The first lullaby I remember

Jo Stafford recorded it in 1949.

Goodness knows where my mum first heard it. On the radio perhaps?

It was surely our favourite lullaby. It's certainly the one that's firmly imprinted in my mind.

Later versions have never appealed to me.

Original 1949 Lyrics: Jack Segal.  Music: Evelyn Danzig.

Family Tree

FOR A.W. (1920 - 2018) 

*

A mother bird 

falls from her perch

Lands in her family tree 

*

One of mum's favourite hobbies was researching her family tree. Another hobby was painting. It was something she started doing at the age of 80. She often painted her own greeting cards. Mostly they were small aquarelles - pictures of flowers she'd happen to have in the house. Sometimes she'd paint a bird, maybe a robin seen through the garden window. She had a delicate and fine style. Inspired by her cards I painted the above picture some time ago but deliberately left it unfinished. This morning I painted the sky with black ink to bring out the vibrancy of the colours. Now it's finished. The family tree. What odd birds we all are.

Discovering God's Secrets

IN the summer of 2008 the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin in a laboratory in Geneva aimed a blue laser beam at a crystal. Don't ask me the technicalities because I don't have the foggiest idea. But let us just accept that he isolated two identical photons. Twins. One of them he sent through a glass fiber cable to a village to the east of Geneva and the other in the exact opposite direction to the west. The distances each one travelled were in both cases 17.5 kms.

Gisin's team of scientists at both destinations measured the results.  What surprised them was the speed that the photon was able to communicate information of its changed state to its twin. It was at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. In other words instantaneous. That is amazing enough. But there is the unsolvable question of how.  How do two particles 35 kms apart know what the other is doing?

And what does this mean for man's relationship with his creator?  Or if there is no creator, then man's relationship with the greater and lesser universe. With nature.

It is being postulated by some scientists according to an article in the German magazine 'PM' (December 2010) that God, if such there be, would be able to create 'coincidences'  (can we also take this to mean synchronicities?) to achieve his desired results without breaking any of the laws of physics.

Werner Heisenberg who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1932 for the discovery of quantum mechanics said: The first drink from the beaker of natural science makes one an atheist but at the bottom of the beaker God is waiting.


Breaking  news:
German scientists in Antarctica have reportedly traced the path of a neutrino to its point of origin, a black hole.

Sorry, but it's not coming home. Updated.

So that's it.

Only one more game for England.  The 3rd place play-off.

The way it's going the '3 Lions' will need a minor miracle if they are to avoid their third defeat in this tournament.

The opponent will be Belgium who unluckily went out 1-0 against the probable final winners France.

Along with the fair play award there ought to be an award for the best dressed manager. Mr Southgate's sartorial elegance would be worthy of it.

The ghost of Brian Clough will haunt the FA corridors for a while yet.

It's a funny old game.

Update:
England's final game:
 Belgium 2-0 England.  England's coming home with only 3 wins. Hardly awe inspiring.

Some basic errors? No 9 as captain? Would not a midfield playmaker have been better placed to conduct the play? Style of play too slow and predictable? Playing too square? Lack of skills -  players too one sided. Some unable to use their left foot?

I remember a World Cup ending with Wayne Rooney in tears. Who is  crying now?

In league terms England's performance reads:
Played 7 - Won 3 - Drawn 1 - Lost 3 - Points (out of 21)  10.  Failure.

Update:
France win the World Cup:
France 4 - 2 Croatia

In league terms France's record reads:
Played 7 - Won 7 - Drawn 0 - Lost 0 - Points (out of 21)  21.  Success.

That's it. There's nothing else to say.

The Mystery Continues

At first we had the Russian agent in the Italian restaurant theory, then we had the Russian agent on the the bench theory, and then the contaminated door handle theory . . .
and I don't know what else.

But now here it comes again.  First we had the discarded syringe theory, then the discarded cigarette butt theory and now we have the theory of the sunglasses . . .

It's becoming a game of Cluedo. 

Perhaps Colonel Mustard did it in the library with a candlestick?

Sherlock Boris has been taken off the case.

Whatever next?

Two Paintings (Updated)

Black Gold  1

Black Gold  2

The third painting (now shown) is titled 'Crucifixion'.

The top painting, springs from the depths of my subconscious or my imagination and basically painted itself. I just let the paints, that is to say the colours on the brushes tell me where they wanted to go and when there was no more to do I stopped.

The next day I decided the scene was from an early stage in the evolution of a planet. For some reason (I cannot fathom it) there is a black quill 'writing' a line of 'dots' which I take to be a code.

Moving on to the second painting, I painted the idea of a planet with an object resembling a milk churn in the foreground but overflowing with a black substance which could be seen as oil. In the sea there is a lighthouse (or a candle), and in the sky there are stars. They are aids to navigation. But it seems they are now defunct for there are no ships, people or animals to be seen. Not even a sea monster.

The final painting in the triptych shows oil gushing from the ground, forming into an image of the death of the last good man and the heralding the break up of the planet. It could be our planet. It could be somewhere else in time and space. The viewer can choose either or none, and interpret the scenes as he wishes.

How to make Fake News.

Yesterday on a German version of this news story they showed part of this clip. It was the part where Angela Merkel spoke.  They DID NOT show the part where the Hungarian leader spoke.

They cut away when Merkel had finished and the commentator said: 'Orban remained hard'. 

Then it was on to the next item.

The uncritical viewer is left with the impression that Merkel is a kind of Mother Teresa figure.

Easy or what?

Can You Trust The Press?

Musical Interlude: Mischa Maisky - Haydn Cello Concerto No.1 in C Major

Mischa Maisky performs one of my favourite pieces - Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major.

Here is the final movement.

There is no more World Cup football until the first quarter-finals on Friday.

Music is the best antidote I know for WCWS* and 'football fatigue'.


*(World Cup Withdrawal Syndrome)

Football friends (and Polytunnel Book Club Selection)

Tonight England  play Colombia.

These two friends will be 'watching' the match in a bar in Colombia.
They know that football can unite people and bring them great joy.
It's something to think about.


And now, for your enlightenment and amusement, here's a Russian proverb from the communist era:

                                      We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.

I discovered this pearl of communist wisdom in a paperback travel book titled 'One Steppe Beyond - Across Russia in a VW Camper' by Thom Wheeler. I'm planning to read the tale of the 'classic caper' over the next couple of weeks, as time permits. 

There's a useful map, a double page showing the route from Tallin to Vladivostok, which coincidentally  passes through some of the more famous World Cup venues: St. Petersburg, Moscow and the wonderfully named Nizhny Novgorod! This madcap journey was undertaken in 1997 when the world, and Russia was a different place than it is today.  

You can find out more at www.summersdale.com  by clicking on Thom Wheeler's name in the list headed 'Authors'.

'This engaging tale will be an inspiration for anyone who's ever daydreamed about abandoning the humdrum and hitting the road' says John Mole, author of 'I Was a Potato Oligarch' on the back cover. 

As a certified* daydreamer myself I'm very much looking froward to reading it. 

______________
*On practically every school report of mine they would write: He is always daydreaming in class!

QED - therefore I qualify. 

ps- I'm not sure who is in charge of the newly formed Polytunnel Book Club. I think it must be Dave, but it could be Rachel. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's nobody. I suspect it's not a must to have a polytunnel such as Dave has, just a dry place to sit out of the rain and read whatever takes your fancy. Maybe the Dirty Irish Joke Book or the Uncollected Works of Shakespeare, or even a National Geographic.  I think it all began when I likened Adam Lang, a character in a thriller - The Ghost - to the British politician commonly known as Bush's poodle or marionette on Rachel's blog. The fine summer won't last forever. The rains will come one fine day and should your hard-worked garden or vegetable plot slowly turn into a muddy morass before your very eyes do not despair . . .  a good read will do very nicely. 

I've started a list. All Polytunnel Book Club fans may suggest additions to it via Comments or they may promulgate this list, or their own list, on their own blogs and thereto add their own recommendations and suggestions. When I've read the ones on the list below they will turn red. And a suitable rating will appear (as a % here). Others taking up the challenge on their blogs may want to award stars, emojis, or simply a row of ubiquitous thumbs. The choice, as they say is yours. Now I'm off to cut some brambles.  

'The Ghost' - Robert Harris    78%
'One Steppe Beyond' - Thom Wheeler
'The Potato' - Larry Zuckerman 
'The Leopard' - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Thought for the day

I'm reading the Robert Harris novel The Ghost.

It's about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British Prime Minister of the time, and the renditions.

It's all fiction of course.

But strangely in this morning's Internet Guardian I did read two stories about these events, including one about the 75 rendition flights in Scotland.

And then I remembered there was an airport terrorist attack in Glasgow one time.  I seem to recall it involved a car driven by a doctor crashing into a concrete barricade and bursting into flames outside the main building. I could never understand why somebody would make such an idiotic attack that was always doomed to failure. But it now looks to me as if the driver knew that rendition flights were using the airport and wanted to stage some form of protest.

Of course, since I'm not in possession of any facts, other than the two Guardian stories, one by Peter Beaumont and the other about the MSP's demanding an investigation, I'm only making an assumption.

In other news the 'Welcome to America' cover of Time Magazine which shows Donald Trump standing in front of a 2 year old child separated from her mother has now been shown to be a deception.

The mother, seen with her child in the original picture, has been erased, and the border guard has been replaced by the president. The child's head has been cynically tilted backwards to gaze into the president's face. The truth is that the child and mother, from Honduras where the father still lives with his several other children, were never separated by the US authorities.

The mother paid the smugglers $6,000 for the journey. The father is employed as a harbour man in Honduras.

The reason I know that 'The Ghost' is fiction is because in real life the ex-British PM is still alive.

The reason I know the Time cover which has now been seen all over the world can be nothing more than a bad joke and part of the anti-Trump campaign, is because the true story with original photographs was reported in German in the weekend supplement of my local paper.

The more things change the more they remain

insane.


It's not very long ago we had all those fake news so-called chemical attack videos on mainstream news, BBC, cnn,  et al, featuring children being splashed with water, which the children and their parents told Robert Fisk and a handful of other reporters who were doing their job properly was some kind of rebel faction / anti-government / white helmet publicity stunt.