now look what she's gone and bought ... she keeps wasting her money in charity shops when she should be saving every penny for my presents

a thaw sets in

Setting forth on my Saturday errands, I see movement at the bus station and I run seventy yards and leap on to the bus, thrusting the closing doors back with both arms held straight in front of me.

It seems evident that even whilst the snow lay all about, the grass has continued to grow beneath it.  The snow thaws quickly in the sunlight and a thin mist forms so that you only see the tops of the trees across the common. 

The dog loses sight of me when she stops to converse with a small terrier whilst I continue to circumnavigate the bandstand on Clapham Common.  She runs up the ramp and then catches sight of me just as she steps on to a steep bank … and then slides down the icy slope on her bum with legs akimbo … and an expression on her face which suggests that one half of her brain may be shouting “WTF?” whilst the other half already cries for “Help!”

three beautiful things ... well, moments, really

Driving out of London towards Gatwick every morning involves a gentle but tedious ascent to the gap in the North Downs at Hooley, where the Brighton road at last turns into a motorway, and then swoops down to the left to face the morning sky.  This morning is as deeply cold as any I can remember, minus nine degrees, and in a crystalline sky the brilliant  planet Venus dazzles low in the south east.  But even lower than Venus, directly beneath it and almost couched on the horizon, is an apparently enormous yellow crescent moon.  In the next hour, the distant planet slowly ascends a little way from left to right, whilst our sharp crescent moon turns silver, gradually lagging further behind, until both are obscured in a freezing fog.

In that same fog, towards the late morning, I glance away from the snowy road through a tall hedge towards a descending vista of ancient oak trees, still bronze and leafy but snow laden so that each twisted bough declares its own long fading history until that vista of ancient sunlit trees fades into a seeming eternity of frozen mist.

Back in London and slumping homewards on the bus in mid-afternoon, I listen to an African woman with a mobile phone conversing in a language I’ve never heard, but I cannot fail to enjoy the universal syntax of her husky laughter.  Glancing up occasionally through the dispersing clumps of fog into the pale blue yonder, there are glimpses of shining aircraft on their inch-perfect glide path into Heathrow, brilliantly under-lit by the sinking sun like herald angels.

three beautiful things ... also

at dawn, a big airliner lands during heavy snow and hurtles unchecked along the runway at gatwick for some distance ... until the pilot turns on the reverse thrust and whips up an enveloping cocoon of whirling snow

despite a previous week or more of deep frost and then snow, finding bags of miraculously clean and flawless charlotte potatoes in the supermarket

at dusk, emerging with those potatoes onto a street along which the snow is blowing almost horizontally in an icy wind, but in which the ambience is "tropicalised" by that marvellously ecstatic smoke that comes from roasting coffee

just messin' around

stop press: local dog wins due diligence award after discovering secret lair of clapham common meta-wabbit

questions, questions, questions!

what can you call the band of colour in the sky that's half-way between the turquoise and the orange?

it seems sort of almost greeny sometimes but mostly its a silver-grey.

Hmmmph !

if God loved philosophers (s)he'd have put clearly written labels on every thing.

red

stuck on page seventeen ...

... what insomniacs do.

my lips are sealed

a fabulous new cheese under development at a top secret research establishment somewhere in the south of england

never ...

... eat anything that's bigger than your head

might be the shortest train journey in the south of england ...

... unless you include this one ...

balcombe viaduct from the west

a handful of beautiful things

in the space of twenty minutes ... a kestrel hovering in a sunbeam, an old-fashioned bi-plane making a high circle beneath some raggle-taggle clouds above some raggle-taggle oak woods, and then a red helicopter following the line of the hills between reigate and dorking, followed minutes later by a yellow one

letters from two dear friends laying side by side beneath our letterbox

the loved one steps in from a long day at work, delves in to her bag, then flourishes aloft a brand-new re-print of posy simmonds' subtle masterpiece, "tamara drewe", winner of the grand prix 2009 de la critique bande dessinee

mirada del mendigo

the boy done good ... again !

http://esmola.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/do-courel-o-bierzo/

a burning issue ... trumble's reputation tied to the stake

i really am enjoying angus trumble's new book, "the finger"

BUT

having rejoiced when discovering therein lay a chapter on gloves, my hopes of finally finding a cogent exegesis of david des granges' enigmatic 1636-ish group portrait of "the saltonstall family" were disappointed

http://thenewemotionalblackmailershandbook.blogspot.com/search?q=saltonstall

botheration !

now i'll have to beg admission to the national art library and do my own bleedin' research

THREE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS

Driving through the woods in the early fog which is rhythmically striped and punctuated by veering sunbeams as the road winds around the hills, and is frequently perfumed with different kinds of wood smoke from domestic stoves and from invisible bonfires smouldering in gardens and coppices.

As night falls, the loved one is filling the building with the sweet aroma of baking cookies whilst the Beach Boys Greatest Hits are playing.

Another twenty page letter to a wonderful friend is finally sealed up and addressed, ready to be posted after a whole week of hesitantly laboured paragraphs and too many lip-biting crossings out, and some unbelievably childish spelling corrections.

seven in the morning, chez micawber ... even now in a laboratory near you, teams of dedicated scientists are working on a twenty-first century cure for feminine snoring

has any one mentioned christmas yet ?

dear diary, went to work in the dark ... and came home in the dark ...

.... although you can never really call London dark