A Magical Orange Grove in a Nightmare

Sitting here writing this from a run down Barkingside Library. 20 min. to say something before being "timed out". Time is money! I'm going to miss these places, like Walthamstow library or the triste bungalows where old men with their sun-burnt, creased skin wear checked shirts with too many buttons undone and the silver-haired women still find meaning in discussing trivial things. [The grey men with double barreled chests work diligently in the bleached-out gardens, the wives, all seventies-like with their shades and flowery dresses fold napkins or leaf through glossy magazines, turning the pages with their index finger. This is how retirement was envisaged, a quiet winding down to the background of radio commentary and the occasional appearance of a bee to remind them of summers long past. But it's no good. This sucks. Big time. This is just one long suffocating Saturday afternoon.

Outside, on the high street, the heavy-bosomed women with their sturdy arms, arms that have grown used to carrying things, and their stern, implaccable faces. Everything about them speaks of a certain defiance of gravity and time. Redeemed by the solid pragmatism that runs to their very core. Teenage kids screech by, all gell and spikes, a spiked existence. Elongated strides and the clink of bling: the first strivings of the ego].

Simple people for whom reading the Guardian qualifies you as being an "intellectual". Will miss the Village bookshop as well. No, England's gone. There's no two ways about it.

The whole thing-literature, novels-all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously.
---V.Woolf on Hardy.

He was a human being, not 'the great man'.
---L. Woolf.

'He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality...[His poems] remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone., who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him,a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious , ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.'
---C. Tomalin

This post was supposed to be about madness and has ended up about sanity! No time for that now. Later.