My Christmas and Yuletide greetings to all well-intentioned readers of the blog, to all Europe, and to the wider world.
Christmas morning music
On this day a year ago
Stray thought
It is always suspect to draw general conclusions from personal experience, at least without more. All the same, we have to start somewhere, like Newton and his apple.
It seems to me that there is an absence of what I recall as “Christmas feeling”. Am I wrong to believe that the feeling of Christmas as a special time has ebbed away over the past couple of decades? If so, why has it happened? It cannot simply be economic stringency etc, looking at the travails of the 20th Century— wars, the Great Depression etc.
I am not talking about religious or wider spiritual belief or adherence, but the actual feeling of Christmas-time. Do “the young”, children etc feel the same, or is the feeling of— what? Flatness? Unease?— connected to the nostalgia which is more naturally an accompaniment of greater age? I do not know.
I come to no conclusion here, but have raised the question. It worries me. I think that it goes beyond Christmas, too.
Tweets seen
Seems to be a good idea in principle. I wonder, though, how much electricity such an installation can produce, and how it can be distributed.
Christmas TV
I doubt that I shall watch TV much in the next few days. Today, saw a few minutes of a religious service (Church of England) on BBC TV. It was from Blackburn Cathedral, a cathedral of which I had never heard, and in a town which I have never visited.
Instead of a traditional carol, something which sounded like the soundtrack for a black mass in a horror film; admittedly, I only saw a few minutes of the whole thing. Instead of a robed officiant such as a priest, a large black man wearing a kind of lumberjack shirt. As for the congregation (or should that be “audience”?), a relatively small crowd. The camera zoomed in on a young British-seeming couple with a tiny baby. The (?) husband and/or (?) father looked stressed or even (as it seemed to me) spiteful, somehow. No smiles seen from either. Were they actors? I suppose not; after all, actors might have simulated some happier look.
Nein danke…I switched off from it.
From the newspapers
“The CIA is combining with the spy service of a NATO ally in Europe to conduct covert sabotage operations inside Russia, according to new claims.
The clandestine campaign is behind many unexplained explosions and fires that have hit strategic or prominent facilities in recent months, says US expert Jack Murphy, an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran.
Separately other European intelligence services have allegedly been ‘running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help’, as has Ukraine.“
[Daily Mail]
Insanity like that (if true, is proven) can have only one result, eventually— escalation, leading to Russian strategic nuclear attack on both North America (both cities and military bases, ports etc) and Western Europe (particularly the UK, particularly London).
More tweets
Reason to be cheerful?
Good to know that Little Matt Hancock’s book has failed to capture public attention, and has failed to make the freeloader even more money, depending on what was his advance, if anything.
More tweets
See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2016/11/17/social-nationalism-and-green-politics/.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Saw, rather sub protest, the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial] on TV.
In fact, it was better than expected, despite having the usual suspects (loud children, louder adults). One of the former looked like becoming the “inevitable” Hollywood film Wunderkind, but in the end did not.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 