Roy Harper – The Spirit Lives

Posted on by Opher

An absolute corker from HQ!!

The Corona Diaries – Day 245

Posted on by Opher

It was very cold today – a little foretaste of winter! I walked up my hill in the wan sunlight seeping through a thin layer of cloud. About four weeks off the shortest day! Days are short!!

Back home I am listening to The Incredible String Band and working on a few poetry books! They need a good bit of disassembling!

Well here I am on day 245 of our isolation! Still no symptoms to report! But my sister is just showing signs of recovering after two weeks of bad flu-like symptoms, aches, pains, coughs, fatigue and no sense of taste or smell! Her husband is on the mend too but their oldest son has not gone down with it. Another friend has also gone down with it. Not sure how he’s doing.

There’s a lot of it about and it sounds nasty!! I think I’ll pass!

Out there in Coronaland much is going on. We are still going full steam ahead for a Brexit crash. But not to worry. They will hide the economic damage behind the covid smokescreen and plans are well ahead to further Tory ideology and let the plebs pick up the tab! As long as you know your place (at the bottom of the heap) and keep voting Tory everthing will be just hunky dory!!

So we head for Christmas with another 18,662 new cases and 396 deaths – even worse that lamentable Brazil!! (18,615 new cases with 196 deaths)! To be worse than Brazil is really bad!!

The Tories have a new policy for Christmas and New Year: meet up with your family in December to celebrate!! Meet with your family again in January to bury them!

It’ll be back to tiers (and tears) after lockdown but most places from gyms to hairdressers will be allowed to open and they are going to let people in to the football!!

Can’t wait to get vaccinated!!

In the USA, where Trump is busy sacking people and losing court cases, still coming out with a string of lies and fabrications, denying reality and looking like a surly brat, the pandemic is raging out of control – another 141,648 new cases yesterday with 844 deaths!! This must make Trump the President who has killed the most Americans in the whole of history!! And we’re not through yet!!

Not that Trump cares. He’s out on the golf course ignoring it! You wouldn’t think that he had any responsibility. If the American people reject him – then let them die!! It’s what they deserve!!

The British vaccine comes through its tests and is looking good! We’re spoilt for choice.

I had to laugh when a scientist was asked about the antivaxxers. He just said ‘good luck to them’.

I guess it’s a process of natural selection – same as we’re seeing in the States with the Trumpists!!

Nature has a way of weeding out those not fitted for the next gene pool!

So, all you out there in Coronaland, stay safe!! Four or five months to go!!! Freedom!! Freedom!!

Today’s Music to keep me SSsAAaannnneeE in Isolation – The Incredible String Band

Posted on by Opher

I first saw them at a festival with a stage littered with different instruments – Just two of them. They kept putting instruments down and picking them up!! Great fun. I remember they played Maybe Someday She’ll Come Along.

Boris Johnson – some Humourly Serious Captions.

Posted on by Opher

Humour can express much in a simple way. With 70,000 dead, an economy in ruins, huge sums being paid out to dubious people with no questions asked, cronyism out of control, a PM who is largely invisible, who acts like a clown, an inept government caught unprepared and floundering around, a world of spin and deception, lies, duplicity and cynicism, greed and selfishness, Brexit looming and a bunch of over-achieving Eton twats in charge, I think we need a bit of satire.

Flamenco – the dance of Spain – photos

Posted on by Opher

My wife is a dancer. Where-ever we travel I find myself attending various dance performances.

Flamenco is a dance that expresses that pride that is the heart of Spain.

Poetry – Early Morning

Posted on by Opher

Early Morning

Hazy morning sunlight,

Glowing behind

Gossamer banks of striated clouds,

Bathing fields and hedges

In buttery radiance.

Diaphanous clouds

Tinged with pinks, oranges and greens.

Trees silhouetted

In clumps of skeletal tendrils

Against an ocean of mist.

That film of vapour

Lying in pools

Mysteriously shrouding

The sloping landscape

In mystic inscrutability.

Opher – 22.11.2020

To walk up on to the hills in the early morning is to enter a different world of great mystery.

The mist hangs low across the fields as the wan sunlight pierces the thin cloud bathing the land.

It reveals a world of great beauty, flooded with subtle pastel colours – glowing.

It reveals a mysterious world in which humans are alien, a world of faeries, goblins and imps.

It is tantamount to peering through a stained-glass window into a different universe.

Poetry – Times

Posted on by Opher

Times

One second nothing.

One second everything.

Nine billion years something.

One billion years more – everything.

Time is material.

Time starts with seconds.

Time ends in billions of years.

Time is all we have.

Five minutes is all it takes

To create a new perspective.

Nine months to reach fruition.

Eighty years to experience it.

Time passes slowly.

Time passes quickly.

Time is relative.

Time was once not there.

One day time will again, not exist.

Opher – 23.11.2020

The universe started in a flash. Everything, including time, burst into existence from nothing.

13.8 billion years and we are here living in it.

It took over nine billion years for the Earth to be formed. A tiny planet in the atmosphere of an average star.

It took a billion years for life to emerge. Just once.

Three and a half billion years later that one amazing event has evolved into a vast interconnecting web of marvels spreading right across the planet.

An amazing precarious wonder. Even the tiniest microbe a thing of astounding mind-boggling awe.

We are just one of those wonders. Each of us with our awareness, a view of the universe, an intelligence, aware and pondering. Each of us created in an event lasting minutes, developing for one gestation, and born into this universe.

One day we will all be gone, enveloped in the substance of our expanding star, our sun. One day all life will end. One day the universe will run down and die and time itself will cease.

Time gives rise to substance.

Roy Harper – The Game

Posted on by Opher

Straight out of HQ – a Hard Rock album. Quite a departure from Roy and his guitar. Brilliant too.

The Game is one of his very best songs. The Rock approach worked so well.

The Corona Diaries – Day 244

Posted on by Opher

I took an early walk today. I wish I’d taken my camera, the light was superb. The low sun through a haze of bands of light cloud, a twilight orange, silhouettes and shadows. An early morning mist. All very atmospheric.

You’ll just have to manage with my words.

Autumn is moving into winter. The gnarled trees bare against the heavens. The birds flitting.

Back home I’ve been playing my James Varda – he was so good. So tragic that he died so young – and a really nice guy.

I’ve finished my editing of my Harper book. I’m giving it a rest for a couple of days and then I’ll reread it before the editor chief takes over. So, today I was working on my poetry books. All being well I should have them knocked into a shambles in a few days.

Meanwhile, out in Coronaland the madness goes on and on as our insane politicians continue their power struggles.

Trump is running out of options as court after court chuck out his absurd allegations. Sooner or later he is going to have to confront the fact that he lost. He was beaten fair and square – most sane Americans saw through what he really was and wanted shot of him – a repugnant human being.

The sooner he is gone the sooner the USA regains a bit of morality.

Trump presides over another 171,980 new cases yesterday with another 1428 deaths. He has no shame. That is his leadership.

Take a look at New Zealand and Vietnam – ten new cases beteen them – no new deaths. That’s the way to do it. They still have their economies operating normally!!

In the UK dithering Johnson has put us in lockdown too late, following a summer of opening up too much. The lazy, inept fool doesn’t have a clue. Despite lockdown we still have 20,252 new cases and 340 more deaths. We’re vying with Bolsonaro with his 32,622 new cases and 376 deaths.

What a mess. Could we have done it any worse?

We’ve got out students locked in their rooms, a fifth of our schoolkids sent home and the promise that the public servants, the key workers, will pick up the bill.

The Tories hand out contracts to their chums. Tendering and fairness are obscene words. This is the time of nepotism and cronyism.

It’s called getting rich on misery!!

Never mind, the vaccine is coming!!

Stay safe!!

Today’s Music to keep me SsSAaaannnneee in Isolation – James Varda

Posted on by Opher

I first saw James supporting Roy Harper. Right from the start you could see that he was special.

That first album – Hunger was like Punk Folk. His next couple were more pastoral and his last was an unbelievable journey through his terminal illness to a mystical appreciation of life.

He deserved to be recognised so much more!!

Today I’m playing James Varda. It’ll make me happy and sad.

Sure miss you James!!