Rain this morning, which makes me think of England.

Once upon a time S. comes to tea; what did we have?  Typhoo or PG Tips, I suppose.

"Pears," she remarks as she sits down and I pour.  She means the fresh oval bar I've put out in the powder room because there is company. 

Good morning, have you used Pears' soap Mr. Bloom thinks running into Bantam Lyons 16th June 1904.

"Funny," S. says, cup in hand, savoring, "how many of the smells that remind me of England are really the smells of India."

We are playing associations that afternoon because of the color of the flowers -- saffron orange daisies like monks' robes -- and the Nag Champa incense burning a wispy drift in the air, and the soap and the tea, and coincidentally I now discover Pears is manufactured in India although the scent is really more an English garden bouquet of thyme and rosemary extract with maybe something like cedar too but like the tea it is more about the why and the when and the way it gets to be English, the colonialism and those old Pears ads with a man in a pith helment, White Man's Burden.  

Look what is done in the name of Empire, I say.  The native people dying to make the White Man Rich.  Look at Roger Casement's report on the atrocities in the Congo -- The Casement Report is published in 1904.  Then he went to Peru in 1906 and reported on what they were doing there to the Indians.  And then he realized the same thing was being done to his own people, the Irish, and that's when he ended up being hanged for treason in 1916.  

Before they carried out the execution they sent copies of the diary they claimed to have found in his possession to the American President and the Pope to prove that Casement was a homosexual, therefore ensuring there'd be no objections, or some embarrassing international outcry, because who would ever protest hanging a man like that?  That sort. 

I have been readng W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and am on a roll and S. looks at me in that gentle way she has to calm me down.  Roger Casement's in Ulysses too you know, [Roger Casement's an Irishman] I say in my defense and she nods sympathetically but I am losing steam and realize I am getting worked up because it's raining and I'm angry at what those in power can do and get away with.  To think sometimes all it takes is a little rain, or a bar of soap.