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The roads of East Sussex are in a shocking state of repair- and driving over to Bexhill yesterday evening in a van with very poor supension we had a fully satisfying experience of every pothole we traversed- and I'm feeling more than usually banged about this morning.

We- Alan, Jim and myself- were over in Bexhill to pick up a library of what- for want of a better phrase- I'm going to call "books on spirituality". Mari assembled it and used to keep it in the Bexhill Meeting House until Them as Rule the Meeting House said they didn't want it any more and would she take it away, please (only they probably didn't say "please".) When we at Easbourne heard it was going free we said we'd have it. It's a great little collection. Mari no longer attends Bexhill Meeting house- though it's just round the corner from her flat- but catches the bus into Hastings instead.

Jim, by the way, is the friend who produced the AI talk I wrote about yesterday which disturbed our other friend so much. He played it for us as we were driving over- and Alan and I sat there going, "Scary!" and "Amazing!" as we bumped along. Not the least of the marvels is that all this magic was done on an i-phone. Yes, I know, I know! In a year or two this will be so run-of-the-mill no-one think anything of it- but right now let us savour this moment of amazement and awe....

It spooked him.

So much so that he felt he needed to share the upset with me.

He'd recorded a short talk on a friend's phone and then the friend had pushed a button or two- and created a discussion of the talk by two people who don't exist. They sounded entirely real- and- the truly scary thing for him- is the things they were saying were intelligent and insightful....

"Wow" I said. "How fascinating!"

'But it means we'll never be able to trust any media ever again."

"Media has never been trustworthy. Maybe this new tech will wake us up to that...."

"September", "November" and "December" all rhyme with "remember." It's a happy accident that poets have thanked heaven for and sometimes abused. Cue many poems of sad reminiscence, generally featuring falling leaves and naked boughs.....

But what does "October" rhyme with?

"Take thought and be sober
"Tis nearly October...."

But lets not be sober. Lets crank up the cheerfulness to counter the gathering chill and the lengthening nights.....

I enjoyed my solstice. I wore one of my brightly coloured smoking caps in celebration. I'd been feeling my age, but yesterday I was feeling someone else's....

Ailz says something as I'm going out the door and I don't quite get it.

"Hollyhocks?" I ask, making a guess at it.

"Equinox," she says.

Ah, yes, so it is! Day and Night are in perfect balance- a magical time.

(As though all times were not magical....)

I pick up The Witches Bible by Janet and Stuart Farrar and refresh my memory. The Autumn Equinox, they say, was when the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated- at the climax of which-allegedly- the initiate was shown an ear of corn and told "In silence is the seed of of wisdom gained".

How very Quaker that is.

The Met office says it's cloudy this morning. The Met office is wrong. The sky is cloudless, the light is golden, the hills have moved very near.....

And I'm seeing blue tits. At least four of them. They have never visited this garden in such strength before- at least not while I've been watching. We're in the Council's black books for feeding "Big Birds" but that was never our intention. We're just feeding birds- and is it our fault if the small ones stay away?

Well, maybe that's changing.....

I have a friend who used to be a bit of a mover and shaker, but he's an old chap now and has been out of action for a while. Wanting to get back into the game he rang a magazine whose editorial staff he'd once have been pally with and they put him on hold and played muzak at him until he went away.....

And the moral of the story is.....

In the few days since he is alleged to have killed Mr Kirk the shooter has been MAGA, a Guyper, a liberal, a closet gay, a trans activist, a loner, a conspirator, a patsy, a CIA and/or Mossad agent- and probably other things as well. Every faction in US politics has claimed him for the group they hate the most- and now the water is so muddied it may prove impossible to establish the truth.....

I dreamed I was in an antiques emporium offering an object for sale. The thing I was selling was a small replica of the Mayan Calendar- or was it a Yorkshire pudding? Anyway it had shiny glass objects buried inside. The stallholder who bought it didn't offer money. Instead she gave me a flute or whistle that had a small bird-cage built into it. "Is there a canary? " I wondered. But, no, there wasn't.

The recording equipment was in fixed positions- a long way away from the action. The mics picked up on the military band but not what anyone was saying. We saw lots of men in suits (very few women) standing about waiting for something to happen- with a few characters in the mix who looked as if they'd been costumed by the D'Oyly Carte. Some of these fancy-dress people were actually female, including one very short Beefeater.

The First Lady was wearing a hat that hid her eyes.

The sky was overcast.

Picture Diary 103

1. Elixir

2. Sundancers

3. Happy Horse

4. Keep to the Path

5. Going, going.....

6. City on the Hill

I dreamed "we" drove into a service station to fill up the car. It was a new kind of service station --roofed in with a carpet on the floor- and it was unclear whether we could drive into it and the woman at the desk seemed to think our doing so irregular. The petrol pump was a new kind of petrol pump and we had to work out how to use it- at which point I wandered away and climbed a slope and saw, over the fence, a collection of wonderful ancient buildings shining on top of the hill- and wanted to photograph them but couldn't frame them quite to my liking. I wanted to stay in this place and explore it properly but I knew everyone else would want to continue the journey so I turned and saw the family I'd forgotten about down below- and my mother looking harassed and knew I needed to get back down there and muck in and show an interest.....

Ailz asks me if I "rate" the woman I was listening to yesterday who was talking about The Shift- and I say, "Yes".

But I'm not entirely happy with my answer. "Rate" I want to add isn't the same as "Believe". I like the woman, I like her energy and her take on things, but I don't necessarily believe her.

I collect information- esoteric and non-esoteric (much as I collect knick-knacks ) then add it to the data banks and see how it fits with everything else that's in there. My assent to anything rarely goes beyond "very likely".

Edna was in her car, she says, and the news coming over the radio was so distressing she could either have burst into tears or drunk a carton of custard- and she chose the latter. She drank it then and there, in the car, having first- I hope- pulled over to the side of the road.

Strange days, these, odd days, most peculiar days- with time moving so fast and all sorts of mad things happening- like Elon Musk, supposedly the world's richest man, speaking by satellite to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's discombobulated, flag-draped hordes on the streets of London and calling for the otherthrow of a government not his own- and the rain is falling in torrents and the wind blowing high. It's confusing, giddy-making, sick-making even. I don't feel too good- and I don't think there's anything physically wrong with me.

Someone I was listening to the other day explained it thusly: We're going through the Shift/the close of the Kali Yuga/the transition into the Age of Aquarius/the Last Days- and the world is moving out of third dimensional reality- where time is strictly sequential- into fourth dimensional reality- where it isn't- and our bodies which are still three-dimensional are having difficulty coping. Also, to make things even more messed up, our consciiousness is increasingly open to fifth-dimensional reality which is where things get really wild.....

Our radio controlled clock lost exactly four hours this morning. And by "exactly? I mean the minutes were right but the hour was wrong- and we were getting the time as it was in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Buenos Aires.

Very odd. I've never known a clock do that before....

So what exactly did the thunder say?

I've been reading and thinking about The Wasteland all my adult life but I've never thought to ask this fundamental question.

Eliot does tell us- but he tells us in Sanscrit- and then translates it in one of his not very helpful footnotes- and, well, I should have paid closer attention but I didn't. My bad.....

Anyway, the thunder woke me up this morning. Da, Da, Da! And one thing led to another and I wound up looking for the source of the Da, Da, Da- and found it in The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad- a Hindu Scripture dating from c.700 BCE- and in the following fable.

(I read it in translation, of course, on infoplease- and this is my adaption of that text)

The children of Pragapati- gods, men and demons- came to Pagapati- who is the Source of all things- and asked him for a word of wisdom.

The gods said. "Tell us something." And Pagapati said "Da.".

And they understood Pragapati to have said "Damyata" which means "Exercise self-control"

Then the men said "Tell us something" And Pragapati said "Da"

And they understood him to have said "Datta" which means "Give".

Finally the demons said, "Tell us something" And Pragpati said "Da"

And they understood him to have said "Dayadharn- which means "Show compassion".

And Pagapati said to each group in turn. "Yes. you have understood."

So whenever you hear the thunder going "Da, Da, Da" remember that what it's saying is, "Exercise self-control, give, be compassionate."

The Epstein Birthday Book shows us how the so-called elites carry on when they think no-one is looking. No point in ranting about it. The thing speaks for itself. It tells us exactly how things will be for as long as we go on thinking that (a} being very very rich is something to aspire to and (b) that it makes people fit to rule.

I've known that Lord Mandelson was a pal of Epstein's for months if not years but apparently our Prime Minister has only just found out....

The Epstein affair isn't about the Republicans being awful or the Democrats being awful but about all of them being awful....

I enjoy extreme weather- just so long as it's not so extreme as to cause damage...

Yesterday, for instance, we were shopping at Lidl in Polegate and got caught in a terrific downpour. I ran for the car, pushing my trolley, and it was if someone was chucking gravel in the air and it was falling on my bent back. A bit daunting at the time but it turned an outing that would otherwise have been routine and forgettable into a Proper Experience- a pleasure to remember- and then to write about.

That downpour was localised. We drove home- a couple of miles- and found our part of town had experienced nothing but a passing dampness.

Since then it has rained on and off. Just now the sun is shining on us but the sky to the West- where most of our weather comes from- is very, very heavy....

The comedy activist group Everyone Hates Elon has tacked a memorial plaque to a bench on the US President's Aberdeen golf course. It reads. "In Loving Memory of Jeffrey Epstein- a terrific guy, See you very, very soon from Donald."

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