Shores of Night

One of the most contentious issues in the world today seems to be one of those matters, that on the face, of it appears simple: the question of returning art and artefacts to the native peoples from whom it was taken by the 19th Century European empires. By now, I imagine you're thinking that of course that's what should happen. It's barmy to think otherwise, isn't it? Those people have a right to their ancestors' works back and that should be the end of it. It's simple, an open and shut case. Any questions and queries can be referred to it literally being the heritage of that set of people and that's that. From the Elgin Marbles to the over 40,000 items held in the Victorian and Albert Art Gallery, all the way to the treasures looted from the Chinese Summer Palace by General Gordon, it should all be returned. It doesn't belong in Britain. It's hard to gainsay that claim, harder to find a decent justification for not simply saying that it's r...

I'm writing this because I am tired, world weary if you like. It's half seven on a Saturday morning, and though I don't feel physically tired, in my soul I feel like I'm a thousand years old and there's not enough tea in the universe to rejuvenate me. I'm tired of this world, of the way it doesn't seem to change, tired of the false promises of improvement that don't seem to filter through. Perhaps I'm missing a generational aspect, but it feels as if the opportunity for things to get better skips blithely through a meadow of fantasy, while in the real world we remain shackled to the Machine, the System, as surely as one of the poor souls chained to the Manometer in Metropolis . A friend has assured me that generally things are improving, quoting  Hans Rosling as an inspiration for this view, but warning that humans are woefully poor at staying kept up to date, often quoting statistisc that are decades out of date to justify their pessimism. ...

It pains me to say it but this year is continuing to suck. From a personal point of view, it's definitely had its highs and lows, but increasingly the lows seem lower and the highs less plentiful. My mental health has been doing a number on me since the start of the year, and I'm sick and tired of it. Working from home has really highlighted how much I hate the commute I was doing before lockdown and means that, between the two of them, I'm going to have start looking for a more local, and more satisfying job. Last week, my cat Jinx went missing and he's still absent. A black cat's body was found under a car and the people who found it put it over the fence by the railway embankment (to explain, we live on the other side of the road from a railway line). Consequently, we have no idea if Jinx is still in the land of the living, and its eating away at me, though I suspect he probably has gone to the City of Cats. I feel really sad about it and, even though I kno...

By now, anybody who reads this will know about the toppling of Bristol's statue of Edward Colston. Pulled down by four ropes, and rolled into the harbour. A fitting end, I suppose, though victory over a lump of stone seems like a pretty damn hollow one to me. I'm not going to say anything else about it, aside from to say Bristol must have been desperate to erect a statue to him in the first place, especially as the statue went up over a century after his death. What I am going to talk about is the very idea of statues, and our perspective of the past. Our tendency to divide people in to goodies and baddies, with no nuance, or context to their actions. We have a bad habit of airbrushing so called heroes  in order to forget any bad things they did. Churchill's entire life might as well be summed up by his actions as Prime Minister, with his myriad of failures and his racist attitudes conveniently forgotten. I can well imagine that our current Prime Minister (Boris J...

Yesterday is the day this fucking year broke me. I was okay with Covid-19 and okay with lockdown. I'm an introvert, and a loner, I like people but in small doses, hate small talk, and I've learned to love my own company. But this year just feels like its piling things on, throwing them onto the pile in some fucked up game of Jenga. Let's see how much topple if we do this. The situation in Minneapolis and the rest of the USA, the Hong Kong protests, the fact that we're still in the middle of the sixth extinction event, the corruption and mendacity of our politicians, and all the fucking rest of the shit show that is, apparently, the way things are just meant to be. I can't express how sick I am of all of it, especially when it feels like no matter how many protests there are, its just going to end up as sound and fury, signifying nothing. In a month's time the keyboard warriors will be venting about something else, there'll be something new to be angry a...