Tag Archives: Wolgalied

Diary Blog, 9 May 2023, including Ukraine news, and something about Oliver Reed

Afternoon music

Tweets seen

Interesting. I wonder what the truth of it is.

Is it just my own subjective perception— or does Charles not look uneasy in that photograph, as if he does not find himself very credible?

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” [Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2]

The Kiev regime killing their own soldiers? An accident? Or what?

I have often wondered over the past year why the Russian side has left most of the rail system in Ukraine intact. Is there some special reason, or is it just slackness and/or lack of capability?

https://twitter.com/Syribelle/status/1655885018177187844?s=20

More music

[Germany 1945— “We are fighting for the future of our children“]
[Dresden 1945]

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…tweets “Dr” Louise Raw, who applauded, inter alia, the prosecutions of Alison Chabloz, and her being barred from entering France for 40 years, merely for singing satirical songs about Jewish frauds…

Another hypocrite.

Oliver Reed— quite a character. Despite the hellraising reputation and lifestyle, he could be quite pleasant and polite. My parents told me that they had met him (would have been in the late 1970s, I think, though maybe early 1980s) when stopping off for a drink at an inn on the Hog’s Back in Surrey, not far from Reed’s large Victorian country house. He was at the bar with a (male) friend, and was interesting and courteous, they said.

The conversation had ended prematurely when the publican whispered to Reed that “she’s outside!“, at which Reed and his friend ran out the back way, behind the bar. A moment later a blazingly-angry woman arrived, and said to the barman “has he been in?“, to which the barman diplomatically said “haven’t seen him“! She then stalked out. This turned out to have been Reed’s then wife, Jacquie.

Yes, Oliver Reed. The sort of character rarely seen then, and never seen now (arguende). Descended from Peter the Great, supposedly, and someone who started a romance with a 16-y-o schoolgirl when he was 42 (they later married, when she was about 21 and he was about 47).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Reed].

The darker side of Reed: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20130706/282724814519990.

…but “Fr Twohig said: ‘‘Oliver Reed was a very nice fellow. He wasn’t such a bad egg as is said.

‘He was quite shy and he used to need a few shots for Dutch courage. Drink set him off but he was a decent chap and very kind.’’

[The Irish Examiner]

The generality of the public want people to be either saints or sinners, but few people are unalloyedly either. “Blame and praise alike befall, when a dauntless man’s spirit is black and white mixed, like the magpie’s plumage” [Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival]

You see that wish of many to perceive people in a very rigid saint/sinner way in almost every political or social (or historical) scenario: the contending forces of the Second World War have to be either “evil” or “good”, despite it being obvious that bad things were done by all major forces contending.

The same is true of contemporary social or political matters in the UK. Those living on State benefits are often seen as either “scroungers” or “fraudsters” (though by some as suffering “victims” of society). Both can be true, even in one individual case, but people only want black and white, not grey.

Likewise, anyone who has served in the Army is now (following the American usage) a “veteran” and, if ever anywhere near a war zone, quite likely a “hero”, a usage that the Sun “newspaper” started in the early 1980s, when anyone who had set foot in the Falklands during the campaign was a “Falklands hero”.

Nurses of course are all seen as good, or even “angels”. Same, more or less, with doctors etc.

There is now no or very little nuance.

More tweets

Funny. In 1988, when I first went to Poland, driven by a former schoolfriend who had met a Polish girl in London when I very nearly slipped into the Thames and drowned— long story…), he opined, after we had spent some weeks there (I think about 6 weeks, in the end) that maybe poor Poland, then still under socialist control, might one day overtake the UK and France, in the Biblical “the last shall be first” way. At the time, I thought it highly unlikely, but look now…

In fact, my addiction to Google Earth and its Street View has revealed to me in recent years how much Poland has changed since I was there in 1988 and 1989 (I went several times over a couple of years). The roads look better by far than most of the UK ones now, especially the motorways and main highways that now exist. As for Warsaw, completely different.

The above changes must be interesting to my then friend and driver (I did not drive at the time), who married that Polish girl a year or so later, in the Autumn of 1989 (I was the best man, and the wedding was a lavish affair held in the St. Mary Basilica in Krakov, in the main market square).

[the nave of the Basilica of St. Mary, Krakov, where in 1989 a darkly-besuited Millard played the role of best man at a wedding reminiscent of that of Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the epic film, El Cid]

Incidentally, the last I heard, some years ago, the pair were still married, and living in leafy Buckinghamshire with their two teenage children (who by now must be well into their twenties).

Some mainstream and more or less international dishes, such as steak, sea bass with green asparagus, coquille of crabmeat and scallops; salad with duck and tomato; a meringue; a Russian favourite, Solyanka with meat (a traditional Russian soup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyanka); also (for the Central Asian guests?) Sherbet with lime.

…until a nuclear missile lands. Who, or what cabal, is stirring these revanchiste sentiments?

Late tweets seen

The Western msm, especially in the USA and UK, is more or less controlled, in its output, by Jews and those working in the Jewish and Israeli interest.

The same is true of, eg, UK governmental and legal systems.

Madness. Escalation of the conflict. Those missiles are not capable of reaching Moscow or Petersburg from Ukrainian territory, but are still able to reach far inside Russia. How long can it be before at least tactical nuclear weapons are used in Ukraine?

At one time, I wondered why the Palestinians in Gaza did not try to replicate the German V-1 technology of the Second World War era (which is almost all now openly available). My conclusion in the end was that the slow maximum speed of the V-1 (about 400 mph) would make it very vulnerable to Israeli jet fighters as well as to ground-to-air defensive missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb.

Late music