Half a dozen somethings for the weekend

Accident spot

On the barrier where the road bends round
the edge of the hill, over the long sloping field,
someone has changed the artificial flowers.
Their polyester red and white and yellow
is loud once more, shouting, vulgar
with the intrusive bad taste of a fresh grief,
among the tired, turning season's speckled
weeds and seeds: the rusted spikes of dock,
hawksbit and knapweed, ragwort,  mallow,
ladies' bedstraw, Queen Anne's lace,
and here and there still the pale scarlet
bloodsplash of a poppy.

~~~

Anyone going into Tartapain bakery in Yffiniac, and possibly other bakers here, with a large baby or small toddler will be offered 'a piece of bread for the baby?'.  This comes from a prepared stock of handy-sized chunks of baguette behind the counter.  Tom says that the London bakers of his childhood also used to give away ' a bit of bread and buppy for the baby.'  Here though, the bread is unbuttered, and probably chewier than that was.  Presumably a child weaned and teethed on baguettes would never have to be cajoled or fibbed to about curling hair to be persuaded to eat its crusts.  Indeed, with much French bread, refusal to eat the crust could mean going rather hungry...

~~~

I allow myself momentarily to succumb to the lure of the Vitrine Magique catalogue.  Though almost tempted by the 36 tiny stick-on wooden ladybirds, the hand-weeding tool with the specially angled metal blade (both at a euro), and a rather sleek little olive stoner (2 euros, and I have one on the garlic crusher anyway), I do not give in, emerge triumphant and throw the catalogue in the recyclables bin.

~~~

A most excellent Archers omnibus.  I've not listened to 'The Archers' much of late, but it's a well-known truism that this doesn't matter a scrap, since like riding a bike, once one has ever learned to listen to it, it is possible to pick it up again after an interval of weeks, months, years or even decades with very little difficulty.  From Jim's sublime lachrymae rerum chat with  Kathy ( "it can be hard to be not quite in the inner circle of mourners...") which had me shedding tears into the breakfast things, to the deliciously ridiculous Aldridge/Carter clash of the snobberies - Jennifer's posh landed airs and graces against Susan's rural working class aspirations - over their children's wedding party, happily resolved in shared excitement at the prospect of a multi-coloured cupcake tower wedding cake, which had me giggling into my Sunday midday sherry, altogether a hugely satisfying listen.

Who knows this knows.

~~~

Rock, shadow, water, root.  From the old railtrack, found on the Cheapcam.

~~~

And finally a bit of Rilke:

Praise the world to the Angel, not what's unsayable.

You can't impress him with lofty emotions; in the cosmos

where he feels more feelingly, you're a mere novice.  Therefore show him

some simple thing, formed by generation after generation

until it's truly our own, living in our hands and in our eyes.

Tell him things.  He'll stand more amazed; as you stood

beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter by the Nile.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours,

how even lamenting grief decides finally on form,

serves as a thing or dies into a thing...

(9th Duino Elegy, trans. Snow)

He might well be right. 

Garbo talks...

This is a video I think I took without meaning to.  Some time ago I went to the launderette, or laverie as it is known, in Lamballe, exciting life I do lead.  This was probably to wash Molly's bedding, but also perhaps to use the tumble dryer, a thing we don't have at home, for other stuff, I forget.  I left Mol in the car, and progressively moved things from washing machine to dryer to basket to car, as you do.  I parked a basket of warm dried washing in the front seat, and when I got back, Madam had curled up in it.  I only had the compact Cheapcam with me, but whipped it out and took some pictures of her.  Unbeknownst to me, one of these was a moving one. 

Then as usual I forgot all about it as it was only on the Cheapcam, whose batteries usually run out well before I get around to downloading the photos from it.  Then last week I lost the memory card from the Lumix.  It's probably down the back of the sofa somewhere, where I have taken to plugging it straight into the mini computer and working with the pictures directly off it, then pulling it out again, and evidently mislaying it, when I've finished.  However, I groped about down there to no avail, so I raided poor little Cheapcam's memory card to use in the other one, and that turned out to have this on it.

This is the first time I've been able to upload a video directly through Blogger, since it's very basic quality and so not too big a file, even then it was not without some difficulty, in the end exporting it whole as a clip then blogging it directly from Picasa, but I got there. 

So, there you are: Garbo talks, Molly moves.

Store cupboard 1: pictures

I really should sort out my picture folders, get the last couple of years' worth stored on DVD, or something. No, I don't have one of those nifty hard drive things. I started a whole load of different themed discs, you know, trees, flowers, landscapes. Don't bother trying is my advice, you'll never keep up. I sometimes get round to shunting them into folders labelled by month, but that's rather out of sight out of mind...

Anyway, for an undemanding Saturday night post, and by way of beginning to sort through, here's a baker's dozen of old pictures, most at least a couple of years old now. Captions below pictures, I never know what's correct like that. Above or below, what do you do?


A grapevine and bindweed in a sheltered corner.



Spring sun through a mullein leaf. Or maybe a foxglove.

This in the butterfly house in Honfleur, I think,

All of the above were taken on a winter day in the arboretum with the little camera; just ivy, moss, a phormium,not much else about.

Hydrangeas. Always hydrangeas. Funny to think Hortense was a popular name once...

Why?

Decay, of wood and metal. Nature opens the closed.


And lastly, a Picasa double exposure collage. I love making these, but haven't for a while. Another thing to get back to.
Have a good Sunday.

The twilight world of Cheapcam, who is,as always, upstaged.

Cheapcam has a somewhat morose character, I've decided. Perhaps it's because she spends most of her life stuffed in the bottom of my bag, under a foldaway shopper and a pile of discarded till receipts, getting poked by the car keys and squashed by the dog lead, rarely taken out and only downloaded every couple of months. Or perhaps it's because she only cost 50 euros from Amazon France when I googled 'cheapest camera' in a moment of desperation when the Powershot was indisposed, and although she may rather pathetically flaunt having as many megapixels as the latter, she and I both know that no one buys into the megapixel myth any more. When it comes down to it, her anti-shake is shakey, her macro-setting only really works when shooting on a level plane, otherwise it stubbornly focuses on the background not the near object, she gets all finicky about not enough light, her zoom is puny and her autofocussing lumberingly slow. Her date setting has a peculiar habit of sliding back a year or two, so the folders disappear when I'm looking for them on Picasa, which logs things in chronological order, because Cheapcam has decided she wants to go back to 2006 (perhaps that was when she was happy, back in the factory with the other cheapcams...). And more often than not her pictures have a murky grey-blue cast that seems to confirm her generally lugubrious outlook on life.

And yet, as the above shows, I have attributed a deal more personality and feeling to her than to the better camera; she appears to have moods and capriciousness, leading often to frustration but occasionally delight. She turned on the charm for these hydrangeas, which I think are quite enhanced by the smudgy blue aura (no editing used at all).

and in fact I quite like it that so many of the pictures are so bad that much of what to discard is decided immediately, and with what's left I'm often forced to be creative with cropping and editing to make something out of them.

She came out to play with Molly and me in the carpark of the old barracks in St Brieuc the other day, a somewhat grubby and gloomy spot on an overcast day where she was presumably quite in her element.


I hesitated about picking up the Canon as I left the house, but figured that probably by the time I'd slaved over a hot photocopier for as long as it took to provide the heroic Rosie/Gillian with enough work for my classes to occupy them well into next year, never mind the five lessons she's actually taking them for, I wouldn't have much time or energy for a photo-stroll. However, when I got back to the car, Molly informed me in no uncertain terms that she hadn't come all this way to sit in the car and go home again, and that a town car park full of plane tree leaves and offered sniffs and smells beyond all the perfumes of Arabia.

The old barracks is a somewhat forbidding and sombre place, as you might expect, but one section of it seems to have been commandeered to house a music school and other arts educational resources. We watched a harpist unloading her instrument from her car, then wandered around the back of the building, where emaciated buddleia and other weeds colonise neglected angles and rough surfaces,

a modern fire escape, a peremptory afterthought, hangs off the wall like a giant piece of peeling swarf,

yet on further looking offers further interesting patterns and shapes,

and barred windows reveal strange sights.

I sometimes feel I have exhausted the possibilities of the rural corner where I live, in all its budding, leafing, cropping, fruiting, shedding, decaying predictability, its quaintness, bucolic fuzzy livestock, macro-shot vegetation, wide cropped landscapes; I fear I've done it all to death, can't squeeze any more out of it, in spite of myself, boredom threatens, a creeping, contemptuous familiarity. It isn't so, always again something catches, draws the eye and the thought, 'there lives the dearest freshness'... But at those times, I hanker for urban variety, not bright lights or night life or shopping, you understand, just a different visual idiom and stimulus, or even just another context.

So, there I was, relishing urban dereliction, nature imposing on the structures and creeping into the cracks, the accretion of a history not fully understood, the pleasant shock of my own ignorance of exactly what I was seeing, poking the little camera into odd corners, when I heard young laughter and cat calls. I assumed I'd been spied, caught out, and someone was mocking my eccentricity, and looked up to see that, in fact, someone else was playing another version of the same game. Two pretty young women were hanging out of a window a couple of floors up, oblivious to me, Molly or Cheapcam grubbing about below, and pointing a very handsome SLR at the roof of another building opposite where a solitary painter and decorator was clambering on a roofing ladder, his white-overalled bottom in the air. He ignored their attempts to attract his attention and make him look over his shoulder in surprise or amusement into the telephoto eye of the camera. When he finally did turn around and sit securely down, and saw not only his watchers in the window with the sleek black SLR but also me on the ground with the small silver point-and-shoot, laughing at them giggling at him, he fixed us with such a stony, unimpressed, baleful glare, that we all quite quickly withdrew in embarrassment. As I drove off, he was still sitting on the slates, gravely lighting up a cigarette, looking as though such frivolities were altogether a tiresome thing for a man with a real job to do.

(In view of my feelings about photographing unwilling subjects, I probably shouldn't really be posting this one, but I daresay there's a much better one somewhere on some St Brieuc art student's Myspace blog, so what the hell... )