July 2025

I was looking through various poems by Dylan Thomas and re-stumbled over this one which felt familiar again:

I Have Longed To Move Away

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.

Dylan Thomas (27.10.1914 – 9.11.1953)

It is, indeed, a trying and testing time to be alive but also certainly a good time with many futures still open to strive for. There is so much going on all the time and so much thunder and lightening that it is nigh impossible to do as you feel is right but still…

I shall deliberately give comments on current political developments a miss because I find a lot of it more than just worrisome and I am almost in daily mourning for lost opportunities.

Digital dependency?

One issue I find very interesting at the moment is a sudden dawning realisation (in Europe) that being dependent on the USA for almost all of our digital technology is rapidly becoming more and more of a problem and that this dependency could have serious consequences. Various city and state governments in Europe are moving away from a Microsoft dependency and I think that the switch to Windows 11 after October 2025 will force more to follow… which I feel is essentially a good thing. Might there be an EU-financed Linux Distribution with Office functionality built in? Might there be a more mainstream development in mobile operating systems other than Google and Apple? No clear signs yet but this may well become an issue.

And all this in a dizzyingly short time-frame at least for the more myopic amongst us.

and some other things….

I have now moved fully over to a new job nearer to home which is good and uncomplicates many daily things. We are keeping the eyes open for a small house somewhere nearby or at least nearish so hopefully some news soon about that (I have never owned a house so am quite intrigued to see how it might feel).

I think I shall post this as a quick Sunday morning update and will add and edit as things come in…

Update 01:

Oh, by the way, I have given up smoking since mid March 🙂

Update 02:

There are rumblings and ruminations about a house, nothing definite to report yet but maybe, just maybe, this has a chance of working out… 🙂

Update 03:

Managed to break off a mirror off the Guzzi whilst adjusting it so have added 2 rather smart new light-weight mirrors which are quite cool. It needs a quite look-over at the workshop and back brake has gone a bit feeble but otherwise all fine at the moment.