Coming back to painful weather after being in a warm place brings instantaneous depression. It was like this after the cruises: your certain and wonderful knowledge of a clement place is ground away in the mortar and pestle, and your current state seems like the first day of a life sentence. For some reason the onset of true winter - the snow-locked, blue-and-white world - often comes while I am away, and so I return to rude truth that has locked up the entire world with pitiless indifference.

Other than that, I’m fine.

Went to work. Someone is shouting a protest on a loop across the street during the latest cop trial.

It may be a recording. In the future it will be perfectly fine if no crowd shows up, but there’s just one phone on a stool in front of a microphone playing an MP3 of the chant, and a big sign with one hundred faces pasted on to indicate all the people who would be watching on Zoom if this was a live conference call.

At least it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas - a phrase that suggests all these decorations might be intended for something that is akin to Christmas, has the general look and feel of Christmas, but is something else. Chrastmis, maybe. It’s like Christmas except the candy canes are striped white and red instead of red and white.

I’ve been reading about other December festivals - Yule, and of course Saturnalia. It’s one of those things the Romans would recognize if they were brought to our time, once they stopped soiling their drawer and trembling. Well, not all of them. Caesar, you can imagine, would enjoy a visit to our times. Take him to a massive Christian basilica, the old columns wound with evergreen boughs, and it would be familiar.

"You say this is two thousand years since my time. Extraordinary. And you still build in our style."

Well, not any more, but a hundred years ago, yes.

"Why did you stop?"

People tired of history and wanted something that reminded them of the new times.

"But history does not go away because you stop building a house for it to dwell in. It merely circulates in a different form, a fog, a fever. And then it is hard for the princips to use it, or stamp it out, whatever the situation calls for. A statue can be knocked down. The image of the statue in the mind of the public becomes an idea. What is that up there, by the way? It seems to be some enormous sort of bird."

It is . . . a chariot for the roads of the air.

"Remarkable. How many soldiers can it carry? Can it assist in a siege? You could drop a cohort behind the walls of a city."

Aren’t you curious how it works?

"In a way, of course, but I am more curious about what it can do. May I go up in one?"

Yes, let me get a ticket.

"Fine. I shall watch the moving paintings on this tablet while you do so. I enjoy your ludi. Interesting refinements. How your gladiators line up in opposing teams and meet like armies. Did the object over which they fight represent the head of a vanquished tribal leader? I assume at some point it was a head."

I was thinking of Romans while watching the 3rd season of The Detectorists on the plane. (They're looking for a Roman funeral coin hoard.) I have watched all the episodes on plane trips over the years. When I am up in the air, removed from everything, that’s when I enter the world of the Danesbury metal-detecting culture.

		Checked some reviews to see if it was still 100% on Rotten Tomatoes - it is - and saw this.

Glister. Sparkle, glitter. I’d never seen that word before. A British term, it seems.

Anyway. It’s cold. And the mind wanders inward. Obviously.

A small example today, a reminder when the Main Street feature was just a handful of photos.

What . . . what is this?

“Town was nothin’ but aliens in the 70s. They came, set up shop, made things look the way they liked, did their studyin’, then ‘veryone of ‘em left.”

‘Course, we thought they might have been from Miami.”

“Ol’ Gus, he came down with the skin disease somethin’ awful. They said it wasn’t contagious but I’ll be damned if his building didn’t catch it as well.”

“Then we got some folks in from Californ-eye-ayy way, and they wanted to test out some building designs, see how they looked without any cars or other buildings or people around ‘em. Nice folk, said we could have them after they were done.”

“Criminey yes, I remember that year. Hailstone drove the whole city council mad. Thought the Japs were attacking.”

“Nice old sign, isn’t it? Don’t get too close. The aliens set up some sort of time-displacement field around it. Never ages. Never fades. Bulbs never go out.”

“Warn’t until 1984 we realized the aliens had been using this here elevator to assemble their rockets.”

"Folks weren’t happy when they spoilt the sign there, but we all knew what it said - Dakota Maid - so it wasn’t that bad.”

		Now hit the road! Motels await.