End Game

Wednesday 22 April

If this blessed journal is to record anything, let me here note my gratitude to Andy L for his timely and powerful intervention in what might have become a regrettably ugly scene. Let me wish this proud young soldier nothing but the best for his travels, and hope he is granted the eventual peace he so richly deserves and commands.

We confidently say that his time with us - "us" - will have given him experience and tolerance that will stand him in in good stead throughout.

We delightedly note also the building of bridges with the other Andy - still and always the main Andy :) - and wish him too nothing but our finest. He has my eternal gratitude for his very presence at that earlier, much more threatening time.

And we wish PW the very best too - and the easing of these destructive tensions. Might he learn who loves him.
Peter

(Perhaps it seems strange to write like this, but I've long accepted that I'm much better in writing than in speaking :))

Sicut erit in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be - world without end. Keep surfin dude. How fucking blessed I am.
Peter

Friday early a.m.

"We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun...."

That was the header Jon Ronson chose for his last Human Zoo feature in the Guardian recently. I love that paper - so much great writing - and in bite-sized portions, being a newspaper.

There was the time Kevin Toolis wrote about his dad's funeral in rural Ireland - and the time Germaine Greer wrote about the sex education "scandal" in Cleveland I think it was.

I dimly recall....."When the children asked the nurse what oral sex was, they didn't want to know the ANSWER, they wanted to know if SHE knew the answer."

The glory of Suzanne Moore, always superb, except now she's gone elsewhere. And the quietly understated comments of Alexander Chancellor - who took a bit of getting used to! Yet now we have the fascination of the latest acquisition, Julie Burchill. Will she live up to her early promise? Will she find something interesting to say every week?

Whatever the answer, she has an ego burning brighter than even a Stella Nova - an essential attribute for any writer.

Think about it -- getting paid an upwardly mobile salary for just one page's scribblings - the effort of which takes up no more than half an hour. You're paid not for your typing, not for your writing, but for your very THOUGHTS! Imagine it....thoughts for sale! My God how I'd love it all back. There's no greater hit I've ever discovered.

It's going to be a great summer again. The best one since the summer of marijuana, those (my God was it four?) years ago. This one will be rich with love, prozaced with peace, and buzzing with excitement. You mark my words.

Well, dear reader - so you've got this far. Hopefully you enjoyed some of the above meanderings, but in fact the real fun is yet to come.