smokingboot

Enjoyed the Witchery.

Not particularly redolent of Johnson and Boswell, but lavish and full of deliciousness anyway. It was a lovely evening, but it's not great seeing the streets of the city deserted two nights before Xmas. Nicola Sturgeon is bringing in some new and seemingly preposterous rules for night clubs, let's hope it extends no further. While I am not a supporter of getting people back to work just to pump money into the economy, even with government support businesses here may be in very real danger. Economically folk can't keep it up, and emotionally they're on the edge of done.

Study of the I Ching hexagram 60, Limitation is awfully good on telling us how marvellous it is to set limits on ourselves, (No-one ever mentions what a colossal bore Confucius seems to have been; guy needed a rave, some booze, an ill-advised tryst somewhere in his pristinely grey existence to make him bearable) but it also points out that 'galling limitation must not be persevered in', or to quote Cleary on it: When discipline gets to the point of inflicting suffering, it brings on danger itself even where there was no danger; you will only suffer toil and servility which is harmful and has no benefit.

No benefit. I don't know if the discipline has gone too far yet, or if it just seems to be applied inconsistently, a real strain on credibility. Fewer masks on trains now; nothing to be done about it, can't throw people off if they've bought a ticket, and anyway that would need, what, police on the trains? Security staff able to remove people? More money needed when there's less of it about, more staff needed when there's fewer to be found. Not happening. And if you can't enforce regulations already in place, adding new ones is distinctly unimpressive.

Besides, the question is getting louder, if the vaccines work and the boosters work, why can't everyone go back to living normally? There's no real satisfactory answer to that yet.

**

I have a curious phenomenon occurring. I keep remembering things that are not actually part of my life and never have been. It's not like dreaming, though it does happen when I am thinking of two things at the same time, say if I am paying about 70% attention to something in front of me and then, in a sort of drifty way, remember a scene from

From nowhere. From nothing.

Last night it was about three guys who -

But, I had to interrupt myself, you don't know those people. You didn't see them or this situation. You must have seen it on TV and your mind has caught the picture, interpreted it. It's a kind of waking dream, you get this, you always have done.

And yet I am suddenly more aware of it as an anomaly, because it feels real, like there is another world I also live in, very similar to this but not. Next time it happens I'll pay it more attention, but when it occurs it is so ordinary it's like real life, the way one doesn't focus on say, going to the corner shop or driving to work. Trying to work out if it's peculiar. Hmm.

And in the meantime last night, an actual dream occurred, in which I was somehow in a house of illicit dealings, a sort of bordello/gambling/money laundering type place, and while I didn't take part in those things, somehow I was complicit just by being there. There was a piece of art I was working on, marginalia in a manuscript, when we were raided by the police and I managed to sneak out. Lots of people outside including Posh Spice, who accused me of betraying her. She was vociferous too! I said some vague stuff and got away with my art, found R at home but was trying to conceal paperwork to do with the house from him...