the Ukrainian trident
When do I mention Zelensky ? I can’t not, because the President of Ukraine sat with the President and Vice President of the US – and we retain all the names. And when you are attacked, you either give in or fight back, both open to endless interpretation. Speaking as somebody who has been attacked and done both – yes, physically – you do what you do.
You have to really want politics badly at any level, let alone internationally, because it makes shot putt, pirouette or world stardom look like tiddlywinks in comparison.
I looked up the definitions of trust, I’m stuck with trust.
I’ll trust Zelensky – even when he gets it wrong. Full stop. Everybody else has written and talked about this to punchdrunk, I am not.
One of the saddest things about human history is how long it takes us to learn, if indeed we ever do. Personally and collectively the human race is slow to learn. Oh sure, there are lessons like lightening – don’t do that again, don’t buy that again – but it’s been a year I have been maundering about keeping a spare key with a convenient neighbour until I lost mine and had to be rescued by Wal – who only has a key because he doesn’t want to find me dead on the floor for the want of asking “Are you all right ?”
And even if I am prepared to claim it
– I am not sure that my past does anything for you. Tell you about me ? Yes, a bit. Tell you about you ? Maybe. But you can push that away, indeed deny it, forget about it – until crisis. Like me and the key.
Yesterday I started thinking about what I was going to write. There are days when this springs to mind, if not quite fully formed, well on the way. Yesterday afternoon I wrote a long careful piece about Zelensky and the meeting in Washington – but it didn’t work. Even the printer hesitated. (Oh how I would like five minutes with the CEO of Epson).
But this morning I saw a sentence that niggled at me and yes, I have read the piece. It said “ I regret
every cigarette I smoked.” I don’t. I am trying to think of what I do regret and the answer is not much and anyway – why would I share it with media except for profit ?
I also thought yesterday, casting around, of all the things I don’t have/haven’t done. Not a trip to India – I might have got lost in India – I’d be there for years. Not Tierra de Fuego. I can still have those unmet dreams met by camera. But all sorts of things.
I have never sat with a bunch of women, no matter how much I liked them, getting legless on bad wine and talking about their sex lives. I have never worn leggings – fine for you, not for me. Nor has peroxide come near my hair. I f you want to see panic in the streets – ban peroxide. I don’t like mobile phones and before you tell me how essential they are – I am cackhanded, use two different pairs of specs because I can’t do varifocals and when I was recently so ill, its use would have been beyond me.
Occasionally I’d be asked why I disliked being called an agony aunt and I would explain that I felt it derogated the writers of letters and phone callers whom I had treated seriously.
As soon as you say to me “everybody is” doing something, I don’t want to. I have never listened to podcast. I don’t listen to radio any more: when it’s good, I miss it and when it’s bad, I muse fruitlessly but briefly on how much work I could lately have done.
I cherish every cigarette I smoked, every man I went to bed with (quickest way to learn about them). I can’t cherish my bad language (horrible) but I cherish where it comes from – anger, displeasure, frustration, heaven help me, the occasional wish to shock. But whether this will help anybody else – that’s open to question. We learn for ourselves, it defines us. The people who won’t learn
– that’s who we have worry about.
*thanks to the Who
Annalog 