under another sun

Woke this morning having had an unusually detailed dream about an Australian war poet, who flew Brewster Buffalos for the Royal Australian Air Force in the far east during world war 2.  In the dream I discovered his collected poems,  and another volume of collected letters and journals, in a bookshop and learned all about him. Woke up remembering everything except his name. I used to dream about books with my name on them. Now I dream about a dead man on the other side of the world. Made me remember the dear old  Victor West , an English WW2 poet I was mates with in my twenties and thirties. Anyway spent my rare idle moments wondering what the dream meant .  Work briefly enlived by Keith's internet going down and him having an enraged phone call with Virgin. Lost about an hour to these shenanigans. Otherwise image hunting to support our slightly strange concepts... near realistic busts of people made out of fabric, people staring through ice, medical doctors from the...

Monday and news of another effective vaccine from AstraZenica and Oxford University. This one also reaches 90% effectiveness if given in two doses. Being manufactured here, this is likely to be the one we'll get. Otherwise a fairly cheery day, I continued on with my new Diabolus in Musica story. Just need a nastier twist in it. I shall come up with something. Received a rejection (although polite and encouraging me to send more) for Doctor Spotlight. Gah. I think it is a good story, but Black Static seem to go for the more overt and gory. I already have somewhere else to send it in mind. Went for three walks today, and smashed my 10k paces for the first time in over a week. Felt much better for it too. Watched lots of episodes of the WW2 week by week You Tube series that Anton talked about. Very good, and now Operation Barbarossa has started, pretty dreadful. It does give you the picture that half of the major events in warfare seems to pivot on human error, pigheadedness and co...

Men dying like the leaves Up at 6:30 again thanks to the kitten, then an early start. More erection copy. Only a few more days this before I can get onto glaucoma. Remembrance day today. Lots of stuff on the radio and TV about the first world war, and the Spanish flu pandemic afterwards which one expert was saying killed 50 million people globally. Picked up my copy of The lost voices of World War 1 edited by Tim Cross. This had been given me by World War II poet Victor West who was a friend of mine but is now dead. The 11th hour always makes me think of Wilfred Owen's parents getting the dreaded telegram as the bells for armistice rang out in Shrewsbury, or one of my all time favourite poets Edward Thomas, when asked by a friend having enlisted in the Artists rifles at the age of 37 what he was fighting for, picked up a handful of soil and crumbled it between his fingers, saying "literally, for this." All that nobility lost, a generation of poets, for what seems today ...