Wednesday 2 October 2024: I started today as I ended yesterday – sat on a bike, but with a difference.
There’s a gym in Chloe’s apartment block, which is where, at 6.30 am, I joined a 40-minute long spin class, riding one of those Peloton power bikes. Not ideal cycling, for sure, but a good way to shake off overnight cobwebs.
Last evening’s ride was hugely much better – two laps of the 6.2 mile long circuit of Central Park in Manhattan, ridden with my nephew, Ben, who introduced me to the route 15 years ago. He took the photograph of me shown below, riding alongside with both hands off his bars, which explains its blurred quality. You get the idea, I hope.
Starting at the Fifth Avenue entrance of CP, the circuit includes a sweeping descent around Harlem Meer, a sneaky, bitter even, climb through North Woods, and a final dash past the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
Click here to view a selection of videos of what the experience of riding the route is like.
How did I find the ride? I enjoyed it enormously, despite being slower off the mark than was the case in 2014, which is when I last did it. This time I averaged 13 mph; 15 back then.
But I didn’t complete the ride this time to achieve a p.b. I rode it just to have fun, with someone I like a lot, and to go down my cycling memory lane. It helped that the conditions were perfect: warm, dry, and with no on-coming wind.
Spin biking, taking Renée to pre-school , and attending Mass got my day started. From 10am, the rest of it was spent in Brooklyn Public Library (I posted some images of this fine building the other day), where I read some more chapters of that book I mentioned yesterday on the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacInytre. It’s reminding me of why I rated him so highly earlier in my life, in the 70s and 80s. I will explain why in a later post.
During downtimes from that book, I read the local press, including the latest edition of Brooklyn Voice (see the photo below) which dedicates 6/23 pages to Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment.
Unlike the editors of the NYT, who want Adams immediately to resign, the BV leader writers think he should stay in post until it can be demonstrated he’s guilty: “No one wants a corrupt leader, but Mayor Adams is an innocent man until and unless he is tried and found guilty – and only then. Any disruptions to regime change should then be minimized, and that means everyone should calm down and proceed in a sensible manner.”
I am beginning to sense the start of a successful fight back by Team Adams, suggesting that my earlier ‘dead man walking’ comment was both false and premature. Indeed, I am now thinking he may well survive!
The headlines in the NYT meanwhile include ones about Iran’s missile attack on Israel (“Air defences blunt barrage”); Israel’s recent attacks of Hezbollah (“Half of Hezbollah’s arsenal destroyed”); Russian advances in East Ukraine (“A long battle nears a sudden end”); Trump’s campaign (“On trail, Trump is increasingly peppering his speeches with doomsday warnings”); and impact of Hurricane Helene (“Leaving ruin in its wake”).
The VP TV debate? Apart from his telling question about the outcome of the 2020 election, Walz I thought side-stepped opportunities to attack Vance more forcefully on other issues, In fact, the latter seized the chance to pitch a gentler version of himself. It seemed to work, if the after-the-event polls are to be believed.
There’s also a double-page spread in today’s NYT on Pete Rose, ex-baseball star, who died on Monday, aged 83.
Despite a record-setting career as a big hitter, Pete was given a lifetime ban in 1983 because of his gambling activities, which were OTT and out of control, crowned subsequently with a short period in jail for tax evasion.
The NYT’s obituarist describes Pete’s moral and professional failings as “exuberant” rather than corrupt or reprehensible.
Pete was of the same mind, saying in his autobiography that, while he let himself and baseball down, that is “no reason to punish me forever”.
I also spent part of today reading the Irish Times’s coverage of Ireland’s Budget, just announced. Its assessment is not positive, even a bit cynical:
“What’s the politics of all this? Giving away a pile of money to voters a few weeks or months before an election is obviously better than doing the opposite. It won’t guarantee anything. But it surely doesn’t do any harm.”
The ‘pile of money’ amounts to a 14 billion euro surplus in Apple back-taxes, which the coalition government has decided to spend on increased social welfare and higher public infrastructure investment. The surplus also provided it with an excuse to introduce a range of tax cuts.
The IT’s front page is very concerned about all of this, reporting the criticism of the budget’s measures made by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council: “Ireland needs a more serious vision that delivers on the economy’s needs without repeating the boom-to-bust pattern of its (Celtic Tiger) past. The large spending increases and ax reductions will drive up inflation, adding an estimated €1,000 to the cost of a typical household’s yearly outgoings”.
Irish Times economics guru Cliff Taylor warns that the “splurge of once-off cash is not a good use of public money … much of the benefit goes to those who don’t need it”.
Fintan O’Toole argues that, while the state has an almost surreal surplus of 25 million euros, it has “no coherent sense of how intelligently to spend it.”
The Irish Times editorial concludes similarly, saying that Budget 2025 is “incoherent and short-termist”.
Ouch! But the IT is right.
Not a chance I am thinking that Rachel Reeve’s UK budget later this month will elicit a similar reaction – she has a deficit not a surplus in her accounts – though it will probably provoke hostile comment from Lefties like me for being far to fiscally orthodox. She won’t mind that, of course.
Tuesday 1 October 2024: A short post today, much of it drafted in the main reading room of the NY Central Library on Fifth Avenue, which is where I spent most of the day studying before meeting up with my nephew, Ben Lloyd, for a bike ride around Central Park.
Do you know the NYCL? I love it. The two photos below show its iconic front entrance (can you spot the famous lions?) and that main reading room I just mentioned.
Earlier, I dropped Renée off at pre-school, subsequently attending Mass at St Augustine and St Francis Xavier’s where reference was made to the 19C French Saint Thérèse whose Feast Day it is today. Unlike Jerome, yesterday’s saint, I knew nothing about her, only discovering later that she commands a lot of respect and devotion among many Catholics because of her fortitude in coping with prolonged debilitating illness which eventually killed her at a very young age.
Highlights in today’s NYT include lots of front page stuff about US singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson who died last Saturday, aged 88. The NYT says his “magnetism commanded the screen” and his songs hugely “broke through”. All lost on me, I’m afraid. I confess I can’t identify one of the films he starred in so successfully or one of the songs he wrote and performed which sold in their millions. Mind you, the fact that they were country & western might have something to do with this as I have never understood or liked such music.
Other headlines: “Israel invades border region inside Lebanon”, “Vice-Presidential debate is chance to help define top of the ticket”; and ‘Portraits begin to emerge of victims of Hurricane Helen’s rampage”.
The occasion of Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday caused the NYT to describe him “as an example of moral seriousness”. I think that is about right.
Meanwhile, by contrast, the beleaguered NYC Mayor Eric Adams says, “I’m not going ro resign – I’m going to reign.” Mmmm? The NYT says he must go, and quickly. NYC’s rich set however isn’t so sure. It rightly fears that if Adams resigned with immediate effect his interim replacement, Jumaané Williams, the public advocate, would make life hard for its members, which is likely as he is a self-declared democratic socialist. Williams has also said that in the event that Adams does go he will stand for election to replace him.
The NYT, I find, is hard even so to place politically. While it’s a Democrat paper, that doesn’t give much away given that that party has some very rightist tendencies running through it. And the paper’s Editors have equivocated on Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza and OWB: and their hostility to all things China is naively predictably. I often think the NYT is more a right of centre outlook than a left of centre one. A poor person’s Guardian, in other words.
Monday 30 September 2024: After dropping Renée off at her new pre-school for 8.30, I walked to St Augustine and St Francis Xavier’s for 9.00 Said Mass (I plan to attend every weekday morning I’m here), which today coincided with the Feast Day for St Jerome.
Unlike many of the individuals who feature in Rome’s very large Family of Saints, about whom I am entirely or largely ignorant, I know a fair bit about Jerome: early 5thC Christian priest, theologian, and translator of the Bible into Latin. He also produced a Biblical commentary which features strongly in every priest’s training, explaining why it is often quoted in homilies.
I like a Said Mass: just 30 minutes – no hymns; psalm recited rather than sung; very short homily; few intercessional prayers (which pleases me, because I don’t like them); no collection; no Nicene Creed, and Eucharist received at near halfway. So, a very foreshortened, concentrated, even intense, service, making it easier prayerfully to attend fully to from start to finish.
During Sunday Parish Mass, which lasts twice as long, and sometimes more, I confess that my mind wanders sometimes. I know it shouldn’t, and I do try hard to stay totally in touch with everything that’s going on.
But weakness of will, often exacerbate by a distraction (an unexpected noise, for example), can easily put me off my stride, though never I find after the prayer of the Eucharist.
Whatever, the circumstances, I always attend closely to the readings, which today included one from the Book of Job that pointed up his steadfast devotion to God despite the awful circumstances of his life (Job, 1, 16-22).
Meanwhile, the Gospel this morning, from Luke (9,46-50), had a hard thing to say to Christ’s followers about the importance of avoiding being vain-glorious.
After Mass, I walked round the corner to my favourite newsstand to pick up today’s NYT. It’s now $4 (=£3). Not so long ago it cost half as much. But, no complaints – like the Guardian, it’s cheap at the price.
A fifteen-minute walk took me to the grand entrance of one of my most-liked places in Park Slope – the Brooklyn Public Library.
As the photo above shows, this is a wonderful public building – a NYC designated landmark no less. A four-story Art Deco style construction, opened in 1941, it resembles an open book as viewed from the air. The next photo shows its splendid front doorway.
I love studying at BPL, always grabbing a place on the first floor in a large, always quiet, area. It’s shown in the snaps immediately below.
After skim-reading the NYT – catching up on the latest about the campaign for the presidency, the indictment of Mayor Adams, the wars in Ukraine and ME, and the heavy toll wrought by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina – I revised parts of my essay, ‘Two Images of Ireland’ (which took me an hour and a bit – see the result HERE).
I ended my study time re-reading a couple of chapters of Peter McMylor’s (1994) Critic of Modernity, a sociological study of Alisdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy, whose Marxist-Christian outlook exerted such an influence on me in the early ‘70s, and whose book After Virtue did the same in the ‘80s. Is MacIntyre still read, I wondered. He ought to be, I concluded. For his Thomism, his rewriting of Aristotle, his Hegelianism, and his excursions into Marxism make him surely still one of liberalism’s best critics. It’s why I am revisiting him now, hoping to rediscover his way of defining a post-liberal moral outlook that renders superfluous the one emerging out of Rightist populism and for which Centrist ideology seems to have no adequate response, other than to bemoan its increasing influence. .
I left the library at 2.50pm. Walked to collect Renée from school at 3.10; then on to Washington Park for the swings, climbing frame, and some biking. Renée, not me! Home by 5pm, via the ice cream parlour. A good day.
Sunday 29 September 2024: I’m writing this in NYC, visiting Chloe, Jonny, and Renée for the second time this year. They live in the Park Slope district of Brooklyn. I arrived last Friday; I leave in 8 days time.
The big city news is the fraud and bribery case against NY Mayor Eric Adams. While he is very busy digging in, including denying all charges etc, I think he is a dead man walking, and will struggle to survive.
The NYT thinks he should resign, arguing that the charges against Adams appear well substantiated. Adams also has ‘previous’, which is why support for him among fellow Democrats – in NY and beyond – is not noticeably either large or fervent. Team Harris clearly fears negative fallout for its presidential campaign, not least because of Adams’s Trumpian parallels: he’s a showman, a relentless self-publicist, and a promoter of dystopian views, particularly about migrants who he once said were “destroying NYC”. The NYT describes Adams as “the latest worm in the Big Apple”. Rotten to the core!?
Saturday’s NYT also published a full page survey of what the IDF is presently up to militarily in the OWB. Chilling stuff – drone attacks, bulldozing of infrastructure, etc – the details of which have not been much, if at all, reported in the British and European press.
Yesterday, with Chloe, Jonny, and Renée, I went to watch a National League baseball game at the Yankee Stadium. This was a new experience – watching a game whose rules I know nothing about.
The Yankees, the home team, lost 9-4 to the visitors, Pittsburgh Pirates. Don’t ask me how, because I can’t work out the way baseball is scored. Indeed, much of what I witnessed yesterday was a mystery to me. So complex. And the weird jargon – just what is a ‘whiff-rate’? Beats me. However, I loved being there at ‘ringside’ to soak up the atmosphere, including the collective fun of it all, excepting the fast food on sale, which was dire and very expensive. But huge larks, otherwise.
This morning, I attended another mystery, which I can make good sense of – Eucharist at Park Slope’s St Augustine & St Francis Xavier church. It’s where I normally attend Mass when I’m over.
Over 200 at the service, which was conducted by Fr Frank in his usual accurate and dignified fashion. Pity though about the ill-disciplined racket made by several of the young children present, which often made it hard for this mind-wandering worshipper to attend fully to the liturgy. And maybe Fr Frank’s announcement at the end that the Feast of Saint Francis of 4 October will occasion him blessing people’s pets wasn’t his finest moment. What is that all about?
This morning’s Epistle – James 5, 1-6 – had some hard things to say about living a life dominated by the acquisition of personal wealth, the reading out of which struck me as deeply ironic given that the American Dream is significantly all about precisely that. Fr Frank steered clear of any mention of this contradiction in his homily!
In the evening, Chloe and I went to the Studio Theatre in Manhattan to see James Ijames’s new play, Good Bones, which is a serio-comedy about the tensions gentrification can set off in a Black community. It was well done: some very good writing; excellent acting from an all-Black cast; and a memorable set. It was a ‘busy’ and mostly plausible drama, addressing a wide range of themes and ideas: the nature of community; class division; nostalgia; getting rich quick; urbanisation and identity.
(Thinking ahead, I must make sure to post something about my father on 25th October, which will be the 30th anniversary of his death date.)
Thursday 29 August 2024: It’s nearly two years since I posted anything on this weblog. This neglect was caused entirely by me diverting all my writing attention to getting off my desk the manuscript of a new book – nearly 90 thousand words of text. A collection of autobiographical essays on a variety of topics, this book has a somewhat sentimental title – Forget me Nots – which betrays badly its actual content, for it is anything but schmaltzy. My plan is to self-publish it before the end of this year. For an idea of what it is about, read this PREFACE
A lot of important stuff has happened in the world and UK since my last post.
During 2022, major war returned to Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the door closed finally on US policy of strategic engagement with China; the Covid-19 pandemic eased in most countries; in Latin America, each of Honduras, Colombia and Brazil moved Left politically; world inflation returned; climate change intensified; the UK had three Tory prime ministers in two months and its Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 September, having reigned over us for seventy years .
In 2023, catastrophic natural disasters took place in each of Morocco, Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria, Libya, Malawi, and Mozambique; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified; a major escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was occasioned by Hamas’s attack on 21 Israeli communities, murdering over a thousand Jews and kidnapping a further 150; COP 28 leaders agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels; the UK crowned Charles as its new monarch; PM Boris Johnson was exposed as a liar over Partygate; Labour performed well in local government elections in May, winning also a byelection in Selby & Ainsty in July with a near 30% swing from the Tories, which I helped to achieve.
So far, in 2024, elections to the European Parliament brought success for far-right parties; Leo Varadkar surprisingly resigned as Ireland’s Taoiseach; former US President Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts in a hush money trial; against every prediction, India’s GE concluded with Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party losing its outright majority in the Lok Sabha; Labour secured a huge parliamentary majority following the UK’s GE, though on a mediocre share of the popular vote (I am told that a mere 6% swing to the Tories would wipe it out); Israel’s bombing of Gaza continued unabated; and Ukraine invaded and occupied Russian territory.
Lots of personal stuff of course has come to pass since I last posted. A birth and two deaths, notably. A second granddaughter, Amaya, parented by my son, Jacob, and his wife, Amanda, was born in London on 28 March 2023. Far less happily, Paul King, my favourite teacher from my grammar school days, continuing as a good friend subsequently, died on 11 September 2023, aged 87 (click PAUL KING EULOGY); and Dorothy Eavis, a dear friend, and widow of an even bigger one, Patrick, passed away on 16 April 2024, also aged 87 (click DOROTHY EAVIS EULOGY).
Between 2022 and now, I visited NYC four times to spend time with my daughter, Chloe, and her family, including Renée my first granddaughter (3 years old as I post this); I redeemed a friendship with ‘Alan’ which I had foolishly a few years back brought to a premature end; I acquired a new political soul mate – ‘John’ – with whom I now regularly exchange political messages; I happily re-met Tony and Kathy Webster, old friends from the 80s with whom I’d had lost touch; I spent time with Kate and Anna Eavis following the death of their mother.
Mention of those four trips to the USA prompts me to mention that I will be making others like them to Rome, beginning next year, because my son, with his new family, has just relocated there, to take up a 4-year long posting as First Secretary at the British Embassy.
Less majorly, I navigated the local book club I lead to complete an end-to-end reading of Joyce’s Ulysses.
I accompanied Kathryn on two extended campervan tours in Europe, which included checking out places with which Dante was associated including the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua to see its incomparable fresco cycle by Giotto (click this ON DANTE AND GIOTTO). San Zeno’s Romanesque masterpiece in Verona was also visited (for the 2nd time). 
Attending Mass at Santa Croce’s in Florence was another highlight.
I went to the Bath Mozart Festivals in each of 2022 and 2023, listening also to over a dozen recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and two Proms at its Albert Hall in the same period, plus local chamber and solo piano events in each of Leeds and Harrogate, often accompanied by Kathryn. The highlight was undoubtedly hearing in February this year over two weekend days a complete cycle of Shostakovich’s string quartets performed by the Brodsky’s at Leeds’s Howard Assembly Rooms.
Kathryn and I also went to some good theatre, including ten Shakespeare’s: Hamlet, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, As You Like It, Othello,Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
I purchased too many CD recordings of classical music – over a hundred since my last post – most of which subsequently I listened to infrequently, excepting Paul McCreesh’s version of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, released in May this year. Going forward, I have decided radically to cut back on what is a form of extravagant consumption, motivated more by obsession than a desire further to educate myself musically.
My chess career as a club and tournament player meanwhile limped on in its usual way – mediocrity, leavened by the occasional half-clever win – though my BCF grade did go up, but only a very small increase. 
It’s lucky then I love playing the game and enjoy the company of many of the people I meet when I do.
I also continued to read a lot of books, mostly serious non-fiction it must be said (I really must read more novels!), with Andrew Davison’s extended study of Aquinas’s theological metaphysics – Participation in God(2019) – and Charles Taylor’s newly issued survey of Romantic poetics – Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024) – being standout texts.
I matured my faith in other ways – by sampling a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham, attending Mass regularly, both on Sundays and midweek, dedicating increased effort to undertaking my daily devotions, and going on two solitary/silent retreats to separate Benedictine houses.
In addition, I kept up my shifts at the local foodbank; doorstepped and delivered leaflets for Labour (though not always enthusiastically, given my uneasy membership of Starmer’s ‘changed’ party); resumed attendance at the Oxford Summer School; and rode my bike often, though not as far as that ‘Coast to Coast’ adventure I posted about on 10-12 September 2022.