The City & the Country no.19 – August 21 2014

Baptism tonight of a new local Festival, the Kingston Festival of the Arts. We went with our friend Linda, and our no less dear friend (and tenant, and neighbor-to-be) Dan, who joined us too, and here we all are at the Uptown diner before going to the evening of operatic and other songs, held in the old Dutch Church in the old town, that initiated the Festival. We went via Claire’s exhibition (part of the Festival) – more on this soon – at the Uptown gallery, her portraits shown off in very satisfying circumstances on a long wall.

The trouble with this blogging business is that it turns you into yet another of the world’s shutterbugs – if that old term still serves for digital cameras, and for smartphones with their increasingly marvellous lenses. Where once the man or woman with a camera was a noticeable pest (or a professional, or both), now the entire population of the planet is armed – they may not have water but they have a phone – with a pocket-slim device once the accoutrement of a master-spy and manufactured by James Bond’s armourer (‘Q’, or whatever his name was), and behold! – (more beholding than in the entire history of our species) – all except obdurate technophobes are everywhere lifting their device to their eye and snapping each other, each other’s pets, each other’s food and their own, until nothing goes unrecorded – not even crime, if it’s street crime. The life of the anchorite in his cave was never a more timely alternative – until the very bears are issued with iPhones.