Category: maizy

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Deliquescence

A light mist pearled the morning.

dandelion

No surface was exempt from damp fingers.

mrs dropple

Small drops drained together to collect in hidden places.

droplet

Leaves layered gold on gold.

layers

Where no leaves were, an alien form with a heart-shaped handle flapped from a branch.

heart

Despite earlier frosts some flowers just can’t give up, thrusting new petals from the brown carapace of the newly blighted.

thrusting rose

Poor Maizy was much troubled by the vile and verminous tree-rats who flicked their tails contemptuously in her face as she, leashed as bye-laws require, barked choked and goggle-eyed threats of violent death.

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Maizy

small lost dog
the colour of autumn leaves
ears can see what eyes can’t tell

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Sausage’s unconformity

You would be forgiven for thinking that all sausages are alike. Round. As in roughly cylindrical. Ok, there are individual variations on the theme – the skinny pink chipolata; the thicker, and disturbingly flecked, Cumberland sausage; the massively-dimensioned and curvilinear heft of the boerewors. These differences do not detract from the unifying form. Not for nothing is the term “sausage-shaped” in common use and widely understood.

So, like I say, you would be forgiven for thinking that all sausages are alike. But you would be wrong.

In Scotland the sausages are flat and square.

lawn sausages

When I first came across this, um, delicacy, I was told it was “lawn sausage”. What a peculiar name, I thought. I supposed it referred to, er, the squareness and flatness of grass-covered gardens. The word is actually “Lorne”, as in Lorne sausages. But assumptions that they hail from Lorne are, apparently, incorrect.

The cooking instructions advised “blotting” the sausage with a piece of kitchen towel to remove excess fat before serving. With a 20% fat content that requires most of a roll of kitchen towel to mop up and doesn’t leave much actually to eat. It didn’t go down well with the assembled masses (apart from Maizy) but the black pudding was a hit, rather to my surprise.

The title refers to Hutton’s Unconformity, past which we walked all unknowingly. Here is our palatial accommodation guarded by our faithful hound:

home 1

More pictures (mainly of the boys, invisible to those not “friend”s on flickr) here.

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Sausage's unconformity

You would be forgiven for thinking that all sausages are alike. Round. As in roughly cylindrical. Ok, there are individual variations on the theme – the skinny pink chipolata; the thicker, and disturbingly flecked, Cumberland sausage; the massively-dimensioned and curvilinear heft of the boerewors. These differences do not detract from the unifying form. Not for nothing is the term “sausage-shaped” in common use and widely understood.

So, like I say, you would be forgiven for thinking that all sausages are alike. But you would be wrong.

In Scotland the sausages are flat and square.

lawn sausages

When I first came across this, um, delicacy, I was told it was “lawn sausage”. What a peculiar name, I thought. I supposed it referred to, er, the squareness and flatness of grass-covered gardens. The word is actually “Lorne”, as in Lorne sausages. But assumptions that they hail from Lorne are, apparently, incorrect.

The cooking instructions advised “blotting” the sausage with a piece of kitchen towel to remove excess fat before serving. With a 20% fat content that requires most of a roll of kitchen towel to mop up and doesn’t leave much actually to eat. It didn’t go down well with the assembled masses (apart from Maizy) but the black pudding was a hit, rather to my surprise.

The title refers to Hutton’s Unconformity, past which we walked all unknowingly. Here is our palatial accommodation guarded by our faithful hound:

home 1

More pictures (mainly of the boys, invisible to those not “friend”s on flickr) here.

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A bath of blackberries

Like a bed of roses, something that one should be grateful life isn’t. Too lacerating.

bath

Back from Wales which was mostly misty.

misty

Sometimes drivingly so. The driving being done by the extremely blusterous wind which threatened at one stage to remove the tent. Luckily the driven mist calmed the sunburn acquired the previous day.

cliff creature 2

Maizy had a great time, what with all the walking.

maizy is my darling

So did I. More pictures here.

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Weekend

I went to stay with Tall Girl at the weekend. She is indeed very tall.

tall girl

It was lovely. We made the most both of an unusual state of not-rain and the delights of Hebden Bridge. Women appear to learn their role in life particularly early in Yorkshire.

siblings

The absence of rain continued in the afternoon allowing a longer and less sploshy walk than had been possible in the sluicing downpour of Friday.

eye on the sky

We came across this family shearing operation – father with hand clippers, daughter in charge of the shorn fleeces, son bringing refreshments, dog peering fixedly through the bars of the make-shift fold, mother directing operations. “Don’t get his bum in” she said when I asked if I could take a picture. Ooops. Too late.

The circuit closed again back by the water, one of the many streams which cut through steep-sided valleys down to join Hebden Water which in turn joins the River Calder and on to the River Aire, the River Humber and on to the sea. Brown and frothy it rushed over the stones but caught in the circle of an abandoned mill pond its stillness reflected the gold of the late sun and the extraordinary, almost oppressive, green of tree and moss and fern.

duck

That evening we went to see Gambian kora player Seikou Susso with his band at the Trades Club in town.

kora, drum and bass

Check out the drummer in the middle there who seemed to spend the whole time peering anxiously at the kora and bass players in turn. The first half was good, but after the break they appeared to play the same songs all over again and Susso’s strange smile and habit of using the phrase “tickety boo” made the experience disturbingly surreal. However I’d become fascinated with the face of the fourth member of the band who played the djembe drum and spent most of my time trying to get a decent shot of him.

djembe drummer

It’s lovely seeing an old friend. Like a home-from-home. And Maizy had a great time too.

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Crazy day

Up at sparrow’s fart to drive down to Whitstable with Nina, Arun, Neha and Maizy. Nina drove, I subdued Maizy in the passenger seat and Neha in the back rose heroically to the initially alarming instruction to give Arun his bottle when he got hungry.

love

He’s a beautiful smiling-gurgling-laughing boy. Which is just what you need if you’re a single parent (speaking from experience).

neha

Neha is already instructing him on the finer points of philosophy.

fish bones

Maizy managed to contain her jealousy (didn’t grab his head in her jaws and drag him around the ground as she does with the cat… which was a relief.) She confined herself to locate the smelliest fish carcasses and offal and rolling in them in order to perfume the car on the return journey. We had a superb meal in the restaurant above the fish market from where we could see a fisherman mending his net

netting

and the gravel processing plant which obscured any further the view of the sea.

gravel works

Unfortunately we then had to belt back to London like shit off a shovel because of my rather urgent and complicated domestic arrangements involving three children, seven adults and four different suppers.

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If only Maizy was a bloodhound

The firstborn has a mobile. It is sleekly curved, slightly rubberised to the touch, a pleasing matt black. It is called a pebl. That’s pronounced “pebble”. Firstborn flips it open with a neat flick of a single hand which is considered extremely cool by his peers. According to the manufacturer:

With chic simplicity, the subtly stylish Motorola PEBL adds a calming convenience to your everyday travels.

Really? Calming? We are currently on our travels, camping on the top of a cliff overlooking this beach (also a gratuitous Maizy picture but I can’t resist).

her supreme saltiness of sea dog

You will note that it is shingly. Stoney. It is, in fact, entirely covered in pebbles. They are its most obvious feature. Can you guess what’s next?

Yes. Firstborn managed to lose his pebl on the beach.

We narrowed down the area of potential loss to a quarter mile or so between a notice about crumbling cliffs and a lump of concrete which had crumbled down to the beach. Firstborn was extremely grumpy about being forced to go to the beach and the last time he had seen his phone was apparently when he made a call to moan about how miserable his life was and this call was by the yellow sign.

grumpy

Part of the outward and visible signs of extreme grumpiness are the headphones indicating that the grumpee is listening to music at an extremely high volume. It is, I conclude, an electronically-aided version of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la la”, but I have decided not to mention this to the grumpee in question.

It would be an exaggeration to say that we subjected the place to a finger-tip search but we certainly spent more than an hour scanning the area, first side to side in strips parallel to the sea then, when that revealed nothing, in strips up and down between sea and cliff. At intervals I rang the phone hoping that we would hear it over the crash of the waves until its owner remembered that it was set on vibrate.

The organisation of the beach was fascinating. At the base of the cliff tiny pebbles which gave way to succeeding banks of shingle organised by size of stone. The most difficult to scan were those banks where the pebbles were the same size as the phone. What we really needed was a bloodhound, suggested secondborn, because Maizy was no help at all and when told to “seek” ran up the side of the cliff like a mountain goat and disappeared over the top.

The sun lowered in the sky. The shadows cast by the cliff were deep and dark. The chill was enough to make us, t-shirted as we were, shiver. Secondborn sat on the stones and screamed about how miserable his life was.

When the shadows reached the sea I called off the search. Secondborn and I set off along the beach, Maizy trotting at our heels. Firstborn appeared to be labouring under a powerful and private emotion and we let him mourn alone.

When we were halfway across the stretch of beach between the yellow sign and the steps up to the campsite, the stretch of beach we had not searched, there was the phone, clearly visible, lying on top of the small stones in an entirely un-pebble-like manner.

Another search which concluded successfully was that of the identity of secondborn’s monster of the deep.

creature of the deep

Click through to the picture on flickr to discover the amazing resource that is the ID Please group. Many thanks to Dem for suggesting it.

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Dog as indirect speech act

I’ve just come across a totally brilliant practice, of which I was previously unaware, among the Akan of Ghana as studied by sociolinguist Samuel Gyasi Obeng:

Like Americans, Ghanaians keep dogs as pets, for security, for hunting, and for the economic benefits derived from breeding and selling puppies. But they also keep and name dogs to create what Obeng calls “a communicative situation in which the ‘unspeakable’ may be spoken.” In such cases, Ghanaians give dogs names that address a problem or issue that cannot be addressed directly by their owners without fear of losing face in the community. “There are probably many dogs named ‘Mind Your Own Business’ in Ghana,” Obeng says, laughing. “People frequently name their dogs to call attention to a social grievance, such as ingratitude or gossip.”

In a recent paper, Obeng cites various examples of dogs with Akan names that address troubling personal issues. Many dogs cited had one- or two-word Akan names that translate into English phrases such as: “Whatever you do, people will gossip about you”; “Enough of your harassment!”; “Money matters/Life is hard!”; and the dramatically indignant, “The community must now be satisfied since the ‘evil’ it wished for me has eventually befallen me.” Sometimes the dog itself becomes a significant tool for dealing with face-threatening situations, as with the dog named “Whatever you do, people will gossip about you.” Having given his dog this name, the owner was able to show his neighbors that he was aware of and insulted by their gossip. By Akan custom, it is also acceptable to call attention to the dog’s name in the presence of the person who is indirectly addressed through the dog. “If an Akan names his dog ‘My neighbor is ungrateful,’ and he happens to pass by that neighbor’s house, he could call the dog’s name and shower it with insults,” Obeng explains. “Of course, the neighbor knows perfectly well that he is the target of these insults, but he cannot respond, because after all, it is the dog being spoken to, not him.”

Imagine shouting “EnoughofYourHarassment” across the park at the vanishing tail of your dog.

I chanced upon this as a result of reading Teju‘s piece Names are Doors 2. I have a memory that amongst the Akan, who have the tradition of naming children after the day of the week they are born on, there is a disproportionately high percentage of the prison population named for the day of the week which is considered to be of ill-omen. Unfortunately I can’t find out whether this is indeed the case, or even which day is supposed to be unlucky (although I think it might be Wednesday).

What, I wonder, is the effect on a dog of being called “The community must now be satisfied since the ‘evil’ it wished for me has eventually befallen me” and being berated and upbraided loudly when in the presence of said community. And what, I further wonder, would I have called Maizy had this device been known to me.

The former question marks me out as a typical Brit more concerned about canine well-being than non-confrontational methods of easing community tensions. So the answer to the latter would probably be “What a gorgeous dog you are”. Which is, in fact, already among her numerous noms de parc already, but most accurate and useful would be “Beware, I Bite”.