May to half of July 2021

May to half of July 2021

What is not baffling? Everything seems increasingly to be so. This whole aging process and ephemerality of one’s end of days is weird. But, then, I have always been attracted to the strange. I’ve had several sessions with Scott and now owe him $351. The cyber and electronic worlds are perhaps the craziest of all. Channel reception with the television also has been steadily diminishing. I took my laptop for repairs to Apple in Covent Garden. I was told to expect seven to ten days but that I would be notified when the machine was ready to

be fetched. This last did not occur, and after more than two weeks, I phoned and learned that the repair had been completed a week earlier. But I still lose important files and, if lucky and after a sleepless night, re-find them. And walking into another room with the laptop but forgetting to take the Bluetooth speaker connected to it completely dismantled the speaker. I had to take it to Peter Jones to get it to work again.

For the rest, it does not seem that much has happened, but since it has been two and half months since my last update, I’m certain there has been something. I have Zoomed with Theitic, Marie-Laure (Jonathan has a fever), and twice with Nancy. Phone calls have been with Darby, Gin and Liz Green. With the coffee shops, etc. re-opening, we have at Vardo had coffee and margaritas with Padma and coffee with Meg. Since then, James was rushed by

ambulance to the hospital with severely Covid-19 congested lungs (he has now been released), and both Tilly and her daughter Edith have also had to deal with the Rona. Both are better now, but Tilly had already had both vaccination jabs.

Stead came for a lunch. We have had dinner with Gin at the Gherkin, a dinner at Padma’s, a dinner just Richard and me at El Pastor Soho, dinner with Patrick and his daughter Sylva at Colbert, and dinner at the Rixes’ on Gowlett Street with a Nigela Lawson pasta recipe before driving to Aldeburgh for a cold, wet and windy but still lovely weekend. It was our first time to be outside London this year if not even for a year. We had a dinner at the Lighthouse and

also visited the Aldeburgh Moot Hall Museum as well as some of the local artists exhibiting in their homes. The raison d’être to be in Aldeburgh was for Richard and me to do our Midsummer’s sunrise bathing ritual, but it was so cold and water so violent that I could not get myself to lie down in it. For the rest, we celebrated Beltane, cast our beans for the Lemuria, cast the stercum, beans and/or rush puppet into the Thames from Chelsea Bridge on the Ides of May and June, did our lustrations, and opened and subsequently re-closed an altar for Consus.

At the British Museum, we have been to the exhibitions on Thomas Beckett (my sympathies remain with Henry II) and Nero (rather successfully managed to make me feel more positive toward this misaligned emperor). At the Tate Britain, there has been “Turner’s Modern World;” and at Saatchi, the “JR Chronicles” concerning the migrants. From the Sloane Club, we heard Max Hudson’s talk on the Victorian English (“Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it.”) There have been two Soteria sessions on Faust. The Faustian Temptation only works if there is a dichotomous divide between good and evil. For one of the moots, Prudence Jones spoke on “Northern Myths of the Constellations – old and new.” The July moot was held at the Iron Duke for Mathias Nordvig’s “How to read Snorri’s Edda,” but the reception/sound was poor, and it was difficult to follow. And at the Duchess Theatre, there has been Jack Holden’s excellent one-man show accompanied by a musician, Cruise, about the early Aids crisis in Soho. And at the last moment, James informed us about the Mozartists concert in which he was performing at the Cadogan Hall with Ian Page conducting and the mezzo- soprano Kitty Whatsley (lovely voice). I enjoyed it all: Mozart’s Symphony in F major, K75; Mysliveček’s aria ‘Non so se il mio peccato’ from Adamo ed Eva; C.P.E. Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in C minor, Wq43/4 (Steven Davine); Salieri’s scena ‘E non degg’io seguirla ... Lungi da te, ben mio’ from Armida; Hayden’s Symphony 44 in E minor ‘Trauer’ and with an encore of the third movement of Boccherini’s 11th String Quintet. James even arranged complimentary tickets for this event. And, finally, at the Jermyn Street Theatre, we enjoyed the delightful Mr and Mrs Nobody with Miranda Foster and Edward Baker-Duly. We laughed a lot.

At home, we had just opened a letter that informed us that our GP had closed his practice. A few minutes later, I was on my desk reaching for books from an upper shelf. From there I stepped onto the bed but completely lost my balance and, with nothing to grab onto, fell backwards. If Richard had not deflected my fall, I would have struck my head instead of my back against a metal armrest, and that might have been it. But my fall shoved Richard hard against another piece of furniture – injuring him even longer than I have been. We are

continuing to heal, but coughing and sneezing continues to be painful. Rix has since given us each a session of cranial sacral therapy. And in addition to all this, my arthritis continues to debilitate me and my walking. At the Marsden, Thyone tapped my legs for a week. My GP insisted I do x-rays before he would recommend a specialist. Thyone pushed Shakarchi and arranged for me to see a consultant at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Thanks now to Luthfur Rahman, I may be having the necessary hip replacement before the end of August.

In Aups, we lost both Nicolas Mailaender – our first friend there – and Joanne’s husband, Jim Gutenson, another good friend. For Wendy Griffin’s memorial, I was one of the speakers. The diminishment of our world continues. Even more alarming, Maggie’s son Jeff who we all suspected was suffering from long covid has since learned that his severe migraine headaches were actually being caused by a fall he had had last autumn. The blood that had accumulated in his brain has now been removed, and he already appears to be much better.

Another horror that occurred around the time of our ‘accident’ was that Richard came to believe that he had inadvertently thrown out with the trash his three i-pads that contained his art work and his music. Stoically, he handled it for the three or four days saying that he was still in shock. But the i-pads have been since found. And at a rather steep expense, I have rented a storage locker in the parking garage beneath our apartment building. Slowly, very slowly, we are moving boxes and boxes to it.

Other things include the €15,000 Dutch tax payment I have been required to pay as ‘income tax’ that is based on my property and savings. I have no income itself. In London, I have okayed the freehold purchase of our flat. We got through the gruellingly tense Spanish-Italian and England versus Italy UEFA European Football Championship matches. And also, there has been Federer’s sad loss at Wimbledon. My Pagan Spirit Gathering online talk on “The Heptatheon of Nature Spirituality: Embracing the Enchantment of the Proto-Gods Belonging to European-Speaking Peoples” went across well enough despite all the preceding technical difficulties, and I have also been able to complete my Heptatheonic essay which summaries much of my life’s work, albeit admittedly rather technically. I have since been interviewed by

Cometan in connection with his Astronic Tradition. He learned of me through my Ted talk.

And in Joyce’s Ulysses with which I continue slowly and even painfully I have come across both “Foutinus” (the pagan phallic god we know through Varages in France) and the term “paganry.” And finally, finally, we are having a true summery weekend moment in England – with the London temperature as I currently write at 29C and to reach 32C. We are off shortly to the park.