the countless sods

I've never enjoyed digging in wet clay ... neither the gardens nor the graves.

It is written that the first British agriculturalists would have used antlers to break the ground ... and their backs, I'm sure.

Now I can only marvel at the plough that turns a whole field in a few mid-winter hours.

An aged friend, roughly built and spoken, and now long buried, told me how he was put to the plough, aged twelve, when all the men from his village had gone off to the Great War.

"I stuck to it all day", he said, and laughed mischievously, "though I only ploughed it to a finger's depth."

before supper, we cross putney heath road and enter the wood to light a fire so that i may contemplate some of whatever is elemental in humanity

damn ! why didn't i think of that ?

http://minimalexposition.blogspot.com/2011/01/hiroshi-sugimoto-lightning-fields-2009.html

bring me another bottle of that distilled joie de vivre ... edward bawden's homage to dicky doyle ... re-printed in the magnificent alexandra harris's romantic moderns

chanticleer chez micawber ce matin

lost in translation ...

In metropolitan London so many languages are being spoken that are unrecognizable for us country boys, but there is always fun to be had in the listening.  Occasionally a familiar word gives you a clue, and sometimes the way people dress helps a little, but sometimes not.

At four in the morning, at the opposite bus stop, four lovely girls are standing; long silken hair, picturesque limbs, very high heels on beautifully made shoes, and wonderfully well-tailored high-waisted overcoats.  Their musical voices, never stopping for breath in loud conversation, are unmistakeably Italian.

Then, two minutes into my bus-journey to work, two heavily built men come aboard, unshaven, wearing scruffy coats over scruffy jackets, misshapen woolly hats, badly worn boots.  Their loud gruff voices, never stopping for breath in loud conversation, are unmistakeably Italian.

Tired and losing concentration towards the end of a frantic day, I make a delivery to the wrong one of a pair of French restaurants about five miles apart in Sutton and Croydon.  The next day I return to what had been the wrong one and ask the chef ( old joke ) if the French have a word for “Deja-vu” ? 

“I wouldn’t fucking know”, growls the morose Danish all-in wrestler with a big Sabatier knife clenched in his massive fist, “I’m not fucking French !”

apropos de nuffinque en hiver

water spouts at ticehurst church

i've been reading antonia fraser's testament of her life with harold pinter, which is full of laughter even if it ends in tears

the man himself was always worth listening to ...

take, for instance, his viscerally lucid nobel prize winner's speech about language and truth, entitled "art, truth & politics"

http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620

i really think mrs trefusis should wear some socks with those boots

http://mrstrefusis.blogspot.com/2010/12/scarlet-dress.html

about three-eighths through ...

i'm getting well into my reading binge

a couple of early finishes at work have helped

so do the double duvet and two plump pillows

nice tail

window shopping in elizabeth street whilst waiting for a bus to depart from victoria coach station

one of the best friends in the universe demonstrating the correct attitude

housemaid's knee ... one of a series of occasional rants brought on by the compulsory hoovering

two things actually, now that the recession is getting deeper and the prospect of affording domestic servants moves up the agenda for so many of us ...

first ... i'm trying not to feel or sound paranoid, but the thought crossed my mind that the loved one might just have moved some of that fluff jungle that was underneath the bed and piled it up behind the sofa as some kind of test, but she won't catch me out that easily

second ... if i maxed my credit card on an expensive vacuum cleaner then we might save water during the summer months by just hoovering the sheets

i had hoped to meet my sister v after she saw the ballet this afternoon, but i am sneezing so it has to be a "stay in and sniffle day", hence this domestic photography

damn ! damn ! damn ! on monday night i ordered a few of the guardian review's readers' recommendations, online from wandsworth libraries... by saturday morning six, no, seven of them were waiting at the counter ... how can i read them all ?

A book takes the chill out of winter.

I’ve been reading Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only published novel, The Leopard, written in Italian in the mid-1950s but only published in English in 1960, about three years after his death.  I’m enjoying it.  It isn’t difficult to read.  But I don’t really want to criticize it analytically, or discuss the text in more than a superficial way, because I’m only half-way through it, and because I’ve been overtaken and slightly surprised by another notion during my short time with this small book. 

I can remember that my mother read it as soon as it became available.  And she must have enjoyed it because it reappeared in the house once or twice.  The first time, she would have been anticipating its availability at the little public library in Malmesbury High Street after hearing it reviewed in the BBC Home Services programme, The Critics.  And I suppose she might have read about it in the Sunday Times as well.  Malmesbury’s tiny library was her lifeline and they supplied so many books that she couldn’t afford and which were her refuge; so many children and so little money having left her exhausted and uncertain about so much in life.  But she always seemed to have clear ideas about art and literature, and she accumulated a vast experience of reading.

As a child, I completely failed to understand or sympathize with her way of seeing and dealing with the world.  But whilst I’ve been reading this book, her dust has suddenly been re-assembled and her spirit re-kindled, before my very eyes so to speak.  Suddenly I discover the very sentences and images that must have amused and excited her and so, even whilst I am reading, sometimes it feels as if I were in the old living room where she rested between laundering marathons, and I can see her laughing from the corner of my mind’s eye.  What’s more, I can sometimes hear what might be her own “internal voice” reading the words to me whilst I stare at the pages, as if I were in her head and reading through her eyes.  This novelist’s powers of evocation are often startling and heart-warming, his dry wit creeps up on me.  But who might have guessed that fifty years later he would indirectly evoke her for me ?  Not I.

if you're going to the shops, will you bring me another jar of those pickled human hearts ?

i think i've discovered a new constellation