You really must share with me how to enter the title and date on these missives, I’m such a techno nincompoop I don’t even know how to do that – crap!!

OK, so as we’re both subversive anarchists at heart, the rather beautifully balanced idea I had of you writing on your Sunday morning, and me replying on mine, seems to have been sandblasted out of existence by our spontaneous enthusiasm, oh well, what the hell…

One of my BIG obsessions about current day living (to your point about lack of media etc) is that, with the incessant flow of noise, musack, news, communication, social media, and other bullshit, we have lost the ability to CONTEMPLATE, to REFLECT. It’s really quite ironical in a sense, as this has been a leitmotif of my marriage since long before the scourge of “social” media (very little I can think of being less ‘social’). Diane is from a mid-Western American settler heritage of pioneers, hard work, hitting nails into planks to build barns, monosyllabic conversations about milk, and a definite aversion to anything as poncey as “reflection”, which equates to laziness, and not getting up in time to milk the cows. She has mellowed, as we all do, but the early years of our marriage were tough for me, especially the excruciating Saturday mornings when she listed the “achievements” she wanted to see accomplished over the weekend. She now has a demanding job and no children at home, so sleeping in, brunch, and morning sex have thankfully replaced mending gutters and moving furniture into bizarrely similar but completely, bafflingly un-important, configurations as suitable goals for meaningful achievement.

I must say I had been intrigued by the Luscious Lumley and her Garden Bridge for London. It did seem a touch self-indulgent, given the state of the nation and the paroxysms of self-doubt created by Boris and Brexit. How complicated we humans manage to make life, what a terribly tangled web we weave!! Are we just practising to deceive? That would seem highly appropriate in the Trump era.

Oh boy, what a eulogy you shared with me, your friend Pat for Hugh Masekela. How wonderful to be remembered like that, warts and all, mind you, as she mentioned the booze and drugs. Success is something about which, like reflection and contemplation,  I think we have somehow lost a crucial part. Success is, in the realest sense, to have left some kind of mark on the world. In your and my cases, this might be, quite modestly, to have left some pretty decent progeny who will do some pretty decent stuff to those around them. We probably both hope it might be a touch more than that, our legacy, but this makes me think of the Robert Louis Stevenson quote, “Little do ye know your own blessedness, for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour”. I’m labouring here, baby!

One more reaction to your missive, about rejection (ref Doris Lessing). Winston Churchill was, I imagine, an awfully cantankerous and objectionable bugger, but he sure as hell left some great quotes behind. His definition of success was, to my mind, just fabulous, and has sustained me through many setbacks. He said “success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”. Hallelujah!!!

Money for Mexican wall is “off the table” says Senator Chuck Schumer. The Democrats have reneged on the deal they struck with President Trump days ago in order to end the government shutdown. This marks “another turn in the fluid debate about how to shield from deportation hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children”. Listen, I’m with the Democrats here, of course, but for fuck’s sake, can we please try to steer a consistent course and not have to rely on deception to achieve things?? Do we really have to have people signing deals they renege on 3 days later, as if that’s a completely natural thing to do? What happened to decency? What happened to “my word is my bond”? I seriously do believe we have lost the place! How do our children view this behaviour, as a model??

Love, hugs, bewilderment, eternal hope from NYC

Jamie