's all this about economics being 'a science'? A science is something that deals in empirically discovered Facts, allied to a rational Hypothesis (ie, 'hunch'), which combine to produce, with luck, a Theory. This Theory will apply in all cases in all places, and is thus held to be 'true' until it is superseded by a broader more all-embracing Theory. That's the scientific method; and it works (or should do).
Economics works entirely differently. It does not work according to empirical objective Facts and sound Theory; it hobbles along from day to day, lurching to left and right at each successive minute. Science does not do that. Why do/es economics lurch and stumble from pillar to post? Because it's all based upon human decisions in the first place and natural disaster in the second. Expensive mathematicians and deluded financial brokers keep trying to devise algorithms to predict market movements, (Why? To add stability, for the benefit of all? Hmm… how about 'to make a quick killing'?) but they will never ever find one, I can predict with fine certainty. They would be literally much better off studying the weather. A typhoon in Japan flattens a factory, and thus by the 'law' of supply and demand, the price of scraggle-tweeters quadruples overnight.
Hang on, though... 'law'? That sounds a bit like science, don't you think? A proper Law, like the Law of Gravity or the Law of Conservation of Energy. But the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing like that. It's not even a 'law of moral convenience' as passed by a parliament in a civilised society for the best protection of its citizens from the mad and the bad.
No, the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing but an observation of the near-universal practice of greed and venality in the world of commerce. If something becomes scarce, traders, merchants, cornershop wallahs and Top Dollar Bankers all react in the same way: they up the price as high as they can get away with. It's not a law; it's a dispiriting reflection on the human capacity for selfishness.

And there you have it: the economics of the entire world is run not on the basis of any Law, or indeed upon rationality of any sort: it is run on the backs of just two emotions: greed and fear. They call a market 'Bullish' when greed is in the chair and everyone thinks they can steal a march over the other guy and drain some extra cash out of the public commonwealth for their own Top Dollar bonuses; and they call it 'Bearish' when fear replaces greed, and everyone judges that the risks of allowing greed full rein are too high. Best sit tight for a while, until untrammelled greed becomes possible again. This is the condition we are in at the moment. The Great Brains of banking are biding their time. They were startled that the USA didn't bail out Lehman's (they were banking(!) on the Big L being so important to The Economy that it could never be left to go bust) and now they are hiding under their collective stone, waiting for us all to forget. Then they can return to plunder us once again.

Or can they? Have we finally learned some sort of lesson? That Rampant Capitalism is no good for anyone? Have we finally learned that a civilised society is not one in which every man is for himself, and himself alone?.... the message that Milton Friedman and Reagan and Thatcher rammed down our throats, and which our public services have been shattered by ever since? (Remember Thatcher's famous 'There is no such thing as society'?)

Have we learned that enormous private wealth for the few at the expense of public squalor for the many is not a good exchange? That a vast wage gap between the highest paid ('earned' from such useless things as property speculation and currency manipulation) and the lowest paid (doing such essential jobs as sewage work and producing food) is bound to breed ill-feeling all round and to greatly diminish such things as civic pride and social cohesion, not to mention national morale?

I doubt that we have learned. We might tinker a little at the edges, and might try (unsuccessfully I would confidently predict) to appeal to the better natures of the Greed Merchants in finance and banking, but overall nothing will change. Greed and Fear will remain the Laws by which the world runs its economies. Until, one day….

… one day the Common Man will say 'enough is enough'…. And politicians will be forced to rein in the Men of Greed. Then maybe economics will slowly change from being run at the whim of personal greed-driven twitches and lurches, and begin to be run as a service to everyone on the planet: fairness will replace greed; everyone's basic needs will be addressed and met; long-term social investment will replace short-term profit rip-offs; huge wealth will be looked down upon instead of looked up to; we will honour each other instead of despising or envying each other. We will be judged by our values and not our value.
And on that day, the Fat Pigs of the City will finally learn to fly.

Until then, we will just have to remain angry at what they've done, and feel more angry because there seems to be no will to change it at the top of governement, and even more angry because we at the bottom feel powerless to change this. And that's the way it will stay until enough of the public get fed up with being swindled and decide to act.

Meanwhile, the Co-op Bank was not involved in any sleazy activity, and is never likely to be, as it is run not by Top Dollar Greed Merchants for their own interest, but by and for its own members: it's a co-operative. You might like to consider this when wondering where your money will be safe in the future.

Rant over. Back to work… Finally finished Chapter 16. About to broach The Occult: toads, newts, skinny blokes with bass guitars hanging below their knees, zombies and all….. but underneath all the nonsense there are some gems of wisdom. More later.

Types…

I spend the best part of my working day sat in front of a computer screen, reading, or if I'm lucky, writing. It can get monotonous, even though I have a big window obliquely to one side of me, which gives out onto the garden. Thus I can occasionally vary my focus and watch the butterflies on the buddleia, or the eucalyptus tickling the breeze; occasionally a scruffy ginger cat, with a dog-end in its gob and a battered trilby, looking for something beautiful to kill, or once in a while, a magnificent pheasant, strutting his technicolor stuff.

But mainly… staring hopefully at a screen, wondering whether I will ever be able to find the right way to finish the chapter I have stalled on halfway through, yet again. After several years of screen gawping I feel I'm something of an expert on how to cope with it, and would like to pass on what I think might be one or two Handy Tips on the subject of fonts.

I use three fonts for different things. For writing, like composing this blog, for example, I find Times New Roman to be unbeatable. The letters are big-bodied, meaning the ascenders and descenders (the tops of 't's and the bottoms of 'g's, for example), are relatively small. Think 'Vanessa Feltz'. Thus, you can fit a lot of easily readable text onto the screen. I use 14pt if I want a quick overview, but mainly I enlarge this to 150% when writing. At this size I never have to peer, and never feel I'm straining my eyes. I can read entire books on my 17" screen at this level of enlargement, with no trouble at all. Recently I read the Torah, the four Gospels, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada like this, one after the other. No problems.

The other onscreen font I use is Comic Sans. This is best, I find, for emails. TNR is too black and formal and in yer face. Comic is more relaxed and really pretty friendly (think Paul Merton, or possibly Joe Pasquale). It is roughly a million times better to write in and a trillion times better to read than that godforsaken and soulless Arial that so many of my incoming mails are in. A font size of 12 or 14pt seems to be about right to me. Why, I wonder, do the Arial fans also favour 1 or 2pt? It's a skinny typeface in the first place and is virtually invisible in small fonts, never mind unreadable. And why do so many of them favour pale blue as a colour? A boring, tiny, skinny font in a virtually invisible colour? Please reconsider if you are an Arial user!
Comic Sans, at 12pt, in navy blue, makes a mail a joy to read, even if it's only another attempt to flog me stuff to make my willy yet another three feet longer, so I can strap eight more counterfeit watches to it to boost my self confidence. But spam seems to inevitably arrive in boring Arial or similar. Suitable for the sad little lives spammers live, I suppose.

You may have noticed that a lot of website pages are set up in either Arial (or one of its clones) or Comic Sans. The former are tiring to read; the latter are a pleasure. Would you agree?

The third font I use is Garamond. This is wonderful for printed text, because it is of slender body, and uses about a half, or less, of the ink TNR would need. Also, TNR on a printed page is downright threatening, I find. It's the stuff of Summonses and Subpoenas. Garamond, however, leads the eye gently across the page, and never demands an effort of the reader. Think Darcey Bussell or Leslie Caron. It dates from the seventeenth century and has never been bettered for elegance and economy. I use 12pt for printing off documents as my printer needs only one pass to print a line, so it's light on ink and takes little time, and the results are beautifully readable.

A further possible Tip is that if you have, as I do, all your colours in one basket, so to speak, and don't do much colour printing on account of the outrageous cost of the ink, and when you do dare to print off a photo, you run the constant nuisance of having to replace all three colours when only one has run out… well…. maybe this will help…
You can keep your jets clean by occasionally printing off in 'brown'. As far as I know, brown is made by mixing all three primaries (it always was at primary school, anyway, so most of my artistic efforts ended up as being pictures of bears hiding in ploughland, or soldiers huddling face down in shell holes on the Somme) which means all three colours get drained at the same rate. And, surprisingly, the result is quite readable, printed in 12pt Garamond, naturally.

***

Yes, you've guessed. The reason I'm writing this now is because I've stalled, yet again, on my current chapter. It's supposed to be about Vibes, Instinct, and Intuition. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, you might say. I thought that myself until I started on it. After two days I had 2,000 words on the page. They read quite well, but there was a certain something missing. I spent an hour trying to work it out. Eventually intuition told me that I had been tackling the issue from the wrong end. Thus, my 2,000 words were not exactly irrelevant or wrong…. but would need a complete re-jig, with extra bits adding here and there, sometimes in mid-paragraph. In other words, the sort of editing I absolutely hate. Too complex to hold in my mind, and too ambiguous at too many points. What goes where? Why? Why not there, instead? But if there, what about X and even Y? And where the hell has Z got to?
At the rate my tiny mind can process stuff, there are several days of slog ahead, and even then it won't feel right because it will have all sort of rough edges and little gaps in the flow and so forth, and so will need constant re-visiting. Bah.

No butterflies out today: raining. No scruffy cat; probably off somewhere dealing dope. No pheasant. He must be in either his Winnebago or a fox.

Anyway… back to staring at my screenful of Times New Roman, wishing I was somewhere else.
It'll pass…. And the chapter will somehow get finished.

Then it will be onto the next chapter: The Occult. Oh, mercy…..

Please don't…

I zapped across to BBC2 last night. The Proms were playing. I'm not a huge classical fan, but I know what I like, which is mainly Bach, mainly on the guitar or cello, and in moderate doses. Other composers I will give a try, but Beethoven frightens me, Mozart gets a bit plinky after a while and Stravinsky sets my teeth on edge. Anything later than Elgar sounds to my cloth ear like stuff falling out of cupboards or a slow train crash.
Yes, I know.. I'm a philistine, and I don't care. I occasionally spend a few moments listening to people talking about the music during intervals, and I am bewildered. I have ears, like them, and a brain, like them. How is it that they seem to be hearing something entirely different from what I do? I know my sense of pitch is dodgy, as is my memory, so I am largely incapable of remembering a theme from the first movement twenty minutes ago which has just been cleverly repeated by the eighth bassoon, counterpointing the fanfare by the trombones and piccolos. But if I were capable of remembering it.. so what? What is so special about repeating a theme, inverted, backwards, and with a flattened fifth and denatured ninth, seventeen bars, or indeed seventeen minutes later? I don't get it.
I do sometimes wonder if I'm missing something, or whether talking about music is simply an easier way of earning a living than working. Writing music isn't easy though. I know that. So why do so many people feel compelled to write music that I find…. deep breath… pointless or even painful?

Some of it definitely falls into the same bag as Modern Art, much of which is genuine garbage to my finely-tuned mind. I don't have much time for the genius of Andy Warhol, but I think he spoke a great truth when he said that 'Art is what you can get away with'.

Anyway… I zapped into the Proms… and what did I see? A couple of operatic types belting out a popular song from the 1930's, with facial expressions which were clearly meant to signify enjoyment, but which somehow only conveyed condescension and lack of understanding. It was like watching a sort of puppet show. What was going on? I checked in the Radio Times.
It seems the Proms are either making themselves more accessible, or dumbing down (rather like 'A' levels), depending upon your point of view: so they were putting on a programme of songs from MGM musicals.

I caught a bar and a half of an old favourite (oddly my memory refuses to remember what the song was, for purposes of mental hygiene, I suspect) and zapped away as fast as possible. Show songs do not improve by being sung by Great Voices. Kiri te Kanawa should NOT sing I've Got You Under My Skin. Operatic voices are the way they are so they could reach the back of the stalls in the days before amplification. Thus impresarios could build bigger halls and pack more bums onto more benches and thus make more lolly. The Voices have remained with us ever since.
Personally, I don't much care for the strangulated foghorn effect, especially in a language I can't understand, with lyrics that frankly don't seem to be worth the effort (if I've understood the plot of The Ring correctly). If you like it, fine. I wish I could join you, really I do. It would give me a touch of class, so sorely needed. But I can't. I've tried many times, and failed.

However, I do like many of those magnificent songs from the twenties and thirties. The tunes are perfect and elegant and the lyrics poignant and ingenious, and they refer to the concerns of real people in language I can understand. The great crooners made them unforgettable and eternal.
But only people who can sing a little like Sinatra or Ella should attempt them. Dieter Fischer-Diskau should not. These songs are intimate and personal and do not gain a thing from being bellowed into the gods, even sottissimo, which still sounds impersonal, mechanical, and contrived.
So please leave popular music alone, O Great Voiced Ones. This includes modern pop, of course, unless you can do the moonwalk and crotch-grabbing to go along with the full orchestral version of Thriller, falsetto squeaks and all, preferably echoed by the blokes on the kettle-drums.

And this plea includes folk music too. I once heard Bryn Terfel (I think) singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and almost cried. It was pitch perfect, of course, and every phoneme was enunciated with crisply starched clarity; and the piano accompaniment was academically spotless. But forgive me Bryn, if indeed it was you… it was soulless. And we poor cloth-eared plebs like our folk songs to touch us, as they were intended to, before they were Collected and sanitised and incorporated into symphonic scores by Great Composers. Folk songs are meant to be scratched out on cheap guitars and accordions with a couple of reeds missing and sung in pubs by people who can barely stand, and who have a vocal range of almost the full octave. The thing is, it's not about technique.
The Foggy Dew is a song of Life, as meaningful in the 15th century as it will be in the 25th (I've no idea when it was written, incidentally, and don't care. Quality is ageless.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that his idea of hell would be to be left alone with himself for eternity. I reckon he could improve on that by having to listen to a loop of Pavarotti singing Where Have all the Flowers Gone? .
Long time passing, indeed….

Not terribly green…

Today I received a notification from the Nationwide building society in a long white envelope. The information was on a slip of paper (a quarter of an A4 sheet). Good thinking Nationwide! Cutting back on wasted paper. Excellent!
However... the slip was enfolded inside a full sheet of A4, bearing the words
PLEASE DISCARD THIS INSERT.
ENCLOSED FOR PRODUCTION PURPOSES ONLY.

One step forward; four steps back. Presumably nobody had worked out that it would have been cheaper in time and paper to print the info on the big sheet and not bother with the slip at all.
The problem obviously lies with their envelope stuffing gear, and no doubt they will be working on that and get it right one day. We hope…
Meanwhile, I wonder how many hundred thousand people will be getting a sheet of completely wasted paper in their post today? How many trees does that represent? And how much wasted fuel in the cutting and transportation etc?

Just by the by… do you, dear reader, buy jotting pads? Surely not! If you take a sheet of one-sided A4 scrap (or two-sided if it's from Nationwide), you can fold it in half and tear it. Then fold the halves into three and tear again. Thus each bit of rubbish paper gives you six handy jotter-sized slips. I use them by the thousand in my writing, and by the dozen for shopping lists and aide memoires. In the kitchen we have a wad secured by a bulldog clip, with a pencil attached to the clip by a piece of string. It never gets lost, and every time I use it I get a warm glow, knowing I've recycled a bit of otherwise wasted paper. Eventually the scraps get burned on the Raeburn, so they are used yet again, and I get an even warmer glow. Wonderful things, Raeburns.

Wonderful…

I've just taken a few minutes off from Sigmund Freud and Chapter 15 of The Book. Freud was a determined Materialist, which means that his underlying premiss is flawed, which means that by definition we can't rely on any of his conclusions. If you start from the wrong assumption, you are going to get things wrong, aren't you? So does that mean that everything he wrote must be wrong? No, I don't think so. But it must surely mean that things won't dovetail neatly. And neither did my writing about him. Grr…

Anyway… I was getting a bit fed up with banging the same old drum all the time and happened to look up and out into the garden. The buddleia is in full bloom, and finally the butterflies have turned up, after being absent for all of the 'summer' so far. One cone of purple florets had five on it: two admirals, two tortoiseshells and a peacock. I had to dash out with my camera.

Is there anything lovelier than a peacock beauterfly? Except perhaps a peacock bird? The tones and designs on its wings are unbelievable. And they are remarkably tame. I could get my macro lens within a centimetre and they wouldn't budge. Admirals are a bit more nervous. They either flap off when you get a bit close, or at least close their wings up. Tortoiseshells are bold as well. One jumped up off the flower and onto my hand. A peacock brushed my ear. I could hear it.
Then a couple of painted ladies joined in. The little buddleia had something like fifteen items of mother nature's jewellery on it, along with three or four 'penny whites'. Plenty for all, of the bittersweet nectar. Everyone getting tanked up as fast as they could.
Just wonderful…

People who think that butterflies just flap about aimlessly have never seen one pick its way faultlessly through a forest of grass stalks in an overgrown meadow, or watched a courting couple in flight. The leader jinks and jiggles 'randomly', but the follower jinks in perfect tune, and instantly, and stays at a constant distance. That isn't random flapping. It is extreme control and intent.

So back now and mentally refreshed; ready to do battle with Freud again. All good stuff, but I'll be glad when I've finished.
The next subject will be 'Hypnosis'. Materialist science hasn't got a clue how it works and thus does its best to avoid dealing with it at all, but it does work and won't go away. How shall I write about this, I wonder?

Onwards…. Have a great day Chas