Category: temporal node

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Small but very determined

enraged dog

A huge hen pheasant had the temerity to waddle across the garden. Maizy, who becomes incensed at small insects daring to occupy her territory, was enraged. She can jump four feet from a standing start under normal circumstances. She was positively flying in her efforts to make the glass between her and the bird disappear. And of course grarking (a mixed growl and bark) loudly the while.

enraged dog too

Eventually I let her out. A hen pheasant laid a clutch of more than 20 eggs in my father’s garden right by the front door last year causing much inconvenience as it was decided that she and her nest should not be disturbed. He suspects it’s the same one back again, casing the joint, and doesn’t want a repeat performance this year. She did appear very full of eggs. She managed, just, to elude the slathering hound let loose on her and lumbered away after a long, scrambling take-off and disappeared over the fence.

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Colour

It was so ridiculously sunny and warm today. And it was the first day back at the shrink after the Easter break occasioning a couple of miles of walking equipped with the camera. What I notice most about the pictures I took today is the vibrant colours. Sunlight and flowers. A winning combination.

forget-me-not

Forget-me-nots were my favourite flower as a child. Small, shy, retiring, a brilliant blue and signifying the sort of love and tenderness I believed might exist somewhere.

keria

I still remain stubbornly convinced (despite the evidence of this picture) that keria blooms are orange. F claims they are yellow.

pink stuff

I don’t know what this stuff is called, but it’s gloriously, fabulously pink and what after all could be more important than that.

I saw men wearing shorts and innumerable individuals of all ages and sexes in diaphanous, truncated tops. The weather forecast is for snow over the weekend.

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Macro

frost bitten

I wept last night alone for loves lost, missed chances, hopes unfulfilled and those who I have known who are now dead. For the grey grief of the turning globe.

old and new

It is not wrong, I think, to mourn. To deny would be to cut out half the world.

highlit

What is sad, I think, is not to move the mind from loss to life.

budding

To miss the thrust of winter into spring.

drops

We are as fragile as the raindrop on the petal. It is our curse to know. And perhaps our consolation.

goldfinch

So when from grey sky and black branches there falls a shower of song we bathe in the bliss that is the blessing of our death.

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A week (or so) in pictures

I keep forgetting my camera and then forgetting I’ve taken pictures on my phone instead. Here are some I discovered earlier.

birthday lunch

Birthday lunch at Cubana.

idli sambar (another birthday meal)

Another birthdayish meal, this time the long-lusted-for idli sambar at the haunt of my student youth Diwani Bhel Poori House. Their card machine wasn’t working, it was cash only, but they gave me half a free lassi since I didn’t have enough. Absolutely scrumptious and well worth the wait.

for acb (double impaling)

The single became double and then both disappeared overnight.

taking a bow

I like this elegant creature all the more for its not being all over my jacket.

big hips

One of the blustrous sunny days.

This is all displacement activity from actually printing out a completely different picture. But I must now bite the bullet.

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In passing

I have one spawn, or another, or both, about the place for the next month or so due to their mismatched school holidays. This may lead to diminished bloggage. Or may not.

I’ve unhobbled the rss feed entries on the basis that regular readers aren’t ad-clickers and therefore forcing them to come to the site is needless. Googlenauts don’t appear to click on ads either.

Why aren’t my daily delicious links plopping into daily blog entries in their previously seamlessly automated fashion, I ask myself. And I don’t have an answer.

The exciting ICA speed dating (next month) appears, it has been pointed out to me, to have only attracted female participants. Which is fortunate, possibly. When informed that I was attending such an event the spawn informed me that I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. Maizy has not vouchsafed her opinion on the matter but is generally thought to be similarly hostile. Mario’s brain is too small to contain anything as complex as an opinion. Or even a passing thought.

In light of the above my decision to provide myself with an iPod Touch is entirely justifiable as a non-disappointing birthday gift to self. Far from being disappointing it’s exceeded expectations and is deeply shiny. I can even carry around pdf knitting patterns on it. Just one small quibble so far – why aren’t different calendars displayed in their different colours? Part of the reason for getting one was the seamless calendar syncing with the desktop and thus keeping track of the two spawn’s different school timetables and social lives as well as my own vestigial appointments. On the Mac we each have a different coloured calendar. On the Touch all entries appear as grey and, furthermore, don’t specify anywhere to which calendar they belong. Why, I wonder, enable multiple calendar syncing in such a useless fashion.

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A loop in the fabric of time

Those instances where, when you’re in them and realise it and think, through the delight, that this moment, this particular configuration of the universe as apprehended in this instant is so exquisitely beautiful that it will live in me and be a constant source of joy available at will, like a rare scent to be unstoppered from the bottle of memory and stroked on the pulse points, conjuring on the brain’s skin and in the brain’s eyes and ears a waft of re-being in that pure ecstasy.

Or (of course a poet says it so much better) a Wordswothian time spot:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

Thus early this morning when SecondSpawn sat cross legged on my bed, the diffuse brightness lighting his cheek and brow and lips and features of solemn concentration as he bent over his knitting, I curled and warm beneath my duvet gazing gazing gazing and so full of love that time and space and every dimension and all meaning converge and are held motionless in that moment.

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Form filling

Today is my birthday.

morning flowers

To mark both the occasion and the rather unusual fact that I feel good about it I have filled in and will today despatch two sets of forms.

The first is an application to train as a listening volunteer for the Samaritans. The second is to submit a photograph to the selection process for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Apart from submitting forms the day may include coffees with friends, stroking yarn at the new I Knit shop, lunch with a friend, post-school tea and cake with the spawn and in the evening (so I was told last night) friends have organised a small supper-and-get-together, babysitter included.

Gift to self? Neither an iPhone nor an Asus Eee, sadly. Not this year. But a ticket to Speed Dating for Artists at the ICA:

Those taking part talk to someone for four minutes at a time, the crucial difference is that each of you will bring a piece of your own work – a drawing, a sculpture, a design, an mp3, anything you can carry in to the ICA – to talk about.

How superbly thrilling/appalling might that be? I may or may not be moved to give an account of the experience after it’s happened.

And just in case anyone’s in any doubt on the matter, pisceans absolutely totally rock. Starting at the beginning of the sign and working through we have, in my small personal sample of gorgeousness:
FirstSpawn – polymath etc;
Friend T – architect, photographer etc;
Dave – writer, poet, photographer etc;
Friend F – painter, sculptor etc;
Krista – rhetorician, writer, photographer etc;
Dale – writer, poet etc;
Ivy – poet, artist etc;
Jeff – rhetorician, writer, photographer etc (and my twin – happy birthday!);
Me – etc 🙂

Have a wonderful day whatever date you were born on!