a negative capability scrapbook
This isn’t just an excuse for cat blogging you know.
It’s also an unfortunate consequence of the weather. I’ve resolved to try to take and post to flickr a picture a day but at the moment the weather’s vile, it gets dark at four in the afternoon and about the only thing that stays still long enough for me to take a picture of it is the cat.
It does mean that I’m having to grapple with things like ISO speed and white balance though, so it’s all a good learning experience.
[Festival of the Trees #7, the first of 2007, is now up at The Voltage Gate!]
Not only is it difficult enough to find a patch of urban ground that isn’t stony, I now discover that the poor old London Plane tree (Platanus x hispanica aka the bauble tree) is generally infertile. According to the first-born’s new tree book:
Female flowers mature to give the familiar, rough football-like plane fruits. The seeds are rarely viable, however, for London Plane is a hybrid between two trees, the Oriental Plane P. orientalis of Asia and south-east Europe, and the American Plane P. occidentalis. Where and when the hybrid appeared is a matter of controversy…
But the Plane entry at The-Tree.org.uk has a seductive theory:
Some sources say this hybrid between the Oriental Plane and the American Plane originated in Spain or France around 1650, but there is also a possibility that it originated in the Tradescant nursery garden in Lambeth, south London. John Tradescendant the younger (1608 -1662) was a gardener to Charles I and inherited the nursery his Father had established for the study of plants. Both P. occidentalis and P. orientalis are on record as having grown in this garden, so it is a real possibility that the London Plane did originate here. The first description of the tree in Great Britain, which we have in writing, is from the Oxford Botanical Gardens in 1670.
There are all sorts of other fascinating snippets – the fact that the peeling of the bark helps the tree survive heavily polluted environments because it prevents the pores becoming blocked; the bark boiled in vinegar is allegedly efficacious in cases of dysentery, chilblains, hernias and toothache etc etc.
The sky was a beautiful clear blue this morning, full of light.
A benign beginning and much appreciated.
However twisted the branch, the buds still push through the dried veins of dead leaves.
Much of the past year has been dark and difficult, so much so that the brighter bits (and there have been some) have often been obscured. But I think, I hope, there has been a process underway, a form of progress however painful.
The sky was a beautiful clear blue this morning, full of light.
A benign beginning and much appreciated.
However twisted the branch, the buds still push through the dried veins of dead leaves.
Much of the past year has been dark and difficult, so much so that the brighter bits (and there have been some) have often been obscured. But I think, I hope, there has been a process underway, a form of progress however painful.
And delighted to be so. Just me and the boys and the critters. Maizy and the cat were happy to see each other again after their separation. I’m sure Maizy boasted about her long country walks and her agility over stiles.
Other pictures from Tuesday’s circular walk can be found here.
Here is the small dog, listening for moles:
The advantage of fog (one of the few I can think of) is that it makes an excellent canvas. And since it sucks the colour out of everything, there’s no need even to think about anything beyond grey and black.
Those who consider cow parsley overrated, particularly when dead and fog-bound, do not venture further.
to be baubled
fa la la la la, la la la laaaa.
There are apparently in the region of 36,000 weddings being celebrated in Delhi alone this December since it’s the first auspicious time after a long period of ill-omen.
This is one particular road where the trees bordering each side had been decked with lights. Whether because of a single, very high profile, wedding or because it was the venue of many I know not. We heard stories of people running from one wedding to another all day long, of displays of unbelievable extravagance and wealth.
This picture also illustrates one of the aspects of Delhi most firmly seared onto my consciousness – the driving. You would not be mistaken in your impression from the photograph above that the taxi in which I am travelling is headed directly towards the oncoming vehicle and both are in the middle of the road. This is absolutely normal.
My introduction to Delhi driving was of course the taxi trip from the airport during which the vehicle I was in attempted to pass a very large lorry which was obviously and inexorably heading into the same space. (Words like “lane” or “carriageway” or even “side of the road” are pretty meaningless in the overall context so I’m not using them.) The driver only abandoned his move when one side of the car was scraping horribly against the concrete carriage divider and the other was scratching squealingly against the side of the lorry. The damage, examined at the next petrol station, was extensive.
For this to happen once might have been deemed bad luck, but the journey back was equally eventful. This time the driver, whose lack of skill and erratic behaviour had already had me blanching in the back on several occasions, smashed with a glancing blow into some other moving object which may or may not have been a motor cyclist, ripping off the left hand wing mirror, leaving long scratches along both left-hand windows and a grinding sound from the left-hand front wheel.
The extent of the damage, the smashed lights, the crumpled wheel-arch, were not totally visible until we arrived at the airport. The driver did not even slow down, never mind stop, and I in my pusillanimousness neither said nor did anything either other than crouch even lower in the middle of the back seat and hope the journey would be over quickly.
frizzyLogic 