My dear auntie Joan died today. My dad's sister.  Why am I announcing this? Well, I don't want her to be just another number, another Covid death. She was the sweetest, kindest woman and I have good thoughts and memories of her. I guess that is the most important thing. We will all die but there is nothing really except love, warmth and a feeling that this is not it. A feeling that perhaps transcends what we perceive as human. That there is something more profound going on but none of us, even the most spiritual and religious can put their finger on or explain. 

Dutch Wisdom!

So much is going on that I forgot to say that,  A Dutch guy on TV just said something on the lines of, '' I am all for freedom and anarchy. Problem is, we live in a country full of idiots, and they need rules!!''

I dreamt I was in Italy, a country I have never visited but since the dream I feel I need to go and live there. I was in a shop, and, feeling nosy, I decided to climb the stairs to browse around what looked like a secret storeroom, out of bounds to the public. It was a familar scene with a lot of old fashioned signs and ornaments from another era mixed with fresh food. An Italian woman in the room was happy to see me and made me feel so welcome and loved. She didn't mind that I was trespassing and started to give me food like a delicious Parma ham served in little nests and boxes. Then she insisted I try a delicate cheese ice-cream served in small cones. It was the most delicious thing. Who knew you could taste things in dreams? The dream stayed with me all day and I need to go back to this place I have never really been to!

BRITANNIA UNCHAINED AND ADRIFT

I have noticed no Brexiteer says anything on the lines of, 'suck it up, we won, you lost!' anymore and it has been replaced with phrases like, 'it's all the EU's fault none of this is working'. Or 'it's the EU that are changing the rules' and so on and so forth till you may or not be convinced the blame lies with 27  countries in a union and not the fact that the UK is no longer in the Customs Union or the Single Market. The UK has left the EU, the CU and the SM but judging from their free, toxic, EU bashing press, one would think the opposite. They are obsessed and one could argue, still in love. They just can't let go of the thing they profess to hate. On the other hand there is an inkling that many people who voted Brexit are keeping schtum. In the old days people would be shredding any evidence of their participation in something so ridiculously damaging. As the penny, or should that be the pound? begins to drop, many people are unsubscribing their likes and membership to the many forums and Facebook pages that were so popular five years ago. Long gone are the Wigmores and Banks. They made their point and money, and have left behind to gripe, the disenfranchised, the innocent people who will inevitable suffer from all of this. That people fell for this shite is one of those things people will wonder about for years to come. 

The following probably won't mean anything to you unless you grew up in Britain at a certain point in space and time. I don't expect or even want everyone to get it. Well, I'm sitting here smoking a pipe ( think Basil Rathbone or Georges Simenon, not a crack pipe), drinking Martini and thinking it's amazing what a photo can inspire. It was a photo of some drag acts, something that I'm guessing is not socially acceptable to say nowadays but that is what drag acts used to call themselves and what I would have said yonks ago but never mind. Anyway, the bit I am getting at is that at some point in my childhood I wanted to be a boy. I could see that the deal they had, boys that is, was much better than what was on offer to me. They also got to wear cooler clothes in my opinion. The warning signs were already there when an old lady, a match for the actress Margaret Rutherford, came up to me when I was about three pushing a toy pram through a street in London and wondered if she could say hello to my dolly. She got quite the surprise when she peeped inside and was met with a pram full of mud. Packed down with a few worms trying to free themselves from my barbarous act. Much later I would insist on wearing boy's tassle loafers and a stripey t-shirt, jeans and so on and a barnet on a par with Dennis the Menace from the Beano. In those days my parents just ignored my pretending to be male and just let me get on with it. My father would most likely have wished I would put a sock in it but he never let on. During this time I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and I had a notion that I wanted to be a whirling Dervish, a member of a Sufi fraternity and would spend hours practising this in the front room of suburbia with the aim of abandonment from the restrictions of English society whilst trying to mimic the planets in the solar system orbiting the sun. I would collapse in a heap on the floor and feel quite elated and slightly nauseated but this was 1970s Britain, a pretty boring place where you made your own fun. Once I had come back down to planet earth I entertained the idea of becoming some kind of music hall artiste. There were various spells, including wanting to be Larry Grayson, a camp stand up act. In the front room, post whirl, I would jump up, put one hand on my hip and talk about my friends Slack Alice and Everard to my parents and bemused relatives. I overheard my mother talking with her friend Brigid saying, 'she wants to be Max Wall', and me being annoyed as it was his act of Professor Wallofski that was my aim, not the man himself. Billy Dainty was another ambition as was that bloke who could disappear into his coat while walking around a stage. I went through a moment where I thought I might be able to make a living from being that geezer who hit his head with a tin tray while singing 'Mule Train'. Danny La Rue was another......girl dressing up as a boy dressed as a girl ... then it was Emma Peel, and/or John Stead. I guess that would sum it up. Decisions decisions. ...I guess most of us are just a work in progress. 

You probably wonder where on earth I live when I describe some of the goings on here. Let's just say if you read Luces de Bohemia by Valle Inclan you might get a better picture. Never a dull moment round here despite the never ending restrictions and curfews. Without going into too much detail I have already had a difference of opinion with a police officer today who did that thing of trying to get me on board with his ridiculous comparisons of situations, gaslighting I think they call it. Trying to make out that we are all guilty at times of misdemeanours. I reminded him that right now I wasn't the mastermind of what was going on in our normally pleasant community and that I was in fact the injured party. I decided to continue the conversation using the aviation alphabet and he crumbled. Two can play at that game. I'm finding this skill or art of getting the other guy to have it my way is getting better as I get older and have nothing to lose.

Britain and Israel seem to be doing really well with their vaccine programmes. Yet what is it with some British people (journalists?) in the UK who have an incessant need to be in competition with everyone else? It's not normal this neediness to show or to prove to who ever can be bothered to listen, that it is all world beating or is the best in the world. It just comes across as needy and insecure.