Remains

"As to the bed's feet, life is shrunk..."

There are catkins, blurred, behind the withered hazelnut.  Morosely, I choose to focus on dead things.  Call it a question of style.

Just a wittering kind of post really

Don't tell Rosie I'm here.  I'm supposed to be finding model business letters of introduction to our services in French on the web, for our new venture (which is nothing as risqué as that might sound).  Our husbands are beginning to suspect that our weekly business meetings are largely a pretext for walking the dogs, which we do indeed do, but we talk business too.  There are so many things to think about.  I have a book of business French which I've been looking in, but then I saw that it was nearly twenty years old, from the time when we first were considering moving here, and I was led to wonder if even French business language may have changed a little in that time; we don't want to sound like something out of Molière...

In fact I've had quite a good day in the office; I actually made a list of Things I Wished to Accomplish and have achieved most of them, (save for turning out a credible sounding letter of professional introduction in French for Rosie's Darling Daughter to peruse and correct...).  It's true that a number of them were rather frivolous.  Such as taking out a year's sub to Jacquie Lawson's e-cards because I'd almost missed my Australian brother's birthday and wanted to send something other than a colourful e-mail, and I've been meaning to get onto them for a while.  I'm not going to give a link, because if everyone does it, they'll lose their appeal, you can Google if you want.

Another thing was to go back through my external hard drive and find the high res. copy of this photo.

This is because a woman with the very non-Breton sounding name of Cindy at the Conseil Régional de Bretagne saw it on Flickr and wanted it for a study of the region they were doing.  She was rather disorganised, kept asking me to sign a release for and send a full-sized copy of a photo without telling me which.  I was a bit disappointed it was this one; she could have found a similar image in a number of places, it's nothing special or original, an image of an image from fairly well-known place.  I had to go to the trouble of looking it out, printing, signing, scanning and returning the release with the larger copy... and if that's not acceptable presumably I have to provide the stamp.  All to gratify my own vanity to have a photo in public that probably won't even have my name on it.  Also it would have been churlish to say no, and she could have just nicked it and I'd never have known.

By coincidence, and really rather more gratifyingly, I picked up a comment on the post where that photo was first shown from someone who said they'd found the piece very helpful for a course they were teaching on church architecture, specifically about the dark ages.  I love those kind of rare comments on old posts, like the woman who would might have eaten horse chestnuts (conkers to fellow Brits) if she hadn't Googled and found my post about chestnut trees.  I have contributed to global knowledge of ancient Christendom and saved someone from unpleasant indigestion!

The other thing I had to do was organise some photos I took yesterday of E.'s house.  She is, after 7 years here, thinking of moving back to Holland, and wanted some shots for an estate agent's website.  E. is the most willfully uninterested, I might say ignorant, person I know, worse by far than Tom or my brother, about anything remotely digital.  She still has dial-up and was perfectly happy to give a home to our elderly Canon SLR film camera, which was quite nice really, as we didn't know what else to do with it.  So I agreed to take the pictures, though I warned her that since we don't want her to move away one bit, I might do my best to take really horrible ones so that no one would want to buy the house.  A., who had just arrived for our weekly yoga session, suggested a bit of judicious photoshopping to superimpose an image of a horrible pig-farm right next door, with perhaps some vile green poisonous seaweed lapping at the door.

Unfortunately, the morning sun came out and flooded the place, and I was unable to make it look very ugly at all.  In order to avoid E.spending all day waiting for even greatly reduced versions of them to crawl through her dial-up connection, I edited, reduced, exported and organised them into a Picasa web album, gave her the link, and told her just to click on them to enlarge, which might be a bit slow but should be possible, then she could choose the ones she wanted to use...

A breezy e-mail finally arrived in her peculiar pidgin combo of Dutch, English and French done on an AZERTY keyboard with the bare minimum punctuation or upper-case, saying yes, very beautiful, thank you, but 'I don't manage to make them bigger next time I see you we might find out which ones are the best,ok?'

Impossible woman.  I don't even bloody want her to sell her house.  I'm hoping her total uselessness is in part affected because she doesn't really want to sell her house either.

Anyway, since this has been some of the only photography I've been doing lately, I quickly scrambled a collage together of some of the pictures.  Not because I'm trying to act as an estate agent, but because at least here people take the trouble to look at my photos.  And because her house is full of charm and colour and light and life.  If by any chance any of you  did want to come and be my neighbours and buy an old Breton three-storey mill house with an acre or so of woodland garden, potager, sunny terrace, views to Moncontour which is a short (steep) walk away, all for about the price of a one-bedroom flat in the south of England then let me know and I wouldn't be averse to a commision.  However, you would have to guarantee to teach me yoga, keep wonderful dogs, play the piano and the accordion, make me laugh with your sometimes use of an unpredictable amalgam of several modern European languages, henna your hair and dress like a slightly demented retired ballerina. 

I'm not quite sure if I'm going to invite her to read the above or not.  She'd probably claim she couldn't get the link to work, anyway.

It's possibly worth enlarging the collage even a little more, since I didn't take the time to see that the best pictures were the biggest.

~~~

Well, considering this was only supposed to be a quick post, I seem to have rattled away at some length.  And I haven't left time for my original purpose which was to ask if anyone knows why when I open an e-mail photo attachment with Picasa (my default viewer), it then opens up a whole load of very small 'temporary internet explorer content' files.  It's creepy and weird and I don't like it; has anyone else experienced this and should I be worried?

Must go.

Frostscapes, and goodbye feeds.

Winter's not done with us yet, nor I with it.

~~~

A year or two ago I dsicovered the wonders of feeds.  I spent an unconscionable long weekend transferring all my blogroll to RSS, and whenever I took on a new blog, I clicked that little orange icon and on they went.

I've just spent the best part of today deleting them, or most of them, as I thought.  I left on those which have been long dormant, in case they should reawaken, a few who post relatively infrequently but I want to know when they do, and a couple who, for different reasons I don't have on the blogroll, and it's handy to have them to hand.  This still left me with an overwhelming 24 feeds.

I couldn't keep up, the feeds had just become overwhelming and a source of guilt, telling me always just how long I'd been neglecting you all for.  Neither will I do any other kind of feed reader, Blogger Followers (still haven't a clue what that's about, though I appear to have 20 of them, not many compared to some, but Blogger won't tell me who they are anyway...), or that kind of feed blogroll thing lots of other people have.  From now on it's up and down the blogroll in the old-fashioned way, which will probably be quicker as I won't have to wait between feed and going to the blog to comment, especially for the Typepad ones or people with loads of posts per page or fussy widgets...

This has meant that in the last few days I think I've managed to visit almost everyone and comment on most, an infrequent state of affairs which, by definition, won't last long.  Sorry if I've still missed you, I'll be along as soon as I can.  Likewise if you're a new but fairly regular visitor, I'll get you on the sidebar very soon. 

I may even find time to write something half-worthwhile here one of these days.  Still, pictures are probably more interesting, and quicker to look at.

Seeds and pods

Just by way of posting more big photos, some croppings I didn't get around to posting back in November.

This last one, below, was cropped too small to be able to post it big, but I like it anyway, so I'll post it smaller.

 

I'm hankering to take more pictures, feel quite deprived of it, but seem to lack the opportunity, or the inspiration.  I don't quite know what I'm waiting for.  Spring, I suppose.  I've still got a few left in the store cupboard, anyway.

Misty, an experiment.

This is an experimental post.  I've ventured into editing the html to expand the width of the layout on this blog, so that perhaps I can post photos in the extra-large format so kindly provided by the new post editor, but which has always been useless since my blog is too narrow for it.  In Blogger Help, I found this useful forum discussion, so here goes.

A misty morning, after the snow,

Lapwings flying into the misty blue,

and a curious arc of refracted light, like a colourless rainbow, which followed us round.

Now, let's see if that's worked...


Yes, it has!  Slightly embarrassing, somehow, seeing them that big.  I expect I'll get used to it, but I shall have to do something about the banner, which is now too narrow.  Probably time for a new one anyway, though I think I like this one more than any I've had before .  Thanks to jstngav5 for the tip.  I feel very intrepid messing with html like this, but quite emboldened!

So now I've widened the banner too, and gone back over the last few posts to embiggen some of the pictures, this is fun...

Snowscapes again

From a walk Molly and I took a day or two before the thaw set in. We slithered a bit, and it was rather grey and sombre, but it was not bad walking. We went to the bottom of our frozen hill where we hadn't dared drive, and looked detachedly at the main road which was clear and free of snow and ice and where cars were speeding nonchalantly, as if we were on the threshold of a different world. Then we turned and decided to explore the hill roads while the light lasted.

~~~

It all seems a long time ago now.  Despite it being still only January, and fairly cold, the earth is tipping, and the season is changing.  I know this partly because of  involuntary memory, an increase in its intensity. 

So today's sherry, as I poured it and took the first sip as the sunlight slanted across the room, wasn't only something I knew as a souvenir of growing up and family custom.  I smelled the strange smell of the sideboard cupboard, of glassware in the confined space of old wooden furniture, and felt and heard the gentle, tactful action of its door closing on the ragged velvetty seal around the frame, the texture under my fingers of the slightly lifting walnut veneer pattern, which looked like a friendly, ugly little face, on the bowed front of it, and the movement and light tapping sound of its small hinged brass handle.  And I breathed in, momentarily, the air of a family Sunday at home, of modest, limited, slightly constrained conviviality, the cheerful expectation of a good meal - Sunday roasts could generally be relied on to come out well, though the exact hour at which they would be served could be variable - and of a not altogether unpleasant dullness and ennuie, a restful boredom.

This is not especially a memory of any season, but for me this kind of identic, involuntary recall tends only to happen in the transitional seasons of spring and autumn, so a visitation from it is particularly welcome and exciting at this time of year.  Something to do with light and brain chemistry I suppose.

~~~

I really did mean to come and visit all your blogs today, but I had to finish 'The Children's Book' instead, since for some days now I have been waking up in the night and thinking about it and wondering and worrying about the people in it, almost to the point of getting up at all hours to continue reading it.  I am, as Dick said he was when he finished it, now feeling quite bereft.  As ever, when one is feeling any grief or loss, I am not in a critical frame of mind about the object of  my bereavement, and rather lacking in articulate things to say about it.  Neither, please, do I really want to know just now, from those cleverer and more clear-sighted than myself, about its faults and failings and why I shouldn't really have loved it as much as I did.

Anyway, as I have perhaps said before, I am a bear, if not of little, of very slow and ponderous brain, and most things take me quite a time to mull over.  I will say, however, that though I have been thoroughly absorbed and intrigued by AS Byatt's books in the past, and have come to feel involved with and to believe in her characters, and generally to admire her talents enormously, I realise that this is the first time I have genuinely been moved by her writing.

~~~ 

 

Now, since Molly is very much better, and can be left alone for a few hours, (with blankets and hot-water bottles of course!) tomorrow evening, I'm off to make cock-a-leekie for Burns Night.

Ballade des dames du temps jadis...

The sad decline of Melusina.  How are the wine corks fallen...

(Where are the snows?)