Today's posts

Today’s poem is   ‘The Painting in Room 23’.  Art galleries are quiet places where we talk in hushed tones and walk reverently from room to room. Attendants make sure we behave appropriately. How different all this is from the lives of the men and women who painted the pictures that hang there!

Doesn’t this apply to all culture?  Once a poet or actor is safely dead and their work is accorded a general seal of approval, it assumes a halo of respectability. We marvel at Versailles and do not think of the starving Parisians who lived just up the road. We walk round the Colosseum in admiration and do not think of the barbarism of the spectacles seen there.  Anything on the ‘To do’ list of any city in the world becomes anaesthetized from its original function. It is ‘culture’ and therefore is beyond criticism.

Today’s letter from my terrace is ‘The toot toot man’.  It is never wise to go back to places you knew years before.