Two recent fires in Central London: areas with masonic connections

There have been two fires in Central London recently that are of great interest to people who study unseen influences: one was an underground electric cable fire in Kingsway, the other was in the lift motor room on the roof of a building in Great Portland Street. 

The second fire broke out this afternoon. Both fires caused black smoke to rise into the air over Central London.

Both areas have masonic connections: Freemasons’ Hall, the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England, is in Great Queen Street, just off Kingsway; Great Portland Street is close to Portland Place, where No. 33 has some interesting associations:

"The Holroyds were a very well connected family and often had influential guests to stay. For a period after 1835, for instance, Lord Charles Townsend, an immensely wealthy gentleman and Grand Master of the Freemasonic Lodges, inhabited the premises. Many residents have since chanced a glimpse of Lord Charles’ ghost drifting down the main staircase clad in Templar robes!"

Read more about No. 33 Portland Place here.

Speaking about unseen influences: be selective and be careful

I remember reading a long time ago something to the effect that if you start to speak from your heart, in your own voice and your own words, several things may well happen: some people will vanish from your life, some will change for the better and join you on your new level and some new people from the higher level will come into your life. 

The first group will feel uncomfortable because you have departed from their scripts, stopped playing their silly games and are no longer enabling and reinforcing their programs; the others will enjoy interacting with an authentic human being, someone who sets a good example, someone who brings out the best in them as opposed to dragging them down and forcing them to act out various scenarios. 

I would say that this is true up to a point, particularly where speaking about everyday topics is concerned. Like attracts like and people find levels where they feel comfortable. It is beneficial to talk to someone whose conversation is positive, direct and nourishing as opposed to being defeatist, confusing and equivalent to junk food; it is enjoyable to talk to someone whose conversation is interesting, informative and helpful as opposed to being predictable like a tape recording and full of useless generalisations and platitudes. 

Speaking about anything related to unseen influences is another matter. 

In my experience, the majority of people will react as if nothing, or nothing interesting or important, has been said or as if a foreign language has been spoken; some will quickly change the subject; a few will vanish as if threatened; a few will seem disconcerted, ‘thrown’ and confused; a few will viciously attack; a few may become thoughtful and a very few will step forward and say, “Tell me more.”

Small synchronicities

I have a few further coincidences to report. They are nothing like so spectacular as the ones in the article about the green men, but even small synchronicities seem worth recording.

Red Dwarf
I was sitting on a bus recently thinking about the many outside errands I had planned for the day, when I suddenly remembered that this was the day that all of the episodes from one of the later series of the TV science fiction programme Red Dwarf were being shown. 

I didn’t want to miss anything – I had seen this particular series only once before - so I decided to go straight home after visiting the first shop on my list and save the other tasks for another day. 

Just as I made this decision, someone in the seat behind me started whistling the Red Dwarf theme song:

“It's cold outside
There's no kind of atmosphere
I'm all alone, more or less
Let me fly far away from here…”

I didn’t like to turn round and see what sort of person might have picked up and reacted to what I was thinking about, so now I will never know who it was who read my mind!

Reading and thinking in synch with the TV
I wish that I had made notes of the numerous occasions many years ago when I was reading or thinking about something only to hear the same word or phrase synchronously being spoken on the TV.

It happened so often that I came to think of it as normal.

It is still happening.

For the first time in many years, I started to think about someone I used to work with. He once made a ‘T’ sign with his hands and told me that it was a way to ask for time in baseball. 

Just as I remembered this, someone on the TV made that same sign. 

I was just reading “Open your eyes” in a book when I heard this expression on the TV. 

I have started to record recent occurrences of this phenomenon. Any more really good ones will be reported on here.

Sir Terry Pratchett R. I. P.

Sir Terry Pratchett has died. There will be no more Discworld novels and no more stories about his witches.

Reading and writing about certain fictional modern-day witches can be depressing and demoralising, especially when they remind us of people who have injured us in real life. Terry Pratchett’s witches provide a pleasant, entertaining and amusing contrast: their sayings and doings lift the spirits of and bring enjoyment to his readers.

I quoted some extracts from his books a while back, and added some thoughts of my own: there is something about his evil elves here and some of his wise words about magic here.

Goodbye Terry, and thank you.

P. S. I saw Terry Pratchett once, and we exchanged brief smiles! 

It was in Hampstead, in north-west London. I was walking past some shops to the bus stop and saw him sitting with someone at a table outside a café. 

His appearance is distinctive and he was a trustee of a charity in the area, so it was definitely him.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy: a major unseen influence

Out of all of the many works of Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy is the one that I like best. 

I first discovered it at the age of 12 or so. This story educated, entertained and inspired me; it sank into my subconscious mind and some years later influenced the course I took in life. I still occasionally go back to it, and I find it just as enjoyable and moving now as I did when I first read it.

I like the descriptions of life on Jubbulpore, capital of the Nine Worlds. I feel relieved when Thorby, the young hero, escapes from the regimented, restricted, custom-ridden, ship-bound life of the clannish Free Traders, which is my idea of hell. It is an anomaly that he had more freedom in his previous life as a beggar than he did as a high-ranking member of that closed society. 

I feel for Thorby when he experiences the cold wind of fear, when he feels some sick twinges because people he cares about have gone away forever and when he feels lost once more. 

I envy Thorby his string of benevolent mentors, father figures even. His abilities are recognised and he is educated and rigorously trained accordingly.

Older women are there to help him just when he needs it, and he gets some useful briefings from young people too. He has people to tell him the score, to explain what is happening, to show him how to look at situations objectively and put his life into the context of various societies. 

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VII: Charlotte Brontë’s Martin Yorke

Of all the characters in all the Brontë sisters’ novels, Martin Yorke, who appears in Charlotte Brontë’s socio-historical novel Shirley, is my favourite.

Shirley (1849) is set in rural Yorkshire in 1811/12 against a background of industrial unrest, of violent opposition to the introduction of machinery in the local textile industry. 

Charlotte Brontë intended Shirley to be a counterpoint to her first novel, Jane Eyre, which was considered to be melodramatic and unrealistic. Shirley was to be political, significant, true to life and, in her own words, “...real, cool and solid, ...as unromantic as Monday morning.” 

Similarly, Martin Yorke is very far from being a dominant, dangerous, glamorous, smouldering, rugged romantic hero like the demonic duo of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester. Martin is nobody’s fantasy ideal man: he is a funny, greedy, clever, mischievous schoolboy who in my opinion is worth more than both those bad Byronic boyos put together. 

Martin Yorke is only a minor character in Shirley, but the scenes I most enjoy in the book are the ones that he appears in. His antics and sayings remind me not only of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky, but also of people I have known in real life. Charlotte Brontë modelled him on the brother of a close friend of hers.

Introducing Martin Yorke
Martin Yorke is 15 years old at the time of his big scene; he has two brothers who are older than he is; he sometimes proposes starting for Australia to obtain some freedom and escape the tyranny of Matthew, the favoured eldest son. 

Martin attends the local grammar school; he likes to read books of fairy tales, but only in secret. Food and adventures are his main interests.