After-sales; chitchat; pease

After a good start with Bram, things went a bit pear-shaped last night, and, disheartened and worried, we felt that the few days might be more to be endured than enjoyed for all of us. Tom decided to go to bed and read, only to find his still-quite-new shiny Kndle p@perwhite seemed to be broken, freezing weirdly or failing to come on altogether, then flashing up unhelpful messages. Assuming it would have to be sent back, I looked around for the very deluxe packaging and paperwork it came with, without success. I snarked at him about this, then e-mailed the relevant French limb of The Megacorporation from whence I had bought it. Within the hour we had a phone call from a very patient and polite young woman who calmly took me through the elaborate procedure of holding down the on-off button for forty seconds and waiting a few more, which miraculously resuscitated the device. If it did it again though, she said, let them know, as it might mean it really was faulty. No fuss about packaging and paperwork.

~

Bram's much better too, and the rain cleared by after lunchtime so we had another good walk. One of the things about having a dog to walk which gets you out on a regular basis is that even, or perhaps especially, in these quiet parts, you run into people, stop and talk, keep a bit up to date with things. Our former neighbour, who looks after our field, stopped his van, curious at seeing me with a dog again, and we chatted about dogs and exchanged information and thoughts about septic tanks, to our mutual benefit. When we got back, Tom said he'd go out alone on a provisioning foray. Bram seemed in fact quite bothered by his absence, and, while still quite reticent, genuinely pleased to see him and join in the rather deliberately exaggerated welcome home celebrations.

~

Less regular walking also means I'm more ignorant about what goes on in the fields round and about. When E came the other day, she pointed out (with a view to where it might not be a good idea to walk) a rather fine young silvery roan bull in one of the pastures. He was new to me, and I realised that the handsome gold coloured Limousin who used to be seen all over the place, a rather gentle seeming character, easily bossed around by the farm dogs and his harem of black and white cows, and who sometimes featured in my Molly walking blog, I hadn't seen for a long time. Scarcely earth shattering, you might say, but of no more nor less importance than many other things. When I did get out walking this year, back in the summer, I noticed a lot more fields of these pretty violet flowered peas:

sometimes on their own, sometime mixed with field beans, like small broad (fava) beans, and a cereal type plant:  

(there were some fields of just the beans, which I sometimes filled my pockets with and cooked, can't remember how)

I picked a bunch of the flowering peas and put them on the window sill, sometimes using the top shoots for salads and stir fries, but mostly just to admire.

What they were used for I don't know, they didn't seem to be there long so they clearly weren't harvested for the peas and beans, but whether they were made into silage or simply ploughed in as green manure I never saw, or spoke to anyone to learn. Pretty while they lasted anyway.

No toothache; melancholy cat; visiting dog (with photos)

Tom was fed up; just when he thought he had finished with the dentist for a while, he broke another tooth. Feeling I had been getting away too lightly, I began to suspect sensitivity and incipient toothache. When our shared appointment arrives, the dentist says that the broken part was where she'd already repaired earlier, and fixed it again without pain or problem, and my toothache having evaporated, any worries prove to be groundless save for a small amount of gum withdrawal (if that's the right expression), she blows the puffer round my teeth almost with impunity. We go home relieved.

~

I am in e-mail communication with the potential future landlady of Simone's and Jean-Felix's daughter (see previous), an Indian lady (I think) in Golders Green. She sounded nice, and very well-spoken, on the 'phone, her written English is slightly quirky. She says it's necessary to let them know, 'We have a quite cat as pet. Tabby is an old cat and does not purr a lot.'

~

Bram, who is staying with us now, is a noble and handsome dog:

though nervous of many things, goats, cows, tractors, Tom...

Also  unfortunately rather attracted to cow poo, though he takes to heart being told off for eating it,

'What me? Noooo!'

But it's good to have a dog to walk again, and to reacquaint myself with the beauty of our hilltop on a late afternoon in winter.

Giggling; pinny; raptors; marigold

I go to bed giggling, at a late comment from Glenn on this post telling me that 'we have learned' (how can one ever dispute something that begins thus?) that Nigella's programme is really all staged, her friends are actors and her perfect home is in fact a hired location. This leads me to this piece which suggests playing 'Nigella bingo', scoring whenever certain familiar Nigella tropes occur, such as: 'triple alliteration, eg “basking in bronze beauty”, “gorgeous golden globules” or “fruitful foraging in the fridge” ' or 'she licks something erotically from a spoon' or ' strolls around high-end London shop, picking out produce - even though in real life, she totally has someone to do her shopping for her'.  There is also the observation that a 'party of glamorous guests descend for candlelit supper. They look faintly important and influential, like you should know who they are, but you don’t', which may well substantiate Glenn's allegation. The comments are also often funny, especially the man who must be on a promise.

~

Simone and Jean-Felix were once our insurance agents, now they're retired and just sort-of friends. It's nice seeing people go from being soigné and professional and restrained to soft and scruffy and expansive on their retirement, I've observed it quite often. They ask me for help - translation, phone calls etc. - with finding short term student accommodation in London for their daughter, whom I've known since she was just a little thing and I used to help with her English sometimes. I feel a sense of weight and reluctance, but I do want to help. I worry for these children I've known, who touch my heart when I don't always want it touched, and if I worry how do their parents cope? It's good though, to sit and chat for much longer than I meant to, and Simone forgets to take her pinny off all the time I'm there.

~

On the way out to see them, there are two buzzards and a heron in our field. I slow down and have a good view of all three taking off and wheeling away in the chill wind. I've not quite forgiven the herons for persecuting our fish, but they are still magnificent.

~

Summer colour, why not?

Adjectival: between showers; cauli; and Toëno

A newcomer to Quess'quitricote, a petite woman perhaps my age, is fun and lively and bright, and not at all shy. She is wearing a skirt, quite short, made from vivid hued, densely patched crochet squares, and from her bag winks a multicoloured ball of glossy, flossy yarn.

~

E brings Bram round on a preliminary visit. The rain clears and we take a turn around the square of fields I used to take with Mol, along the ridge road. It is breezy and splashy with sunlight after rain, and Bram is brisk and alert and a fine dog to walk. E remarks on how very beautiful it is up on our hill, and I realise I had rather stopped appreciating it.

~

A good, medium sized cauliflower for just 65 eurocents. I roast half of it with olive oil and cumin seeds to go with a couple of mackerel fillets. 

~

The Ile de Toëno, or perhaps it's just a presqu'île: one of those funny sort of causewayed excrescences up on the Pink Granite Coast, with nothing much there but a menhir, a small boatyard, a place to buy oysters and other shellfish, and rather pleasant motel type hotel, where we spent a night back in early October, to attend a concert at the Lanvellec early music festival. The concert was a disappointing washout, which made us cross, but it doesn't seem to matter much now, and I spent a pleasant hour or so scrambling about on scrubby granite pavements and rocks and headlands enjoying the views and the sight and sound of the sea, which one can never have too much of.

 ~

Insurance; thankful; things on the table, and another goat.

I am having trouble looking forward to our coming trip to Iceland. We have never travelled much in winter, so many things can go wrong, and in the cold, short days it just seems more advisable to stay at home. Now, feelings of apprehension and impending doom, and a certain reluctance to focus on fun and frivolity, are casting a pall over it, and I find I'm avoiding making even necessary arrangements. I took out basic insurance with the first flight, but even finding something more comprehensive and suitable seems to be difficult for a couple of ageing expats. However, we talk it through, decide the extra cost is worth the peace of mind. I apply myself to a more thorough search and come up with something clear, appropriate and not ruinous, and now I find I can better enjoy making plans.

~

We watch a programme about the home life of the Georgians. It's lively and full of interesting detail you never knew about. We end up agreeing that, whatever the problems of the 21st century, for ourselves anyway, we're glad we live when, where and how we do.

~

I scan the things on the table, and though it's a bit messy and not-dealt-with, mostly I like what I see and how it reflects our life.  There is a book by Simon Schama about the Dutch Republic, a leaflet about a museum in Châtelaudren that wasn't open when I went to see it, catalogues for organic garden seeds and gifts in aid of the SPA, a pad of 2mm graph paper and one of ordinary squared, a to-do list from an indeterminate time ago, a printout from my brother of something he wrote about Green Man ornaments in a church in the Orne, the monthly free departmental magazine, scissors, matches, pens and pencils, reading glasses, the stalled septic tank project papers, vitamin pills, books about drawing and painting and meditation, a book of very difficult sudoku, two Kindles known to have at the top of their contents the accumulating works of Patrick O'Brian and CJ Samson, blood test results, a basket of walnuts and a large and handsome plate unusually containing a good selection of fresh fruit.

Some of these things really should be tidied away though.

~

Not too much yoga; fragment; fritters

E has a lot to do, and must walk her dogs afterwards, and yoga only lasts about half an hour, about the same as pre-yoga coffee. Her older dog Moos, having lately acquired an adopted younger brother, is expressing rather puppyish behaviour and pointedly steals one of her wellington boots to play with.

~

The corners of my blue room, it being at something of a dead end of the house, are beginning to smell slightly musty. I set about clearing them out a bit in the afternoon - my sister quoted once a much respected elderly lady, who had cleaned for other people for much of her working life, who said that if you take care of the corners of a room, the middle will take care of itself. Along with a number of boxes of things no longer under guarantee which can be thrown out, I displace my old tapestry frame. I'm loathe to get rid of this, Tom bought it for me during a fairly short phase when needlepoint was a hobby, before we even came here, and I feel it may one day acquire a new usefulness, even if not for needlepoint or not for me. I unrolled the stretchers and found the last thing I began on it, again before we came here.

A very large self-designed canvas of some hyacinths, along with the full sized background cartoon and the original design it was scaled up from (together with a short list of vegetables and some figures, which seem to me more possibly more interesting, being inexplicable).

I no longer, for now at least, have any time or motivation for activities whose outcome is purely decorative; I'm not sure or rigid about what might be included in this category*, but I think I can say needlepoint is, unless I suppose one was a mediaeval person with enough of it to hang on a wall as draught exclusion. I know you can make it into cushions, but that's about it, and they aren't particularly useful cushions. Anyway, the wool for this has long since mostly been knitted up into other, more useful, enjoyable and visible things. Needlepoint can be a pleasant and satisfying activity and can be extremely beautiful, but I'm not sure, looking at this, about trying to translate a style of visual art - those kind of closely observed, highly shaded still-life and botanical drawings I've been fond of doing in the past - into the medium of wool and canvas, though there are artists, like Kaffe Fassett, who have done it to good effect. 

The main problem with it though, is something that has been the bane of my life forever, starting something hugely ambitious, insisting on it being entirely original, and never finishing it. I have had too many beautiful, and even more not so beautiful, fragments of unfinished things lying around, making the corners musty. Yes, I guess I am talking figuratively as well. Taking stock though, I have think I have fewer than I used to. I embark on things I have no hope of completing less often, I think, and have the staying power (and the time, when I set about these kind of projects I was considerably more busy with working life etc) to finish more. On the other hand I suppose, if no time is wasted, process can count for something even if the product never happens, if one enjoyed it at the time.

Not quite sure what I'll do with it, I can't quite bring myself to throw it out yet, but that's what needs to be done in the end.

~

Not just spinach curry, but also rounds of aubergine dipped in egg and a mixture of breadcrumbs, polenta and seasonings and fried. Delicious.

~

* and I'm not imposing it as a rule for living on anyone else.

3BT: Good intentions; sisterly; crunchy bits - and goats

Didn't post yesterday as I thought Sunday night's link would do, and was, I'm afraid, too confounded by heartache, anger and despair which I don't want to spill out, or indeed seem to be fishing for comfort for, here.

But I'll turn to and come back to the daily postings, if only not to give in. Maybe some 3BT for a bit would be helpful, and for pictures, if I don't take any, to have a trawl through the web albums and even the external hard drive, on which languish many thousands of old ones.

Here's yesterday's for today, a pattern I might follow.

~

Monday yoga being postponed, but needing to get out after the weekend anyway, I drive out to Lamballe to shop. On one of our frequent resolves for a dietary spruce up, I buy wholewheat loaves, unsliced, and cut them into doorsteps for freezing, and now the fruit and vegetable stocks are also satisfyingly, but realistically (we probably will be able to get through them), replenished. Better still, I persuade Tom to turn the 400 gram bag of spinach into a curry for tonight.

~

While I was out, the 'phone went, and rang and rang. Tom doesn't usually answer on the land line when I'm not here, as he can't understand the caller if they're speaking French or hear them anyway even if they're English, and he gets in a state trying. 'I wondered if it was Doreen.' he said. This is a bit odd, since his sister doesn't ring often and he's unlikely usually to think about a call being from her. She is a kind and courageous woman for whom I have always had a great deal of time, not least because she loves her brother with an open, generous, persistent affection despite his rather offhand gruffness with her. I do the redial and it is indeed her number, so I call her back.

'I've been so worried about you,' she says 'I know you're nowhere near, but still. And I've been reading what you wrote on that Facebook thing you do.'

I don't do Facebook.

'Huh? Oh the blog?'

I am surprised and touched. I gave them a link to a post about their beautiful dog Lara, now sadly passed away, which I wrote much earlier in the year after they'd visited, but didn't imagine they'd follow here after that. I tell her Tom had an inkling it was her, which pleases her, and we talk about her new adopted grandchildren, the brave, sometimes hard, but loving road their parents have taken. They are not to spoil them with toys at Christmas, she's been instructed, but rather give them games for sharing, perhaps tickets to a pantomime, and - here her daughter is going back on her initial refusal of hand knits - could she perhaps knit them a traditional Aran sweater, in natural wool to go with everything? We talk soothingly about wool and cables, then end the call easily. We, Tom and I, are both warmed and heartened.

~

As often we watch Nigella, not quite sure why we do; the food isn't really our kind of thing, and the lifestyle porn aspect and her awful friends get up our noses somewhat, but it kind of rounds off Monday evening telly after the quizzes, and we did like the her quoting of Terry Pratchett: something along the lines that chewy burned sticky crunchy bits were a separate food group.

~

Photo: Goats

A patch of scrubby woodland up the road was cleared a while back, perhaps as a future building plot, and sown with grass. These girls, there are up to half a dozen of them, are sometimes to be seen maintaining it. Though of course any goat worth its salt would rather have had the trees than pappy old grass. 

Three beautiful things for a cold-stricken time

Wasabi peanuts, from a special Christmas stall at the supermarket, with all kinds of odd dried and glacé things. I love wasabi, in a unique, slightly masochistic way, and I like the way these Japanese snacks incorporating it are sweet and savoury and dry and pungent all at once, and just now especially I like how they send a kind of delayed explosive charge through the soft palate, into the sinuses and tear ducts, finishing up somewhere in the vicinity of the Eustachian tube.  I also like the colour.

~

Librivox. Why didn't I know about this before?  The audiobook equivalent of Project Gutenberg: aiming to make every book in the public domain available free as an audio book. It's easy to access and you don't have to download the podcasts.  Scratching the surface of it would get me through several lifetimes and an awful lot of knitting.  I've just finished Emma; the reader was good, her American accent very quickly ceased to bother me (sorry, US friends, for this show of prejudice) and in fact her British accent and range of voices for the dialogue was impressive, I thought Emma's voice in particular was spot-on.

~

Something that made me rather tearful*, not because it's sad, quite the contrary, but because it's so touching and lovely: the astonishingly talented Colin and Li Yi's latest Christmas video.  I've yet to meet these two in person, they live in England and are good friends of my niece and sparkly nephew-out-law, but I've posted their previous ones twice, here and here, so I reckon three times constitutes a tradition. A little while ago I recommended Erin Morgernstern's book The Night Circus to my sister, who then thrust it on her daughter who then lent it to Colin and Li Yi.  When they returned the book, my niece opened it and there was a handmade thank you card in the shape of a pop-up model of the Night Circus.  In fact I think perhaps they belong in the Night Circus... 

Though they are clearly technically very savvy, much of the work is done with pencil and paper, the paper shapes cut out meticulously with scalpels, very hands-on (there's a page of stills about the making of this video here), and it takes a long time.  And though this kind of design is their profession, the videos are really made simply out of love, generosity and and overflowing creative spirit; one commenter here before said seeing them made her feel quite hopeful for the future. Enjoy, and thanks and happy Christmas to Colin and Li Yi.

~

*since, as Simone de Beauvoir (I think) said, no matter what tears you shed, you always end up blowing your nose. Which is one reason why it's good for a cold, the other is that cheering and beautiful things make you feel better anyway.

Fire, rescue with quinces, Mashrou'Leila

1: The radiators are barely coming on yet but we feel chilly and damp.  The beginning of November justifies the first fire of the winter, and our day and our mood lift enormously.

2: B the German Doctor discreetly hints by e-mail that the Quiet American might like an excuse to take a breather from family responsibilities. An hour or two later he is on our doorstep with a box of quinces, and needs very little persuasion to sit by our fire for a little and talk about Indian food.  Grandchild worship is wearing a little thin, it seems; our house is quieter.  I don't quite know what I'm going to do with the quinces, but they are making the back extension smell very nice.

3: My recent, limited, forays into Arab indie music have also yielded Mashrou3Leila.  Lebanese, sometime students of the American University of Beirut, some boys and a girl, an openly gay lead singer, I don't understand what they're singing about, and it may be deceptively political and serious, but it seems fun and lively, and as a lover of aubergines, I couldn't but respond to this:

~

Hamburg parsley, epistemological exoticism, and a thousand colours

1: Hamburg parsley: a very poor germination of the seeds means I only have four plants to show for it, but I pulled one today and roasted it with some carrots and leek and an undersized and barely ripe butternut squash.  I've never eaten it before; it does indeed resemble, as Jane Grigson described it, 'an underprivileged parsnip', but the flavour and texture are not much like, and certainly more delicate.

2: My big brother Phil gave me a book he'd written when we met earlier in the month.  It's a GURPS role-playing game supplement on the subject of Atlantis. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, and in fact what big bro is best known for in this line is his collaboration with Terry Pratchett in creating the GURPS series for the Discworld books.  I am only a little the wiser as the the arcane nature of these activities, but I am already absorbed in the book, which is full of fascinating information on every possible aspect of the Lost City, from Plato through Madam Blavatsky and Jules Verne to modern submariners.  It's meticulously researched and delightfully, accessibly written, and it serves to remind me of  how we spent so much of our childhood, with Look and Learn comics and Jackdaw folders and wall charts and maps and bickering over knowing most about obscure things, and generally being pretty horrid little bookish know-it-alls, and how marvellously enriched our lives have been by it, even though neither of us, he by choice and I by aptitude or the lack of it, has ended up as conventional academics.

3: More knitting! The Lang Mille Colori I mentioned before, which Iso bought for me as a present when we had our knitting day out , I started making into a fairly narrow single rib scarf, along the lines of the famous Noro striped scarf as written down by the mighty Brooklyn Tweed.  However, and this wasn't my original idea but I can't remember whose it was so I can't credit it, instead of using two different self-striping yarns, I used two different ends of one colourway, so that instead of one end of the wool being at the start of the knitting and the other still embedded in the ball, both are left at the beginning and one runs out in a loop instead of an end, a topologically interesting proposition. Thus the broad fuzzy bands of colour are broken up into narrower stripes but only by other colours of the same wool.  I've no idea if this makes any sense at all, but this is the result:

(In fact at this point I'm using opposite ends of two different balls, but anyway, the principle is the same.) I've lately picked it up again since putting it aside in favour of other projects for other people with deadlines. I must say that knitting seems to be one of the only things I've ever taken up where I'm finishing things some time before the deadlines, which must be a good sign, though how long this situation will continue before I overreach myself I don't know.

Yarns and knitting are extraordinary for provoking memories and associations, particularly the colours involved.  The chalky hues in this wool put me in mind of a couple of ceramic items I came upon at a particular time in my life: a fragment of mediaeval floor tile preserved at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset, and a small pottery pendant in the shape of a leaping salmon, small and simply shaped but with a glaze of remarkable complexity, which I bought from a young woman on the street in Killarney.  I may one day revisit Muchelney, and even perhaps Killarney, I hope so, but the little fish pendant I left behind somewhere and won't see again.

Dinan, in search of lost glasses, bag wash.

Deadline cleaving as ever, though this one is entirely self-imposed so no one but I will give a monkey's if I make it or not anyway.  In order to reach exactly one thousand published posts in exactly seven years of blogging, I must now produce one a day for the next four days as of today.  So it's really a question of making myself sit down for a short time and come up with something, just like I did when I first started, only I think I can safely say I I will not be getting up at six in the morning, plugging in the dial-up connection, making tea, going for a walk round the block, reading the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu etc before the connection was made and Blogger Dashboard, in its dear old chunky black and blue format appeared... ah, those were the days.

So, when daily blogging calls, and inspiration falters, what else is there to do but the time-honoured and always handy Three Beautiful Things! In my preferred format of two written items and an illustration.

1:  Tom is stir crazy from resting his Rabbits' Revenge twisted leg, and decides it's better enough to drive to Dinan and eat Indian.  The New Delhi is fairly new, and the menu is good enough to assuage our yearnings. The nan breads are especially good, the right balance of puffy and light yet still chewy and substantial, and they bring us a vindaloo strength sauce, savoury and tomato-ey, in a separate dish, so we can add it judiciously to taste.  I beg a stop at Fil de Lune, get an extra ball of one I've already got on the needles to be sure, and some sea-green bouclé on clearance which I'm not 100% sure about but think I can do something nice with. It's a glorious sunny day.

2: On the way we are passing through Moncontour to go to the bank and a large elderly man in a wheelchair is stuck in the middle of the road on a very steep hill, holding up the traffic.  We pull over, Tom goes to the bank, I join in the effort to push the man out of the road into a safe parking place in the sunshine until his carers can come and get him.  Much later, in Dinan, I realise I've lost my nice new reading glasses which were hanging round my neck in a case on a string.  Did they get caught up in the wheelchair?  Who knows.  I retrace as many steps as possible, including the site of the wheelchair episode, but without success.  I call in at the retraite where the man comes from.  The woman at the reception is so kind: 'Oh he's a pain,' she grumbles about the old man,' he's always going into town and he knows her can't get up the hill again.  And you were trying to help and now you've lost your glasses!' I add that I don't know for sure that it happened then.  She promises to ring me if they do show up, but I trail home drearily and without much hope.  Tom urges me not to wait around feeling rotten about it, ring the opticians in England now, get them replaced.  All the paperwork is still together, and I find a voucher with it for 50% off if I buy an extra pair.  A quick 'phone call to the always lovely, cheerful, helpful people at Specsavers in Bishops Stortford and the request is underway and an identical pair will be in the post shortly, for not much more than the cost of the Indian lunch. Till then, I've got the older ones, which are still OK.

3: Molly is smelling rather sousty.  'Put her in the bag wash!' says Tom.  The what?  But he can't really say what it was, it's an elusive childhood memory, his mother putting a bag of dirty clothes in an old push chair and it coming back all wet and crumpled, perhaps having been washed still in the bag.  Hooray for the internet! Not only was it confirmed that such things did take place, but there is a photographic work in the Tate Gallery collection about it:

It's by Nigel Henderson, there's more about it here.  But we won't send Molly off to the bag wash really.

Three good things for today

We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette.  The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed.  They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift.  On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him.  There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant.  Well it's only an imitation, he said.

~

Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home.  The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)

~

Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup.  The girl is seriously gifted.

Tuesday 30th August

When I was speaking to my sister on the 'phone the other day, my niece and sparkly nephew-out-law came in (to her house in England, not mine). Sparkly N-o-l insisted he wanted to talk to me as he had something important to tell me.  This turned out to be that whilst working at the Royal Opera House the other day, as he does, he found himself caught short and availed himself of the facilities of the Royal Toilets!  He knew how this news would delight me, as I was privileged to visit this illustrious petit coin myself during a guided visit that he kindly took me on, as documented in this post, with photos.

~

At last, a new painting on Glenn's blog! And such a lovely one.  I'll post it here very small here as a taster.

There, and I did it using a URL link, so it's not like I've nicked it or anything....  It's called Winter garden, Pembrokeshire.   There's a handful of paintings on-line there now, all beautiful, though  I still think perhaps Muggy weather, Newport Bay might be my favourite.

~

Made a phone call to sign myself up for a life-drawing class in Lamballe, once a month for 10 months.  I've never done real life-drawing before, only clothed figure drawing.  The idea of commiting myself to going somewhere doing some art with other people around, and to using some of the poor neglected materials I have lying around is exciting. But I'm also interested in the idea of moving towards the human form, going against my resistance and tendency to stay safely with natural and abstract things. 

~

Make stock, take stock

I tell myself I'd stay right here
live on pea soup, burn cones and prunings,
sweep floors, take notes about the Duino Elegies
(which I still read like listening to music),
resist all efforts to make or give away
anything of my own, let the dregs settle
render the fat, and this way set aside
an uncomplicated life time.

~

Also set about reserving a hotel in Pontorson, near Mt St Michel for my birthday in December.  It's my half-antique one, and while I'm not bothered about it from the ageing point of view - if ageing bothers me, and I can't say it doesn't, one day doesn't make a huge difference one way or another - I had a strong impulse that it was better to get right out of town for it.  I have to admit, after years (getting on for 50 of them in fact) of being Pollyanna-ish about it, a birthday just before Christmas is, and always has been, very largely a short straw, and the last couple of years the elements have conspired to make it particularly unfavourable. 

But actually a dark winter night on the Mont might be rather a wonderful way to celebrate, weather permitting - if we can get out of the village and onto the main roads out there we should be OK.  The return e-mail from the hotel, which does good wines and a very good pré-salé lamb, and an excellent deal on half-board, was warm and friendly, carefully translated into English after the French, though I'd written to them in French, with a 'PS - the dog is welcome for free'.

It's good to have things to look forward to, even, or perhaps especially, if it's a leap of hope to do so. 

~

Photos: pond stuff again.

~

I think that's probably enough of Three Beautiful Things for now.  I find it hard to keep to daily posting, hard to keep with the beautiful, in the sense of the positive, the shapely and the life affirming, and hard to keep concise.  Feast or famine seems to suit me better.  Still, 3BT is a fabulous idea, thanks Clare. 

Monday 29th August

The Quiet American promises home-made trout paté (with a deliciously softened t and a nicely accented e-acute) when we come tomorrow evening, and I promise the tarte tatin we didn't have the other night when  dinner was cancelled owing to bad news.  We feel cheered and a little defiant, but not inappropriately. 

(Now there's a mish-mash,  tarte tatin italicised, 'paté' not, at what point can Anglicisation be said to have taken place, I wonder?) 

~

I have cut the grass, which makes everything in the garden look better, and puts a layer of cuttings over the apple waste on the compost heap that was drawing the wasps.

~

Photo: Sun through sumac.

Saturday 27th August - double ration again

A parcel arrived from my sister.  It contained fabric samples, in every kind of red and a few more colours besides, of shot silks and velvets and chenilles, tapestries and brocades and even a Morris print (Brer Rabbit, in red and hemp).  We ran our fingers over the textures and drank in the colours, a perfusion of joy.

~

Red silk and velvet notwithstanding, we struggled with difficult things through the morning.  At lunchtime we ate slice after slice of good white bread and butter, and some chocolate spread, and felt much better.

~

A warm blade of sunshine falls on an especially deeply coloured lemon in the fruit basket on the windowsill, making it glow, and scent the air with a perfume of lemon oil. Kennst du das Land …?

~

A perfect spotted cow under a small, top-lit, cumulus cloud.

~

 Rilke on Rodin:

I realised immediately that his house meant nothing to him ... it concerned him not in the least and placed no burden on his loneliness and composure.  Deep inside himself he carried the darkness, refuge and peace of a house over which he himself became the sky and the surrounding forest, the vast expanses and the mighty stream that always overflowed.

( From Lou Andreas Salome's memoir, translated by Andrea von der Lippe)

~

Photo: in the laundry.

I liked the way the sun through the laundry room window passed through Molly's old striped bed cover and lit up the plastic laundry basket.  The photo was much crisper and more literal than I saw it, so I played with the editing until it looked more like I remembered.

Thursday 25th August

There must be some special law of entropy governing the plastic food containers that I seem to be constitutionally unable to throw away, despite the fact that more of them accumulate than I can possibly ever re-use. They gather in unruly, chaotic heaps, bottoms without lids, lids without bottoms, in the kitchen cupboard amongst the cast iron casseroles, ceramic baking dishes, mixing bowls, funnels and colanders.  Their propensity to disorder must be partly a result how light they are, and the number of different shapes they come in.  However, today I tidy them up into matching stacks, with their matching lids, and at least manage to reduce the volume of cupboard space they take up.  It can't last, I know, it's just not in their nature to behave, but it is, for the moment, a pleasure to behold.

~

I rather like this calm, patient, autumnal rain.  Just now it suits me.

~

Photo:

 [shield] bug on a [potentilla] flower [I think]

Wednesday 24th August

A wasps' nest in an old mole gallery at the bottom of the garden which we have been leaving alone has been getting to be a worry.  I phoned around and found the cheapest professional to do it in Loudeac.  He was well equipped, and trudged down the garden in an all-over green body suit with matching face covering, powder gun and pickaxe, and came back with a large soggy papery mess in a bin bag, which he took away with him.  Killing anything is not beautiful, but the relief that it is done and we can sit out in the evening without being harassed, and that that our Charmless Bulb-growing Neighbour's small children can pick up their windfall apples in the autumn without being stung to bits, is a good feeling.  

~

A Hercules transport plane, which I could hear before I saw it, flew so low over the garden that is seemed scarcely higher than the treetops, and the reflective glass in the cockpit windows was so clearly visible that I waved at it, even though I'd no way of knowing if anyone on it saw me.  Near as it was, the deep thrum of its engines was astonishingly gentle and soft, and it had the ponderous, grey dignity of an unexpected large mammal moving through a landscape.

~

The prospect of reading the last section of David Lodge's Therapy before bed.  It's the first Lodge novel I've read, and I'm enjoying it very much.  Not least because I think of one or two people I've known who are great enthusiasts for him, and the new insight it seems to give me into their characters.  These include a shy but very quietly clever French woman of my acquaintance, whose eyes twinkle a little when she mentions him, and who reads the novels in translation.  I wonder how on earth some of it can successfully be translated, as his writing seems so very British, but I'm glad they are appreciated.  Comic novelists seem to inspire a particular kind of affection and sense of ownership, it seems to me.

~

Photo: garden collage,

  

 Tom was bemoaning the scruffiness of the poppy seed heads, and they do look somewhat sere and dingy, but I do like the form of them, and the fact that some of the poppies are still only just coming into flower.  The sedum are just beginning to flush red with flowers, and already the bees are trying to feed from them.  I know it's ridiculously late to have tomatoes just flowering, but these are self-seeded things, which are rompsing away all over the place in the beds; they are so lush and lusty I've not had the heart to get rid of them, and who knows, we may get a few late fruit from them yet. 

~

Failed to post yesterday, owing to busy-ness, no excuse really as busier folk than me manage it, but not to worry.  An extra one for today anyway.  Not sure how long to go on with this, a bit longer perhaps.

Monday 22nd August

The rest of the cauliflower, a big one, after Tom's pickling activities, made into curry, using this recipe.  It really is as good as it's cooked up to be.  Instead of boiling the eggs. though, I followed one commenter's advice and simply poached the eggs in the sauce at the last minute.  It reminds me a bit of the way R used to do it, only she sort of scrambled them into it.

~

The cough/cold virus I have more or less shaken off now, but one of its symptoms (I assume) was blocked ears, tinnitus and earache, which the introduction of a warmed-up mix of olive and tea tree oil followed by self-syringing with a poire effilée , normally quite a satisfying experience (yes, I know, I must be weird), only made worse.  It has more or less subsided now, except for a strange echo effect in the upper frequencies of my hearing, so that Molly barking, announcements over the supermarket tannoy and excited female newsreaders and reporters bringing us the latest on the situation in Libya produce an effect that is distorted, broken and generally irritating inside my ear canal.  

Not much good to be said of this really, though it is clearly not life threatening and will no doubt pass in due course.  However, when the opening to the 2nd movement of Dvorak's New World symphony was played on a music starter question on University Challenge this evening, those plangent, cliché cor anglais notes echoed complete and whole and perfect, so it was in fact not unpleasant, beguiling almost ...

~

Photo: collage

Chestnut woods late in May.  Not so fresh and light now, but still cool and pleasant, a green thought in a green shade.

Sunday 21st August

The button tin was old before I was born, as are some of its contents, like these splendid cover-your-own buttons, which true to their word have not rusted, and are endorsed by the strangely bisected face of one of those Ideal Homes-type post-war ladies ubiquitous in the imagery of my childhood who all looked Janet's and John's mummy.

I went to the tin looking for a missing button from a shirt I haven't worn for ages because every time I get it out to wear, I am reminded that it's missing a button, and then I found the button somewhere quite recently, and now I can't recall where it was, but wherever it was it wasn't in the old button tin, or its environs.  But plenty of other interesting things were, and by the end of the morning I had lined up a good strong dog-lead swivel clip, so I can mend Mol's extending lead, a long piece  of bright gold velvet and some blue ceramic beads to sew onto it for a table runner, and three large, round maroon, Bakerlite buttons, rather art deco in style, which I'm fairly sure came off an old coat of my mum's, and which will just go nicely with the sleeveless thing I knitted from some thick soft yarn I bought in Lidl.  The pattern was designed by moi using a piece of squared paper and I'm afraid it rather shows, so I probably won't wear it out of the house, but it is the most delightful sunsetty colours, and will be very warm, and the buttons will give it the added values of nostalgia and continuity.

My make and mend ethic is something of a silly conceit: the things I make I often don't need, or cost more to make than they would to buy anyway, and the things I mend I have often replaced already, or they are just as wearable holey as darned, or the repairs will only hasten their falling apart.  I strain thriftily at gnats and swallow wasteful camels.  But it makes me feel wholesome, and I do enjoy it, I really do.

I decided to move the buttons round on the shirt, replacing the missing one with a lower one, whose absence will be less visible. This is a sure way to make the stray button reappear.

~

Lining drawers with a roll of red tissue paper.

~

The evening air through the window upstairs is cooling at last.

~ 

Saturday 20th August

A couple of videos for Saturday night

~ Snail, the best I could find to explain how they move so as to deposit a line of blobs of slime:

In fact I think I've got to add this next one too, which doesn't show the slime thing quite as well but just for the really cool millipede that keeps trying to get into shot:

~ And while we're about how creatures do things we'd never thought about in ways we didn't expect, here's one forwarded to me by the rather good company, Canine Concepts, who supplied dear Mol's waterproof coat ( a useful creator god in the shape of interfering dog-genetic buggering human breeders having failed to do so).  This is how dogs drink. 

Well, who'd have thought?

~

Finally, just caught a bit of a Radio 4 tribute to Robert Robinson, who died lately.  A quote from him:  

There's no such thing as a good listener, just someone waiting for their chance to talk.

 As I remember it.  I don't think it's necessarily true, but it doesn't do one any harm to think on it.