I often play on a chess site, against opponents from all over the world known only by their monikers, particularly when I have some time on my hands that is freer than my free time. Admittedly this last, as the gentle reader is likely right to surmise, is very nearly always.
Some months back a wise friend of mine observed that the frequency with which I sound off on Russia – notwithstanding that I am tied to this troublesome part of the world by “propinquity and property of blood” – is likely to fatigue the gentle reader.
My firstborn Nikolai is in Palermo this week to meet his new brother and, perspicaciously, has brought with him a liter of excellent French brandy to mark the occasion. “Your Christmas pudding, Father,” he said, handing over the ornate gold-topped bottle.
A diverting article in the New York Post, of all places, made me look back on nearly half a century of Western handwringing and eyerolling at the mention of the homeland I had lost long before I was born.
There’s a lot of dust in the house, visitors from abroad have on occasion admonished us, don’t we ever vacuum? Now, with the newborn child on hand, I fear the criticisms will sound yet more insistent and the excuses ever more feeble. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and by the way when are you planning to get the baby vaccinated?
A university friend of mine, Peter Baldwin, whose book on the pandemic I mentioned here some months back, has just come out with another. The title is Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History. Were I a libertarian, it would always sit on my bedside table, next to a tome of Ayn Rand and a sepia print of the Unibomber in a silver frame.
I realize the above pun leaves much to be desired, but I was in an exceptionally jolly mood last week. I had come across a ridiculous article in The Atlantic which straightaway I knew would give my next post its subject and meaning, and the headline above it was “Vladimir Putin’s Waning Tolerance for Art.” Gosh, I thought, mentally addressing the author of the article, you say waning tolerance for art like it’s a bad thing.
The gentle reader may recall the series of posts in the spring of last year in which I argued that the pestilence is a biological weapon designed and launched deliberately to destabilize the West, where even a single death is a matter of public concern, by a totalitarian regime prepared to sustain such casualties in the millions especially when its own population is 1.4 billion.
Every time I look at a newspaper, I feel like the soldier in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the tinder box.
I am not writing this on pagan Lemuria or on what to the Catholics in Italy is Ognisanti, in other words, on All Saints’ Day, but apparently on what is now a Russian state holiday called Bailiffs’ Day.
