“No balcony but that view makes up for it”, I said when I moved in. I used to spend hours hanging out of the windows watching the world. Til the nets went up. It is not just that I have lost the view, I have lost the use of the windows for the purpose of looking out of. There’s a difference. It is engendering of a sense of imprisonment to see the netting every time one looks at or out of the window.

“The problem is not focusing the eyes, but rather ‘fusion’ of the
eye’s as they converge on the netting or the more distant objects. What
happens is, when they converge to either, the other images do not fall on
the corresponding regions of the retina. One then gets double vision or
‘rivalry’ as the brain can not combine the images. The point about a net is
that there are a series of positions for which the eyes will find
corresponding points and so give stable vision, but for each the background
objects have different disparities. This is extremely confusing, and can
indeed give nausea.” - from one of the world’s leading authorities on human vision and optics.

Last week I lost the first of several legal battles with the London Borough of Newham Council over this issue on a minor legal technicality. It is only a question of time until I win in court. The Judge last week - despite declaring there was no remedy the law offered him in the current legal approach - also described the netting as “not the best way forward” and a “mistake” and described Newham Council’s handling of the case as poor.

The first independent environmental health officer who visited exclaimed “what on earth made them think they could get away with that. It’s certainly illegal and a health hazard” - that was two years ago. The second confirmed it’s illegality and advised the council should “consult with appropriate experts to avoid further potentially expensive mistakes”.

Having spent thousands on illegally erecting the netting, Newham Council have wasted £8,000 defending the indefensible in court. This is just one of several looming court battles over the issue … meaning that not only have Newham Council been acting against the idependent advice they have had in hand for two years but are prepared to waste thousands and thousands of ratepayers money trying to defend something they know to be an illegal health hazard.

When my housing officer visited when I first complained he said “I can see exactly why you have a problem with it but now its up you will have a hard ime getting it removed”. I wish he hadn’t been so right. Yet for the London Borough Of Newham the rule is: “if you can avoid changing something you have already done then do so”. I wonder how much more of your money  Mayor Sir Robin “Everyone Blind” Wales and the Burgesses of Newham Council want to waste, in order that they avoid admitting and rectifying their “mistake”.

An accoustic solution similar to the mice scarers most of us know is available and would have cost Newham Council around £2,000 to purchase and install - a fraction of the costs spent on erecting this illegal health hazard and a quarter of the money they have just wasted in court. details at http://www.pestcontrol-products.com/birdcontrol_repellents_superbird.htm

Mortido and Libido, Freud said, ruled our lives. These ad-hoc structures are but points on a scale, limits within which one finds all aspects of self. Habits of perception and being dictate patterns that assume control. Parts of a whole, a system of control. A little commitee.

3D urgent scans promised 2D Routine booked.

A promised test not undertaken then reluctantly agreed after being told even if it shows something there is probably nothing they “can do”.

Scans which reveal no pathology in the UK. Read by a Russian doctor he can see the causal distortions in the neck that have evaded three scan attempts in the UK.

From these causes he deduces the problems with my body accurately, specifically those in the pelvis, hips, lower back and shoulder and neck.

Read by an American doctor they reveal the same thing and, he adds, the greatest danger is that I swallow my tongue.

Some people wonder what is going on. I soldier on. Eventually I will meet an honourable honest and capable surgeon who can understand what is happening and what needs to be done. Not that I am suggesting all those I have met to date are either dishonest or dishonorouable. That is far from the case. But understanding what is happening isn’t happening.

Comment spammers are rodents that leave crumbs of their own poo in comments of blogs to try and get people to click and see what Viagra online can be bought for or whatever.

They do not succeed in getting on my site. But the same IP addresses are trying again and again, leaving the same generic advertisements. I’ll get a filter, but for now I delete them by hand. They never even get published as I moderate every comment.

So go away. You know who you are. Unless it’s robots of course. Which it probably is.

The low in the sky late afternoon sun casts shadows longer than the people in the queue waiting to enter the Pompidou centre.

A woman as Matisse wanted her to be seen, one supposes.

A bowl of fruit detail from the same painting.

This mans stern face made me think a lot. I didn’t like it but I did like the picture.

The Violinist

What is art? Does it have purpose? In the moment of creation it has purpose. In those moments of it’s creation the artist may or may not concieve of a purpose for it beyond his immediate one of expression. It may be political, or educational. Or accidental. Or none at all.

This guy, guarding works in a hall at the Pompidou, was being art in real time. How do I know … he was being turned into art by many artists including myself. Of course he didn’t mean to become one of the museums most popular displays. His art was accidental, whilst mine was not.

The view from the balcony high in the Musee D’Orsay, heading for their single Matisse …I’m on a hunt to find what a certain someone loves in his work. She loved it when she was three years old and shocked a museum guard, at that age, asking where to find his works. When I arrived at the Orsay I was told they had only one! But this view was a work of art in and of itself.

Finally I track down their Matisse … I approach from a distance … wondering what draw it will have for me.

Up close and personal I am looking at this sole painting by Matisse at the Orsay … which unfortunately does little for me.

However, not far away I am drawn into and towards this painting by …I don’t know who Segall perhaps? i don’t remember. But I loved it. And later, at the Pompidou I found some more Matisse and found some things therein I did love.

And then I draw a deep breath and am blown away, shocked into silence, almost gasping for breath at the sight of this painting “The Villas de Bordighera” by Claud Monet. The finesse of the light and the style of this work shock me and for a moment there is just me and this painting only I am not there.

I saw some red fishes
Swimming in the crowd
At the Pompidou centre
They cried out loud
Come and swim with us
You’ll enjoy yourself
Come swim til dawn
Come swim all night
At the Pompidou centre
In the sea of the crowd
Cried the little red fishes
Swimming out loud

The Little Red Fishes ..  a special thank you to good old (dead) Matisse

Crossing the River Seine, heading from, the left bank to the right, I am stopped by a tourist asking me to take a photograph of himself and his family. “I’m English”, I say, “so now I am going to say ’say cheese’”, before taking the snap, which puts a smile on their faces - even though I am certain they haven’t a clue what I am saying or why. After taking the picture and exchanging a few words with him, and discovering he is from Macedonia, I walk on.

At the next bridge, as I leave the Ile de la Cite there is a man taking a picture of a young woman. He takes the photograph and hands back the camera. I had thought they were lovers but she thanks him, in English and they part, heading in opposite directions. There are people smiling and laughing in the cold but beutifully sunny and clear light of late morning.

I start to remember, having not set foot “en France” for several years, why I love this country so much. People here are enduringly polite to each other and deeply rooted on the ground and in the moment to moment reality of being, in a way the English are not. People here help each other, whist in England, the overuling principle is to help oneself, whether legitimiately or not.

Many English and Americans would no doubt disbelieve this, but then those people are stupid enough to come here without having learned a word of the French language. I have no doubt a Frenchman who walked into a coffeeshop in Detroit or Birmingham and asked for the toilet or a cup of coffee in French would find the response he got less than enthuiastic or informative.

I love France, I love the people and I love the languague so I am heavily biased myself of course. Yet having grown up in England and at various times lived in France for a total of four years, I know both countries, both peoples and both languages well enough.

England, America and the “help yourself” mentality embodied in the cultures, sytems and peoples of those countries stink. England and America in their new colonialism towards the Middle East, in order to secure political division amongst those peoples and supplies of oil for themselves, are commiting attrocities worse than a thousand Jihad Terrorists could achieve. Individualism stinks. It creates greed and a feeding frenzy of the ego that dehumanizes us and we do not even see it happening.

Since the Regan-Thatcher era, when the Iron Bitch announced there was no such thing as “society” and then set out to destroy wholesale that which she proclaimed was not there Britain has been heading steadily downhill, towards the cultural low that is “The American Way”. I can see so clearly in the light of this French day why the French are “contre” - against - everything for which that stands.

Together yet apart is the only way man can live, be it in the field of economics, international relations or even something as everyday as marriage. The me against you attitude embodied in the politico-economic domination of the Anglo-Saxon way is killing our planet. It is time the peoples of America, Britain and their followers in the world woke up to reality and smelled the bad odour of the path they follow. Total individualism and Britain, I’m sorry to say, stink.