EnviroSpin Watch

Our Ship of Fools.....

This morning I was reminded inexorably of Hieronymus Bosch's symbolic masterpiece, The Ship of Fools, painted around 1490-1500. Humanity sails through the ocean of life in a riot of madness, symbolized by an inverted funnel, beneath an owl of heresy.

What has changed? We have never been modern. Today, Margaret Beckett and a science correspondent, Heaven forefend, talk merrily of achieving "a stable climate". What foolish hubris! Climate has never been stable for a moment - it is the maddest of oxymora. Elsewhere, the Westminster Village feeds gluttonously on the carcass, butchered and barbecued on College Green, of a Northern lad made good - Bl(a)unket(t) coverage, filled with self-righteous pieties (as if journalists never make fools of themselves). And a missing red panda is re-discovered "safe in a tree" in Birmingham. What Pandamonium!

Of course, it is all a Gunpowder Plot to get King Blair. [Above Right: The Ship of Fools (1490-1500) by Hieronymus Bosch: part of a triptych, oil on wood, measuring 58 x 33 cm, on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image: public domain, from Wikipedia.]

Meanwhile, back at The Ranch, a chap who often wears a kilt, and a bloke who has been spotted sporting a cowboy hat, tuck into:

Watercress soup with applewood-smoked bacon
Espellette cream
*
Lemon sole with herb crust
Chicory, petite asparagus, and black cherry tomatoes
Salad of butter lettuce, white cucumbers, and golden pea tendrils
Champagne dressing
*
Lady apple sorbet
Brandy snap basket
Spiced Autumn fruit compote.

What can one say, save:

"..... Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
[Macbeth (V, v, 19)]

Philip, dead parrots all round.