MELANCHOLIA?

We drive to the little village of Ruan Lanihorne, where the King's Head specialises in fish and seafood straight from the sea. After a lunch of wild mussels and sea-bass we stroll through the village, and out along a lane which doesn't have a destination marked, because it doesn't have a destination.
It wanders along the side of an estuary filled with reeds, and the late October sun shines in a delicate blue sky. No con-trails, no traffic sounds. A pleasant house is tucked away among trees, in an idyllic situation.
In the distance there is a gleam of open water, and the hill of Lamorran Woods rises straight from the water level, like a rampart.
We return to the car, and drive off, feeling that we have had a privileged experience.



It is only later that I remember that the lane does have a road-sign. It reads Road Liable To Flooding. And if that is true now, how much longer, in an era of global warming, is it going to be possible to stroll as we did? And will the pleasant house be cut off? Very minor considerations, when one thinks, for example, of the impending fate of Bangladesh.

But why does it occur to me? Have I developed a habit of melancholy, 'that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries'? Or are we living in times which give particular cause for such thoughts? I must take care that this blog does not dissolve in a pool of tears.

TO THE READER

The Figure that thou seest below,
It doth the gentle Frederick show,
In which the Camera had a strife
With Nature to out-do the life.
His inner thoughts to catalogue
Read not his Picture but his Blog.

The Author

THEOLOGICAL QUIZ

Bush has assured us that he consulted God before the Iraq invasion, and that God advised him to attack. Now Bush is saying that the important thing is to withdraw. Does this mean
(a) That in the first place God advised him not to attack, but that Bush is so spiritually deaf that he mis-heard his orders, or
(b) That God did advise him to attack, but that the war has gone on so long, and so bloodily, that God has had time to change his mind, or
(c) That Bush has decided not to listen to God any more?

Answers on a postcard, please, addressed to GWB, c/o the back door, White House, USA. And mark your entry VOX POPULI VOX DEI.

INFANT CLICHES
Young neighbours bring us their new-born child to see. She is perfection. What is one to think? Any idea that one has is a cliche that thousands have thought before. None the less one thinks it. The plump fingers, each with a miniature nail. The calm acceptance of the whole world....... These things have to be re-thought every time.

At the back of one's mind the old words recite themselves
Come away, O human child
To the water and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

One pushes them away.

INTRODUCTION
Old men have to learn not to say,"I told you so". Nevertheless there are so many events which we opposed then and deplore now that one sometimes longs to point this out, and a blog seems a good way of letting off steam.
How's this for starters? If (in Britain) you convert first-rate polytechnics into second-rate universities is it not inevitable that [a] you will create a class-system of universities in which the top ones will regard the bottom ones as a joke, and [b] that a degree will lose both its cachet in society and its value in in the labour market? Discuss.