Tony Grist (poliphilo) wrote,
Tony Grist
poliphilo

Strange Days Indeed

Prince Prospero self-isolates in his castle for a nonstop orgy with all his bestest mates- and then an uninvited guest shows up. Normally I go months without thinking about The Masque of the Red Death- and now- for some reason- it keeps popping into my head...

The sky is blue. The sun shines bright. I hear a plane going over and look up- and it's one of those funny little put-put monoplanes that would have been cutting edge in the 1920s. And then I notice something else: no vapour trails, no shiny silver birds in the stratosphere. We lie under numerous flightpaths- but the airliners have mostly been grounded and I can't say I'm sorry.

What price political ideology- or indeed political normality- when a Tory government finds itself implementing policies which it would have mocked as madly Socialist- if not Stalinist- a few weeks ago? Again, who would have predicted that Boris Johnson- libertarian, hedonist and former Bullingdon boy- would preside over the closure of the theatres, cinemas, pubs and clubs? Not even Cromwell went quite so far. Oh, and that money tree- which used not to exist? Apparently we have access to a whole orchard of them now.
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  • 11 comments

  • Supplementary

    The cover picture on that book I dreamed about looked a lot like this.....

  • Baptist Church 1882

    I have a cold. I was coughing so irrepressibly that I spent the night downstairs in a chair. Among the dreams that drifted by was one about a book…

  • Eostre

    According to the Venerable Bede (but no-one else) Easter is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre- who had a whole month, roughly corresponding…