Psi Gate

Go through, my children! The time of miracles is upon us. Let us cast off sin and walk together to the Garden of the Lord. With God’s mercy we shall meet again on the other side.

 —Sister Miriam Godwinson, “Last Testament”

Propositions of wealth

1. Wealth is whichever input that helps one produces/procures a set of things that one value.

2. Wealth can produce intermediaries that are also wealth, i.e. follows #1.

3. Things that one value are not necessarily wealth; if no things are valued, then there could be no wealth.

Eternally beautiful

When I think about travel in my mind, I see a girl on a boat, scantily clad, eternally beautiful, hair blowing in the wind. She has no problems, no fucked up love life, no issues with money. It’s just an endless adventure with the promise of late night kisses and skies filled with stars.

 4 ways travel has hurt me

The Long Dark

You wander the long road to observe the quiet apocalypse and chronicle the passing of an era.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, judges would be sent out from Westminster every seven years to adjudicate on any disputes that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is rich.’ She implored the judge: ‘I have none to help me save God and you.’

Alice then might be Alice today. What should she do? She cannot simply take the seven shillings from Thomas. Not only does the law forbid it, Thomas’s wealth means he probably has the power to take it back (or worse). So without access to a court, Alice has to rely on his goodwill for her money and her surcoat. This shows the first reason to care about access to justice, by which I mean being in a position to have your legal claims heard and enforced by a court. Such access is necessary if our rights are to have real content; without it, the rich and powerful can exploit the poor and weak.

 Necessity or ideology

Writing's on The Wall

How do I live? How do I breathe?
When you're not here I'm suffocating
I want to feel love, run through my blood
Tell me is this where I give it all up?

Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice

On his retirement Fisher advised Harold Macmillan against appointing Michael Ramsey as his successor. The conversation, as reconstructed by Ramsey, went as follows:

Fisher: I have come to give you some advice about my successor. Whomever you choose, under no account must it be Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of York. Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore, he is entirely unsuitable as archbishop of Canterbury. I have known him all his life. I was his headmaster at Repton.

Macmillan: Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice. You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.

Macmillan duly appointed Ramsey, who was a reforming archbishop, making his mark as a supporter of the liberation of homosexuality, as a strong opponent of apartheid and of the Smith regime in Rhodesia, and as an influential voice opposing curbs on immigration for Kenyan Asians.

Mary Bennett, Oxford 

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."