One third of a Century

Today, Moonface and I have been married for a third of a century.
Thirty-three and a third years!

:o)

Microwaves

Our microwave died yesterday evening.
No more hot muesli this morning, and my coffee has to be heated over the gas stove.

We've had it since 1983, so it was nearly 28 years old. We could tell by the publication date of the cookery book which accompanied it and by the tasteful beige and brown colours it sported. Thank you, Toshiba, I'll be surprised if the next one lasts as long.

So this morning Moonface and i trotted down to Nailsea Electrical to buy another, hummed and hawed a few minutes, dithered a little, then bought a replacement. I borrowed a sack-truck to carry it home, then over the next hour or so I pulled out the old Tosh from the cupboard it has been sitting in for 25 years and replaced it with the new shiny new powerful microwave oven.

Hooray!
Hot muesli in the morning!

:o)

Northerners

Since I'm deskbound most of the day, working from home, I appreciate a morning walk towards college with Moonface before we both switch on our computers and off to the world.

The streets were quiet today because of the combined start of the Christmas shutdown and the snow, but two people said "Hello" to me, which was most unusual and very welcome. Both were northerners: a tanker driver from the north-east and a Lancastrian woman sliding her way down towards the Gloucester Road.

How cheering, how typical.

:o)

Solstice

Today marked the solstice and a lunar eclipse. In Bristol the times of sunrise and maximum occlusion were separated by only four minutes. I've no idea what that means to a good pagan, especially since we could see nothing of the sky through the lowering clouds and mist.

As the roads are snowy and unsafe we reluctantly decided not to drive to Avebury but still felt that we had to celebrate the turning of the year in some way. So Moonface, Tom, Biggsy and I left our homes in the pre-dawn cold and walked up through the snowy streets to the highest point of the Downs, not far from Sea Walls. Biggsy had brought some tea-lights so we picked some small sprigs of holly and ivy, planted those in the snow and surrounded them by the seven lights. We lit them at sunrise, welcomed the return of the sun and the moon together then walked home via a cafe and bacon sandwiches.

All in all it was a lovely quiet start to the new year which gave us a real feeling of being able to look forwards to spring, in spite of the snow and frost with which we are still surrounded.

:o)

Wikipedia Ascending

Folly, Kings Weston House



Three weeks after first hearing Vaughan-Williams' "The Lark Ascending" for the first time and subsequently asking for a CD of the music as a Christmas present, I learned something more about its composition.

Moonface and I tried to get some exercise today by walking from home to Shirehampton via the Downs and Blaise, about six miles over quiet roads and snowy deserted open spaces. En route we stopped for a very civilised coffee and cake at Kings Weston House. In the potted history of the House which was provided for visitors, we read that it was there in 1920 that Vaughan Williams completed the composition of The Lark Ascending. Later we passed the compact Shirehampton village hall which was where the work was first performed, with the Avonmouth and Shirehampton Choral Society providing the chorus.

When I returned home (in darkness, it's been a short day) I tried to confirm the history and found that though this story is well attested locally, Wikipedia thought that the work was first performed in London. Bloody typical. So I edited Wikipedia to give the real version. This is my first ever edit of Wikipedia. It's so easy that I'll have to do it more.

:o)

Bench 2

Sorry about that, Simon.

It was a great party, with lots of talk & good food & drink. I enjoyed the dancing enough to need to cool off, so I joined the smokers outside around the fire. In my defence, it seemed as if there was space on the bench and we didn't know that this one was rotten, either. It broke beneath our combined weights, so it wasn't entirely my fault, honestly.

Oops. Sorry again, Simon.

:o/

Corvids

This morning I awoke clear-headed, alert and full of energy.
By early afternoon my hours of staring at a screen had made me heavy & torpid so I grabbed the chance to cycle around the Downs for half an hour or low bright sunlight.

There were so many corvids around, pecking at the turf or scavenging discarded food wrappers.
I saw crows, rooks, a couple of jackdaws, plenty of magpies and a solitary jay. Why so many? What's so special about the Downs?

:o)

The Way Through the Woods

Thinking about the renascence of nature exemplified by the way our garden path had become overgrown by weeds and accretions of rich black soil, I was reminded of this poem. Of course, this is set in springtime, but there is also that sense of combined hope and melancholy within it.

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods….
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling, 1906.

:o)

Clearing up

I don't do gardening.
I may mow the lawn or pick up odd lumps of cement that surface in the flower-beds from building works gone by, but generally I don't garden.

But today I cleared up the dead growth from the path leading to our front door, the dead flowers that were killed in the recent frosts and which have been lying there, blackening and giving silent reproach every time I walk by. Moonface, chief gardener, has been resistant to me clearing the path because she thinks it looks pretty when overgrown; so I waited until she's returned the right tool from the allotment, and had gone out for a while. Oh, it was satisfying to get rid of all that messy dead stuff and start to make it look somewhat tidier.

Sometime, I'll get around to hacking out some of the Lady's Mantle that is slowly forcing apart the flagstones in our back garden. That's a strange plant. I remember that when I was a child of five or so, my mother was quite excited by finding small growths of the stuff on the railway embankment near home as it was so rare. Perhaps that's because we were in the North, and winters were colder then. In our garden, it's a definite unruly weed.

Clearing the dead foliage from the front path gave me a curious sense of optimism in this cold grey time of year. Hacking the fronds away, I exposed astounding deposits of rich black soil which have magically accumulated over the last coupe of years and which would have acted as seed-beds for yet more plants if I hadn't cleared it away. I could see that in spite of man's imposition of brick and concrete, Gaia is slowly yet continually fighting back and how if left unattended, our cities would revert sooner rather than later. Like the Roman cities buried under English fields, our modern world would soon be covered and reborn as something different.

We are getting closer to the Solstice again.

:o)

oor Phil.

I love Steve Bell's cartoons in the Guardian.

Phil & me are dead hard.

Bench

Sorry about that, Lucy.




we were dancing, the room was hot and so were we, so someone had opened the window to let some air in. Once we had cooled down, it had to be shut again. The sash window wouldn't slide shut from the inside, so someone had to go outside to push it up. That was me. Mission accomplished, I turned to jump off the bench and promptly fell through the slats. Umm. As I was so relaxed by a tiny glass of red wine I didn't feel any pain from the scrape on my elbow, but I think that Matt may have some bench-mending to do. I think it was rotten anyway.

Sorry again, Lucy. And it was a great party.

:o/

:o)

the weight of years

I've been out one way or another five nights in succession, and I'm feeling tired. I just can't take it anymore like I used to. Just look at my wrinkles.

Tuesday: Exhibition & evening meal in London, then straight back to the pub with the Tuesboyz. Not all of them, as two of the lads were on the same rain as me travelling up to the Smoke: Geoff the architect en route to a meeting, & Andy off to visit Fredka in Germany.

Wednesday: The Lake AGM. I''ve been elected to the committee. I don't know whether that's good, or lots of work.

Thursday: The Concretes at the Fleece. A great band with a wonderful new record, but only fifty in the audience. They need their brass, though. The cut-back band just doesn't cut so well.

Friday: The Bridge at the Polish Club. White reggae & dub for the middle-class & middle-aged and their late-teen offspring. Hey! I danced for the whole set and felt so much better for it, ins spite of the walk home at midnight.

Saturday: Dreadzone at the Trinity. More white reggae & dubstep, but for the festival crowd, poorer, younger, sweatier. Dreadzone also missed their brass section, but that's because half the band were stuck overseas with snow blocking the airports (either that or it's due to the Spanish air-traffic strike). We danced again, so I was all smiles. Then we nipped into Lucy's party for more talk and dancing, staggering home at two. It's a shame about the bench.

Sunday: I'm taking it easy today, just a walk down to the Lake to look at trees for trimming later in the winter. Moonface is now co-opted onto the Environmental Committee, too.

:0)