Do not go gentle

Packing, ticklists, choices, spatial geometry. No time for a properly constructed blip, a ragbag of random thoughts

Our neighbours are gardening gurus; we are caretakers while they are away. I photographed a tangled wilderness of parsnip growing beside a brussels sprouts forest, across from a barricade of leeks. Only the horseradish is showing signs of age. I suppose I'm looking at the Christmas dinner bed

How do they have honeysuckle that seems to flower for eleven months a year? In centuries past, this would all add up to suspicions of the occult. So would the weather - summer refuses to die. A queen bumblebee working hard taking nectar from honeysuckle on the 25th of October. I have not seen any data, but are we about to have headlines about another record breaking month? We have only lit the stove once this autumn; at this stage of the year, that is unprecedented

I read a review of a book about Determinism - the philosophical position that all events, including all the choices - momentous or mundane - that we make on a minute by minute basis, are entirely determined by a myriad of pre-conditions, so numerous that we could not possibly discover or enumerate them. The apparent corollary is that our experience of our own free will is illusory: where we think we are making decisions, our choice is in fact determined by everything that has happened to us, around us and before we existed - a chain of cause and effect going back to the beginning of time. 

From the article, I get the impression that this is the accepted view of the majority of philosophers, which is startling, with all kinds of implications for crime and punishment, economic equality, personal morality and the awarding of school prizes. Ultimately, if everything I do is pre-determined, am I truly alive, or merely a conduit - a cause to generate more effects. Thinking about this is at once absorbing and annihilating. I had to stop

About 18 months ago, a new neighbour brought a cat to live next door. Previously feral, it lost an argument with a car when it was four years old and, as a consequence, lost one back leg, it has now lived that way for many years, seemingly little hindered by its disability. It is deeply suspicious of strangers. If I talked to it, it would 'talk' back, and behave in a friendly way, but if I approached it would withdraw; the closest it got was smelling the end of my fingers. Yesterday, it chose to trust, accepted to be petted, and stayed for as long as I was prepared to carry on. Today was the same. The cat is a philosopher; it believes it made a conscious choice

The Eagle and Child (aka the Bird and Baby) - the Oxford pub where J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis discussed their work - has been sold to the Ellison Institute of Technology. Yes, that Ellison. It is to be renovated by Norman Foster (I'm not making this up).  Above the bar wiil be a spotlit picture of Saruman the White (played in the film by Christopher Lee) "illustrating the corruption of power; 'man of skill or cunning' - his desire for knowledge and order leads to his fall" (OK, I made that up)