Sunday, 11th January, 2026
Bloody Sunday! Don’t you just hate them. Silent as the grave. Dull and grey but mild. Boring. Let’s get on with the world again even though it’s a nightmare at the moment.
The world is on fire. The old order is being challenged like it hasn’t been since World War 2. Instability is the order of the day and it doesn’t feel comfortable. I have lived my life, we have lived our lives, Dear Reader, under a long period of peace. Yes, we have seen off the Cold War, the ‘Troubles in Ireland’, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and they were significant in localised ways but Global Geopolitics have never been so fractious in my lifetime.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The Second Coming – William Butler Yeats
The lines above were written by the Irish poet in the immediate aftermath of World War 1 and at the start of Irish War of Independence. His world was much smaller then. Today, the same feeling prevails but it is difficult to be optimistic about any part of the World.
- Iran and Israel compete for dominance of the Middle East with Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen in the mix.
- Expansionist Russia currently seeks to regain Ukraine but has its sights set on the whole Baltic region and extends that in to EU Europe and out via Denmark to Greenland.
- China claims sovereignty over Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong based on historical precedence. It’s interest in Greenland is strategic.
- Geopolitics in South Asia is undergoing a sharp turn. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh tensions are constantly inflamed. Currently, Geopolitics in South Asia are undergoing a sharp turn. Bangladesh has increasingly viewed India as an adversary while leaning towards Pakistan, the very nation from which India helped liberate it in 1971.
- USA expands into South America, threatening Venezuela and into North America threatening Canada and into Europe threatening Denmark and Greenland. In The Middle East, it threatens Iran, Syria and Gaza.
I’m thinking of turning our Garage-cum-Gym into a drone-free bomb shelter. At least it’s got a year’s supply of red wine. I’m going out there to hide now anyway. Unfortunately, the Drama I am watching is centred on an America in the grips of its own self- aggrandisment. Art and Life are intimately intertwined, Dear Reader. Happy Sunday!
Monday, 12th January, 2026
A (relatively) warm, grey morning. Alexa defined my day at 6.00 am by announcing,
John, Today your calendar has one event. Black Bin to put out.
I have to admit, my heart sank a little. Does putting out the bin urge you to get up in the half light on a Monday morning, Dear Reader? It is only my determination and/or stupidity that forced me out into the day.
You have to see all things in perspective. When I was working, I longed for such days to be free to indulge myself. Now, it almost seems like a reproach for being old. I began to think about perspectives in life as I shaved. It is the pin pricks of time that help us see the relevance of the Now. Two, specific ones came to mind as I brushed my teeth. Yes, Dear Reader, I still have teeth. All the better to …. But then you know the children’s fable.
I have picked 1891 – just 60 years before I was born – and 1973 when I was 22 years old. There are many others but these two points explain to me at least who I am. I was born into a fairly insular, East Midlands village of Repton where my Grandfather and Father ran the family firm of Builders – Sanders & Son. I was the product of a strange union between an Atheist and a Roman Catholic; between a village boy and a city of London girl; between a fairly dour and unassuming architect and a pretentiously snobby, articulate artist.
Mum had quickly bought into the prestige of being in a long established village family of entrepreneurs with its extensive antecedents in the Methodist Chapel, Parish Council and Parochial entertainment. It was almost as if she felt grounded, established and complete. It was a union of which D.H.Lawrence would feel vindicated.
So, my first point of perspective is in my discovery of the Mill that brought my ancestors to Repton village when they bought and took over the mill in the mid-19th century. By 1958, it was in ruins and deserted. It has always hidden in my memory but only made sense when I discovered the true extent of my family’s involvement in and contribution to the locality of my birth. I was amazed to find that my Great Grandparent’s gravestone was in the village graveyard at St Wystan’s church. My parents never mentioned them.
Richard, who had started a Carpentry & Coffin-making business and his wife, Anne, both lived to 70 years old, dying in 1891 & 1898 when my Grandfather took over the business and expanded the firm into a Building and Construction one. He built the house where I was born and referred to in this book – Repton Remembered as Nos. 81 and 83 in Repton Square.
So I was produced by a fairly monosyllabic East Midlander completely grounded in his locality and an articulate and Arty Southerner looking for establishment, acknowledgement and belonging. I have a lot of my father’s doggedness, determination and grit but even more of my Mother’s articulacy, creativity and self-awareness. Like my father, I eschewed Religion. Like my Mother I always wanted to express myself. Unlike my father, I was desperate to leave the confines of village life and move to the South of my mother.
I know this is a long – too long – post and that you will have left me long ago, Dear Reader, but for my sanity I will press on. From the first half you will easily see why the second has such relevance. In 1973, I met James Joyce and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It was me! He was describing ME! I couldn’t believe it. I don’t read books. I never read books other than for study or for teaching. I was teaching Advanced Level English Literature for the first time and what should be prescribed for me but This.
I was feeling quite vulnerable, empty and lost at the time. I was beginning to write – poetry mainly – but this book describes Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, as he gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints to live a life devoted to the art of writing. I had cast off my family, my pretence at religion, my social connections and was living in a hovel in a faded Northern mill town. My father was dead as was his. His mother despairs of him and his rejection of the Catholic faith just as mine did.
One of the defining characteristics of the novel’s rising action is the pattern of following a triumph or epiphany at the end of each chapter by a deflation of that success at the beginning of the next, and this structure models the way in which Stephen’s perspective adapts over time. Of course, Stephen’s surname was not chosen acidentally. Dedalus is Daedalus – the cocky boy who flew too close to the sun and crashed and burned. The story of my life I fear.