Frozen

The first frost came before the water lily leaves had gone, begun their fall through water, not air. Even some corpse flower buds remained. The ice holding them was a creased and pleated membrane, not a rigid sheet, the fish moved freely below it. 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

  ~

Last day of November

Probably a title I've used before, since most years I have made this strangely binding commitment, to myself and the outside online world,m whatever my state of relations with the blogging medium, to do this every day, and, as with most years, I don't mind that I've done so. Having an rendezvous here every evening has indeed been quite helpful this year, when I've found myself somewhat beset with perturbations and not altogether pleasant distractions. It's been good to be obliged to post something, without fretting too much as to whether it's likely to be worthwhile, or whether I've got anything to show or tell, and even when I've been quite sure I haven't, I've found I have after all, worthwhile or not. If that makes sense.

Thanks to all of you who've looked in and left comments. I think I feel a little more reconnected with blogs and blogging again, and hope I'll be more often moved to post more often and more unselfconsciously again. I look forward now to being able to get around to visiting all of you and yours, apologies for neglecting to do so, and to the recent newer visitors I've not paid return calls to yet. I thought I might try to make the final post one of answering the comments I didn't get around to replying to at the time, like Catalyst's question as to why I left the scanner lid open when I scanned the liquidambar leaves (I hoped it might give a darker ground and a more 3D effect), but I've rather run out of time to comb through, and you've probably forgotten what you might have said by now anyway and not to worry.

Now needing to bend myself to sorting through the dazzling array of submissions for the Alphabet Soup exhibition at Clive's, ( I've linked to it plenty, if you don't know what I'm talking about by now...) with the excellent back-up that I have this will surely be only a pleasure - I'll keep posted with progress for that here as well.

So a quick pic of some cockles put to soak.  Sho Shellfish.

  

29 things for the 29th

 Dried liquidambar

 Red green and blue baking dishes

 Our 10% off day at the DIY store

Oily brown wood-pulp firelighters in an old tea caddy with Notre Dame on it

The odd word 'caddy'

Prototype

'Terracotta warriors with an artistic twist'

Deciding not to order bathroom tiles even though it's our 10% off day

Glad to have finished A Place of Greater Safety

I like the flat lid shells of scallops better than the dish-shaped bottom shells

Mind my car

Molly munching pea pods

Sun through the red plastic funnel like a red balloon

Big bags for garden clearing

Saladings

Rubi the labrador is thirteen, and rather overweight.  He lay down too much and got bedsores, but now he's much better

Vermeer's Lady at a Virginal; she looks a bit drippy

Black leggings under purple yoga pants.  Bug-rug-snug

Where did the hills stop and the clouds begin?

Garlic mushrooms good, baked beans better *

Little boat: best (non-edible) thing ever in an ice cream

Yellow glints of sallow leaves

Two packs of chestnut wood floorboards

Pepitas

Thinking about birthday lunch

Thinking about Christmas dinner

Soft foxtail larch tops against the hill

Just one more thing...

Bwha- ha-ha-ha!

* with baked potatoes

Tipping points and other matter(s).

Hard to say what the feeling about the tipping point is.  Not exactly the imminence of death, as I suppose Anne was talking about in her comment, though doubltless related.  More perhaps the sense that the capacity to grow and benefit from vicissitudes and reverses seems to wane, that overall the balance seems to be towards lessening, that experiences cease to augment one's stock and substance, and tend to diminish them.  But such metaphors are probably flawed; what stock, what substance? I suppose I assumed that the gaps left by losses would always be filled by something else, now I'm not sure.  But the tendency to look on the bleak side is at least in part a function of one's nature as much as one's age and stage, which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to curb it.

Anyway.

~

We really must eat more baked potatoes.

~

The bank manager rang.  I am easily confused on the phone about who people are.  He reminded me he was Sophie's and Stephanie's dad and then I placed him, but instantly assumed there was a problem.  Well, he did say he was concerned about our account.  I ran upstairs, 'phone in hand, to consult Tom:

'He says we've only got X euros in there!'

'Well, that's more than usual...'

After a bit, and after I'd spluttered apologetically about having to move some money over from the UK, paying the gardener and getting another car, but how we'd managed to scrape up the funds for that in liquide by other means, he went on to say that if we didn't need it all there he recommended we move some of it over to the savings account. He was not reproving us for inadequate funds but the opposite. It was our instant reaction, though, to an authority figure to assume we must be in trouble, even if he is Sophie and Stephanie's dad.  

Though why bother, we wondered, it's not as though we'd get anything on it anyway, interest on savings being a nice idea but not to be dreamed of again in our lifetime.  We speculated that perhaps in response to the increased Greek bail-out, all the bank managers of France had been issued with instructions to move as much money to more usable places.  Yes, that must be it, we are doing our bit to help with the Eurozone-in-crisis.

I promised him we'd move some over, and sent kisses to Sophie and Stephanie.

~

'Phone in hand.  Yes, we have a cordless 'phone at last,  I finally faced the fact that my fear and loathing of the telephone, which has made me stubbornly refuse to have any more to do with it than I had to and so not to modernise in any way, was cutting my nose off to spite my face.  It was even worse to be pinned in the corner by it and not even able to move around and do anything else. Still no answering machine, though, that would be going to far in conceding to the Watson-come-here-please-I-want-you tyranny.

~

Touching wood, crossing fingers, and performing all manner of other superstitious contortions one can think of, the plumbing leak seems to be fixed on the second attempt.  

~

Tom likes the new car.  It's nippy and fun, and he likes the change.  I still don't really want much to do with it.  Tom refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of a tipping point.

~

Looking through old pics to find one of interest, I came across this one of the emptying of the septic tank, which, it turns out, took place about eighteen months ago (so we don't need to think about having that done again just yet, photos and blogging are so useful for keeping informal records).

Fear not, nothing too detailed is revealed of this necessary but always to my rather prissy English bourgeois sensibilities, slightly embarrassing operation.  At least not to you.  However, as may be seen, Victor and his sister Hélène couldn't get close enough.  They are both over ninety, and we don't see all that much of them these days, but no sooner had the septic tank emptying truck arrived than they both got wind of it, so to speak, and turned up to chew the fat while peering down the hole at our bodily waste products and their evacuation.  They greeted us only perfunctorily, it seems it was our poo they were primarily interested in. Bless them.

The Manitou and little Mol

RRobinson expressed a familiarity with the brand of French heavy building plant 'Manitou'.  Our Jean-Paul was very proud of his Manitou, which he brought along when he re-aligned our lintels and smartened up our chimney.  He was very keen we should pose in the shovel of it at some height from the ground, so here am I,

and here's Tom - blimey, he still wears that shirt: 

Those were taken probably fourteen years ago, long pre-digital, scans of old film snaps I've looked out.  The changes in the landscape, how trees and garden have grown up since, is noticeable to me in the first picture.  Looking into the old photo album is quite unsettling, possibly salutary.  In many ways it feels as though life didn't really begin until we came here to live, and since then that time has stood still; I can't quite believe it's been well over fifteen years, that I was still in my mid-thirties, Tom not yet into his sixties when we came.  Yet looking over those old pictures, it's apparent that we have covered quite a bit of ground, and indeed aged.  I'd pick out more to scan and show here, but it makes me feel rather sad and shaky to look too much at them.  I find myself wondering if we haven't reached the tipping point.  I'm afraid I do think there might be a tipping point.

Those days were also pre-Molly, and later pages show her puppy years, which also makes me feel a bit  wobbly inside.  But it's been good, and worth everything. I'd be a coward to say otherwise.

Molly, in her first year.

Pumpkins and kippers for soup, and a bombastic bloater.

Got a couple of collages done for Alphabet Soup today.  I think I'm probably on course to get perhaps a half-dozen completed, with ideas for the rest which might or might not come to fruition once the deadline heat is off.

So here is P for pumpkin:

That thing in the middle of the right-hand pumpkin flower is a messed-up scribble, which I meant to do something to correct but forgot to.  But the good thing about this technique is you can stick stuff on top!  So I think I'll make it a bumble bee.

The next one proved to be somewhat topical:

Kippers.  I have mixed feelings about these smoked members of the herring tribe, indeed about most smoked fish really. We used to get them in England that were boil-in-the-bag, from a man with a van who came round.  His stuff was so expensive the kippers were all we could really bring ourselves to buy, and I know that b-i-t-b is shameful and Not Proper Food but these were just so good and so easy and didn't stink the place out.   Now I often swear I will not buy kippers here again, but then Tom looks at them with such longing I give in, knowing the ordeal I have in store in the preparation of them, often for a dry, salty, disappointing result.  Those vacuum packed Breton smoked herrings in oil are not much better, but at least you don't have to wrestle with fins and bones and stuff, and they don't smell quite so bad.

So when we were at a low ebb in the supermarket the other day and my dear one's eyes fell upon a bloater, or un bouffi, as it is known hereabouts in pleasingly transparent translation (and as an adjective it seems that also means 'bombastic' according to the dictionary), instead of saying 'put it down it's disgusting' as I might have had I been feeling stronger, I allowed him to put it in the trolley.

I have never actually handled a bloater before; it took me a couple of days, until today, to square up to the thing and only then did I realise it was whole, all it's innards still contained within its plump form - hence its puffiness and its name, I suppose.  Fortunately it was in a sealed pack and well within it's eat-by date, as the well-documented 'gaminess' and it's bloating tendencies might have been really unmanageable.  I was by this time feeling slightly stronger and less self-sacrificing, and picking over it's smoky, slimy guts, jaundiced eyes, intact gills and hairy bones I felt little compunction in saying that 'I am only putting myself through this because I love you and because I'm still feeling mortified about smashing up the car, so yes I am largely doing it out of guilt.' He ventured to say he might not in fact enjoy it much under those terms but I said he'd bloody better do so.

But then something happened when I looked at the generous and firm portion of roe that emerged from it, which one source described as the cook's treat, I couldn't help myself thinking, and saying aloud: 'That looks good!'.  The bronze, gold and silver skin with its delicate criss-cross patterning was also rather exquisite, and by the time I'd cleaned up the fillets and put them, with the roe, under the grill, and having eaten a good portion of Jean-Paul's crisp and cleansing scarole salad, I was coming round to the idea that I might have some after all.

It really was very good indeed, much better than any kippers we've had here, and it was very inexpensive.  The roe was saltier than the flesh, but spread on a piece of bread was very interesting too.  So I will buy them again, now I know what I'm letting myself in for, or else find a way to persuade Tom that dissecting and preparing a bloater for consumption is a project that he really needs to engage with for his moral, intellectual and spiritual betterment.

(Kedgeree is also a good smoked fish option, and also begins with a 'K'. Kippers don't in fact make one's breath smell, so kissing is not completely out of the question.)

Low light and camera shake

Left it late to get out on a glorious ormolu autumn day.  Thought I'd take the camera anyway and see what inadvertent effects might be achieved.  Not much editing involved beyond wilful ineptitude and a bit of cropping.  

 

Three good things for today

We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette.  The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed.  They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift.  On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him.  There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant.  Well it's only an imitation, he said.

~

Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home.  The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)

~

Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup.  The girl is seriously gifted.

More spicy goings-on in the kitchen

Reached out for the black peppercorns, the lid came off the jar!

It reminded me of once when I saw a woman drop a punnet of blueberries in the supermarket.  They fell through the mesh of her trolley and dispersed across the smooth floor like an explosion of lapis marbles, a fruity super-nova.  She looked around as if she wished she could flee, but there was nowhere to run, the berries were everywhere, and if she had wheeled the trolley over them, the carnage would have been terrible.

On dropping the peppercorns, I exclaimed, gasped, nay squealed. The area of impact seemed far greater than the consequent inch or so of vacant space in the jar would seem to indicate, in the same way that it seemed like far more than a mere punnet of blueberries that spread across the supermarket floor.  Tom came running to the rescue.  Knowing it wasn't as bad as he must have expected from the noise I made, I let him find out for himself and experience the relief that there were no actual breakages, no lacerating shards (it was a plastic jar), no chemicals hazardous to health, involved.

Yet the clear-up was no simple matter, each time one tried to gather any up, further dispersal seemed to result.

Finally he disappeared upstairsand came down with the right tool for the job, a hogs-hair fan-brush, which accomplished the task admirably.

Phew!

( The upside-down pink plastic beaker in the first photo is the Spider Cup.  It usually has a postcard beside it, I use those which people send me from various global locations when they start looking a bit tired on the shelf or pinboard, considering it a useful way for old postcards to end their lives. Arachnid appears, oop-la, pink beaker over the top, postcard underneath, out of the door with her...)

And that piece of inconsequentiality really is my post for today!