Bonfire of the vanities, the blog roll - and some have detachment thrust upon them.

It would appear the cosmos is seeking to teach me yet more lessons in detachment. I logged on this morning to find that my sidebar blog list feed thingy, which had served me well in keeping up with almost all of my blogging friends and acquaintances for many a long year, had completely disappeared. I was thrown into a flat spin, quite discombobulated - or should that be discomblogulated?

An odd thing about this was that just yesterday I was indulging in a characteristically whimsical exchange in a comment thread with Robbie (Roderick Robinson) about visiting defunct blogs, of friends and contacts who have disappeared either from actual life or from the blogosphere, and how poignant it was scanning the list to the bottom - I had it set to display the most recent twenty-five blogs to post, but the 'view all' function showed over sixty, many of which had not been updated for several years. I said:

And that's only a sample of all the 'trépassés' whose blogs languish there. At one time I might have cleared them out as link-rot but now I can't quite bring myself to, it feels like a kind of betrayal. There are also many who update quite regularly but I seldom visit them any more, again, it would seem disloyal to delete, and I like to know they're still there. 

Despite the fact I should really be concentrating on getting on with our final move back into our own house which we are just now undertaking and other things, I could not rest until I had  gone onto Blogger help, where I received the very inexpert 'expert reply', did I mean the blog archive? And that I could always add it again. Of course I could, but the information, the URLs of all the blogs on the list, was lost, and just relying on my 'meat' memory to recall what was on it would not really be adequate. Oh, and they told me to back up from time to time, horses and stable doors and all that.

After a bit, however, a more helpful non-expert (this has happened to a number of people and seems to be something to do with an 'it-ain't-broke-but-we'll-bugger-about-pretending-to-fix-it-anyway' change to the search box widget which has spilled over into the links list) suggested searching out a cached copy of the blog and getting the html from there. I had no idea how to do this but found out about the first bit and quickly copied all the URLs into a notepad thingy, so I've saved the data if Blogger can't fix it.

But this would leave me with the question, what do I keep on the roll and what do I let go? While the redundant links were just sitting there, I could just leave them and not make any decision. If it came to putting them all back, do I just shunt them over, or should I have a cull and a clean out? In digital microcosm, it's the same as the stuff in the house really. How much should sentiment stop you from getting rid of the unnecessary?

~

As I say (do I use that collocation too much?), it's not as though I don't have other things to be doing. We are officially out of here - the gite - tomorrow. The electrician took it to the wire (!) and finished the wiring and putting all the stuff he'd bashed up back together this afternoon, I had thought we might sleep there tonight but I've bottled out, though I have made the bed up. Tom's been working flat out to get all sorts of jobs finished there and being upbeat and brave and energetic and I know I'm in danger of giving into being fearful and difficult and tedious. Getting back and getting on with it has simply got to be done and at least there's plenty of clear and present work to be busy with; it won't be so bad once we've been there a day or two, the gite has been getting a bit cramped and boring really, though we've appreciate much about being here, and in Hénon. And the house really is beginning to look very fine, especially the new light oak staircase, the beauty of which we can just stand and gaze at. Even the new fuse box is rather lovely in its well-labelled order, and the rest of the repairs and re-painting should be done in the next month or so, ready for it to be put on the market and for us to leave it for good, as is the plan.

Then Tom yesterday started getting weird black floaters and the odd flash in his eyes, which have been giving him some trouble with blurring and tiredness all summer, so that was my cue finally to get on to the clinic where he had his cataract ops done pronto; the ophthalmologist there had a look and said he was not in fact suffering a detached retina (more detachment!) but would need some minor corrective laser surgery next week. 

(Turns out he's just posted about this, he wasn't just doing on-line sudoku after all,  and we've both employed the same lame pun. Not altogether surprising).

Ken Hyam

A couple of days ago, on the second anniversary of Joe's death, a card came in the post. The sender's name on the back was J.Hyam, which gave me a start, but when I looked again it was a London address. It was in fact from Joyce, the wife of Joe's brother Ken, with the very sad news that Ken had died, suddenly, of a heart attack, almost two weeks previously. She had written almost straight away, though the card had taken a time to get here, which was strikingly thoughtful of her, since she and I didn't know each other personally.

Ken was the youngest, and last surviving, of the three Hyam brothers by some way, not yet seventy, I think. I met him just the once at Joe's funeral, and instantly felt I was with a trusted friend, not only because of our blogging contact and connection through Joe, but because he was clearly a gentle, kind and listening soul, a quiet man. He was a teacher, specifically of youngsters with learning difficulties, and he must have been a lovely one; the comments he often left here were always positive but also thoughtful and showing a very careful and attentive reading, and at times of loss and sadness most sensitive and comforting. We corresponded from time to time in the last couple of years, and a little while after his brother died he sent me Joe's copy of Eliot's Four Quartets, which had come into his possession, well-preserved with an inscription from when he left school in the fifties, a preternaturally perceptive choice which meant more to me than I can say.

He blogged as Lucas, mostly poems, sometime photos, less so of recent times, but he also ran a collaborative magazine blog with some excellent content called Small Party, for the last couple of years.* He was a fine and original poet, his work an intriguing mixture of naivety, subtlety and surprise which seemed to bespeak his character. He posted last in January of this year, about an old vinyl copy of Brahms Lieder he had found in a charity shop, copied onto CD, then spent some time researching the lyrics of and rendering into his own translations, the kind of pleasure in finding treasure and unexpected beauty in the detail which was typical of the man. I'm taking the liberty of reposting the translation he made of one of these, a poem by Dieter Rihm. It seems to me to take one to a place of clear, bright, joyful serenity, a good note to leave on, even if you are leaving too soon.


There was a town of noble heritage,
A church, shops, thatched roofs with spiral chimneys,
A hill that sloped down to a landing stage.
I see white blossoms drifting on the breeze,
The pleasant boredom of the boats in Summer,
How Autumn’s setting sun and fiery leaves
Influence the lake with bronze, how it grows calmer.
I see the stillness deep Winter conceives

When in the lake an image of the town
Appears: sloping roofs, smoke in blue air,
The shops closed-up, the church’s gentle spire,
This holiday, pointing both up and down
Into the water, which holds as in a mirror
Good will for everyone, both here and there.

Dieter Rihm, translated by Ken Hyam.

~

*Both these are now left as they were; I imagine he must have been the comment moderator on Small Party, so even a comment about his passing can't be made to appear. This brings it home again that, morbid as it may seem, we should think about what might happen to our blogs if the worst happens to us, and if possible sort out someone to be able to access and post on them, or at least do a bit of housekeeping. Ghost blogs of the departed, left hanging in the ether, getting cluttered with spam comments, are a very melancholy thing, I think, whereas on Ellena's and Paula's, for example, their dear ones have access and have posted since their deaths, which seems better, and even a potential comfort to all concerned. For many of us, our on-line lives are an important and very solid dimension of our whole lives, and need to be tended to and marked when these end, I think.

Seven years, one thousand posts.

Well, here it is: today is the seventh anniversary of my first ever post here, and this is my one thousandth post.  It's been good.

I shall continue here, much as ever, though it must be said things have changed a bit.  In essence, blogging is still an important part of my life, but not quite as important as it has been.  It's easy to lament the changing times, blame Facebook, regret one's lost readership - or waning commentariat, in fact my stats and followers are still pretty much as good as ever they were - or apologise for one's own lack of motivation.   I know full well I simply don't put the effort into reading and commenting on other people's blogs or even replying to comments on mine; I've become a rather less sociable blogger, so I really can't grumble about anyone else's levels of attentiveness. Often I do still read, reflect on, am charmed, interested, (mildly)annoyed and generally enriched by what others have to say, but I don't end up responding to them in comments.  I don't know why I've lost the will to do so, I am sorry about that.  The corollary of this is that I'm really not so disappointed or depressed when I receive less response myself, which is surely no bad thing; I'm not sure one should be too reliant on strokes from others for one's moral and spiritual well-being - though be assured I always like the strokes very much!

I'm not sure that the Facebook explanation works as an explanation for a decline in blogging activity really.  When FB did their floatation thingy a year or two back I seem to remember a few pundits saying that it was in fact too late already: the fascination with sharing all of one's life on-line through that particular conduit was already in decline.  Many of my fellow bloggers, I know, largely eschew FB.  I do wonder, based purely on my own experience, if many of us just find that we've more or less shared and told most of what we want to share and tell and are now returning to our ordinary 'meat-world' (anyone remember that rather gross and dualistic expression?) lives, albeit enriched, enlightened and grateful for the people and things we've gained here.

Conversations are still clearly going on though, but perhaps I'm just not feeling so much like talking any more. And perhaps the knitting, in my case, expresses something of a need to return to something more concrete for a while. I do that reading back over one's own stuff thing quite a lot (bet you all do too!) and often get a touch of Jonathan Swift's 'Oh what a genius was on my when I wrote that!' feeling, which is a mixed pleasure, but it's still all there anyway.


For me, the discovery and sharing of photography was always one of the most important things about blogging, and I've really enjoyed that.  But while I'm sure I'll continue to take photos sometimes, of particular things or when I feel inclined, I no longer automatically pick up the camera anywhere and everywhere.  Occasionally I regret this, when something unexpected and serendipitous presents itself, but often I've a sense of being liberated from the necessity to document and make art of anything and everything, and of the time spent reviewing and editing images - though of course when I was more involved and interested in taking the photos, that wasn't a chore but an eagerly anticipated pleasure, nevertheless it was time consuming and difficult to keep up with.  Also, and seriously this is not fishing for compliments or self-pity, there is so much really excellent photography, from people with skills and equipment far beyond what I can acquire, that the excitement that came in with digital cameras initially, whereby everyone could produce quality images with little outlay or training, has inevitably faded somewhat; the world is awash with beautiful photos, it grows harder to add anything significant to that.

Yet, even early on, it occurred to me that one day I might find I was doing it without the camera, framing and seeing and appreciating the visual beauty everywhere without the need of a pictorial record, as I didn't before, and I think perhaps that is what has happened, to a point.  Likewise, I am seeing and appreciating the world generally better for the experience of blogging, without necessarily having to impose the demands, on myself or on others, of actually blogging about it.

However, as I said, I'm not stopping.  I think we all have to go on, or not, as we see fit.  The best blogs, to my mind, and many of them have been going quite a bit longer than I have, do so very largely for the blogger's own benefit, to record and reflect on the things which are important to them, without undue concern as to whether they are becoming repetitious or trivial, whether they're as good as they used to be, or even whether anyone else is paying attention.  I flatter myself in believing that some of my posts are quite useful or informative: there's still a kind of sporadic conversation going on on a four year old post between commenters, usually anonymous, who sailed on the Aztec Lady in their youth: every now and then someone is relieved to know they didn't imagine the existence of a chocolate spread called Nutch; lately a chap on holiday in this area told me he'd found  the post on the painted church at Morieux helpful, and the stats on the one about chestnuts indicate that I may still be forestalling people from eating conkers, or at least providing some diverting illustrations to Hopkins.  I try to describe the place where I live, and those I visit, in (English language) terms which I hope are appealing without being bland and rose-tinted.  I was gratified to see in the on-line visitors' book at Kerbiriou the names of a couple who I know had, by chance, used some of my blog as a guide to this area when they were staying at our friends' gîte a few years ago, which may have been coincidence but they may have followed a link from here.  I hope I can go on doing this kind of thing from time to time, and if the occasional poem still comes to me, I'll still post that as well. and who knows, things wax and wane in importance in life, I may find a renewed purpose here yet.

So, with much appreciation for all the friendship, kindness and encouragement, here's to the next seven.  I'll try to get round you all soon, and leave some comments!  I shan't be doing daily posting this November, as I've been posting pretty frequently lately anyway and have quite a bit of knitting to get done by Christmas.

Here are a few odd photos from the last Morlaix trip, which didn't quite fit anywhere else, just to finish on.

See you all soon.

New blogger, Brit cuisine, and hares

Who said blogging was a dying medium? Egged on by one or two of you, Tom has decided to make the transition from being a principle protagonist here and set one up of his own.  He's always been very supportive of my efforts, and has long enjoyed reading and occasionally commenting on other people's, and he's suddenly quite enthusiastic about doing it for himself, so with some encouragement might even stick with it.  His blog, called simply 'Gwynt' (you can find out why if you visit), can be found here, so far with only an opening post but I'm sure there will be more. (I was somewhat tickled to learn from his profile that I was one of his interests.  In this he proves to be unique, though there are twenty others on Blogger who cite 'my dog Molly' among theirs!)

~

Having dealt with certain aspects of British cuisine here recently, by coincidence, last night we were invited along by the Quiet American and B the German doctor to le Bistrot du Marin* at le Légué, the very workaday port and docks end of St Brieuc, which I had already heard about from our Dutch friend E as serving good fish and chips.  While perhaps these were not quite typical of a lower end UK chippy, they were authentic, with good crisp, light batter and thick chips (fries, in American, but not the same, oh no), and the whole place (reputedly an Irish foundation) was a bright and lively delight, with deep red painted walls, chequered table cloths, blackboards and pictures and curios everywhere.  There was even malt vinegar on the table - though we did get salad, mayonnaise and home made tartar sauce as well, and my dessert was the best ever île flottante, a huge slab of meringue stuff floating in custard and caramel, smothered in speculoos biscuit crumbs and served in a sort of 1950s design cereal bowl.  

Best of all, it was packed and buzzing with noisy, happy French folk all enthusiastically tucking into 'les fish and chips', billed as such on the menu and not translated.  Result.

* link to French Tripadvisor, there's an English one too but the French one's interesting. There's a photo there too.

~

And finally, some hares from my eponymous Pinterest board

~

Sprucing up my blogging

When blogs were first invented and still weblogs, as I understand, they were very simple shared collections of links to other sites one had visited.  The man who invented them, I believe, rather deplored what they subsequently became: people's personal on-line journals, reflections, opinionising etc, and the introduction of comments that led to posts becoming springboards and forums for discussions. He more or less said, as I remember, that there was no reason to introduce any personal element or affect at all, that one had no reason to think one had anything important to say of any originality, since whatever one thought needed saying had surely already been said and better elsewhere, and need only be found and linked to, and going on about it served no function.  Such stringent reductionism and humility has a certain appeal, but there is surely a logical flaw to it: if no one ever seeks to post any original content on-line, beyond the starkest and most impersonal information, in the end, there will be no more content to link to? 

Now, as many of my blogging mentors who are still around are reaching the ten year mark, the lament is that blogging has reached something of a dead end; that the discussions have moved elsewhere, blog posts are more set pieces than exchanges, etc.  Among the contributions to the well-deserved paean of praise and congratulation for Beth's decade at Cassandra Pages, a piece from Blork, another Montreal blogger, who remarks:

'Where once the platform was largely about personal writing and exploration, blogging is now is a vehicle for competitive foodieism, personal branding, and all forms of marketing'

which was news to me, hanging out mostly as I do on people's personal blogs, though I had noticed a proliferation in somewhat scarily high-faluting foodie blogs, come to think.  

Happily, most of these soul-searchings seem to end in a fairly cheerful if slightly sadder-and-wiser optimism: even if a certain amount of momentum, of starry-eyed energy and earnestness and sense of importance about this astonishing new thing and what might be achieved by it, has been lost, there's a consensus that the whole enterprise has been satisfying, life-changing if not world-changing, and will continue to be so for a while yet.

Coming in a few years later, this being my seventh year in this place, I don't think I had many illusions that I was doing anything very important, except, I suppose, for myself.  From that point of view it became very important indeed and that people came and looked and read was a very nice surprise.  The activity and its place in my life has changed, and indeed grown less intense; I carry and use the camera far less, I have fewer ideas that I think are worth noting, and when I do either lack the motivation to sit down and write about them, or they don't seem so remarkable and worth sharing after all, or, and perhaps this is a function of ageing too, they elude me and I forget them before I get to the computer, or even to pen and paper.  Nevertheless, tiresome moments of blog angst and questioning of why I do it and whether and how I might carry on notwithstanding, blogging has become a habit, and I think a good one, and as the persistence of good habits is rarer than that of bad ones, that's something to be celebrated.  Fellow bloggers come and go, but new friends still appear and many of the old ones are still around, which is a source of great pleasure and wonder. 

However, I do feel I need need to find ways to keep the activity fresh and interesting, for myself as well as for my gentle readers. And as original words and photos of any substance or newness sometimes desert me, why not take a leaf from the book of the original weblog concept and collect things which interest and appeal from elsewhere?  Not in the form of links but as snippets, a kind of scrapbook blogging?  Now I know this is also being busily done elsewhere, in the shape of Tumblr blogs and Pinterest, but those things rather bewilder me, as with Facebook and Twitter, I can't quite be bothered to get my head round making them work for me, and why scatter one's eggs in too many baskets anyway?  I've established my corner of the web here, why set up more flimsy new outposts? And the beauty of blogging, it seems to me, is that, contrary to the puritanical aims of its weblogging founders, one is free to enrich, inform and weave in one's own personal. subjective comment and experience, with observations and gatherings from the outer world, in any way one chooses.

And it doesn't only need to be things from the web. Blork, quoted above in the post from Beth's, also keeps, very quietly, a blog of snippets from books he's been reading.  This rather appeals to me.  In the first heady days of keeping a blog (sound a bit like keeping a pig, doesn't it?!) book reading suffered.  With the undeniable waning of the former, I have been returning to the latter, but of late I've felt the need to make it rather more constructive.  I've taken to listing what I read, but have no wish to try to write reviews or even brief reader responses; it's not something I enjoy doing very much, always perceiving an onus to be a clever bugger, and use lots of smart-alec critical theory terms, or at the very least justify myself as to why I do or don't like something! And anyway, I often don't really know whether I've found a book good or not until months after I've read it.  Goodreads does not appeal, thank you, another on-line outpost I have no wish to maintain.  However, there are times when I come across a passage that really pleases me or which I want to hold on to, so I may take to transcribing them here sometimes.

So those are some thoughts.  This blogging thing is still an amazing, largely free, resource with great creative potential, and I intend to keep doing it for the foreseeable, howsoever.  So here are some pickings.

~

The last post about early music prompted a question about old instruments; browsing in images on the subject yielded these, which I liked:

stringed instruments from different times and places;

some more strings, from a mediaeval enthusiast's Tumblr collection (I'm not going to put links in everywhere, it will be too time consuming)

Attributes of Music - still life by Anne Valleyer Coster.  More of her in another post perhaps.

~

My sock-knitting is progressing, slowly.  It will be a while before I can proudly present a complete pair, and then I fear they may be so riddled with mistakes and bizarrely shaped they may only be good for bedsocks.  I'm enjoying the making anyway. Then I had to stop for a while as I was completely in thrall to Rose Tremain's novel Music and Silence, which contained this delightful passage:

Queen Sophie, when she was young ... loved to be rowed in a little boat to this island and there sit in the sunshine and indulge in her secret passion for knitting.  This activity had been proscribed throughout the land as tending to induce in women an idle trance of mind, in which their proper thoughts would fly away and be replaced by fancy.  Men called this state 'wool gathering'.  That the wool itself could be fashioned into useful articles of haberdashery such as stockings or night bonnets made them no less superstitiously afraid of the knitting craze.  They believed that any knitted night bonnet might contain among its millions of stitches the longings of their wives that they could never satisfy and which in consequence would give them nightmares of the darkest kind.  The knitted stockings they feared yet more completely as the probable instruments of their own enfeeblement.  They imagined their feet becoming swollen and all the muscles of their legs beginning to grow weak.

Wonderful book, and I think I will still think so in a few months.

~

Keeping one's anti-scurvy rations up in winter.  A new foraging find: hairy bittercress.  That naughty weed that throws out those little white flowers that rapidly and very early become tiny pods which, when touched, explode seeds in every direction.  We love egg and cress sandwiches, but watercress is not always easy to find in the shops here; I grow cress in punnets on the kitchen window sill, and American land cress in the garden over winter, but though the latter makes a good purée for soups and sauces, neither seems to quite provide the taste of cress as one remembers it.  Then Crafty Green Poet mentioned foraging for bittercress.  Many of the foraging ideas that are trendily put about at the moment are a dead loss - sow thistles, no thank you ('your friend appears to have bitten a bee...'), wall pennywort tastes like what it is, a spongey plant that came out of a grubby wall, but bittercress is a hit.  Yes, of course it's bitter, that's why it's called that, but chopped up it really does give that peppery, cressy bite in the egg sarnies we are looking for.

Here with some newly emerging chives and Welsh onion.

What I now grow on the windowsill, pea shoots.  A cheap pack of mangetout seeds from Lidl, and these crunchy little things contain, it seems, something like five time the vitamin C by weight of blueberries.  Tasty too, scattered on a stir-fry, for instance.  Here they are performing for the webcam.

~

The weather is perishing cold still, with a raw north-easterly, though we are spared the extremes many parts of the UK are getting.  But the pussy willow is out.

~

Snow (gone now), more birds, busier blogging

Never did see such a thing in March, in my recollection anyway. Started last Monday night,

driving straight into the back windows, and continued all through Tuesday,

so the back garden and terrace looked like this. Note paw prints.

Mol likes the idea of snow, and continually asks to go out in it,

though the reality of cold wet paws and snow between the pads is less appealing.

There was a powerful wind through the night it came down, so in places it drifted very deeply.

The birds were very hungry, and we still hadn't any birdseed, so they ate a lot of bread, porridge oats and hulled sunflower seeds.  Their need was greater than ours.

The robin, two of them in fact, Mr and Mrs presumably, since they are aggressively territorial amongst themselves, was very much in evidence,

These aren't great bird photos, but it's always fun to watch them at these times (and I've noticed American readers are always curious about European robins and how different they are from American ones).  The blue and great tits (that's a blue tit in the pic above, the great tits, which my Dutch friend E has been known to call in English 'big tits', have black heads and a black chest stripes) took advantage of the fat balls in the feeder,

queuing for their place on it on the pillar and looped extension lead hung on it.  The blue tits, despite their smaller size, are feisty little buggers and weren't averse to dropping onto the great tits from above and driving them off when they reckoned it was their turn, as the one in the photo above might have been thinking of doing.

the finches looked up enviously from the ground below.

and after a time one or two greenfinches, in spite of their bulk and lack of agility compared with the tits, had a go at eating from the feeder.

The snow stayed with us here in the hills for longer than anywhere.  An afternoon's teaching was cancelled on the Wednesday - I didn't fancy the roads still and the student had barely been back at school anyway and had little to work on - and postponed a visit to H in St Brieuc until the Friday.  I read a lot, mostly Victor Hugo's The Laughing Man (thanks Joe).  I think I quite like Victor Hugo, as French classic novelists go, for, try as I might to get on with them, they mostly seem to me a bitter and twisted lot.  I've heard it said their are writers who love and writers who hate, and an elderly student of mine, an enthusiast for Balzac himself, after we had been reading some Dickens, (in fact the passage in Great Expectations when Pip first meets Miss Haversham, and you don't really get much more bitter and twisted than that) said that 'Dickens was a writer who loved, Balzac was a writer who hated'.  I think perhaps it's a very fine line, and the resulting love or hatred very often comes from the same impulse to compassion.  Hugo was perhaps more a writer who loved; I just wish it didn't always end up so morbid and melancholy with him.  I'm not sure all writers either love or hate, some are just quite dispassionately interested, and some just have an eye to what will sell.

I also decided this was the moment to teach myself to knit socks, which I have been meaning to do for a long time.  It's very difficult and very slow for me, but deeply compulsive.  I have not finished my first sock yet (it's very thin wool and 2mm needles) and I am trying not to think about the fact that I will necessarily have to repeat the whole procedure. As I am not someone who can knit and read, I have listened to quite a lot of radio, notably Roger McGough's fun and funny translation/version of Moliere's The Misanthrope performed at Powys Castle on Radio 3, (the link is to the ETT's site for the performance, since the Listen Again is about to expire and there doesn't seem to be a podcast, which is a shame), and a lovely programme about RS Thomas and birdwatching. I shall perhaps feature the socks if and when they are completed.

And now there is scarcely a sliver of snow left in the ditches; I saw stitchwort and even a few forget-me-knots coming into flower, and the robins have resumed singing like mad.

~

I've set myself a modest blogging challenge this year: the beginning of November will see Box Elder's seventh birthday, and I am some fifty-five posts short of a thousand posts. If I can average a steady couple of posts a week, I should be able to effect a simultaneous seven years and thousand posts by the required date, and at the same time perhaps encourage a bit limbering and strengthening of the blogging muscles for me, which can't be bad...

Waxing anorakish about new toys # 1

I finally made a decision about replacing my defunct Dell Mini computer, the one which saved my back from sitting too long at the supposedly ergonomic computer chair, as I could cart it around with me and balance it on top of the dog, who usually got to my lap first, on the sofa, and which saved Tom and me from computer-generated marital disharmony.  Tablets simply didn't appeal, except I suppose the real i-McCoy, an opinion largely founded on the remarkable creative things Plutarch seems to be able to get up to on his, and hisquiet putting of the case for it in the face of its detractors. But the price was simply more than I was prepared to cough up, and I'm a bit refractory about buying into the whole Cult of Apple anyway.

Which is somewhat ironic really (why is it ironic, exactly, why do we say that?  I try not to as I think it's a misuse of the term, it is neither, as far as I can see dramatic or any of the various forms of situational irony, but then I say it anyway...) because I got a Chromebook, thereby putting all my eggs into the basket of another world-eating behemoth instead.

The fact is I've been well hooked into Google - Chrome as a browser, Picasa for photo editing and Gmail - for ages now and I rather liked the idea of doing without Windows altogether. I didn't want to pay a lot, and at under 200 quid this wasn't a lot.  Also I do need to have an English language OS, and even more important, a qwerty keyboard, Francophone azerty ones make me feel as if I've had a stroke, and even from specialist computer places here that seems to be impossible. So I have to order from the UK, which is also problematic, as many suppliers just won't, or if they do when you check it turns out they charge about another 50 quid (I exaggerate not) for carriage, which I think is scandalous, so I resorted to that other entity bent on world domination beginning with A and named after a South American river or a tribe of woman warriors from Ancient Thrace, who sent it to me immaculately, beautifully and securely packed in a scant three working days for just over a fiver, which I thought was brilliant.

So, what do I think of it?  I like it, but of course it has its limitations.  I kind of quite like limitations, like the woman I remember saying that one of the reasons she bought organic food as a policy was because she got so fed up with endless, time-consuming, bewildering consumer choice and liked having to work within the limits of its availability.  I'm quite happy that I'm more or less told, this is cheap, it is solid and will work but you'll only get this this and this with it, don't expect that, that and that as well.

It's also very quick, and the battery life is good.  It's sleek and light and pretty with a good screen and an interesting, spacious keyboard with these odd sort of low relief keys; which I'm getting used to.  Then there's the touch-pad.  Unlike most people who seem to prefer them, I am completely useless and cack-handed with a mouse, have only ever used a standard two-button touch-pad (never used a Mac of any kind either).  This one has no buttons, so one press with one finger equals a left-click, two fingers a right, one finger held down and the other drawn for drag-and-drop etc (but you have to remember to do it in two separate movements or it thinks you mean right-click), and a really smooth scroll by drawing two fingers up or down simultaneously, which I think most touch-pads do but not always as well as this one.

So much for the hardware, when it comes to the software, really, everything you can do with it has to be done on-line, within the Chrome browser, there's a reasonable amount of internal storage but it's all for downloads.  Documents can be created on-line as Google Documents, which I used to do quite a bit, when I wrote more. You can plug in an SD card or external drive and work directly on it, but you can't transfer the stuff onto the computer. All is up there in The Cloud, looked after by rainbows and unicorns.

What's more, there's no Picasa.  Well, Picasa web albums of course, but no Picasa editing programme, and you can't download it.  There's a very, very basic editing tool which you can use on pictures you've either downloaded or which are on an SD card, but since Picasa has always been, for me, one of Google's great achievements, it seems a bit odd that there's no way you can use it here.  There are plenty of on-line editing programmes, some of which seem pretty good, but they require you to upload first of course, and without the means to shrink and export, that's slow and, to me, carries an unacceptable level of redundancy, (even with the oodles of free on-line storage that come with the machine, so I shall never be required to start this blog over again because I've used up my picture allowance). I think I'll probably end up editing photos on the main computer, uploading them to Blogger, or Picasa web albums, or elsewhere, and working with them from there, which was mostly what I used to do with the old Mini, because of its limited storage and small screen. (The batch of photos here I edited on the card, then uploaded directly from there to Picasa, then posted here by URL, which is OK for small numbers but not ideal.)

But then there are apps.  I didn't really know what an app was until the other day.  Not sure I do now really but I've started using them anyway.  And there are extensions, and I don't really know what they are either but I've got a dinky little toolbar full of them already. As well as WOT and Adblock, which I've had for a long time, I've got a thing to turn anything into print-friendly format, a thing to send any web-page in Kindle-friendly format to my Kindle, a little icon of a radio which opens up any of the main BBC radio stations and plays them, with a link to the BBC i-player too, a little leaf which gives me a new fascinating factoid everyday, today's is:

The pieces of a ball that has been taken apart can be used to build two balls identical to the original one - at least in set theoretic geometry. This peculiar trait is known as the Banach-Tarski paradox

and another which gives me a new obscure word every day (rather disappointing, so far none have been very obscure or unknown to me).  There's a word and character count tool, a thing to conjugate French verbs, and another very neat device called 'Accents plus' which takes the place of the character map in Windows only using keyboard shortcuts.  There's a blocker for those intensely irritating Faecesbook thumbs-up 'Like' buttons and all their evil kind, which is cherishably called 'StopSocial', I love that one.  There's a little thing which will make printable teaching flashcards to your own design using any picture on the web, and another button you can press when you buy anything on-line which will plant a tree or trees at no extra cost. Best of all, though, or it will be when I have the required equipment, there's a widget to turn any photo into 3D.  Now all I need are the glasses.

Of course I could have got them all on any computer using Chrome, but I never saw much point before, now browsing the webstore has become somewhat addictive, and they're easier to get at, and free. Except for the  small matter of selling my soul, of course, but you don't get owt for nowt I suppose. 

I haven't put any links in for any of these, since I think I'm giving them enough of a plug as it is. Apologies if required for such lengthy meta-meanderings, I'm always rather taken with a novelty. At least I suppose I'm not blasé (hey, it works, e+control!).

~

I was going to go on about other things that have come my way, but I think that will do for now. It's really a bit much how I don't blog for nearly a fortnight then can't seem to stop; I shall put the rest in a post tomorrow, you see if I don't!

On cars, driving, comment spam, and a strange yellow sky, where the camera lies and photo-editing tells the truth.

The trouble is, I said to Tom and J, that I can't help thinking of them as horses.  I'm not so much anthropomorphic about cars as hippomorphic.  The old Saxo, the one I just had to have shot, was a dear little steady old Exmoor pony, a bit rough and ready, easy to stable and pasture and feed, affectionate...

Initially they found the idea odd and silly - Tom's rightly doing his best to crack down on my getting too sentimental and heart-achey about the matter of the old car.  But then they rather took it up and ran with it. J said her Renault was a good solid grey hack.  The BX, we decided, was a strong and useful workhorse, but with a tendency to unexpected viciousness, which, Tom said, would sometimes get the bit between its teeth and refuse to stop.

This new one's more like a little chestnut mare who fancies herself part-thoroughbred with an inclination to be a bit frisky. She's been spoiled, and kept in a garage for much of her life and primped and beribboned; her car-proud previous owner apologised for not having had a chance to vacuum again since the mechanic who did the test made the mat a bit dirty, and she looked a little distressed when I said that this was going to be my dog's car too, and wouldn't stay clean for very long.  It also came with some jingly and affected bits of harness that irritate me and don't suit my way of life or self-image.  For example the steering wheel:

Yes, it really is meant to look like it's made of scrap metal and wood offcuts and belongs on a go-kart. A Saxo go-kart. I'm somewhat torn about it, in fact: it's slightly smaller than normal, so the steering seems a bit twitchy, and also because it isn't the original wheel it has interfered with the indicator thing so that it doesn't self-cancel, which is quite annoying and reminds me of when we were kids and used to have to call out 'ticker Dad!' from the back seat to remind my father to cancel the indicator.  On the other hand, being short of leg, in most other cars I've driven I've found that to have the seat far enough forward I practically had to have the steering wheel up against my chest which wasn't great, and in fact this one, smaller and flatter with a shorter column, gives me a better driving position from that point of view. And that nasty looking fishnet-rubber grip is actually quite pleasant to hold.

Then there are the black stretchy seat covers with the shocking pink appliqué flowers on (I've more or less covered those up with wool check travel rugs, dog blankets and my old candy striped chair cushions you can see for padding), and worst of all, the hideous boombox amplifier and speakers which nearly made Tom jump out of his skin when he first turned the engine on and which took up almost all of the boot (trunk, transatlantic readers) so that one simply can't get any shopping/recyclables/scavenged firewood/scrumped apples or whatever in there, and made the back shelf too heavy to lift.  The young woman who sold it to me was delighted to be able to include the sound system in the bargain, but I'm afraid they just had to go, and now they are occupying the back seat in a cardboard box, their wires having been careful extricated by the new garage man, who seemed slightly surprised that I didn't want them there, didn't I like music? Yes, I said, very much, but not in the car and not like that .

I can't quite think what to do with them, a depot-vente will, I hope, be an option, otherwise it'll have to be Emmaus or even the dechetterie.  Sorry, my little pony, your jingle bells are out of here, you might even feel better for it. Now you will be working for a living, you aren't a filly any more, you will live outside and put up with mud and cow-poo and dog hair and pulling the shopping home, OK?  Knuckle down and I'll take reasonable care of you, feed you on sans-plomb 95 oats, give you a quick curry-combing and a spit-and-polish now and then at the car-wash - though only the hose, not the fluffy brushes - and in time, maybe, you and I might even become friends.  And you can keep your flowery seat covers, they're one more barrier to the tide of mud and dog hair and dead leaves, and in fact the rather post-modern combo of checks, stripes and floral in black, red, orange and pink is kind of growing on me.  We'll see about the steering wheel.

~

The left-hand drive is OK, still working on the positioning.  When discussing this people often seem to think what I'm worrying about is suddenly forgetting which country I'm in and so which side of the road I'm meant to be driving on, and turning into oncoming traffic, going the wrong way around roundabouts, etc.  In fact, of all the cock-ups I've made driving here, that was never one of them and I don't think it will be now, unless serious dementia kicks in; I have driven in France far more and longer than I ever did in England, and would, I think, have serious problems re-adjusting to driving on the left.  No, it's a question of my spatial awareness with regard to where I am in the car, which has never really come naturally to me; the danger that I will go too close to the right hand side of the road, forgetting how much more car there now is on that side of me, and scuff curbs, scrape parked cars, slide into ditches or whatever, and that it still feels scarily close to oncoming traffic to be hanging out there near the centre of the road, especially after the accident.  I know it's not a problem for most people, but there we are, mea stulta.  

Anyway, I've booked a driving lesson with the school I mentioned before to try to address some of the possible problems.  

~

On a quite different topic, I think I'm going to have to do something about comment spam.  I turned off the word verification because it is annoying, I know, though I never really mind doing it myself at other people's blogs, I suppose it does discourage me from commenting as much as I might.  I turned on moderation for posts beyond a certain age, and with Blugger's own spam filter that stopped most of them from ever becoming visible.  However, they still clog up my e-mail inbox, and it's grown more and more annoying to have to keep deleting them from there, and now more of them seem to be slipping through the filter and actually turning up on the blog.  

Most of them are anonymous.  I've never wanted to block anonymous comments because I've got at least one proper regular reader who comments as anonymous then signs herself off in the comment, and occasionally I get a really interesting anonymous comments from people, non-bloggers, on old posts and I'd regret cutting them out.  But I think I'd rather block anonymous comments than turn on the odious WV.  It should still be possible to comment by entering just your name, or Open ID if you're on Wordpress or whatever, so I'm not forcing anyone unwillingly to take Google's shilling or anything. I'll leave a message above the comment box to that effect.  Let me know what you think.

Afterword:There doesn't seem to be any option for non-anonymous comments that doesn't involve signing in with Goggle or another blogging platform, which is just as exclusive. You can't just sign in with a plain name any more, it seems. So I'm afraid I've switched to word verification after all, and reinstated the anonymous option.  Sorry if this is irksome, I know some people get very righteous about being made to do it and say they won't bother any more, but I'm fed up with the spam so it's the lesser of two evils.  If the WV is difficult to read, you can refresh it till you get an easier one...

~

And just a picture to close: trying to capture the strange, gamboge colour sky that of a sudden surrounded us and suffused everything for a few short moments between the endless rain showers and the fall of dark the other day. The camera's guesswork completely failed, with boring anodyne optimism it said it looked like this:

and my fairly ignorant fiddling around with the controls could make little difference. However, with the wonders of photo-editing, I can tell you, with very little exaggeration, that in fact it looked much more like this:

  ~

Blog ennui notwithstanding, daily posting will commence on the morrow.

Not much fuss these days about November daily posting, I hesitate even to refer to it as Nablopomo, since, having done it most years for quite a long time, the word is becoming a bit, well, naff.  Nafflopomo.  Anyway, I am undeterred, have signed up for it officially and will attempt to get something out everyday.  If nothing else, it makes me bother to pick the camera up and use it more, and perhaps hold the somewhat evanescent thoughts and impressions which it still occasionally occurs to me might be worth sharing here long enough actually to do so.

So, it's blowing a hoolie out there and a wet one too, but Jack-o-Lanterns is still flickering and gazing orangely out into the darkness and keeping the ghosties and geesties and bugaboos at bay, and that'll be worth a photo or two anyway.  See you tomorrow!

Create or consume? Some autumn snaps and snips anyway.

Creative flare. Careless pointing of the camera into the light can sometimes have quite agreeable results.  And of course it is 2012, and not quite the end of it, so if you like you can believe those iridescent globules of light are something to do with the Mayan calendar. 

Creative flair.  I don't seem to be able to muster very much. I miss the small computer, find it hard to apply myself to sitting at the desk.  Further research discourages me from the whole idea of a tablet device, tempting little shiny widgets though they are.  Apart from anything else I don't think many of them, perhaps the undesired I-pad aside, would be much use for blogging or for commenting on blogs, which though I am less assiduous than I used to be, is still one of my main requirements. One or two of my betters have chuckled a bit at my pretentious parroting of reviews which say that tablets are designed for the consumption rather than the creation of content.  'Won't do for you,' said Tom 'you are a creative spirit.  Wherever you go in the world something is created.  Usually mess and mayhem.'  Or something along those lines.

The impulse when on my couch I lie in vacant or on pensive mood, usually vacant, to reach for an electronic device and graze has to be satisfied by the Kindle, but I resent paying any money for stuff on that.  It's fun seeing what you can get for nothing though. Carlyle is a good companion on Novalis (the link is to a cheap e-book but I think I got it free), since he more or less says don't worry, I find him largely impenetrable and slightly bonkers too, but stay with it and you won't regret it.  I'm coming to like Carlyle. wryly lamenting the laggard intellectual ways of 'the Scotch philosopher and the English unphilosopher'.  

Lowering the tone significantly I've also been reading Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks, which might seem a little desperate, coming across it I was roused to curiosity by the rhyme that my mother used to quote, and which my friend H is always slightly surprised and tickled that I know, since it dates from her youth too:

Would you like to sin 

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err

With her

On some other fur?

Poor bloody tiger, you died in vain, it really is a dreadful book.  It's not like I don't have any decent things to read around either, electronic or otherwise.

In fact too many, I am threatened by drowning by the tide of good reading matter, books, magazines, blogs, and I'm not getting round half as many of those as I should, even though blogging in general seems to be a little quieter than it was.  And as I say, creative activity on my own part seems to be at something of a low ebb; I do wonder if perhaps whatever force I had is pretty much spent and if giving in to being mainly a consumer of others' creative output might be what I ought to be doing anyway. Consumption and acquisition are such negative ideas, but someone has to be the audience after all, and there's just so many lives and talents deserve one.

Supposing I said I was going to stop trying to turn out any worthwhile content here, limit myself to commenting on other people's blogs and answering the several e-mails I seem always to owe peoplewith the thought and promptness they deserve?   In both instances I often seem to find I have more of apparent interest to say for myself. But if I did that, I know I'd instantly regret it, find I had something desperately important I wanted to say, perhaps experience a sudden burst of creative fervour and start writing three poems a day or something, then have to go through the fraught business of reinventing myself, which I suppose then might make it worthwhile.  But if that didn't happen, what would I do with all my holiday snaps? 

So in that spirit here are a few snaps and snippings of the season.

The sunflowers continue, though many have gone over and been blown or battered down by wind and rain.  But they are still a feast for green- and goldfinches.  I was tidying up the veg beds the other day, and went to clear out the cold frame, which has been invaded by nettles.  I lifted the clump and a small newt and a midwife toad looked up at me balefully from under them, to say nothing of the spiders.  A group (or a charm, if one is being accurately lyrical) of goldfinches chided me with impatience from the eucalyptus tree, as good as saying I was keeping them from their lunch, and indeed, as soon as I walked away they were on the sunflower heads.  I'm chased out of my own veg patch, which I suppose is how they feel.

So I took a walk, there are some late butterflies about, more really than we've had through much of this apology for a summer (yes I know August was three hot days and a thunderstorm, and I don't really mind cool summers, and those of you who are sweltering and gasping under rapid desertification elsewhere on the planet will chide me, but it really has been fairly lousy).

There was a peacock on Marcelle's shabby chintz Michaelmas daisies,

and a comma on the bramble leaves.

The brambles themselves offer colour, though the berries are finished,

 there are late flowers of knapweed and hawksbit,

and pretty leaves of this and that.

To me, umbelliferous plants are like wading birds, an area where my taxonomic awareness and smart-alec need-to-know identification skills let me down, getting vague and hazy, consequently I miss out on foraging opportunities, some  of them are delicious, it seems, others toxic. 

I believe these things which seem to flourish most of the year, rather coarse and rank but with  interesting lines and forms and geometries, are hogweed, which are not edible, maybe toxic, except they're said to yield a seed which resembles cardomon in flavour, but I hesitate to risk it.

Even the commonplace bracken, as it begins to turn to yellow, becomes more apparent and pleasing in its forms,

and more delicately translucent.

Another creature joined us, walking always ahead of us;

despite its being put into this landscape purely to be blown out of it, and despite that I was a human with a dog with pointing a black mechanical device at it, it didn't bother to fly away or even hide, but trotted in front of us like a barnyard fowl.

It turned out to be a black pheasant, though I couldn't be sure of this until I enlarged the photos.  I've not seen one of these here before.  Though pheasants are introduced game for the hunting season (which seems to be depressingly and oppressively noisy and well-subscribed this year) a number do survive and breed; I was delighted back in the early summer to encounter a handsome red, gold and green cock pheasant with a brood of chicks pottering along by the side of the road as I was driving past.  Someone told me some years ago in the UK that this newer strain of black birds tend to unsettle and stress out the older multicoloured ones.  Likewise, the white-ringed ones apparently drove out and displaced the original smaller ones without the white neckband.

Back to the vegetables:  pumpkins, or rather winter squashes, the real pumpkins aren't on stream yet,  and pink onions are furnishing the kitchen.

Tom has tried his best but had to admit that he just can't really get to like pumpkins; he'll eat them in soup with some enjoyment but that's all. Oh dear, there go my plans for a pumpkin based cuisine and diet.  Molly really likes them though, so Tom will have to have pease pudding or something and the two of us will thrive on a beta-carotene cucurbit rich regime.

You can't go wrong with pink onions, though.  We've eaten most of them already, so the celebrated Roscoff rosés' keeping qualities remain largely untested.

And what better in which to cook these delights than this cast iron enamel, not quite Le Creuset pan in the most sublime shade of deep violet, posing here with one of the runts of the pumpkin litter and sundry other items of autumn produce?  A snip from Noz at just under fourteen euros.  I have such things already, in dark green, butter yellow and black, but you can't have too many cast iron enamel pans can you, and I didn't have one quite this shape and size, and certainly not this colour... oh OK, so I'm a feckless spendthrift, an unfettered consumerist junkie with no conscience and an obsession with bowls and saucepans.

Fed up with rainy days and damp air, though it wasn't really cold, we lit the first fire the other night.

A sawn up beam, Tom's been busy, and a branch of rosemary.  The rosemary was bullying everything else in the vicinity and getting sprawling and ungainly.  I miss it in the kitchen but not in the garden, and it burns with a friendly and fragrant flame.

Enough already.