Firths and Fourths

Star wars message from Charmaine the other day - “May the fourth be with you”.

Weblog. We blog. Web lock. Backlog. I have come up against resistance. The urge to write here no longer blithely bulldozes through self-consciousness and the fear of ridicule. Everything that comes into my mind under the “I could post this” heading is immediately crushed and nipped in the bud.

I cannot write the truth because someone might read it… I think I may well start an anonymous blog and a blog in French, or some combination of both, to beat at least some of my censors, or follow my original impulse which was to sprout forth freely in one or tother.

In the meantime, what am I actually free to write? That the first thing our new President elect did was fly off in the private jet of a multibillionaire friend and spend three days in said friend’s yacht with a Jacuzzi on the upper deck and a crew of 17 in waiting? Sending the silent message to disinherited urban youth that if they want to enjoy the same privileges, they only have to rise earlier and work harder.

In the picture, the gold structure reminds me of the ominous presence of bridges such as the ones over the Firth of Forth. The Forth’s Bridges. The original Forth Bridge is a railway bridge which was used as a metaphor for a job that can never be completed – a metal bridge, the paint had to be kept in a decent state of repair to protect it from the salt, and the bridge was so long that as soon as they reached one end it was time to start again at the other end.

Like a kind of giant palimpsest which you don’t have to physically erase, because the signs painted on it disappear gradually over time, through the action of the elements, but that requires regular reinscription just to stay in existence.