Is this Wales?

We spent a couple of nights in mid-Wales over the weekend: walking, sightseeing and relaxing. Then getting sunburned before suffering from sunstroke, in my case, hence our return to Bristol a day earlier than expected.

But there were some surreal aspects of our weekend stay. On our way there, dead by the side of the road near Llandovery, we saw a wallaby. We were both sure it was a wallaby, anyway, as it had the rabbity head and thick body, hind legs and tail of a kangaroo, and was definitely not a deer.

Then, the next morning as we were eating our breakfast in Cwm Rhaeadr, a peacock pecked by us, and stayed close to our van for the next couple of hours. By the picnic tables, set upon rotting stumps, were bizarre little porcelain tableaux of miniature houses with gnomes and mushrooms.
Is this really Wales? And why were these fairy homes there?


:o)

Thirty Years

It's our thirtieth wedding anniversary today.

I'm so happy that Moonface and I are still together, after raising two children, living in two homes, travelling, arguing, making up, having adventures and misadventures, and generally remaining a contented couple. We have had a few bad times, but many more good ones.

We look forward to the next thirty years, and I hope that they are as much fun as the last thirty have been.


:o)

Mindreading

Daughters. Aren't they pains in the arse? But lovely with it. Sometimes.

I walked past Rio as she was preparing food in the kitchen.

I started to ask "Sh....?"
"Yes!" she snapped.
"Don't interrupt" I snarled. "Let me finish what I was going to ask"

"You were going to ask whether I wanted the washed bedclothes put in the tumble dryer, weren't you?"

And I was.
Bloody mindreading daughters.


:o)

Coast (half-way) to Coast, Day 1.

A half-day of travelling, a half-day of walking, and a Priory.
The railway journey for the three hundred miles or five hundred km from Bristol took six hours and three changes, but put us in St Bees after some wonderful views over the cold Irish Sea by 1pm. By two we set out on our first leg, taking the time to dip our feet in the grey waters before we commenced the steady trudge up the first hill to the cliff-tops.

Red cliffs, seagulls and cormorants, and the Isle of Man in the distance.
Sad post-industrial villages, just this side of slums, with unhappy looking gardens.
Views of Whitehaven, where five of my cousins were brought up, the last English town to be invaded during wartime. (And that was by Americans in their war of Independence / Rebellion. Their leader was from Whitehaven, and the raid ended in a pub, getting drunk. It failed.)

Then through green lush valleys to another sad town, Cleator, whence we were picked up to be taken to our first night's lodgings.

St Bees

After a long day's travel and a walk, what do you do in the evening?
Go for a stroll, of course.

So, on the first evening of our Coast (Half-Way to) Coast, we pottered through St Bees to the Priory. It was dusk, the first streetlights appearing, and the birds ceasing to sing as we walked around the pink stone church. The 12th century Norman door is worn but magnificent, and out of habit and interest, we tried to open it. Much to our surprise, it wasn't locked, so we tip-toed inside.

It was (I think) the first time that I had been alone in a dark church, with no lights inside and only a dull nightfall outside. It was quiet, hushed, anechoic. The church is plain inside, Spartan, bare stone walled with little decoration: a style which I prefer over the rococo ornamentation of High Church and Catholic places. My gods are of simple things and high places. As we moved forwards, single spotlights clicked on and showed us where to walk in the deserted aisles. The semi-dark and quiet made it a spiritual place, much more so than if we had seen it lit or in daytime.

Then we heard footsteps.
We were by the door, when a rumpled, flushed forty-ish man pushed open the door. We guessed that he had seen the lights and had arrived to investigate, but that wasn't the case. He almost jumped when he pushed open the door and found us there, but calmed when we turned out to be middle-aged greying oldies rather than young vandals. And, since he turned out to be the Priory organist and rather drunk, he insisted upon showing us the whole building, which was rather wonderful with its old memorial brasses and tombs. In fact, it was difficult and embarrassing to extricate ourselves from his over-enthusiasm, but we did so and were most grateful for the tour. So we walked slowly back to our B+B, to be fresh for the second stage of the walk in the morning.


:o)

13 months

Since my second job after leaving university, in which I helped build a small factory, I've enjoyed semi-skilled manual work: making things, repairing things. Generally it's small projects which I prefer, those which can be completed in a day or afternoon.

One example was mending the lawnmower. Like many household goods, it first broke down about thirteen months after purchase, when it was just out of guarantee. I took it apart to find the problem, which turned out to be a burned-out connection. Some wire and some solder later, it worked fine again, and it's still running (albeit roughly and noisily) after more than thirteen years.

The washing machine was another example: thirteen months after buying it, it died, so I tried to find what had gone wrong. I was able to sort that problem out after finding the huge deposits of calcium scale inside the internal pipework, and determining that it had blocked and broken the recirculating pump. So I upended the machine, and replaced the pump. That was a fair few years ago. Today, I mended the washing machine again. Over the weekend, and just too late for me to fix it before the shops shut, the laundry drum stopped rotating. It wasn't the pump that had gone wrong again, and the drive belt was still intact, so the chap on the phone said it was probably the brushes.

So, this morning, I upend the washing machine, disconnect its power and shut off the water supply, then remove the hatch to start searching amongst its innards. Separate the power supply blocks. Remove the motor. Disconnect the drive belt and pull off the insulating foam from the motor. Find the brushes, which are not brush-like at all, but trapped square-section carbon rods in plastic boxes, and remove them. Take one up to a parts supplier, and wait for ten minutes while he mutters about them not being made any more, and finally pay ten per cent of the price of a new washing machine for two small components. Cycle home, replace the brushes and reassemble everything. Realise that I have left the foam insulation off the motor. Disassemble the motor from the body again, fit the foam, reassemble. Test. It works! Push the washing machine and dishwasher back into place, having reconnected all the electricity and water. Worry that I haven't got the drive belt tight enough, but think, "Sod it".

And wash some clothes.


:o)

Woodwork

I spent most of yesterday fabricating a board to form part of our camper-van bed. As it had to match the dimensions of the existing board, but be much lighter and easier to handle, the task took longer than I expected. Part of the process involved cutting large holes in the plywood, to allow ventilation of the mattresses. Cutting the holes wasn't difficult, as I used a hole-saw which scorched and burned the wood, bringing back a strange memory.

Around '98 or '99 I had to drive to a conference in Nimes, in the south of France. It's a long way from home, exactly 1000km or about 600 miles from Calais, so the drive and ferry crossing took me almost a full day from Bristol. Whilst driving, I could continually smell burnt or scorched wood for hours on end. It was specifically the smell of scorched iroko wood, remembered, I assume, from a previous occasion when I was using an electric saw to cut shelving and found that the saw-blade blackened and burned the wood whenever I went the slightest bit off-line.

And suddenly, half-way through the conference and following a nose-bleed, my sense of smell disappeared. For several years, I could hardly smell anything. Over the last two years, it has slowly been re-establishing itself, so that now (so far as I can tell) it's about the same as it was ten years ago. But it was awkward, being without smell. I could taste adequately, but smells had to be extremely strong for me to detect and identify them.

The most peculiar sensations were when my nose seemed to prickle, when I could tell there was a nasty smell in the air yet I couldn't smell anything. I had an intellectual knowledge that something smelled bad, but it wasn't the direct experience or the smell itself. I guess the closest comparison is eating when one has a heavy cold, when one knows that the food tastes good , but the actual flavour is undetectable.

I've really appreciated the slow return of my sense of smell, being able to taste better, and to enjoy life more: from flowers to wet woodland and Moonface's armpits, it's all good.


:o)

Superstition

I'm not religious, and in theory I'm not superstitious. I believe that life is a series of chances, influenced by butterflies and sunshine and bastards. But in practise, I reckon that I display many small signs of superstition. I notice magpies, and count them. I touch wood. I throw spilt salt over my left shoulder, and spit when I see a funeral cortege. Why, I'm not sure. At a rational level, none of the above have any effect on my life yet still I repeat the actions and others. In fact, forget the rationality: none of those actions have any point whatsoever.

Yet still I get the tingling feeling of the unknown upon certain occasions. One happened last week. Moonface and I were on one of the better walking days of our best ever walking week, high in the Lakes, having just started the descent from the peak of Kidsty Pike. The view was clear and far-ranging: to the South-West we could see the Irish Sea for the last time that holiday, to the North lay Scotland beyond the Solway Firth and in the East were the last hillocks of Lakeland, the vale of Eden and beyond that the lowering line of the Pennines. The Pike had been relatively crowded, with three small parties arriving more-or-less simultaneously, but we let the others march ahead of us in order to get some private peace.

A raven flew into view, coming from behind us and from the North. Odin's bird, the reader of the future. It flapped slowly across our paths croaking hoarsely, completed about three quarters of a circle around us, then perched upon a crag and called out. My skin shivered. Irrationality told me that it was telling us something, but I didn't know what. (Or I won't admit to it.)

I can still visualise that raven upon its crag. I think that it was last Tuesday.....


8¬ o

Eve Ensler

Whilst staying with a friend about a month ago, I read two of Eve Ensler's books in one long late-night session. (They're short books, hardly more than pamphlets. It didn't involve staying awake all night.)

Both the "Vagina Monologues" and "The Good Body" shocked and appalled me, in that Ensler assumes that all women, or at least most Western women, are disgusted or ashamed of their bodies. As a man, I guess there's no way I can know whether it's true, but speaking to female family and friends, it seems as if Ensler has projected her own American insecurities into the world.

But what surprised me is that she still retains the euphemisms that she rails against, in her book. Speaking as a biologist with an interest in linguistics and precision in literature, I don't understand why her polemic in "The Good Body" is aimed at women's discomfort with their "stomachs". A stomach is a bag, part of the intestines. Why can't she say abdomen, belly, tummy, gut? All of those are more accurate. A stomach is not a belly. And again, in the Monologues she uses the anatomically inaccurate term "vagina" when she means -I guess- pudendum, fanny, pussy, cunt, or any other term for the assemblage of labia and folds that are the entrance to the tunnel of the vagina itself. It's a strange cowardice for a radical feminist. It's as if one always referred to an arsehole (anus) as a rectum or intestine. One of the wonders of English is that the language has two vocabularies: one curt and Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Norse, and the other more wordy, polysyllabic, with the Romance of Norman-French and Latin roots. She opts for the easy, learned-sounding Southern tongues every time, even when it's the wrong choice.

How can she preach comfort and ease with one's body when she is so obviously experiencing & causing discomfort herself, by her choice of words and language? I don't understand.

One shocking passage - not a back one - in one of the books, I cannot remember which, actually celebrated the alcohol-assisted rape or assault of a thirteen-year-old girl by an older woman; describing it as a positive experience. It was contrasted with earlier rapes of the same vulnerable girl by men, but was still a one-night, one-off nasty seduction that was presented as acceptable because it was initiated by a woman. Strange.


:¬I

Coming Down

Today, the world seems flat and dull. I can't motivate myself, and I'm being snappy and short with my family. It's the contrast between the literal and metaphorical highs of our holiday, and the ordinary life which has started again today.

So I'm down. Down in the dumps, down off the hills, down South again. Down. Work stuff, admin stuff for other people, stuff to do with Moonface's mother. I feel outflanked by life, so I wish we were walking again.

I didn't summon the energy to go to the balloon fiesta, I couldn't be arsed to go swimming, didn't feel like going out. Grrrrr. Put it down to Sunday.



:-(

Coast (half-way) to Coast

Yes, we did it. Moonface and I spent a relaxed and wonderful week walking from St Bees on the Irish Sea to Kirkby Stephen in the Pennines. We only walked eighty or ninety miles or so, but most of that was through the heart of the Lake District. We had sun, rain, wind and hills; all-in-all I think it might have been the best walk we've done. I'll reflect upon the holiday then write more.

Le Boulot encore

It's no good, I'm not enjoying this.

Fuck 1t, I'll chuck it.



[12th Aug: For your information, I did. Resigning was not easy, because the boss wanted me to stay, but I managed to leave his office eventually. It took nearly an hour. Now for a life with just a single part-time job and a lot of other hassles to cope with]


:)

Sun

After two dreadful months of heavy rain in which large parts of the country flooded, we have had a run of sunny weather, and I feel cheerful and optimistic again.

This morning, I arose at six thirty and while our tea was brewing in the pot, I hung out the washing on the line, for the first time for weeks. The lawn needs mowing, as it has been too wet since early June. I wrinkled my toes in the long grass. A goldfinch perched on the dead shrub next door, then twittered. The city hum was vaguely audible in the cool still air and the damp clothes hung limply, lit from the east. Perhaps it's summer.


:o)