49 articles

Herhimnbryn, who is the queen and the onlie begetter of many a good list, started this, some time back.  Zhoen and Fire Bird and the Polish Chick took it up and rattled off some which were so good I couldn't imagine adding anything to them, check on the links and you'll see.  But I started saving them up, reckoning that by this point I might have collected an adequate 49, for my span, and I have.

I have passed the time richly with friends, and will go on doing so.  We'll may be go up the coast tomorrow, just Tom and Molly and I, and I've a thing or two to open

~~~

49

1.  Don't forget about music

2.  Wine really does taste better if you don't drink it every day

3.  You weren't so good as you thought you were then, no reason to suppose you're as good as you think you are now.

4.  You weren't so bad as you thought you were then, no reason to suppose...

5.  Limes are so much more than green lemons

6.  Let yourself be nailed to the sofa by a warm spaniel while you can.

7.  Prepare for a lonely old age.  Then if anyone does show up, it'll be a bonus, and you'll still have the stores you laid by against a lonely old age.

8.  Eat all the veg you like, but mind the butter and mayonnaise you put on them

9.  Walk by woods and water.

10. Let Tom take out the recyclables and make coffee.

11. Sometimes you don't have to relax with something, you can just relax.

12. Good practice will sometimes desert you, it's just too bad.

13. Blue for summer, red for winter.

14. Don't be disloyal.

15. Brown paper bags are lovely, and often filled with good things.

16. Things change fast, it doesn't mean you were wrong.

17. Sometimes you will irresistibly crave the taste of Jerusalem artichokes, but remember, everything has its consequences.

18. It's a fine line between procrastinating and prioritising.  You aren't always guilty of the former.

19. Wear a scarf.

20. Thank them, even and especially the ones not there, you owe them so much, and they won't throw it back in your face, stamped with reproach.

21. Count your blessings.

22. Don't  take every offer of help as a criticism.

23. Look into the fire, stay awhile.

24. Exercise won't make you thin, but it will make you feel better.

25. Stroke the alabaster swan.

26. Don't lose heart.

27. Colours are too important to be mere adjectives.

28. Luxuriate in fatigue.

29. For fried egg sandwiches, it doesn't matter too much if the yolk breaks.

30. Blues seldom clash.

31. Don't be greedy.

32. More things than you think take less than an hour.

33. More things than you think take more than an hour.

34. Keep taking the magnesium.

35. Come on, don't be shy.

36. Always remember to pack the battery chargers and leads.

37. Take the long way round sometimes.

38. Though it is better to light a candle, there's a time and a place for cursing the darkness.

39. Make stock, take stock.

40. Make sure the bruise gel is always handy.

41. There is no bruise gel for the spirit; you just have to wait and watch the colours turn and fade.

42. Never underestimate the restorative power of hot water and toothpaste.

43. Don't expect people to be amenable to having vicarious amends made to them.  If they are, beware.

44. Try not to flinch.

45. Have something warm across your shoulders, an arm, a shawl, the sun...

46. The wrong you've done others hurts more than any wrong done you.  In this you may well be fortunate.

47. Make patterns, break patterns.

48. Kippers and balsamic vinegar.

49.  Light, light, light.

~~~

Cards

Recently I expressed my complete puzzlement as to how anyone was able to raise children, and work full-time, when I feel quite busy and unequal to keeping up with the general business of life with neither of these demands.  I received a couple of rightly terse replies from women who do succeed, or have succeeded, in this everyday but nevertheless astonishing and, to me superhuman achievement, to the effect that you get extremely tired and don't do much else.  In fact both of them seem to be capable of doing all kinds of  other very impressive things, like reading a lot of books and blogging, to say nothing of singing and making things and all sorts of stuff and who knows what else.

However, one thing probably most people with proper lives don't do is spend ages and ages hand-making their Christmas cards.

Why then do I?  I don't even really like the whole business of Christmas cards.  And on receiving one of these offerings, most people will, quite frankly, either not give it a second look, since they've probably got at least 200 more to find room for in their homes already groaning with festive trappings with which my card will be chucked out with a sigh of relief on or before the feast of the Epiphany,or if they do will, quite understandably snort with derision and the probably words ' Well, she must have too much time on her hands!'

In fact those words are almost certainly somebody-somewhere's judgement on most everything I do, from blogging to burning wood to making chicken stock to reading poetry to scrambling egg in the microwave to make Molly's dinner more interesting.  Likewise they are my judgement on all manner of activities I don't understand or wish to participate in.  Only I try to judge not that I be not judged, though there are some things....

But  the fact is, I simply do enjoy making things sometimes.  We don't send a small fraction of the number of cards other people in the Anglo-Saxon (yes yes, I know it's both an ethnographic and a historical misnomer...) world do, partly because we live in a country where it isn't done so that lets us off the hook where neighbours and colleagues are concerned, and partly because we're an anti-social pair of no-mates.  Some years we just order charity cards, some years Tom does a picture and gets it copied. Yet other years I have dug out the stored piles of previous years' cards (because I don't sling them out because I'm hopeless about not wasting anything, while, like most thrift-obsessives I strain at gnats and swallow camels) and carefully snipped and glued and collaged them into new ones.

This year I ordered Moo mini cards of croppings from my photos, and snipped and glued and collaged them into bigger cards.  I always have stacks of coloured card and paper about because I can't walk past packs of this in places like Lidl and Noz.  I used hole punches, a standard round one and a heart-shaped one from somewhere like Lidl or Noz.  I'm still a little uncertain about hearts as a decorative motif, but I'm thinking more Scandinavian folk art than the sew-on jeans patches and teenage girls' magazines of my youth.

Like many of my creative efforts, they have an air of the primary school or Blue Peter about them.  But I enjoyed myself.

Now I'm fairly hopelessly behind with many other more pointful jobs which even in my child-free and part-time employed state I still ought to do, and must go to bed.  I might get around to putting some links into this post tomorrow.

Crab apple thief

Young blackbird, breast still thrush-speckled, drunk on bletted crab apples.

~

34 cm and counting!

Couldn't get out of the gate,

and this is what the car looked like.

Now it's more or less disappeared, washed away in the rain, so back to work this morning.  For myself, I was quite glad of it, as there was no two ways about not getting out, it was pretty and a novelty, and it gave me some much appreciated time to catch up with some things which I really needed a chunk of undisturbed time at home for.  None of which was keeping up with this blog or anybody much else's, I'm afraid.  Still, quite a few more snowy pictures to come, and I'll try to get about again.  Though now, of course there'll be all the things I cancelled and put off to catch up with.  How do people work full-time and raise families, I often wonder?

Back soon.

The last day of November

~
The last day of daily posting, I've kept at it, though somewhat tersely some days, and now a satisfying number of photos can perhaps be shunted off to the external drive, and some old notebooks can also perhaps be stowed away, having yielded anything they're likely to.  And I can get on with making the Christmas cards.  Thanks for stopping by.

December, Advent, my birthday and the winter solstice and Christmas are all ahead; it's been suddenly, intensely cold, but beautiful with it.  I feel at peace with the season, and myself, just now.

The one below is not an old one, but of the moment.  It is missing an epigraph, but, to include the epigraph, I would need to ask permission, and I don't quite have the nerve to do that, so it'll have to stand alone.



Advent 2010

From blue ground under frost
layers of hedges and hills
the translating gold of beech leaves,

from the white field lying
beside the round stone tower
the lapwings' flight
over striped winter fields,

from the stiff and matted fur
and rigour of grief,  
from joy, ruin and rapture -

peace rises.

~~~

Road

Onward and up

Sorry, fresh out of original thought, and time, tonight.

All thanks to St Antony and St Jude, a mystery, and other bits and pieces

~

Walking  the approach to Bogard, on Wednesday late afternoon.

There is a poem in these poplar woods, but I haven't found it yet.  The gaunt old hamadryads are guarding it jealously.  Or I'm just not very good at looking for it.

That was the day when I perceived that something was wrong with the zoom and shutter button of the camera; the zoom was slithering about like a car on ice, and the shutter sometimes wasn't shutting.  Damage occasioned, I realised, the day before, when I had to throw a wet and muddy Molly over my shoulder to prevent her from getting into a fight with a neighbourhood German Shepherd dog five times her size.  She was not impressed and struggled and kicked, insisting that she be allowed down to give the young whippersnapper a good hiding and/or, probably and, die in the attempt, showering the camera round my neck with water and mud.

I was annoyed.  The camera is still under guarantee, but the German shepherd should be kept under better control, its owner is an unprepossessing halfwit with whom any kind of rational exchange seems to be impossible, and I would have to make a journey into St Brieuc with the camera and probably be without it for however long it took to service.

I set about looking for the paperwork for it anyway.  Bureau drawers, kitchen pinboard, dear little clip in the shape of a wading bird in the kitchen, shelves by the washing machine, bedside locker drawer, shelving units in my room, ancient cardboard wallet in plastic box upstairs with receipts from twelve years ago when Jean-Paul the mason knocked the holes in our back wall, plus the one from the last emptying of the septic tank - oops, was it really that long ago? - under the telly, behind the bookshelves... everywhere a piece of paper could be, and I found every bit of paperwork for everything we have ever paid for except that one.  I started to cast baleful and accusing glances at He-who-insists-on-throwing-things-out, especially empty cardboard boxes that things came in, while I wring my hands and say  'But if it goes wrong we'll need the box to send it back...'.  He maintained and I knew that he would not just have thrown out the camera box with paperwork in it, to say nothing of instruction manuals on disc and paper, spare cables etc, but in desperate times people are sometimes accused of crimes they haven't committed.

Anyway, I finally found the whole box complete with guarantee, receipts, manuals, cables neatly stowed in the shelving in my room.  Yes, I had already looked there.

But just by way of an experiment, I left the camera in a warm dry place with one of those silica gel packets on top of the zoom-shutter button, and by the following morning, it was functioning completely normally again.  I thought of burying it in rice, as I've heard that works, but I don't think I had enough rice avalaible, and I don't suppose green split peas would be the same.  So, do what they tell you and don't eat the silica gel, you never know when you may need it. 

~~~

I ended up cancelling work on Friday, it's really much too early in the season to be having to do this.  I spent some of the morning watching with interest and a gratifying sense of self-justification while other people tried to get their cars around the corner as their wheels spun merrily.   Charmless bulb grower gave up after one attempt, little Remy in his rubber-band-powered, sans-permis, not-so-smart car gave it four tries and finally made it.  The post girl did it OK in her yellow van, but they're made of sterner stuff.  On Saturday morning I ran out to meet her at the fence.

I can't believe I did this.  And I thought I had flat feet.  The yoga must be working.  Ten minutes later these footprints had disappeared.

~~~

Tom has just googled himself, for some reason this commonplace act of narcissism is one he has not thought of before.  Our name is not really very common,  I have a namesake on-line in the US, another in Australia, that's all.  He found someone who apparently shared both his first and middle names as well as his surname, listed as a company director (which he never was) in Gloucestershire, where we used to live.  There was a postcode, which he looked up, and it was for the road we used to live on, about sixteen years ago.  Sinister ideas of a supernatural kind about shadow lives and doppelgangers, and rather less supernatural but equally sinister ones about identity theft and false identities, are now causing us some unease.  

Three images of Morlaix viaduct

- I should have done these yesterday, then it could have been viaduct vendredi...

Oddment

A stray Chartres poem from last year, which didn't make it then, got tinkered about with plenty but still I'm not sure if it makes it.  But it's Friday night, late in the daily blogging stretch, I'm a bit bog-eyed with snow and long hours and typing e-mails on the tiny computer, and I don't much mind.



Chartres


from gentle darkened depths
she draws you   mermaid blue
wrack red   blood gout anemone
poppy petals creased transparent
over the limestone white sheet light
the gleam of ringing river water

iris gold hearted fibrils
a tongue speaking clarity
fractured to rainbows
sieved through meshes of meaning
broken from a prism into the seagreen
wings of the announcing angels
flood blue robe blue cobalt soda

and the saffron of haloes

~

Unseasonable

We shouldn't really be waking up to this at this time of year.

We've not even really had any frost yet; the flowers were still enjoying a last fling,

and the autumn leaves and fruits were still in full swing,

and the hydrangeas were still only mid-purple, their autumn colour, between summer blue and winter brown, as they're really leaves, just posing as flowers, of course.

It's all rather pretty,

but I'd sooner not have to drive out in it tomorrow morning - it's still here tonight.