endless time

how would you feel

if everything happened forever

if every moment of your life was still ongoing

everything always in total contradiction

i want the unexpected

off script, dumbfound me

astonish me quick

with your attention to retail

when they finish the history books we’ll see

we just have to just accept the past

it happened

i think about time a lot, the hopeless impossibility of the past, its unchanging nature, its doubtful nature. do facts remain or do they change over time? i worry that the despots of the past, henry 8, pope urban, alexander the great, ghengis khan become sanitised by history. i dread a work 1000 years hence on which the crimes of fascism are forgotten or decontextualised and hitler is remembered as some great socialist leader. perhaps in an eerie, whitewashed slave globe.

it’s important to remember that the rich and powerful are only in it for themselves. the pharos put their slaves to death. the romans were a plunder economy. social democracy is not normal and if we want it we always have to fight for it.

have you tried the choco lonely, graceful child? / it’s getting less expensive but you’ll still need a mortgage

i must be getting old. everything seems to expensive. £7 for a pint of beer? i remember when £2 was considered pricey. i don’t smoke any more, but i distinctly remember 10 packs of smokes for £1.36. they don’t even do ten packs any more and its most of £20 for a twenty deck. and the chocolate bars seem to have doubled in price in a mere couple of years.

i used to read about history, war, famine, strikes and all that, and think it was lucky i lived in the settled, modern world. sometimes now i wish i’d been born a million years ago. when human history does end, it will end with a bang, and not with the philosophy of francis fukuyama.

and in a fog of lousy vibes await an operative positive.

calling back to yesterday’s quite literary post, i am suddenly reminded of a literary/confectionary connection of note. roald dahl was one of my favourite childhood authors. i am ashamed to say my inner reactionary preferred enid blyton generally. but long before i had started on adult books i had reaslised that dahl had the superior worldview.

anyway, while of course dahl famously wrote ‘charlie and the chocolate factory,’ you may be unaware he also wrote a non-fiction essay ‘the chocolate revolution’ which revealed him to be a keen lover and historian of confectionary, and a particular aficionado of the ‘golden age’ of chocolate, 1930-1937, a heady seven years of sin which saw the inventions of many of the great confections of our age of tooth decay: the mars bar, the crunchie, the curly wurly, the aero, and the ‘energy balls’ – which are now known as ‘maltesers’.

what is your favourite chocolate bar?