frizzyLogic

I’ve been tagged by Loren with the following “six things” meme:

1- link to the person who tagged you.
2 – post the rules on your blog.
3 – write six random things about yourself.
4 – tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5 – let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6 – let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I’ve been reading Loren since before I started blogging back in 2003. Poetry, birds and photography – and particularly photography of birds. All he needs for blogging perfection would be a small dose of knitting. However it’s a bit strange being in this new, unlisted, blog home about which few people know, and nearly all of them (you) I would guess people who read the old site. So I’m slightly at a loss to know quite how obscure the random facts have to be since nearly six years of blogging has left few stones unturned. Anyway here are some “random” “facts” which might not previously have seen the light of blogday:

1) I’ve worked in or visited 20 countries in Africa and lived for extended periods in three. I seldom write about it because it makes me feel like a pith-helmeted colonialist. Perhaps I should try to get over myself. Or perhaps there’s nothing to say. However I took SonOne with me on a work trip to Cameroon back when he was three and we kept a diary together as something to do at the end of the day since we were travelling around so much and I wanted there to be something predictable and routine happening. I bought a polaroid camera and he chose one thing/occasion each day to be photographed (the camera was unfortunately far too big and cumbersome for him to use himself) and we stuck the instant result in the diary. I still have it and have been toying with the idea of scanning it.

2) I can juggle with two or three balls but not four.

3) There was a period in my life when I wore an armful of copper bangles. Ok, not an armful since they only went from wrist to elbow rather than wrist to shoulder. But lots. I never took them off. I arrived in Moscow airport wearing them and of course they set off the security scanner. I tried to demonstrate (having not a word of Russian to explain) that there was nothing else metallic about my person. I held out my arm, walked slowly through the arch without a beep as far as my extended elbow, stood still, then moved my arm through to set off the beeping, but it was all to no avail. This was in the late 80s and everything about Moscow was rigid and unsmiling. I had to take every single bangle off which took a very long time. Some were so small I’d only got them on with the liberal use of soap and other lubricants. I have never worn the entire collection together since, although I still have them all.

4) Anti-depressants can no longer be blamed for my (greater than optimal) weight since I stopped taking them seven months ago.

5) If I lived alone I probably would never cook. I base this “fact” on my behaviour when the children are not here. When they’re here I cook every day – no heating up of chilled/frozen crap (too expensive for a start) but proper, albeit plain, nutritionally balanced meals involving peeling and chopping and grating and boiling and grilling and baking. But when they’re away I find myself living on coffee, wine, beer and things out of packets. Hunks of cheese and oatcakes. Instant miso soup. Bombay mix. Breakfast cereal. Biscuits. Hummus and tortilla crisps. Snickers bars. Crumpets and marmite. (Could this, I wonder, have any relevance to fact 4? Almost undoubtedly.) Perhaps when they’ve both left home I’ll miss the cooking and will prepare gourmet delicacies for one, but I rather doubt it.

6) I haven’t had a bath for eight years. (That’s also, you’ll probably be glad to hear, was how long ago the shower was installed.)

The same blog identity confusion detailed above prevents me from tagging six specific people (thus brazenly breaking rules 4 and 5) so I hereby throw the batons in the air for anyone to catch.

I cycle east along black roads dusted gold with leaf, directly into the rising sun. The sky bleeds yellow into blue. Whipped-egg-white clouds, peaks smutted with grey, sides gilded cream, float below thin sharp lines of vapour trails converging spoke-like on the hub of the sun.

The silence would be enormous were it not for the birds. A robin, song sweetly anthropomorphised, warbles murder to rivals. Magpies rattle asthmatically in twos and threes among the aerials and chimney pots, shouldering aside garrulous groups of starlings that squawk, whistle and trill. The delicate fluting of blackbirds is almost drowned by the raucous shouting of sparrows once annoying or unnoticed in its universality, silenced and now much loved on its fitful return. I swing out wide to skirt a flock of pigeons cooing as they peck crumbs of crushed crisps from the tarmac.

There is not a single car, lorry, bus, motorbike. No dogs bark. No voices, sirens, music, machinery, footfalls. The air clear, cool and still. In the park each tree in the rank along the iron railing rises from a pool of gold the width of its own black branches.

When I reach my gate I turn. Behind me the vapour trails are bright but wide, diffuse against the deep blue. The moon, waning, blanched and blotched, sinks into yesterday.

During a detour in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable en route to “behemoth” we came across “botanomancy” which the volume in questions defines as:

Divination by leaves. Words were written on leaves which were exposed to the wind. The leaves left contained the response.

Web definitions are slightly different, involving less wind and more fire, mentioning fig and sage leaves in particular. Or oak. Or vervain and briar. Take your pick, really.

I loved the word itself and the idea of words on the wind, on leaves. There was a young fig tree in the garden, a red permanent marker in the desk, a random webpage of quotations relating to the month of October on the laptop from which to pick chance words and a slight but sufficient breeze.

The tree yielded an adequate crop of fallen leaves, the marker left a mark once the leaves had been dried of excess moisture and the dog, by rampaging through the pile a couple of times, assisted the wind in its distributary divinatory work.

Were I to punctuate the result it might go something like this:

Moon rise.
Frosty silence.
Autumn grain,
Scarlet flowers.
Mellower – again.

This is my entry for the October retrospective/November 1st Festival of the Trees which this month is being hosted at its founding home, Via Negativa.