A walk on the beach and a Molly maquette

Prompted by this and that around the place, I have almost got around to posting those blog posts I have been meaning to post for almost the whole five-and-a-bit years I have been blogging: about not having children, and about the double-sided Hohner harmonica I inherited from my Bachelor Uncle Jack-the-Only-Musical-Member-of-My-Family (I even took the photos for that one about five years ago).

Almost but not quite, and I wonder if really the urge to talk about, and the conviction of the importance of, these subjects, and others, are no more; if I were going to write about them and post it I'd have done it by now.  There's perhaps too much and too little to be said, and do my reflections and reminiscences, uncooked and unremarkable, really matter?  Perhaps, like Margaret in Howards End (I love my Kindle and all the free out-of-copyright books I am finally reading on it, but I must give a donation to Project Gutenberg...), I am 'passing from words to things'.  Though I rather doubt it. 

So, I went for a walk on the beach with my dear ones instead.

We looked at and across and through the water,

and saw a lot of squiggly things.

It did the heart good.  We have to keep Mol on the extending lead most places these days, because she becomes rather worried if we don't, and comes and asks for it, especially in wide open spaces, where she's always been a little uneasy and agoraphobic.  She doesn't see or hear very well, which makes smelling things even more absorbing and distracting, so she loses us rather easily, and tends to run back towards the car in a panic.  I tend to think of it as being like the invisible link between people and their daemons in the Philip Pullman books, or like a heartstring.

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And I made a Molly maquette.  I used black paper to save time colouring it, and just scribbled on it a bit with coloured pencils.  I didn't want them all to be straight profiles, so tried for a kind of three-quarters view.  It won't, I then realised, work for the Three Musicians, as they all have to be facing the same way to stand one on top of each other's backs to look through the farmhouse window, and anyway, the dog in the story is an old working hound or farm dog cast out by his owners, as all the animals are - except the cockerel, whose fate was to be cooked and eaten - so Mol doesn't quite fit the bill for that, but I kept a pattern as a template which I can easily adjust and reverse.  It was small enough to scan. 

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That'll suffice for now, there are pansies to plant and grass to cut and teenagers to coach.  I've a lovely new one of these, a 17 year old girl (I think I quite like 17 as an age, at least in others, I don't know if I cared for it when I was 17...) who towers over me with black hair and bright brown eyes who is overflowing with fun and a desire to communicate but desperately short of language to do so, and whose English teacher never invites her to speak.  The pansies are blue and yellow.