Wool gathering

Little to report. I owe too many e-mails, stocks are running low, there are still piles of leaves to rake in the garden, and in general I have left undone those things I ought to have done etc and there is no health in me. But we have lit the second fire of the winter, a warm dog and warm sofa is beckoning, the world is filled with woe but home is good, though it seems less important where it is.

I was asked what I thought about when knitting. It's rather hard to say; sometimes about the other things I ought to be up and doing instead of knitting, sometimes what I'm watching or listening to at the time. Just lately it's been this serialisation of this book, about girls and women acquiring the power to electrocute people at will. It's a bit good but I get the impression reading the review that the serialisation misses out quite a bit.

In fact I rather like this passage from Rose Tremain's Music and Silence (probably more my scene that speculative post-feminist dystopias really) set in 17th century Denmark, about the act of knitting, which I have posted here before but I don't suppose anyone remembers:

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.

'Wool gathering' seems like a good description of not only what is going on in my head when knitting but in my life much of the time. Could be worse.

(Old photo, again, posted before.)

Letter from America

That was a radio programme I grew up with, a weekly fifteen minute broadcast by British born, naturalised American Alastair Cooke, on BBC Radio 4. It began in 1946 (it's roots were even earlier, in the 1930s) and the last one was broadcast in 2004, just a month before Cooke's death at the age of 95, and was the longest running speech radio programme in history. I remember sitting up as a kid on Friday nights, often not really understanding the subject matter, or even really listening for information anyway, but just wondering at and wallowing in Cooke's rich, mellifluous voice, and the crafting of his language, his beautiful, embedded sentences, a perfect balance of discursive and precise.

In the wake of the US election, this week in the Book of the Week slot in the mornings, Radio 4 has commissioned a series of new Letters from America from individual US based writers, today's was by Thomas Chatterton Williams.  He began with this quote from H.L.Mencken, which I imagine is getting quite a bit of airing at the moment:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

and which caught my attention, but the whole was far more than a petulant or despairing rant against the American electorate and their elected, it was impressive, eloquent, brave and honest, and as beautifully crafted and delivered as anything Cooke did. At fifteen minutes, well worth following the link. The others will doubtless but of high quality too ( can be found from the same R4 page); I've not listened to the Zoe Heller one which they kicked off with, but will do.

There is talk they may revive the regular Letter from America in this format, which would be good. All Cooke's original letters are archived and still available to listen to here.

Feathered; Bram; Bette or Betty; no comparison

The birds are busy. Long-tailed tits bob among the coppiced chestnuts, greenfinches fly out of the top of the tulip tree, and by the farm, starlings murmur while pretending to be leaves in the now leafless poplars.

Dutch E's new dog Bram, who looks like he is wearing eye-liner, still barks at Tom when he comes in after our yoga session, but then slips round and licks his hand twice when he thinks no one's noticing, and later on a walk he lies down on the path to have him scratch his ribs. We're having him to stay later this month, so are trying to make friends, but he's easier with women than men.

Listening to Cousin Bette (or 'Cousin Betty' as it's called there) on Librivox. So far: the seedy, exploitative old perfumier, the threadbare curtains, the mention of Rastignac, and the bargain over the yellow cashmere shawl. Librivox is such a worthy idea and potentially great resource, but unfortunately many of the readers are so unskilled as to be almost impossible to listen to. Elizabeth Klett, who does all the Jane Austen canon and many more, is a professional and very good indeed, but sadly she's exceptional. Also, many of the foreign works translated have fairly dismal old versions, since the translation has to be out of copyright as well. The reading of Cousin Betty is OK.

First clementines of the winter.

Self

Just lately the subject of self-portraiture is rather in the air. I seem to be overcoming my aversion to showing photos of myself somewhat.  Admittedly the last one was back view only, but that was partly to show the shape of the jacket better, I don't mind this one either:

And these aren't even selfies; I suppose one of the things about taking one's own photo, consciously, with all the redundancy digital technology allows, is the control over one's features one has, with the option of deleting all but the ones we like. Unlike those snaps that other people take when you aren't aware of it, talking or laughing, the angle just catching the double chin at its most horribly evident, the mouth slack or distorted, or even worse the ones you know they're taking, but without the benefit of seeing ourselves as others see us, so you start holding your face in a certain kind of unnatural fixed pout or grimace.  Or I do anyway, I've seen other people whose faces relax into beautiful repose in front of the camera but I'm not one of them; Tom always laughs when he sees me approach a reflective surface or be approached by a pointing lens, and imitates my pursed lips and widened eyes.

I don't particularly mind the neologism 'selfie', it doesn't seem to me necessarily to carry a negative value judgement. We've long been ambivalent, it seems to me, about 'self-' as a prefix: selfishness, self-centredness, self-indulgence, self-regard, self-satisfaction, self-seeking = bad, but self-preservation, self-esteem, self-reliance, self-knowledge = good. (Self-love and self-consciousness are more opaque). The self-taken photograph is simply something we can now easily do, so we do it. Younger people maybe do it rather more because they're more concerned, for better or worse, with how they appear, more attached to their toys, and youth is pretty of course (no, I know, not more beautiful, nor more interesting, nor superior in any way to age, but undeniably pretty), but none of that's anything new. The camera phone or webcam or whatever now enables us to see how we will appear in the image we make, whereas previously we couldn't see through the camera when we turned it on ourselves, or had to take our reflected image in a mirror, where the camera often got in the way. Though I still can't quite get used to my image in the webcam not moving symmetrically with me as it does in the mirror, but seeming to go the other way, and my newish silvery pre-molar crown which glints when I stretch my mouth, to smile or pretend to, apparently on the other side.

Self-portraiture also seems to be something of a theme because of the Rembrandt Late Works exhibition at the National Gallery in London, which has been mentioned quite a bit around the place. We won't get to see it, but we very much enjoyed Simon Schama's TV preview of it (the link is to a review of the programme, it's been on BBC I-Player but you can't get that outside of the UK and it runs out tonight anyway), and it was also the central topic of today's Start the Week on Radio 4 (that link available indefinitely), which I happened to switch on this morning. An excellent presenter (Tom Sutcliffe,  who I don't remember hearing before but he was quite as good as his predecessors), and four very impressive guests from different disciplines, including Betsy Wieseman, the curator of the exhibition, all of whom have clearly prepared their own contributions carefully and speak eloquently but come across as spontaneous and - dare I say it - unself-conscious, and who have also clearly studied and the other guests' work and show one another great respect. It's a joy to listen to for that reason alone.

It was posited that making the self-portraits the central element of the exhibition's presentation  was perhaps a sign of the times, that at one time it might have been a big group portrait or a historical or biblical scene or whatever that might have caught people's interest.  Self-portraits however, have always been of valued, most artists of the time and before and since did them and their patrons wanted them.  Rembrandt's, it was agreed, were more candid, more frank, more ugly and self-exposing, all the things everyone says about them; his gaze at himself is steady, concentrated, solitary, as opposed to that in Vandyck's self-portraits, where his 'quicksilver glances' seem to be always flitting over his shoulder, anxious as to who else is looking at him and how. But Rembrandt's apparent candour may be deceptive; he was frequently dressed up oddly, and trying out moods and attitudes and expressions - what does melancholy look like, or anger, or despair? Rather perhaps as the self-snapping smartphoners might?

The programme explores the tension between the negative and positive ways in which self-regard has been viewed culturally and historically; Narcissus, it seems, was not always considered a vain and preening wuss: Voltaire's view of him was as a hero of  interiority, the examined life, retreat from worldliness in order to know oneself, even Ovid's original version of the story hinges much more on his unawareness that it is himself he is seeing; it was largely Freud, who seems to have done a lot of unhelpful and unnecessary pathologising of things to a dubious agenda, who identified narcissism as an arrested and unhealthy state. 

And there are many other gems and insights: the received idea that self-regard and hence self-portraiture took off in the 15th century when the Venetians started making flat glass mirrors is probably false, these were very expensive and uselessly small, people were doing it long before that by other means - convex mirrors, polished metal, water. (So we aren't always led by the nose by the material technology...); that people like Montaigne started the trend in ideas which the visual artists took up; Montaigne himself was inspired and encouraged in his own quest for an examined life by seeing an early self-portrait painting by a contemporary royal artist. And then there was this quote from Martin Buber:

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves

So, take a selfie today in the right spirit, and don't feel bad about it. And if you've any time left after reading this self-indulgent ramble, listen to the programme.

A lazy post

Stuff from elsewhere, links and embedded.

Walter Benjamin on the radio. There's a good basic intro on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed, and, going up a notch, a lecture by George Steiner, broadcast originally in 1997 (Steiner sounds uncannily like Jacob Bronowsky, there are only a couple of weeks left to listen to that one). Finally Michael Rosen talking about his radio broadcasts for children made in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s, the scripts of which are due to appear in English translation soon. I find Rosen a bit irritating, not quite sure why, he sometimes seems rather self-satisfied and intrusive as a presence, and the programme contains a certain amount of padding and duplication at the expense of the source material, but there are some fascinating and shivery stories and details in there. I didn't know about Benjamin at all until quite lately and still don't know much; but his name seems to come up more; Heather was a great admirer, and now I begin to see why.

~

On a lighter note, for those of us never quite sure when to use 'vous' and when 'tu' (vousvoyer/tutoyer), here's a guide in flow chart form.

~

And lighter still, my Niece Who Makes Me Laugh started the day for me appropriately by e-mailing this video, which I've surely seen before but not for a long time.

~

 Well, I never said I'd be original every day, did I?

Have an hour?

Though longer, with several listenings and re-readings, is better. It helps, albeit in a cold comfort sort of way, you might say:

And I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

The CD's been on my wishlist but unavailable for a long time, turns out some good soul who had it on vinyl has put it on Youtube, the sound quality is fine.

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time.

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.

Knitting - interlude: on reading and knitting.

Just wondering, about reading.  Yes, I can read and knit, but it isn't all that easy really.  Since I took on so many knitting projects, my reading has diminished drastically, and I suppose I'm also pondering the matter of constructive activity.  My mother grew up with the constant rebuke from her mother of 'Get your nose out of that book and do something useful!'. I think it was similar for my father too, and in my his case this message seemed to be almost cosmically reinforced by an incident in his early teens when he was sitting at the edge of a field with his nose stuck in a book, oblivious of all else around him, while his brothers and some other boys were, as I understand it, playing a game which involved throwing a bar of metal around.  Life was harsh in Hemel Hempstead in the old days.  The bar flew in his direction and before he could disengage his nose from the book in time to avoid it, the two objects, bar and nose, collided, with the effect of fracturing the latter.

They were determined, however, that this anti-reading attitude would not be conveyed to us, and we were encouraged and praised for our love of books, yet still there was a little shadow, of envy perhaps, but also an understandable impatience with sloping off with a book when there were tables to be cleared, washing up to be done, rooms to be tidied and so on, things which my elder siblings were required to do before pleasing themselves but which, by the time we last two came along my parents had grown too old, tired and indulgent to enforce.  And there's the thing; reading was, in the end, a pleasure, a self-indulgence, not a discipline or a study, not homework or really all that purposeful, not, in other words, constructive.  And not very social either; my bachelor uncle Jack, an intelligent, cultured, musical, funny, somewhat petulant and pompous man, whose presence greatly enriched our family life and childhoods, once grew tired of us, his sister's family, fell out mildly (the only possible way one could) with my father about his dog (Uncle Jack's), and estranged himself from us for a time.  One of his gripes was that my brother and I were 'too bookish', not interested in conversation or his company.

But by the time they had us, in late middle age, I'm afraid my parents valued peace and quiet, fewer social demands and requirements to fetch and carry us, and were rather happy for us to be able to amuse ourselves  quietly with a book - or paper and paints or whatever, there wasn't much telly then.  But I don't remember seeing my mum with a book when I was a child, she was always too busy, she said, and the internalised disapproval, the feeling that sitting reading was really rather idle and effete, was still present.  My dad read a little more, but not much when we were growing up, again, there were more important things to be attended too.  Later, in his old age, he was forever with his nose in a book, but less and less the history that had been his earlier love, Trevelyan, Churchill, Arthur Bryant, and more of middle-brow historical romances, Georgette Heyer and Catherine Cookson novels from the library.  Often he'd read the same one several times and barely be aware of it.  Left on their own once we'd all flown, his withdrawal into this passive reading state exasperated my mother.  When she spoke to him about it he agreed that it was fairly pointless, he confessed that it was ' a bit like the kids with their pop music', a background noise he seemed to need.' My mother managed to regain some reading practice, and we shared a few books and writers that we were able to talk about, but tired eyes and ill-health and old-age depression got in the way somewhat for her.

For a short time in my late teens, it seemed to me that I might really be able to make a life from reading, I could study literature forever, that would be what I would do.  I had a very unclear knowledge both of the way the world worked and of my own abilities and character.  I was not cut out to be an academic, and was inclined finally to own one of the aforesaid Uncle Jack's conclusions: that you should never try to make your hobby and your pleasure your living, it will kill all your joy in and love for it.  He had given up a job he was fed up with as a cinema projectionist and set up as a professional photographer, a pastime he loved.  He was insecure and miserable in his work for ever after, and his wedding photos were fairly dreadful.  Many people I've voiced this too, who have successfully made their passions their jobs, refute it as advice, but for him and for me, I think it held good.

My mother was kind and encouraging when I was dreaming of a literary life, but opined that I'd probably end up doing something with my hands.  I was a bit miffed at the time, but she was right really.  In fact I've not done anything properly or in a sustained way as a career, but used hands and language according to what came along, in both paid and unpaid capacities, middlingly, if not brilliantly, well.  I've been lucky.

Many of these reflections on matters mental and manual, and my vacillating between the differing activities which give rise to them, are perhaps to do with my response to losing my sister, whose life was so much in the work of her hands, and then immediately afterwards finding, then later losing Heather, for whom words and ideas and the work of the mind was so important.  Both of them were vivid and full of energy and purpose and beauty and the sense of beauty, both exemplars to me in some wise.  Heather was continually challenging me on my reading, giving me difficult things to read, chiding me about not reading more in French, assuming my knowledge about things way over my head.  It could be tiring, and I sometimes thought she could cut me, and some of the less heavy and intellectual things I was fond of, some slack, but it did present reading as something positive, active, something gained, un bien; a pleasure for sure but not just a pastime, something to amuse when you had nothing more important to do, something of account, and a discipline.

I decided at the beginning of this year to record my reading, if not to review and comment on it at least to make a note of it and hence, perhaps, to do it a bit more purposefully, more constructively, to give something of an account of it.   I've kept up the record, but since the spring, there's not been too much to add to it.  I'm missing reading, but not enough, because when idle on my couch I lie my mind, left to its own devices, is spinning off into coloured threads, making imaginary garments and objects, thinking how and of what and for whom.  Not least for whom, how to make just the right thing, choose just the right texture, colour and style for such and such a person; almost as if there's no tomorrow and I want as many people as possible to have things I've made (I know that sounds a potentially morbid; I don't really have any baleful sense of doom and foreboding or anything...).  I don't quite know what it's all about, or how long it will last, but I'm happy to go along with it for the foreseeable.  I hope I'm producing something useful, that will give pleasure and be used or worn, but it's certainly not necessary; one can buy new things, or just make do and mend, at a fraction of the price, not many people expect gifts of me anyway, but it's the making, and the envisioning and planning to make, that matters, process as much as product. One very obsessed dedicated knitter I read about, away from home over a holiday weekend with nothing new to knit, unravelled the thing she had just finished and made it again just in order to have something in hand.  I wouldn't go that far.

I also think perhaps that working out and working on patterns and sequences, making the linear wool into a plane, and thence by increasing and decreasing, curving pulling, into a three dimensional form, creating  spaces and nodes, charting colour changes etc, all essentially by means of bucket mathematics, is probably good exercise for my brain which hasn't been accustomed to that kind of use.

Get your nose out of that book, do something useful.  Make something, to eat or to wear.  My mum wasn't a knitter, though she knew how and showed me the basics, but we, my mum, my sisters and I, all sewed.  Yes, yes it was all very sexist, etc, we sewed, my brothers made model aeroplanes, my dad did things involving lorries.  Sewing was shared, sociable, I was quite literally at my mother's knee, the one that wasn't operating the vertical lever which powered the Singer electric sewing machine (a strange mechanism I've never seen on any machine since), my sisters came and went, plundered the draws and chests and boxes of fabric and haberdashery, showed me how to do things.  They were very good at it, and both made a living doing it at different times.  I was competent, and clothed myself in my youth cheaply and originally, with satisfaction if not with the utmost elegance.  And while the act of making things precluded reading, it was almost always accompanied by listening; Radio 4, always, speech radio, news, discussion, plays, serialisations and dramatisations of books (and The Archers, of course).  So working with the hands became conducive to absorbing things with the head, and still is.  As I say, I can read and knit, but listening is better, and as well as radio and music cds, there are audio books.

Which is the other question that has been exercising me, and the only thing I really intended to write about here, before I got started.  What in fact is reading? Does having listened to a book mean you've read it?  When there was only tape and vinyl to record on, and it was necessary to abridge texts, one could clearly say no, any more than reading a Reader's Digest condensed book could be said to be reading that book, but now with cds, and MP3s too, full, unabridged texts are available for many things.  The thirty-five discs of Proust I've been listening to are still heavily abridged, and I wouldn't claim to have read Proust on the strength of listening to them, merely to have familiarised myself with a broad outline, and in that instance perhaps abridging is especially to eviscerate the text, since it's not really so much what he said, as how, and at what length, he said it.  But there are other things I've listened to in full of recent times, not while knitting but when painting walls, ironing, cooking etc, which I rather doubt I'd have made the effort to work my way through on the page these days, The Divine Comedy, for example, and Paradise Lost, and if I had, I'm not sure I'd have absorbed as much as by listening.  Many writers in the past, from Homer to Chaucer to Dickens, wrote (or composed in Homer's case I guess) with an intention that their words would be heard rather than read. Nevertheless, I still feel that unless one actively engages, in silence, directly with the text on the page, one can't really be said to be reading it. Listening implies too passive a state.

Which then makes me wonder what is reading for? Is it for accomplishment, to acquire experience and have something to show for it, un bien, to be able to say 'I have read...', in the same way as one can hold up a piece of fabric and say 'I have made...'? Or is it to experience the act of reading for itself, process as much as product?

Just wondering...

Back to posting knitting projects tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.

Wildlife in the garden # 1

We have a visitor in our garden.  

These are through the kitchen window with maximum zoom.  However, he has been spotted within a few yards of the house investigating the pots of herbs on the terrace (we refer to it as he, as one does).  We don't quite know where he's getting in, but then rabbits can squeeze through very small spaces.

When we see him, we do our best Mr McGregor imitation.

Now my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.

Poor Peter, child of a single mother, lacking male role models,his sisters all higher achievers than he, turning to delinquency... 

There's a funny and clever critique of Beatrix Potter and her ambivalent morality by Stuart Jeffries here, from when the film Miss Potter came out.  Jeffries is a terrible snarky smart-arse but I do often enjoy his pieces.  In truth, he comes out rather positively about her.  He also mentions that the reason so many Japanese tourists make the pilgrimage to Beatrix Potter's house in the Lake District is that Japanese children often learned English from her books.  This was interesting to me because many years ago I assisted in home-schooling a couple of very bright Anglo-Japanese children of about 5 and 7 or so, who now have Cambridge doctorates and heaven knows what under their belts (nothing to do with me, both their parents were exceptionally clever, they went on to international schools in France and spent all their summers in Japan, they were, and are, just very gifted), and we worked our way through much of the Beatrix Potter canon, from a big volume they'd been given.  I assumed this gift had come from the English side of the family, but perhaps not. I was struck by how the books really provided a remarkably complete and well-differentiated reading scheme.  Jeffries sneers a bit at the idea of 'delightfully outré Edwardian syntax' and 'bizarre Potterian ideas about our dress codes and ethical views' but I can't say they caused us any problems.

And for my French visitors, here's the Francophone version.

I do like the art nouveau/ belle époque font for the title, which is slightly subverted by the blockish 1970s majuscules for the author's name (I expect someone with greater design and typography knowledge than I have can better inform me about these). A perusal of Google seems to show that Peter and friends are well appreciated here, though Benjamin Bunny becomes Jeannot Lapin. I mean, what's going on there?

Anyway, whatever our visitor's resemblance to said anthropomorphised lagomorph, we didn't find him so cute when he chewed all the tops off our newly planted pinks.  There didn't seem to be much else he fancied in the flower beds, and he could eat all the dandelions he wanted, plenty more where they came from.  For a while it didn't seem as if he had made it to the veg garden, since he seemed to be entering at the other end of the plot, but then my new sweetcorn shoots were chewed, then the better established peas...

Unable to resort to the McGregors' pie option, we have to employ other methods to protect our vegetables:

Apologies for the flare, I was stricken by an urge, rare these days, to get me up and go out in the garden with the camera sometime around 6.30 am as the sun was rising.  Old willow hurdles and bird netting we had lying around have been commissioned as an anti-bunny measure.  So far so good.  The white trapezoid shape mid right is the old cold frame, falling apart but still useful, the tuft behind it the broad bean plantation, of which I am quite proud.  The variety is Karmazyn, they are pink beans and the plant stems are slightly pinkish.  Despite the continual presence of prospecting black ants, the tops haven't fallen prey to blackfly, and the flowers are incredibly abundant, I hope the beans will be too.

The other rather larger animal who has been frequenting our patch is a red squirrel. If there were no other reason to be glad to live here, that the only squirrels are red ones would be enough.  They're somewhat elusive round here, but they are about.  For a long time now, I've wondered why the excellent if rather small nuts on the purple filbert bush always disappeared before I could get to them, and assumed that the middens of hazel, walnut and occasionally snail shells in the same area were to do with mice or voles.  Then the other day a movement of something running across the veg garden caught my eye. 'Bloody rabbit again,' I thought, but a second look revealed it was a squirrel.  Since then, I've seen it twice: once early in the morning, outside on the terrace - I reached for the camera but wasn't quick enough, and again when I was turning the corner in the car, and it was scampering down the verge towards the house, it quickly ran across the road and ran down Ludovic's drive.  Both sightings confirm that it has a circuit; the large hazelnuts we find come from Marcelle's garden up the road, the walnuts probably from Ludovic's.

We had a basket of hazelnuts on the table, left over from Christmas in fact, too much bother to get into and often not worthwhile when you do.  Tom started taking them down and leaving them under the purple filbert. First of all they were taken away, one by one.  It amused us to think of the squirrel bringing Marcelle's hazels down to ours, then taking ours back to hers and stashing them there.

Now though, he (there we go again) mostly eats them sur place.

We wondered if perhaps squirrels buried nuts because they were easier to get into after they'd been exposed to soil and moisture for a time.  This was confirmed by Michael Pollan on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme the other week who noted that, since cooking is not only the application of heat but also of natural cultures and microbial actions, so that in that way, squirrels can be seen as the only other cooking animal.

Obviously, Cyril, as we have called him, can't wait.

Rich hours, castles of welcome, music and memory...

One of my discoveries on internet radio is Ancient FM.  It wasn't the first early music station I found, that was Early Music FM, but they have now sadly gone off air for a bit.  But AFM are very similar, commercial free, run by volunteers and a very diverse mixture of mediaeval to Renaissance, but no Baroque, there are plenty of other stations catering for that (Baroque around the Clock, for example, from Hilversum, a name redolent of old bakerlite radios and the mysterious ether...). Entering internet radio portals is fascinating; following sidebar links can lead you from the Middle Ages to Venice, up into the Baroque or across to folk and Celtic, and, on account of the fantasy element, there seems to be quite a strong cultural connection between mediaeval music and Gothic so I sometimes find myself in places called things like 'Tormented Radio', and 'Radio Dark Dimensions', and  in the company of people like this,

though I don't tend to linger.

I've learned of quite a few early music ensembles over time, but there are even more that come up on Ancient FM that I never knew about: the Dufay Collective, the Baltimore, Waverly and Toronto Consorts, Sequentia and more. But one of the best things was a reminder of Gothic Voices' album 'The Castle of Fair Welcome'.  The station's playlists seem to change at intervals, but to be repeated and shuffled for a period, so for a time a couple of weeks ago the Dufay piece 'Ne je ne dors', one of my favourite tracks from the album, came up several times, and it took me back nearly twenty years, so I found myself stopped in my tracks, heart lifted, giddy with nostalgia.  I bought the 'The Castle of Fair Welcome' on a cassette, so it had no notes, words or translations with it, around the time we were first married, and we played it endlessly, especially on the car stereo in the old BX; in more ribald moments we referred to it as 'The Castle of Easy Access'.  For me it brings back early morning roads through Normandy off the ferry, and winding down through France in early May a week or two after we were married, the walls and turrets of Montreuil-Bellay where we stayed in a dour and ancient hotel with a spiral stone staircase and where the rosé tasted of strawberries, the first sight of silvery stretches of the Loire, and the yellow stones of the Charente and the Perigord where there were nightingales in the trees and wild marjoram in the hedgerows, and we stayed in a tiny house with deep-set windows and lizards on the sills.

We can't seem to find many photos from that time; we argue as to whether there really were more and if so what happened to them. But there are some and I've scanned a few:

produce on a market, the kind of thing I like taking pictures of now, and am somewhat better equipped for;

one of those bastide or hillside towns in the Dordogne - Domme, perhaps, or Sarlat?  I never labelled or wrote on photos then, always assumed I'd remember...

again, I'm not sure where, but I seem to recall this was a one-woman art gallery somewhere;

me in the garden of the gîte;

Tom doing the Boyhood of Raleigh at Montreuil-Bellay.

That was before we had a digital camera, and before we had a dog, or a house of our own, or a garden, before we had all the years we have now, of marriage and life in France, of life altogether.  I don't know how real all these memories are, they are of course light-filled and rosy, like the wine in Montreuil-Bellay, and selective - the house over the road from our honeymoon gîte was the second home of some snooty rich Eurocrats from Brussels, there was a small aerodrome nearby and the planes droned and whined overhead annoyingly for too much of the time, but I can't remember much else that was wrong...  I'm not even sure we had the cassette with us, or whether it's all become blurred through an association of experiences and feelings so I just think we did. But I think we did.  I'm not given to remembering the past over-romantically; I tend in fact to pick out the flaws with hindsight and remember the things which make me wince; I am given to regret and remorse, and not someone who finds it easy to connect with my past selves with much pleasure, and yet to be taken back to that particular time is sweet indeed.

I'm happy now too, of course.

The songs on 'The Castle of Fair Welcome' are mostly polished pieces of courtly convention from the late middle ages, the words formulaic and unimportant, the an exaggerated pose of abasement and adoration,  'Ne je ne dors' included:

I neither sleep nor wake
such is my agitation
all I can do is sigh...
anguish with open eyes urges me
to die with weeping

The exception is Christine de Pisan's 'Deuil angoisseux', though you wouldn't necessarily know it.  For the outpourings of her 'anguished grief... a doleful heart living in darkness... bitter distress endured in secret' are not, as might appear, further striking of attitudes from a man melodramatically relishing the role of courtly lover, but the grief of a widow for the death of her husband.

The cassette of 'The Castle of Fair Welcome' was chewed up by the player in the BX at some point not long after - that car always did have a mean streak - and we stopped playing much music as we drove after that, and didn't replace it with a CD recording, perhaps there wasn't one readily available.  It wasn't till it came up on the radio that it occurred to me to do so, and the internet made it easy.  It's reassuringly as beautiful as ever, though Tom can't hear the subtleties of the harmonies as well as he could.  'Ne je ne dors' is still one of my favourites; it's quite a sedate piece, I suppose, repetitive perhaps, but as each cycle comes to an end I long for it to start over again, which, happily, it does, many times.  And with a piece of music one loves, unlike many things, it's possible to go back to the beginning and play it all over again.  There seems to be only one other version of it on-line, or on You-tube anyway, which is by the Medieval Ensemble of London.  It's probably more authentic, and lovely too in its own way when you get used to the relatively harsh and slightly dissonant sound of it, but not as rich and pleasing as the Gothic Voices version. So I've made a video of that, as I haven't done one of those for a bit. The images are from the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn and Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which are roughly contemporary with the song in both time and place.

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...

New toys # 2

My other toy is the internet radio I had for my birthday a month or so ago, which I've already mentioned.

I am enjoying this, in unexpected ways.  Tom seemed rather disappointed that it was completely dependent on the wi-fi box.  'So you couldn't take it off to the park with you on a picnic like we did in the old days...' he said sadly.  Which was touchingly nostalgic but a little wide of any fact or experience relating to our own lives, since I can remember doing no such thing myself, with or without him, and he doesn't listen to radio or much like picnics either.  I remember finding it funny years ago that when Sam Cooke was Having a Party, he and his buddies were 'dancing to the music ... on the radio', the idea of one's party playlist being supplied by the radio seemed somewhat quaint.

However, after a fashion we - the radio and I that is - do have a private party.  Persian Dance Party quite often (courtesy of Iranian Radio FM), though sometimes its Absolute Trance, or Blue Marlin Ibiza, or Flamenco Radio, or Arvorig FM, or others ... This takes place in seclusion in my blue room, though Molly quite often joins us and chaperones from the beanbag, I don't mind looking stupid in front of her.  Finding that of the roughly eight kilos I took off a couple of years ago, nearly half that number had found their way back on, something had to be done.  Eat less, move around more.  But the manner of moving around proves difficult to sustain; last year I tried running, what was I thinking?  Running is painful and boring, I'm sure it isn't if you can do it but I can't.  It lasted about a week and the sneaky kilos continued to sneak.  Swimming is all right, but one has to make one's way to the pool on chilly winter days, and the last couple of times I swam, once in the sea and once at the pool, I caught a cold which put me off somewhat - in the sea I was in the company of two of Tom's grandchildren who probably made me a parting gift of the choicest of their infections collected over the school year, and from the pool I suspect the transition from the Turkish bath levels of heat in the pool area to the shivering cold of the changing rooms does little to boost one's immune resistance.  Cycling was a thing which kept me fairly fit aeons ago, but since Molly arrived in my life, taking a trip out on the bike rather than giving her a walk always seemed rather mean, and anyway, I never much cared for it round here, though I don't mind walking, so last year I finally accepted reality and took my old Raleigh to Emmaus, where the cheerful blokes who live there always seem happy to take old bikes to tinker with, and it would have cost probably more for me to have reconditioned than to buy a serviceable new one anyway.

No, in fact the only successful and sustained form of exercise, successful inasmuch as it has helped me lose weight and turn flab into something resembling muscle, albeit cellulite-covered muscle, that seems to suit is a kind of improvised  dance work-out based on various actions gathered from keep-fit classes, yoga positions, things I've seen people doing on telly, and other largely intuitive movements. Yoga itself is good for suppleness and balance but is frankly more a once a week social convention these days between E, A and myself, where the drinking of coffee (and sometimes the eating of Dutch sticky waffle biscuits or gingerbread, with real ginger, not the bland cinnamony stuff the French like) often take nearly as much time as the yoga.  Since I'm possibly even more lazy about initiating social arrangements than I am about taking exercise, having a default pre-arranged one is really no bad thing, but it doesn't burn fat.

So I maintained these solitary exercise sessions of between half an hour and an hour, three or four times a week for a year or so and found them quite tolerable, even, dare I say it enjoyable, and they really did me some good.  However, they lapsed, as all such good practice is in danger of doing with me, partly because I became complacent that I'd lost the weight and didn't think I needed to do them any more, and partly because I simply grew bored with them.  And one of the reasons for the boredom was that they really do need music, and I didn't own sufficient of the right kind of music to do them to - a couple of CDs of mixed World Music, which I liked well enough but which grew a bit stale after a while, and a few pop albums retrieved from younger days, some of which I realized I had grown out of, they sounded thin and inane, and the lyrics irritated me.

Then the internet radio arrived.  I know you can get internet radio off a computer, but I wanted a proper radio, with reasonable sound, on which I could get all my favourite BBC stations, plugged in in the kitchen or in my room, without interruptions to reception from bad weather, light bulbs, Tom moving about upstairs, or whatever, which the normal FM was subject to, and perhaps that I could get podcasts/Listen Again on.  Well, this new Roberts is good for all that, except sadly the podcasts, which it will do but if there's any break in the wi-fi, as there inevitably is from time to time, they cut off and you have to go back to the start again, which is infuriating.  However, mostly I want them for speech radio, and the new Chromebook turns out to have perfectly adequate sound for that, not bad at all for a titchy thing, so that solves that problem.  But then I can get all these radio stations from around the world; sometimes I listen to a general news radio from somewhere like Vancouver for a bit, and hear about the weather and the traffic and imagine Marja-Leena getting up just when I'm having tea in the afternoon (yes I really did!), but also I've found there are an enormous number of non-stop music stations, and this solves my exercise backing track ennui. The dance stations feature the kind of music which I would never listen to for its own sake, rhythmic, repetitive, rather anodyne, the whole Ibiza scene, rather than the orgiastic hedonism of remote and alien youth I had imagined it to be, if the radio stations are anything to go by, sounds gentle to the point of bland, but the long, subtly morphing dj mixes (I think that's what they are anyway...) are ideal for my private gyrations.  Some of them are a very mixed bag, Persian Dance Party is one of the ones I like best, partly because there are fewer English lyrics to irritate, and the rhythms are lively but the flavour is exotic, makes me want to go and eat a lovely lamb and rice dish with pomegranates or something.  Then there are always things like Flamenco, Latin, African and other World music, many of which I only really enjoy in small doses, but the unfamiliarity is an incentive to get moving.

So there we are, probably more than you really needed or wanted to know, but another window into life at Maison Box Elder.  I've not bothered seeking out links for the stations I've mentioned, but they can all be found at this wi-fi radio portal. And if any of my far flung bloggy friends have radio stations, or programmes they recommend, let me know, and assist me in my new nerdy hobbydom!

Eat, drink and be merry...

While noting Christmas charity donations, Tom said:

"Of course, it doesn't really matter whether we sent the blind dogs a cheque for twenty euros or five million, they won't have time to cash it before the world ends anyway."

"No, and the dogs won't have time to undergo their training either."

One of several such conversations.

" Be funny if it did happen though, wouldn't it? We'd be laughing on the other side of our faces then..."

There have been some numerogical weirdnesses, not only will tomorrow be 21/12, palindromic, today is 20.12.2012, and the other week was the 12th of the 12th of the 12th.  Which also happened to be my birthday, don't know if this gives me any privileges in apocalyptic terms.

I had a nice day or two but forgot to take the camera out when we went up to the seaside to eat, because the weather was so frightful, I didn't really want to go out at all but Tom said he'd drag me out by the scruff if necessary.  And it turned out rather lovely, with sun breaking through the mist and shining off the wet sand, and the little lighthouse on the harbour wall all looking pastel and sculpted, and distant flashes off the waves beyond.  The deserted terraces were rain-washed and puddled and sodden, the viviers were drained and empty of crustaceans, but inside the restaurant was cosy and warm, and I ate crab maki and fried sea bream with winter squash confit, and the crême brulée had bits of broken gingerbread on the top which tasted Christmassy.

And I came into my internet radio which means I no longer have to choose in the kitchen between the under-shelf task lighting and The Archers, plus I've discovered a non-stop early music station with a rolling display of what they're playing. It's like some early music nerd's i-pod on shuffle, which may well be what it is.

~

So in the expectation that I will be able to get through all the submissions before the end of the world, Alphabet Soup continues, with

elegant ballerinas and greedy giraffes

 astonishing physical geography

and wild and wind-swept islands.












I'm really having quite a lot of fun.

Christmas Eve

So I just sent out the last e-mail Christmas 'cards', half a dozen or so to those we reckon might not see a virtual one as unacceptable insouciance or cheap-skating or who never send us a card anyway.  I used one of today's photos, added text and made a coloured background, then set about personalising and adapting them, only to find that, having sent one in French to a French friend, I had erased the text I'd sent to her but forgotten to change Lucy et Tom to 'Lucy and Tom' in all the subsequent ones to anglophone recipients. An ampersand would have been a better idea.  What bothers me about this is not that I have exposed myself as absent-minded and inept, or even a copy-and-paste correspondent, but that it might conceivably look as though I was attempting some kind of pretentious affected Franglais to prove how jolly cosmopolitan I am and how effortlessly I move between languages etc which is a thing I can't abide and which reflects no kind of truth about the situation.  So if you got one, my apologies and please take it from me it's the ineptitude option.

I like to get a post done to wish you all well on Christmas Eve, but often find I've run out of steam somewhat by the time I get here.  In fact I have been filling a stocking with small stones over the last week or two, to get in practice and also to have something to hang up here tonight if all else failed.  But then Mol and I went for a walk and took some pictures leaving Tom to play with chicken stock in the kitchen, so you can perhaps have the stocking tomorrow morning, and look at some landscape for now.

We seem to have had all kinds of weather lately, most of it dreary, though none of it intemperate, so a day of sun in and out of the house was most welcome.  As you can see, there are still flashes and sheens of gold to be seen in the countryside, and we have all manner of confused spring and summer flowers still blooming in fits and starts. As a friend said the other day, it seems as if it will go from autumn to spring with nothing in between this time.  But I wouldn't be sure, it can still have something up its sleeve, no doubt, and I do feel we need a touch of ice for our health's sake.

Mol has been going a bit short of exercise one way and another, the last time we tried to walk it was cold and she suddenly went all poorly and pathetic, holding up her paw and wouldn't walk any further, though she was chirpy enough when she got home, after being carried much of the way, hmm. Then the other morning she got up and seemed to be afflicted with cramp, squealed horribly for a few moments, limped  downstairs, then by the time she came in from the garden she was fine again - none of this looked as though it was ear-related, but seemed to be around her forequarters.

So it's time for her to wear her neck-warmer!  This is an old one of mine, a bit small for me but fine for her, and rather a fetching colour on her, we think.  She wears it happily and walked very well for an hour today.

We came home in time for tea and the last of the mince pies and Nine Lessons and Carols on Radio 4.  A nice one, I hadn't heard 'The First Tree in the Greenwood' for a long time.  We pottered in the kitchen for a while - I'm very appreciative that the level of busy-ness I experience at Christmas is largely of my own choosing, as much or as little as I wish, and I enjoy it.  We considered the telly but decided to skip it, anything we might have watched we'd either seen before or it wasn't that compelling, and then Tom surprised and pleased me by putting on The Messiah, which is still going.  Just us tomorrow and Boxing Day, dinner with friends the next day, then dear step-daughter is coming over, on her own and just for a couple of days at the beginning of the New Year, which was another lovely surprise.  'Step-daughter' always sounds very inappropriate in terms of our relationship for all sorts of reasons, yet I find I now want a way of placing her which involves 'my' rather than referring to as her 'Tom's daughter' all the time.  I hope, of course, that she is my friend, but that doesn't explain how we came to be here. I have an inclination to say 'daughter-in-law', and in French of course the distinction would not be made, but then, while she would be the rather nice-sounding belle-fille I would be a belle-mère which brings us back to Snow White, Cinderella et al.

Well now Mister Händel is just winding up with the big Amen, and it only remains for me to wish you all the very best of the season and the holiday, whatever it means and brings to you, and a fond goodnight.