E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

One is reminded of King Lear, broken on the heath, by the immensity of human loss and suffering. London, and the UK, is reaching a summer breaking point.  As temperatures soar to 31 Celsius, murder, hate and death keeps erupting in weekly events, each unbearable for both victims, and any bystanders with a heart or soul. Last night, a terror attack on law-abiding, decent, and needless to say, blameless, Muslim British people attending a Mosque, injured many. This is awful, and this blog is not going to state the obvious here. But we did not want this event to pass without comment. This blog considers the British Muslim population of the UK to be an incredible, enriching, and valuable part of the whole intermixed splendour that is UK culture and society. Far from being a fifth-column, Muslims in the UK are - as we saw after the Grenfell Tower Fire - as compassionate or more compassionate than any other community - and their doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, workers, drivers, ...

Rumours or news that Geoffrey Hill might become Oxford Professor of Poetry have Eyewear thrilled. Hill represents a more serious tradition than that espoused by the current laureate; and one loftier, more sublime and rhetorically nuanced. Hill is the finest living poet writing in the Miltonic line. He would bring much to the post.

It has been a funny old week-end, or so, here in the UK. Reading The Sunday Times I have discovered that the new Booker winner despises the telegenic parents of a missing child, that Mr. Clegg , a candidate for the Lib Dems leadership allegedly wrote glowingly of opium at Oxford when 18, that Hilary Clinton has no chance of winning the Presidency as she coldly jilted Socks post-White House, that one of the great geneticists and Nobel winners has been banned from his lecture tour of England as he is apparently a bigot - and, mostly oddly of all, that Dumbledore is "gay". J.K. Rowling , not to be confused with other initialled geniuses W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot , has "outed" one of her fictional characters, after selling a billion dollars worth of merchandise, some of it in text-based format, to adults and children - now, this once-anodyne billionairess is able to go all po-mo on us. Harry is bi, and Hogwarts is a cover for an S&M club. Why not go further J.K a...