{Foresight}[13th November 1980]

[Redbook2:171-172][19801113:2310b]{Foresight}[13^th November 1980]

19801113.2310

[continued]

Still I do not know* what is reality and what fantasy, or even if they differ; nevertheless as I remember … (interrupted) … seeing Robert Mugabe on television for the first time and saying on impulse (or impression) 'That is the future Prime Minister of Black Rhodesia' – and later qualifying it – so I remember seeing Michael Foot** in a photograph of a demonstration many years ago, wielding his stick against the zealots (or so it appeared), and thinking that he counted for more than any other Labour politician I knew of. I have always since then been surprised that he did not rise higher.

But this whole business is fraught with ambiguities. I do not know what will happen to Foot. Somehow it is hard to imagine him now as Prime Minister, or indeed as anything. Will he just die away? Experience has taught that I cannot achieve anything in this area by concentration, even to the extent of thinking seriously about something – which is what I have been taught to do (and have resisted doing). It is the incidentals – the co-incidentals? – which count for something – but are they picked by retrospective selection by my own perception of the present, so that all the non-co-incidental incidentals are ignored? Will [S[Q]] drop dead***? Or was it only his own fears which led me to pinpoint unerringly and innocently the centrepoint of that fear? Is [S[N]]'s affair with [D[M]] about to end****? And if so, need anything more than experience and her words inform me? Did my image of the drowning man sinking, and the other striding from the Sea holding some body (dead or alive) across his arms, signify anything at all? The sense of significance just before was overwhelming: I had forgotten, but must have known, that that it was U.S. Election Night.

*(i.e. of what I next discussed [in this entry], I think) <921108>

**Michael Foot, who became leader of the Labour Party in 198011, was replaced by Neil Kinnock in October 1983 <900806> (without having been P[rime] M[inister] <921108>)

***[He didn't as far as I know]

****[Reader, she married him.]

[continues]

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