pumpkinstrokemarrow

Views which coincided with some stuff in the Guardian about how such pylons are destroying our green and pretty land and that someone ought to do something about it.

Not stuff which I go along with. I do not dispute the need for such things and I do not find them a blot on the landscape. Indeed they exemplify a theory once advanced by my father that beauty lies in the match of structure with function. A theory which I find needs a fair amount of tweaking to hold up, but which does, to my mind, work with engineering structures of this sort. They are doing something important, one can see what they are about - their function does align with their structure in a very visible way - and I no not have a problem with them.

Their was also a lot of stuff about the use of gagging orders by celebs and others, one aspect of which caught my eye, despite my lack of sympathy for people who make very good livings by being in the public eye and who then whine when the public gets to see the crud under the carpet. The aspect being that if A & B are up to something at night which neither of them wish to share with the public, that is one thing. But if A wants to share and B does not want to share, that is another. Why should B be able to stop A exercising his or her human right to exhibitionism? Or revenge?

Rather less stuff about how some scheme to rescue people who cannot pay their mortgages is resulting in the conversion of a lot of real estate into what used to be called council houses. Ironic that it has taken the spectacular failure of market forces to propel a right-wing government into rebuilding the stock of social housing.

The hotel then moved us onto the Times, a paper that I do not read very often. I was struck by the high density of advertisements - which seemed much higher than in either the Guardian or the DT. Murdoch is clearly setting his stamp on the thing.

Visit closed by a dream which contained rather an odd illusion. I was with some people in a bookshop in Russia, one of whom wanted a biography of Nikita Krushchev. I poked around until I found a book which contained what appeared to be the word Krushchev in the title and which I assumed to be a biography. The idea of the book then seemed to fuse with that of a particular sort of glue pot which was much used in schools when I was young. A triangular shaped, clear glass container of yellow gum with a red rubber lid, the sloping top of which you dragged along whatever it was you wanted to glue; the Stephen's Golden Gum you can get now is perhaps the successor product. However, by the time that I got to the checkout, the book had become more ordinary, with just an elaborate coat of arms made of coloured plastic being clipped onto the front of an otherwise ordinary book. The sort of coat of arms which has a shield in the middle, a helmet on the top, supporters (usually animals) at the side, a motto underneath and with the whole thing being tied up with various ornamental flourishes. By the time I had the book in my hand it was entirely ordinary and I tossed it in a rather rude and dismissive way to the chap who wanted it. An unremarkable dream except for the fusing bit. I really had the sense of the book being the glue pot. Senior moments working their way into the underworld?