Jul 102015
 

It might take me a while to find the words; the heat saps my will. At first the mid-thirties heat here was enjoyable, was welcome: it was wonderful just to feel actually hot. But now in the third week of these temperatures, I find myself envying the temperature in Totnes: twenty would be quite warm enough, to give me break from endlessly sweating and drinking water. No heavy shower of rain to cool things down. Which is unusual. And the forecasts suggest it will stay like this until the weekend when I will be catching that flight back to the UK.

Whilst sweltering I have been attending to the political/financial situation in Greece and the negotiations with the EU financial elite plus IMF. Why cannot this elite think? They seem to believe that they can continue to think in the same old knee-jerk reflexes of their neo-liberal training. And this urge to punish, where does that come from?

And there is also the Tour de France happening which I always find somewhat addictive.

But here we are and as usual it is a question of what is the writing on the wall. Or to put it another way, what are the emerging thoughts in this being that I could refer to as “mine”, though in another sense it is stuff that doesn’t really belong to me or anyone. As though the thoughts might emerge, evolve, develop from the density of rock, the stones of the wall.

And now just to avoid any new thinking about what is going on in the world we have a budget from the omnishambles chancellor george osbocameron presenting his card tricks once again. I begin to feel that I’m on a sinking ship and the supposed captain is quaffing champagne, giving out big bags of gold to his mates and telling us how well everything is going. Which I suppose it is for him and his mates. No doubt the rescue helicopter is on standby ready to whisk them off to some off-shore paradise.

In the evening warmth of Piazza Santissima Annunziata we watched a documentary, Jose & Pilar – Saramago and his wife/dynamo. Perhaps a bit overlong but fascinating and moving. The atheist saint passes on. One of our heroes from the decade between twenty and ten years ago. Documentaries have moved into the forefront of my recent thinking. I’m thinking of the documentaries such as the work of Adam Curtis but also the recent films (not yet seen) looking at the life and work of Amy Winehouse and Robert Wilson of the Beach Boys. And working with fragments.