Tempus fugit vertiginously fast; gloria mundi transits like it’s going out of fashion; Carthage is being destroyed relentlessly over and over; my elderly bones sing a droning dirge from dawn till dusk. And I have become a tedious statistic to people that once pledged their knowledge and their endeavours to the promotion of the wellbeing of their fellow bipedal carbon-based sentient life-forms. One day you are a heedless bright young thing with flowers on her hair and next you are a wreck, most of what’s left of your mind occupied by Shoggoths and the ineffable Cagnolitos of Tindalos. But why bovvah? Let us go, once more, with Mehitabel: Toujours gai, toujours gai. Argh, me hearties. The phantom whale is a-coming! Look, off she blows!

Here’s a couple of sunrise scenes. Let it never be said I’m all Gloom & Doom. Well Met. In her quest for kindred spirits, young Miss BattyBall has been travelling along the Via Spaccata for many moons, on her way to the Open Marshes. Half a mile before the Fuzzy Crossroads, where the Via intersects the Slippery Slope, she is met by a couple of  chubby sauroids bearing gifts and a small cluster of sentient stardust, there to assist her in the often perilous negotiating of said junction. Also to provide some much needed comic relief; the sentient cluster has a nearly inexhaustible stock of crappy jokes, spurious anecdotes and utterly absurd but otherwise entirely truthful and accurate tittle-tattle. Sunrise Demonettes. They dance with the rising sun, they do, these flaming creatures. Just for the pure joy of it.

I’ve got a new toy; a new app for the tablet. I actually paid for this app, believe it or not. Other than being pixelatious, as opposed to vectoroid, it’s quite groovy. It’s called ArtRage and this is my first serious attempt to get something out of it. The scene takes place somewhere in the generic South. Actually, it’s happening not to far from Uluru. There.

Weeping Lizards. For Federico, who wrote, and for Paco, who sang, and for Maria Clara, who likes them both.

El lagarto está llorando.
La lagarta está llorando.
El lagarto y la lagarta
con delantaritos blancos.
Han perdido sin querer
su anillo de desposados.
¡Ay, su anillito de plomo,
ay, su anillito plomado!
Un cielo grande y sin gente
monta en su globo a los pájaros.
El sol, capitán redondo,
lleva un chaleco de raso.
¡Miradlos qué viejos son!
¡Qué viejos son los lagartos!
¡Ay cómo lloran y lloran.
¡ay! ¡ay!, cómo están llorando!

Not a joke. A little old lady with perhaps a touch of dementia, walks into a supemarket and  steals a pint of milk. She gets arrested and the full force on The Law falls on her poor addled bonce and she gets called names into the bargain. A fat cat bursting at the seams with fraudulently obtained cream hides his profits in some nice little tax haven. Nothing happens to him and he gets feted and praised and called a benefactor of mankind by the Mainstream Meedja; every dark, murky night millions of peasant dream of being just like him one day. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I know “monsters. with more good sense and integrity that either the fat cats or the peasants. There. PS. I seldom bother with topic themes but this one about the leaked off-shore accounts “scandal” (and the subsequent meedja response) was too good to miss. Also, it coincided with one of my latest lots of monstrous larvae. These two are called Sol and Elvira, like the daughters of Messer don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, alias el Cid.

Update 11/04/16 For don Esteban Bucknell, because I kind of promised. According to Google Translate specula means, amongst all the other more obvious things, watchtower. That’ll do me. Meet yet another relative of the MadGirl-who-stands-before-tanks-and-dies-young. This one is likely to last a little longer!if she’s very careful how she opens her fridge. Offer her a wee dram now and again, along with your requests, and if she deems your requests righteously groovy she’ll see what she can do. And because too much of even a just moderately good thing is wonderful, have a B&W version, just in case.

By the Sea. (This one is for the folks at the Met Office and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.) I have a dream. I’m sitting by the sea, listening to the shipping forecast, musing dark musings and watching time trolling past, when a colossal and kindly sea serpent called Teresina, like my maternal grandmother, pops out of the primeval depths and makes me an offer I can’t refuse. PS. The two little apprentices accompanying the sea serpent are a strange tribute of sorts to the tactical PR nous of those bible bashers that materialize on my doorstep occasionally. Invariably, they have in tow a couple of impossibly cute small children that, also invariably, stop me from telling the godbothering adults exactly what I think of their highly refusable offers to save my black soul. I just tell them I’m a Buddhist or a Post-Lapsarian Anabaptist or, my favourite, a certified agent of the local Jesuit chapter. They don’t like that one one tiny little bit, they don’t, and they bugger off double quick.

Here be a couple of compadritos wot have recently joined the Family.  Mistah Fox. He very angrysad to looksee peoples nobrainy iniquities. Mistah Fox he cry manymany angrysad tears and he make bigbig rain and bigbig rain make bigboggy flood for to carry big trouble awash. There. Next time Mistah Fox come see you you give him tea and muffins to make his belly sweet and maybe he let you play with his mystic rubber ducky and his flying fishis.

2. Miss Bananahat. Miss Bananahat likes to go walkabout. Wherever she goes she takes her own vegetation, a couple of  totem poles and some walking companions. Here she can be seen with two Angry Young Worms and a pair of puppies not-quite-of Tindalos she has been looking after whilst the parents are away on a much-deserved long weekend break in Magaluf, where there’s very good soul hunting & eating to be had. PS. Miss Bananahat is a nice lass but she can be a cheeky cow, she can. These totem poles are mine; she’s nicked them from me and won’t give them back. I’m not in the mood for an open confrontation so I’ll just have to rescue them back from her. The Shoggies will help and perhaps the Cagnolitos, who are notoriously fickle in their loyalties.

Update 23/03/16 The Reluctant Baby. For Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith -long time no read but obviously not forgotten. And for my compadre Patricio, also a great believer in the things that dwell “at the bottom of one’s head”.

 

Another Fine Mess! Candidates? Take your pick: Tory policy at large; the impending TTIP; the looming American election; Boris Johnson’s gob; Teresa May’s brain; 99% of the Knesset; the BBC, the Daily Mail, Simon Stevens, Atos “Healthcare. … No shortage of runners, indeed. Please feel free to suggest your own top three un-favourites.

Brief Encounter III (or is it VI?). The young Pygmy Dino who showed such great talent for storytelling in the recent Serpentine shindig, has encountered an equally fresh-faced Cagnolito Not-Quite-of Tindalos. An anecdote or two later the wretched hound is totally gobsmacked, utterly dazed and near blowing a fuse. There’s the mesmerizing power of a good yarn for you, chaps. Out there in the distance, Doña Alegrí­a looks fondly on the budding Svengali and thinks, not without some pride, that her assessment of the creature’s natural gifts were spot on.

Update 11/03/16 Have a break. Do not have a Kit-Kat. Have a stroll by the pond instead and talk to your favourite stroppy wee fishis. Life can be sweet, sometimes.

 It’s good to know where one is. The more so if you are a free-floating Ronin Balloon with a tendency to getting lost, especially in the Badlands. Thank Bumba for helpful creatures like the Hospitality Birdie and the Silly Clouds. PS. The paranoid-looking wee flower has an excruciatingly sad story of her own and a very good reason for looking perennially askance at all & sundry strangers. I might tell it to you some other time if the spirit grabs me.

All praise Priceless Protoplasm! The Shoggies have coalesced in a single massive entity to celebrate Shoggothohood, see just for the Hell of it. The baby flowers with untidy hairstyles have joined in a merry tribal dance. Just because they feel like it. So!Viva Sevilla y olé! (Why not?)

My politics are not popular. We knew that. Still, the more they are disliked, the more the p’litical stuff bubbles out. Preverse, I call it… So, have the latest batch. Fishy shenanigans. Decisions, decisions… The story so far. 1. The button. I don’t know what the button does. 2. The Tadpoles. Well…Tadpoles will be Tadpoles, that’s a well-known fact. 3. The helpful small fish. His whole extremely large extended family was wiped out a few years gone in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of BP’s little accident. His name is Leonardo. And that’s all I can reveal, honest. They never tell me anything… 🙁

The Scrounger. Creep Cameron was in Brussels, prattling away with his forked tongue, boring everyone to distraction. With one tongue he raved against foreign-imposed limitations on our sovereignty. With the other he has just sold the country down the murky river of the power of the Multimafionals to sue the pants of anyone impertinent enough to demand they pay taxes. And the NHS to Simon Stevens. Back at the home Chicken Ranch, the Farrago Fright and sundry large cattle of that ilk (most of Laughbour included), also rant against foreign powers European (but not Transatlantic) in particular and foreigners in general. The small fry bleat away the Daily Mail Mantras or the Guardian’s Party Line, according to preferred diet. Nobody mentions (if they know at all what it is) the secretly conceived, developed, discussed and soon to be passed TTIP. Everybody thinks we should bomb another “middle eastern” country. Possibly flatten it to kingdom come, so we can stop once and for all this horrid stream of ghastly migrants hell bent on swamping our green and pleasant land with the sole aim of assaulting our women and making away with all the council housing, hip operations and orange juice.                   Shoggoths very seldom weep, just in case anyone was wondering.