(Lord’s day). Up and to church in the best manner I have gone a good while, that is to say, with my wife, and her woman, Mercer, along with us, and Tom, my boy, waiting on us. A dull sermon….This afternoon, it seems, Sir J. Minnes fell sicke at church, and going down the gallery stairs fell down dead, but came to himself again and is pretty well.

No point in panicking and calling 999. The best you could do was to summon the doctor.

Just got another E-mail from brasscheck.com, another factual website. This time the video was about Building Seven made on behalf of a group of over 1,500 architects and engineers who are dissatisfied with the explanation given by the NIST report mainly because it did not even mention Building 7 . This one fell down of its own accord about 8 hours after WTC1 and WTC2 because it was tired. So typical of reinforced steel structures. The vid is only 15 minutes in length and for those of you new to the subject, it is a good intro.

*****

For the first time this year I needed to wear socks in bed. A sunny morning with rain forecast (surprise surprise) for later this afternoon. If the jet stream moves south we can forget hot weather even during the summer, sad to say. This afternoon, to my eye appointment. My offending eye, the wet macular in the left eye, has been behaving well so hopefully I will avoid having another injection. I put up with them for the greater good. (search on ‘macular’ for full descriptions).

*****

nice to see an Indian women getting respect.

Quite a story for the women’s libbers. World’s youngest woman commander of Boeing 777. She made history when she accompanied by an all female Air India crew flew across the globe on International Womens’ Day 2017

*****

A very un-monkish picture

To my delight I have found another diarist, Thomas Merton (1915-1968)  who was an American Catholic writer, theologian and mystic. Born in France, he became a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky and was a poet, paradoxically a social activist, and a student of comparative religion.

His entry on June 16, 1961 reads “Sweet afternoon! Cool breezes and a clear sky! This day will not come again. The bulls lie under the tree in the corner of their field. Quiet afternoon! The blue hills, the day lilies in the wind. This day will not come again”.

As you may know the Trappist order has a tradition of silence. Here are some quotes.

“In silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience”

“When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm”.

“Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say”

*****

humans from the bird’s point of view

Royal United Hospital Bath has an excellent display of paintings and other works. I have been speaking about the principles of photography and this is another point to bear in mind. Let’s look at a scene from another participants point of view, in this case, a predatory bird.

I ate at Jimmy‘s in Bath as is my wont. It is opposite the bus station on the first floor (second floor if you are from the USA). It was slightly spoiled by groups of students from France and South Korea who came in with scant respect, more or less looting the food and leaving large amounts of waste. I had three courses – mushroom soup, mixed salad of very good quality and fish to die for cooked in oyster sauce with rice. The sweets tend to be bulked up with chemicals so I decided to have my sweet course at the RUH hospital (as one does).

custard and apple pie

Some of my food habits have been ingrained in me since I was young. Rice pudding, custard and …. apple pie are the supreme sweets for me. When at school I used to sit at the head of the lunch table to ensure I got maximum dollop of custard. At the age of 73, nothing has changed.

*****

I had to wait about two hours for my injection. Alas there is some water in one of the layers of my left eye, and a small bleed. This morning someone had come in for a cataract operation (simple enough these days) and had reacted with panic to a local injection so they had to have a general anesthetic which has a time consuming protocol. This put everyone back starting at the latter end of the morning list. Nothing for it  but to be good humoured. Once again this is offered free on the NHS,  a procedure that would cost about £1200 a shot done privately. I remind anyone who complains of this fact and it usually shuts them up.

There is a waiting room which doubles as a therapy and mutual consoling space for everyone – first timers, experienced people, those who drive the patients to their appointment. It is always light hearted and fun. It is a bit like hitch hiking. People know you are not going to see them again so they don’t mind giving their personal stories and secrets. One woman was lamenting that when she came to clear out the effects of her departed mother the only thing she could not find was the family album which in those days was treasured unlike today when photos are common. She became quite emotional about it but in a hospital that is OK.

It is quite easy to find grumpy old men or should I say curmudgeonly people of a certain age in any waiting room facility. I was talking about the deterioration of the language and listing my pat hates of the phrases ‘jermain’ (do you know what I mean), I’m like uh (I feel things), sort of (my absolute pet hate – you either do something or you do not do something. How can you ‘sort of’ do it?). The latter sounds like a built in apologia. “To be, or sort of not to be. That is the question”

I eventually was called in at 4.30pm (2.45 appointment). Normally there are two people – the doctor who gives the injection and the assistant who prepares the eye. In this case there were three people – a nurse, a doctor and a dashing Spanish doctor who welcomed me with great panache and charm. They made the mistake of asking me what I was going to do that evening. I replied that I was going to see the horror film by Stephen King, IT. The nurse  said she had seen an earlier version at the age of 10 and had nightmares for days. I said that this was a new version and I would report back.

With this gay banter in the background, having a needle stuck in your eye is a sideshow.

*****

an exciting meeting

And so I jump on the bus which handily stops right outside the Odeon Bath. I am starting to photograph people as previously mentioned. As its a public place I don’t think you need permission.  Here is a dazzlingly exciting meeting between two people who obviously have lots in common. .

There is something that puts me off about these huge machines that dispense tickets.

monstrous machines

I have enough machines to deal with in my life never mind ‘fast’ ones so I chose instead to talk to a real human being at the sweet and popcorn counter that doubles as a ticket sales point. I made a joke about the difference between ‘It’, the name of the film,  and I.T. which she actually understood and smiled – non robotically. Huge number of brownie points for that.

I entered Screen 3 to find one other person there for a 5.30 show. The film took $117.2m on its first weekend in the USA so I guess Odeon took a gamble and are showing the film 10 times daily for the moment. Big mistake in my view.

I’m going to take a deep breath now and write about the grossest and most appalling film that comes under the banner of ‘entertainment’ (AKA brainwashing) albeit in the horror genre. Now dear readers I know it was not written for my age group, but…..

Summary of the film

1. Every 27 years an evil influence AKA a clown invades a nondescript town in the USA and steals children for his own insatiable pleasure.
2. The film starts with a young boy floating a small boat along a rain drenches street gutter. It floats down a drain. The clown is somehow in the drain and catches the boat.
3. the boy wants it back but reaches too far into the cover wherupon the clown suddenly sprouts a lot of teeth, bites off the left arm of the boy and pulls him down into the extensive drainage system of the town. … many gore scenes later
4. a group of teenagers take on the clown and in the final scene discover that if they are not afraid of him, he cannot harm them.

You may call this a spoiler but really there is very little to spoil. If special effects are overdone including very loud music and bangs it is seen for what it is, shock for the sake of shock. It is not ‘frightening’ but numbing we can say or even laughable.

The 5 or 6 teenagers who rode their bicycles around the town in pursuit of the clown all had the nastiest and most bullying parents you could imagine. One father was showing almost sexual designs on his daughter. The use of the F*** word was so frequent it bought an ugliness to the whole especially with boys whose voices have not yet broken. There is something about hearing children indeed anyone swear that is so unlovely. To the gullible young mind this is in a way permission to emulate that behaviour. There were also many nasty teenagers who delighted in victimising their fellows who did not fit in (programming to fit in or be a reject).

To an American audience already dumbed down by the ‘education’ system, anti depressant drugs, vaccines, unceasing violence on TV, ditto video games, trash main stream media ‘news’ and junk food, this is just another ingredient contributing to the destruction of humanness that we were born with. Stephen King’s adapted story many have gone down well in USA but from the bored look on the faces of the leaving audience (increased to 8 during the ads before the film) I doubt if it will do so well here in the UK.

I forgot about the impact of the film as soon as I was out of the movie house – into yet another rain shower. I think it was far too gross to be creepy. On to the 40 minute bus ride home….. Tired workers ending their shifts, staring at nothing ahead of them. The odd eccentric unemployed and maybe unemployable person. A single mother with a tired child in tow. Someone with lots of shopping bags from Primark. A young girl flicking through hundreds of images of other people grinning or doing silly things. Someone slumped sideways in their seat, sound asleep. Excited youngsters making a noise at the back of the bus.

Back to a warm home and a meal.  At least I have a home to go back to. Those in Bangladesh, Houston, parts of Florida and the Caribbean are not so lucky.