Coastalblog

According to Theodor Adorno, elements of an authoritarian personality type include: "Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong Respect for submission to acknowledged authority Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days. Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview. A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group" Source Any of this sounding familiar? The pace of events since June 23rd last year has been hard to keep up with, but the train of events set in motion by the Brexit vote...

I've been reading Roger Deakin's Waterlog , a moving and stille vocation of the seemingly faintly transgressive act of wild swimming. Being someone who tends to go against the grain, I've got a lot of sympathy for Deakin's cussedness, and determination to swim wherever the hell he pleases. This isn't, however, intended to be a book review, I'd recommend it,by all means, you should check it out, but it was one idea that came from the reading which particularly stuck with me. Whilst exploring a series of Tarns in the Welsh Rhinog Mountains, Deakin discovers some ruined outbuildings, not marked on the map. It is this fact which pleases him most, the idea that we don't know everything, that maps can be wrong. I'd extrapolate further that this is a delight that life still has a bit of mystery to it (what on earth he'd make of Google Maps is anybody's guess, I imagine that for him they'd be something else stripping magic from the world). In this ...