2013 — 22 November: Friday
It (belatedly) occurs to me that the more interesting question would have been Where do you think you will be 50 years from now?1
Step back a mere half a century and there I am, staying at a friend's house while I see out the rest of the Autumn term at Cheadle Hulme grammar school while my parents are busy relocating from Alderley Edge in Cheshire to a Hertfordshire village called Harpenden. Big Bro, meanwhile, is resident at Astwick Manor, Hatfield, (as he starts his aero-engineering apprenticeship with de Havilland) just as I will be for a year in 1969/70. It all seems quite a long time ago, somehow. Though where all that Time has disappeared to is anybody's guess.
Perhaps I should consult my relatively more recent Lee Smolin book? It can't have got far!
I note...
... the barometer has shot back up. And my flood defences are currently bone dry. I shall be nipping out in less than an hour to do my usual round of pre-weekend foodie shopping and then I shall amuse myself (as ever) until I join Roger & Eileen to raid their replenished biscuit barrel this afternoon. There are also vague plans afoot to catch "Gravity" in 3D at some local moving picture palace. Watch this (outer) space.
By 'eck, it's cold out there this morning. And I got carved up by a lunatic on a roundabout where I was already on the damn' thing and he was merely entering it. Did I hoot? No, because I know from the one time I was in exactly his situation at the same roundabout just how rotten it makes you feel being hooted at! He knew he was in the wrong, judging by the speed at which he moved out of my way. Wasn't even a white van.
500 years on...
... and not much changes, does it? A lengthier snippet than usual, from a particularly acute and polished set of book reviews:
Machiavelli was no democrat, but he understood that popular anger in the lanes and alleys of his city could bring a prince's rule to a bloody end. If Machiavelli advised politicians to dissimulate, to pretend to virtues they did not practice in private life, it was because he believed that the people in the lanes and alleys cared more about whether the prince delivered peace and security than whether he was an authentic or even an honest person.
All of this looks like cynicism only if we fail to see its deep realism. In his book, Alan Ryan captures Machiavelli's hold on the modern moral imagination when he says, "The staying power of The Prince comes from ... its insistence on the need for a clear-sighted appreciation of how men really are as distinct from the moralizing claptrap about how they ought to be."
This moral clarity remains bracing in an era like our own, when politicians hide the necessary ruthlessness of political life behind the rhetoric of family values and Christian principles and call on citizens to feel their pain when they make difficult decisions. We are still drawn to Machiavelli because we sense how impatient he was with the equivalent flummery in his own day, and how determined he was to confront a problem that preoccupies us too: when and how much ruthlessness is necessary in the world of politics.
Personally, I don't believe the state should be in the business of killing people. But then, I don't actually think that anyone should be in that business. That's just me, of course. I could be wrong.
Listening...
... to the reporting of the growing sh1tstorm surrounding a Methodist Reverend Chairman of the Co-op Bank, and his taste for illegal pharmaceutical substances (added, if one of my chums is correct, to the six months or so experience he actually had as a bank teller!) is an unedifying experience. Oddly, I was doing so while completing the rigorous set of security hoops imposed on anyone seeking online access to Uncle ERNIE's little world.
Assuming I can ever log back on — the session timed out five minutes into my initial attempt to specify the answers to five security questions, create a six- to eight-character password, pick the security login image and phrase, nominate the details of my current account — then any future cheques from Uncle ERNIE should go straight into my current account, thus saving me petrol costs to either Eastleigh or Soton and parking charges. Not to mention shoe leather and time. It amuses me, somewhat, to ponder what chance Mrs Elderly Josephine Public probably has of successfully completing this process.
All done. I think that's enough "work" for one day. And lunch is now becoming an urgent necessity.
Just been spellbound listening to the "interview" Mark Kermode carried out with the divine Emma Thompson.
Long pause
By the sound of it, the second film of "The Hunger Games" is very promising. I enjoyed the first, immensely. I also liked what I heard about "Saving Mr Banks", though I only ever saw "Mary Poppins" once, somewhat reluctantly, and have read nothing by PL Travers. She sounds quite fascinating.