If I told you that I went to a fair on Saturday, bought a jar of chutney from the WI, drank real ale, and watched morris dancers, you would probably form one impression in your mind. The reality was a little different: we went to the Nunhead Cemetery Open Day, and wandered amongst the stalls and the dead in a crowd of the living that contained a sizeable contingent of goths. The dancing came from the Black Swan Border Morris, resplendent in black and purple and a lot of tattoos. We headed to the Ivy House for lunch, where I had that pint (Here Comes the Sun elderflower pale ale from 360 Degree Brewing Co.) and watched a repeat performance from Black Swan who had also made their way to the same pub.

Morris dancers. They are dressed in black with purple accents, and are striking their sticks with each other and shouting.

Black Swan Border Morris

Interesting 2025 on Wednesday evening lived up to its billing as usual. The most inspiring talk was Lessons in Resistance from South African Sci-Fi by Lauren Beukes and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nwalo, who reminded us of all the ways that people fought fascism in apartheid South Africa. I also loved learning from Cate McLaurin about the Dutch practice of tegelwippen to make geveltuinen: strip gardens along the façades of buildings.

I went and looked up the obituary of Somerset Struben de Chair that Anthony Dhanendran recommended. It seems like a bit more colour could be added to de Chair’s misleadingly sedate Wikipedia entry.

I was so pleased with the CD I picked up for 25p in the second-hand music shop, a collaboration album between an Okinawan sanshin player and an American guitarist. I listened to it. I enjoyed it. Then I looked up the guitarist on Wikipedia.

Was everyone working in the music industry in the 70s and 80s a depraved sex criminal?

While reading the latest issue of the LRB, in Adam Thirlwell’s piece on Macunaíma, I came across a passage

It was Tarsila who moved fastest. In 1923, back in Paris, she painted A Negra (‘The Black Woman’), her first picture in a new method that used flat colour and long biomorphic lines.

and realised, I just saw that painting a couple of weeks ago, at the Tarsila exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao. It’s only a coincidence, but it pleases me to have the art put into a wider context.

In the same issue, James Butler summarises the current political situation with savage accuracy:

Labour is governing badly. It has pointlessly squandered the popular goodwill that accompanied its return to office. Its leader is a besuited void. It is embarrassed by its few real achievements (a rise in the minimum wage, expanded workers’ rights, partial nationalisation of rail) and cowed by corporate tantrums. It says and does nothing about water monopolists stealing money from the public purse and fouling rivers. Homelessness and drug addiction are ever more obvious on the streets. The cost of living still bites hard. The government has imprisoned itself in a cage of fiscal rules and taxation promises wholly inadequate to the rapidly changing global picture, and its most eye-catching economic strategy is a further reduction of welfare.

Amongst all the completely warranted indignation at Keir Starmer’s adoption of inflammatory rhetoric on immigration (“take back control”; “a squalid chapter”), I haven’t hear anyone point out the other problem with it: he talks only about Britain and warns of becoming “an island of strangers”, but the UK is not, at the time of writing, just Britain, and it is not just an island.

Agus mar sin, beidh mé ag Gaeltacht Chois Tamaise an deireadh seachtaine seo chugainn. Tá súil agam nach bhfuil dearmad déanta agam ar mo chuid Gaeilge ar fad!

Links from this week: