Prose is the rest of the time;
workaday words, with a job to do.

If you're lucky, they like their work,
go to it with a light step and heart,
not plodding, dreary or reluctant,
though breaking a healthy sweat at times.

They may have satisfying moments,

laughs with their mates, even perhaps

some light-filled days and revelations,
and carry out their tasks with grace and joy.

But poems are the words on pilgrimage.

(Or, at the very least, on holiday...)

Where to begin...

... with our trip to Chartres?

Still rather overwhelmed. Bewildered, you might say. Too much is not enough.

A collage of architectural details is as good a place as any...

Perhaps. (You can always click on it if you want to see more).

Things worth coming home for...

Books arrived in the post.

A teapot, one's own.

Soup and toast.

The new red wallpaper, half forgotten.

Buttercups and sorrel in the verges.

Molly's place on the sofa.

The white azalea flowering.

(and you all, of course !)

More of spring.

This really is the last one before we go away, in a quick bit of time snatched between a trip to the launderette to make Molly's bedding presentable for the very chic looking B&B we'll be staying at in Chartres, and a trip to the dentist for a check-up for me and an appraisal of a broken crown for Tom, then I'll be packing. The early May drive across some part of France has been a part of our life almost every year we've been married, even before we lived here; I look forward to it so much.

The first thing is a spring melodies meme, passed on from Jonathan, who hovers in virtual space between Paris and Norway, to name seven favourite musical things to be listening to in this season. This was actually rather nice,as it made me think about what I actually fancied listening to, to accompany my vernal musings, as well as the earworms that were already wiggling about in my head.

I am not a seriously musical person at all; I have no talent for the performing of it and limited discrimination. I have scarce any knowledge of current pop, I have never really succeeded in acquiring a taste for jazz, except when I'm at Tall Girl's place, where the jazz always sounds wonderful. Though I've come to classical music a lot more of recent years mostly through Tom, my tastes in it are generally pretty middlebrow and obvious. I like early music probably because it's often a bit less complicated, and also frequently melancholy and solemn, and I like melancholy and solemn. However, I have been fortunate enough to have had many people in my life with a real gift for music, so inevitably some osmosis has happened.

Even for spring I like some melancholy; however joyful the season, it is always so exquisitely, poignantly fleeting, but I have looked for things with some lilt and lift too. So:

1) The Messiah, a bundle of mixed arias and choruses, enough so that the earworms show some variety. We often seem to have a Messiah Day or two at this time of year, which I love. We have yet to find the Perfect-Messiah-as-Tom-Remembers-It, which I think is without too many of the (authentic) twiddly bits. This may be something like Parsley-Liquor-for-Pies-Like-the-Pie-Shops-of-his-Youth-Used-to-Do-It, which is to say, a piece of lost time impossible to retrieve, but we enjoy the ones we have anyway. (The Messiah recordings, not the parsley sauce).

2)Bax, Spring Fire Symphony. I just put this on. It is nice in parts, but I think I'm partly beguiled by the title, which seems so redolent of the blazing bright urgency of it all, as well as those welcome fires one still sometimes lights on chilly evenings in early spring ...

3) Canteloube, Songs of the Auvergne. We took a holiday there at this time of year a few years ago. Actually it turned into something of a nightmare, because the place we were staying at, which was pretty and luxuriant and green beyond imagining, and full of lovely wildlife, also turned out to be full of ticks, not so lovely wildlife. The only day Molly and I didn't acquire any was when we visitied Vichy, which is a delightful town, its historical associations notwithstanding. The paintings by Alphonse Osbert in the old pump room reminded me of Cantaloube's music(that link is fun, you can fly around the room!).

This music also reminds me of my mum; not that I ever remember her listening to it. She always said she liked it, and I bought her a cassette of it late in her life, but in fact she rarely listened to music at all. Partly because she was deaf, partly because, like me, she didn't think to do it, the music-playing equipment wasn't so handy then, but also I think because she wouldn't allow herself the indulgence of it, the time to do something pleasurable just for herself. So I got a CD of it a while ago, and took the time to get to know and enjoy it, as it were for her, though I'm not sure in quite what spirit I have done this...

It's samey in places, and irritating in others, but there's something about that opening phrase of 'Baïlero - lero -lero!', that makes my heart soar.

4)Van Morrison. Some standards - And It Stoned Me ('oh, the water...), Bright side of the Road, Have I Told You Lately... you know the kind of thing.

5) Bhundu Boys - Jit Jive. Their 'True Jit' album, which I used to have on vinyl but lost along the way, is difficult to obtain now on CD or download (which I don't do anyway). Lilting and joyous, I listened to it obssessively at a time I seemed to recall was not particularly joyous, but it has completely transcended the memory. I have this one track on a World music compilation, though there were others I liked better. While listening, I also rediscovered ...

6) Hugh Masekela. Tall Girl gave me a cassette of 'Waiting for the Rain' more years ago than I care to remember, which I wore out listening to on a clunky old Walkman every night going to sleep on sometimes tense visits to the parental home.

7) Yann Tiersen's soundtrack music for 'Amelie'. Very winsome!

No time for many appropriate links, I'm afraid. Now, I have to tag 5 more people, so I'll choose those I know are considerably more musically literate (if that makes sense), than I am. Tall Girl, Sheila, Julia, Rosie and Barrett Bonden, seven spring melodies, or collections thereof, if you please.

And of course, and I know this makes 8, what is more appropriate the Vaughan Williams? Not my beloved Tallis Theme or Dives and Lazarus, say, which are solemn and wintry, but the English Folk Songs Suite, for example. Here's a video I made the other day, as a kind of round-up of the season. I still can't make head nor tail of the Windows Movie Maker, so it's done with Picasa again. I put the slides together first, then loaded the music, which helps with the jumpy scratchiness, though it's not perfect.

~~~

Finally, and my toothbrush is calling, my response to Joe's demand for lunch, is over at Compasses.

~~~

Sorry if I haven't got around to visiting everyone before I go. See you soon!

Orchids, and another blossom.

I know I'm posting rather a lot at the moment, but we are going away next week, so there'll be a hiatus then, and I've still many spring things to use up. I always feel our early May peregrinations mark the end of spring, at least in its first flush.


Bee read about these early purple orchids (orchis mascula), at Out with Mol, and wanted to see them. They are not particularly rare, but to see them in this abundance is unusual, and they're very striking to see, though not as sensational as Bee's Texas bluebonnets. They're just growing on a municipal roadside verge near the plan d'eau in Trédaniel.

Bee spoke about how she'd seen bluebells that seemed to glow in the shade, which reminded me of a DH Lawrence poem 'Bavarian Gentians', though that is very much an autumn poem :

' burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light',

and the way blue flowers in shade seem, paradoxically, to glow with darkness.

~~~

And on the subject of gorgeous flowers, and blue bonnets too, come to think, a couple of photos of Princeling who we saw for the first time for ages yesterday. Still a continually sunny and cheerful character, as he has been since he was born, now running around on two legs and needing quite a bit of keeping up with.

Postscript

Having posted the post on posts really quite flippantly, on reflection, and reading your comments, I find I have quite a lot more to say, on posts, and on the idea of typology, and the connections between those two things, as wellas quite a lot more photos of posts. This in turn lent itself to another punning title, which clinched the matter. (Though I think I'll resist Dave's clever idea of a blog entirely dedicated to pictures of posts, a post a day...)

In fact, one of the first photos I ever put on the internet was of a fence post! It was before ever I had a blog, but I heard through a friend's of the Festival of the Trees, and asked if she'd publish some pictures I'd recently taken on a trip to New Zealand. They were of the great forest god, Tane Mahuta, whose avatar is in the mighty kauri tree in the north of the North Island.

It is very difficult to photograph these trees and give any sense of scale which demonstrates their enormity, but in the shot below, the tree fern directly to the right of the trunk is perhaps the size of an ordinary sycamore or somesuch in an English park, and only half of Tane Mahuta's trunk is visible.

A day or two later, I was scrambling about on a headland, where the wild white freesias filled the air with perfume, above a beach of radiantly silver sand, when I encountered a more humble, but nevertheless imposing, incarnation of the forest god, in the shape of an old fence post.

My friend agreed to put the pictures on her blog, but suggested that I could always get a blog of my own, if only to post about trees once a month. So I did, and named it after a tree I was fond of, though I rarely post about trees now.

I've even been known to draw fence posts. For the Flickr group pool, 'Drawing Close to Nature', which I love but unfortunately don't contribute to as often as I'd like.

Back in the winter, over Christmas, when we had those amazing crystalline air frosts and ethereal morning mists followed by cerulean blue skies, I also collected a number of photos of fences and posts, with a view to a post that never happened. I tend to think blogging, especially of photos, shoud be seasonal, topical, immediate; once the moment is past it's too late, but why? It is often quite interesting to be suddenly taken back to another season.

The posts and wires, outlined solarised by the frost, introduced a graphic element, markers in a landscape whose form had become uncertain,

and this function became further enhanced with the more overt meaning of the finger post,


and the weightier one of the old stone cross on the corner.

So what is a post? It is a node and and a nexus, a support and a pin, it helps to define, delimit and enclose - and if you are a cow with a persistent itch, you can scratch your back on it...

Which provides one connection point to the subject of photographic typologies (there are others, stay with me if you will ...). It's to do with rhythm and pattern and markers, of containing things within fields, and with finding what you're looking for, to scratch an itch.

Cara Phillips' criticism about typologies giving work 'the illusion of cohesion and intellectual rigor', which I think I was not alone in thinking initially sounded somewhat intimidating and snobbish, does perhaps have a point, (though I'd be the first to admit to being one of those 'people who have no real conceptual thinking in their work'; I'm a blogger who does it for fun for goodness sake, not a conceptual artist or documentary social commentator...).

I suppose the possibly spurious sense of meaning would derive from the sense of order, of pattern and rhythm, qualities which, as a species, we are constantly seeking to give a sense of meaning in a world that sometimes threatens not to have any. The appeal of the typology is the appeal of the stamp album, the bird book, the wallchart of flags of the world, of the collection of whatever, variations on a theme, things the same but differing, and of things labelled and marked. And, as Phillips also points out, it's quite difficult to avoid reference to typology in photography, the medium lends itself to it, that's what it's always been used for, often without any artistic or aesthetic motive, simply as a utilitarian record, or sometimes for more sinister purposes. But it satisfies us aesthetically because, I suppose, we like order.

A collection of things, too, often contains an implicit narrative. I remember years ago seeing and being fascinated by pictures of different kinds of barbed wire, which, apparently is much prized by certain collectors , who understand its history, often military, and its associations. The electric fencing many of these posts support has replaced barbed wire - though some of those I've shown pertain to large square wire mesh, to enclose a small and unusual paddock of sheep, or chain link, to seal off someone's residential property, hence the red 'Propriété privé' sign in the previous collection. To contain and restrain cattle, one strand of electric wire is enough, sheep, agile and heavy fleeced, are less easily discouraged from wandering, and human's who wish to keep other humans off their patch resort to the more forbidding chain link. Electric fencing is, on the whole, a gentler and more environmentally friendly solution than barbs; it can be powered by a small solar panel -though it rarely is, more often a portable rechargeable battery - smaller animals, and people, can pass freely and safely under or over it, and though Molly has occasionally fallen foul of a stray strand, and great has been the screaming and shuddering that ensues, it is nevertheless less damaging than the torn skin and blood poisoning that barbed wire can cause. Now, she seems to hear the tell-tale electric pulse, and give it a wide berth. In some of the pictures, the posts are wound about not with wire but with blue bailer twine. This product, ubiquitous in the agrarian landscape, is often used as a makeshift boundary for the cattle, for example along the tracks where they are driven from place to place; they seem to see the electric blue line as real electric wire, and, at least for a short time, can be fooled into not pushing against it. Sometimes, on a foggy, monochrome Brittany day, a line or squiggle of the turquoise twine is the brightest thing in the landscape.

Electric fancing has also replaced the child labour that, within living memory, was used to keep watch over the animals.

Typologies often deal with man-made objects, in isolation ( check out Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher, I tried to work them into this but couldn't really without unacceptable digression, that's a Wiki link, and there's also a good article here, from an exhibition of their work at the Tate Modern). But I find what appeals about the fence posts is that they seem to provide a transition, a conciliation, between the natural, organic forms and textures of the wood, and of the lichens and fungi that grow on them, and the human intervention in the landscape which uses them to demarcate, contain and enclose. Often the timber around here is chestnut, split along the grain rather than sawn, like the chestnut rail fencing that the young Abraham Lincoln is said to have spent his youth making, and the random roughness and irregularities of the wood, the grain and lines and knots, the peeling bark left on it, are offset by the geometry, the lines and circles, of the wires and the ceramic resistors attached to them.

So, there you are, from looking closer at something as banal and unremarkable as the humble fence post, I seem to have learned quite a lot, and some previously neglected photos have seen the light of day. Thanks to everyone who left thoughtful comments and observations, and got me reflecting and looking. Perhaps my conceptual thinking has even come on a bit! I'll keep you posted if I have any more insights...

Last post...

Self-doubt, self-hate, nasty, nattering, grubby, gnawing,

Keep away from me! If I should wake, cowardly like Napoleon,

At 2, or 3 or 4 o'clock, I'll tell you now

Begone, piss off, get stuffed!

I've better things to do than fight with you!

A post on posts

Wondering what I could photograph that was new under the sun, or how I could present it, I decided to focus on a frequently occurring item in these parts: fence posts. And to succumb to the lure of the photographic typology.

In searching for a link to reference this particular photographic genre, I found this at a serious photographer's blog;

'While there are many great bodies of work employing this method, there is also a lot of crap. Let’s be honest, for people who have no real conceptual thinking in their work, the typology can become an easy trick. It gives work the illusion of cohesion and intellectual rigor.'

(Cara Phillips, Ground Glass, Typology).

Well, that's me stuffed then.

In fact it was a very interesting post, I loved the year on year series of photos by Nicholas Nixon of his wife and her sisters that she drew my attention to.

(PS - As Fantastic Forrest pointed out in comments, the above link is to a general overview of Nixon's work, including the portrayals of AIDS sufferers. '25 years of the Brown sisters' his photos of his wife and her sisters, is shown here.)

I seem to be linking a lot lately. There's so much good stuff to be found...

(The posts might be worth enlarging...)

~~~

Oh yes - Joe tells us where he's from... at Compasses

Crane, St Brieuc, April.

A mighty wonder, the demolition crane stands, vermilion, against a spring blue sky.

The man in the cab at its axis is a small figure. If the crane were a toy, you would have to get him out of there, to open the little hinged perspex door of the cab, and take him between finger and thumb, plastic and smiling, bent in the middle, his backside flattened to the seat. Then you would probably lose him in the random chaos of the toybox.

But that man up there, tiny and remote, is a figure of power and mystery, a distant godhead enthroned. His face is ineffable, veiled by the glassy darkness of the cab, only his orange hat and scarlet knee-pads are made visible. He has dominion, wields power on many planes.

He reaches out his hand, and swings the crane's great arm wide, over the rooftops, the lead and the slate, over the skylights and wrought iron balconies and belle époque dormers, over the men below labouring with hands and hammers, over the car parks and kerbsides, the weedy grass and waste ground blossoming with beer cans and sweet wrappers, over the plane trees' and sycamores' translucent fluttering, over the black redstart whistling from the chimney pot, over the estate agent, the photocopiers', the school and the clinic and the sex shop, swings it through a wide arc while all the time pulling and lifting its load, with its sharp, hard edges and its terrible gravity.

Slow and measured its shadow passes over us, like an angel of death, leaving us below, miraculously safe and whole, craning our necks, gazing upward in awe and thankfulness.

What a wonder it is, the structure, the mechanism; we may well marvel at its unerring gentleness, at our trust in it, that it holds, sustains, moves with mysterious grace, and at the mercy with which it does not come down in noisy, murderous cataclysm about our heads.

Look at it there, rising, its planes and angles and diagonals, its ascending order of vivid flaming struts and shining bolts against the impossible blue - an oratorio in tempered steel!

Another plug...

This is such a good book! Also, it's part of one of those trains of internet serendipity that I like so much when they happen.

I went to an expat website that's fairly useful and helpful but which I don't usually frequent very much, with a thought to suggest it as a place to promote Barry's exhibition (which was good, and, I think, successful for him. The pasties were also great...), and saw on their bookpage a new history of Brittany in English, so I went over to Amazon to see about it there, and in the 'people who bought that also bought this' bit, I saw this book, 'Bumping about Brittany'. It looked interesting, and had a couple of good reviews, so I ordered it. With the spring and all, I'm in something of a phase of wanting to get out more, and find out more about my surroundings.

It's 'a guide book with a difference,' according to the blurb ' a series of excursions into the cultural, physical and emotional heartland of Brittany' which is about right. Each chapter is a properly described and referenced walk, but that's just a starting point for a great wealth of history, folklore, geography, all leavened with hilarious, genuinely laugh-out-loud anecdote and humour. There are chapters on Roscoff pink onions, foraging for lunch on beaches, cider and other potions, Celtic saints, and much more besides.

It contains a lot of observations which we've ourselves made, but have never quite had confirmed, but beyond that, the author's knowledge of and insights into the region make me realise how barely I've scratched the surface when it comes to the place where I live.

Charles Davis is a walker and writer of walking guides who lives in Brittany; many of the places he covers are a in the western, Breton-speaking part of the region, rather than the Gallic bit where we live. His knowledge of the area clearly comes from both reading and speaking with people - his partner, Jeannette, is from Brittany, though they've lived all over the world. He clearly has a great curiosity and eye for detail, as well as a capacity to retain and organise it.

There's some concern that the print was too small, and it is a bit, but not enough to be distracting as far as I'm concerned. The photos look good but are too small and poorly presented to do them justice, which is a shame, and an index and a bibliography would have been good, but I gather authors don't have a lot of say in these things...

So, having obtained the book, I was annoying Tom by bursting out laughing at it at regular intervals, and thought I'd just google its author out of curiosity. This led me to his page on The Red Room, which invited me to 'contact this author', so I thought why not? To do so it turned out one needed to sign up to The Red Room, which turns out to be very interesting in itself, a centre on the web for writers both well- and lesser-known, including their blogs. Charles Davis' blog is as witty and self-deprecatingly ironic as his writing in the book, I'd recommend it(you don't need to sign up to the site to read).

For example, on the matter of the financial crisis, and how he always felt stupid about not understanding what it was exactly his acquaintances in finance were doing, or quite how money was being 'made' -

Be honest now. How many of you had the foggiest idea what these brokers and bankers and financiers and consultants and executives have been doing all these years to ‘make’ all this imaginary money? You didn’t have a clue, did you? You thought you were too stupid to understand. I bet you’re feeling better already. You weren’t stupid. It was all those utterly preposterous people with overdeveloped greed glands who were stupid. Admittedly, they’re a little less preposterous, possibly even less stupid, for having a few million quid secreted in the back pocket (kindly given to them by the government after they lost all their imaginary money), but they’re barely coherent as human beings otherwise. You and I may be getting poorer by the day thanks to their overactive imaginations, but it is deeply satisfying to know that we were right all along and ‘they’ were wrong. Got to look on the bright side.

Or on why he's a writer: among other things because

It takes me absolutely bloody dark ages to work out what I really think about something, and, often as not, I need to tell myself a story about a given subject before I know precisely what my values are and how they accord with the topic to hand. It’s sad, really, several hundred pages and I’ve produced what a pundit would toss off in a couple of pithy soundbites, but there you go.

He replied to my e-mail very promptly, and we had a bit of a chat. 'Bumping about Brittany', was written to order, he said, but he clearly warmed to the task. He had feared he might be required to write a ' a smug-brits-abroad-sniggering-at-the-funny-foreigners book', but it really isn't that. Though Breton culture is often the subject of his humour, so are British attitudes, (and also himself!). And it's the kind of amusement that comes from close familiarity and real affection, not ridicule. I'd like to quote some examples, but I fear I'm overrunning, and also, much of the appeal of it is how he builds up a picture and refers back. For that reason it's as good, if not better, an armchair read as it is a guidebook. And he can be more serious, lyrical and reflective too.

He has written two fiction books, 'Walking the Dog' and 'Walk on, Bright Boy'. I'm looking forward to reading them too, particularly the latter, with its themes of mediaeval Spanish history and Gnosticism, which are right up my street. It got a seriously rave review from the Independent too...

I like finding new things, hidden treasure, and it seems to me that when really good stuff is produced by clever people who aren't particularly well-known in the mainstream media, it's worthwhile giving them as much word of mouth as possible.