My love story 

I see so little of love nowadays,

I need to go retrace my ways

My magic and romance. 

Less morose or melancholy, 

Or fear to enter the fray

And say in a peaceful way 

I believe our fated love story

In mind and body. 

Love should still be something sacred, 

Something more spiritual than real, 

That I cannot quite capture, only know, 

Only feel with every beat of my heart, 

Every breath I take, 

Every look upon the creation

Curled up in bed 

Like a fairy.

I once upon a time found

sleeping next to me who I awoke

From some romantic dream

Who so softly spoke and disappeared

before it could be captured 

I search the sheets in vain

Still feel now the pain

Cheated many times 

By the loveless features of my age 

Still seeking creature comfort

Like some lonely girl or boy 

To fill this lovelorn page

With the hope and joy

to awake one day

My dream to stay

The poem I wrote yesterday doesn’t seem so great the next and perhaps that’s a natural reaction when the intensity is no longer there. It can be improved and I hope it will be over the coming days.

I woke at 4am this morning because it was cold so I got up and made myself some Ovaltine, gave a drop of warm milk to the cat, went back to bed and read the introduction by John Guest on the life and works of Oscar Wilde. I sometimes think that we bring about our own destruction and perhaps we need to fall for others to rise. There certainly can be no level playing field in a society with so much disparity.

I think we are entering into a new age of decadence only rather than the individual attitude and aesthetic movement that formed around Oscar Wilde with its excesses I think we need or should I say I need to move towards a larger measure of self control, frugality and socialism not merely because economic circumstances requires it but because it is the right thing to do.

In Wilde’s restless times there was a growing sense of individual freedom and responsibility but according to Guest it seemed couple with a recklessness, not in keeping with Victorian morality however hypocritical it may have been with its laissez faire standards leading to the mechanisation of Britain at the expense of the poor and working classes. 

The part I find interesting in this introduction is that ‘Imagination, fantasy and romanticism, which had been restricted from excess by the decorous tone of the previous period, took their head, and a new aestheticism, claiming to be a law unto itself, sallied forth unhampered by moral restrictions. ‘Beauty had existed long before 1880’, wrote Max Beerbohm. ‘It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her debut[…] Wilde was the focus point of a spirit, ready and anxious for release, rather than a prophet in a hostile land. In leading the dangerous way toward new experiments, he had no lack of applause.

Throughout his writings one finds rapier thrusts at established codes of thought and behaviour: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all’; ‘The first duty in life is to as artificial as possible’; ‘I can sympathise with everything except suffering’. […] There was an underlying seriousness of purpose but his own decadence or moral falling off led to his critique of society to also being rejected. His own artistic or personal lust for experience went beyond the limits: ‘sensation is no sooner satisfied than stranger and rarer fruits are demanded to stimulate the jaded palate.’

The party was over and the individual held accountable was in jail. 

Despite Wilde’s own belief that ‘an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them’ he would perhaps have avoided censure if he had curbed his aesthetic life in accordance with what undoubtedly rings through in his social satire.

It is hard to know what is the most effective way to communicate with the masses but I personally believe I must live the kind of life I’d like others to emulate and that must be a life that is not artificial but sincerely reflected in one's work.

It occurred to me that I should perhaps volunteer to give an online course in the art of storytelling on our local radio so that among other things to activate my activism in the community this year.