Blast from the Past

We had some peculiar weather yesterday -- mostly sunny but occasionally, cloudy, rainy and even snowy. Dave and I went out to trim the buddleias and no sooner had we started than icy precipitation started coming down. We finished the big one by the back door, but the others will have to wait until another day.
As for the flurries (or sleet or whatever it was), it all instantly melted. Daytime temperatures were cold but well above freezing.

So, this Ukraine situation is terrifying, isn't it? I am feeling a pervasive sense of dread -- an existential dread, like I used to feel as a child when I had nightmares about nuclear weapons. Putin seems like the kind of dangerous megalomaniac who's likely to do anything. He seems like he would be perfectly willing to sacrifice the planet in order to "win" (even though in that situation everybody loses). Of course, that's also what he wants us to think. He wants us to be scared of him.

I know nothing about the controls placed on nuclear weapons in Russia, and how easy or difficult it would be for them to be used, but I hope there are people below Putin who have some degree of control and are perhaps less obsessed with territoriality and their own masculinity.

My grandfather, who was an engineer at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C, used to say during the days of bomb shelters and duck-and-cover exercises that if nuclear weapons were launched, he would get in the car and drive to the center of the city. He didn't want to be around for what happens afterwards, and I feel exactly the same way.

Not that I want to be overly dramatic here -- we're still (hopefully) a long way from nuclear holocaust. But this is a sudden reminder that those weapons are still out there and they're in the hands of a power-mad expansionist autocrat.

(Doesn't it seem like Putin has been around forever, too? Supposedly there are term limits in Russia but he's found ways to weasel around them. Apparently there was a constitutional revision in 2020 that granted him the right to run for two more terms, with the next election in 2024. He's not going anywhere anytime soon. He is entrenched.)

On a more concrete level, we're hearing that our energy prices will increase and in fact I got an e-mail from our supplier yesterday saying our rates are going up. Apparently the UK only gets a tiny percentage of its gas supply from Russia, and we're not likely to see a physical shortage -- but of course we compete in the same marketplace as the rest of Europe so we'll still pay more.

On a brighter note -- sort of -- Dave and I started watching Julian Fellowes' newest show, "The Gilded Age," last night. It is not good. The performances, even those by skilled veteran actors, seem stilted and awkward, and the CGI street scenes look weird and otherworldly. I can't decide if the fault lies with the direction or the writing or what, but it's like watching uncomfortable community theater. The Guardian's hilarious one-star review is spot on. Even worse, we had to renew our membership to NOW TV to stream it, so since we have NOW for another month I suppose we'll endure the rest of the season and see if it improves.

(Photo: An interior view of Coventry Cathedral, on Wednesday.)