A sometimes daft and improbable Friday

Homeward bound at dusk, the platforms at Vauxhall are crowded, the signs aren’t working, the African station announcer is hesitantly struggling with his syntax … and then everyone on the station looks incredulous because a completely clean and completely empty train draws in.

In mid-afternoon, as I slow down for a level crossing by Betchworth Station, a highly polished green steam locomotive thunders past, belching grey smoke and drawing eight antique brown and cream Pullman carriages.

On the three-thirty bus to work this morning, a jolly crowd of well-heeled but penniless Halloween clubbers get on and argue about the fare.  One athletic young man is dressed as a pumpkin … and he is ready and willing, he declares loudly in a public school accent, to fight any passenger that disapproves. “Relax !”, I tell him, “You look great !”

http://www.orient-express.com/web/uktr/british_pullman.jsp?c=ppc&p=uk&cr=uktr_br_bp&gclid=CM-5yanyxboCFRMctAodwxsAZQ

i wouldn't mind postponing christmas if the roads are gonna be this bad

it was fortunate father christmas wasn't hurrying ...

... and three is his lucky number !

ladeeyzangennermen ... for your exclusive entertainment ... we bring on the terpsichorean triceratops quintuplets ... lights ! cameras ! action !

3BT

Alvi greets me at his front door.  He holds up two small pine cones for me to see.  Laughing, I reach in to my bag and pull out … a pineapple !  You can see from his expression that his little brain is already engaging with problems of difference and similarity.

Walking through the dark rainy streets to the factory, above the roar of two cheese lorries backing on to their loading bays just before four in the morning, the night loader Winston Heavens’ radio is playing.  I hear, and then recognize in only two or three seconds, the opening bars of Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime (Same As It ever Was); same as it ever was indeed, because that riff excites me now just as much as the first time I heard it in the Dug Out thirty something years ago.  I pause to stand there in the rain, briefly enraptured

School is out for some, and all along the Wandsworth Road, and down in Nine Elms it is a great sunny afternoon for tiny children of every race and colour to be out walking with their grandparents.

only ( let the number of days be ... ) x shopping days left 'til christmas ... better start forming an orderly queue ...

http://www.xmasclock.com/

less than familiar objects

i'm going back to bed right now ... sundays are brain de-tox time !

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/267611.php

http://io9.com/the-real-reason-why-sleep-deprivation-can-destroy-you-1447241194

alvi's going to need a black leather jacket next ...

a quick toast to absent friends ... and then to everyone else i know ! ( i can't wait to get back to work on monday )

danged electricians ! ... attached memoir discovered via metafilter ( naturally )

http://www.zamiang.com/posts/2013/10/13/red-team/

" ... OR BURN IN HELL !"

dion massey, top man at penshurst fine foods ... newly wed

another twist in the plot ... i threw away my own tv set ?eighteen? years ago ... now i'm unexpectedly watching childrens' tv with my unexpected grandson

i have belatedly remembered to credit the photographer ...
she who should be obeyed ...
lady lavender randall ...
librarian to the stars

our school's motto was carpe diem ... i found this short discussion in http://alexandresoaressilva.tumblr.com/

OCTOBER 8, 2013

"‘Carpe diem’ doesn’t mean seize the day — it means something gentler and more sensible. ‘Carpe diem’ means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be ‘cape diem,’ if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice.
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things — so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant — pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.
"

— Nicholson Baker, from The Anthologist (via ayjay)
(via tierradentro)

7:20PM  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZXbs7yx9H2PA

(Notes: 424)

  

spain's second goal is a sweet classic of "deadly" simplicity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C32C0S-uww

apropos de nuffinque

daylight robbery at the charity shop ... an un-put-down-able page turner

3BT … this week, though not all in one day

A green woodpecker with a red flash flies out of an oak wood across the country road on that low dipping flight that might take him up and down a series of invisible waves … and quickly disappears across a wide meadow towards another wood, swooping between two placid horses, one black, one white.

Whist stopping to admire an autumn flowering magnolia at Ockenden Manor, I marvel at the huge creamy petals and then tilt my head further back to watch a buzzard drawing first one small figure of eight in a deep blue sky, and then another, and then another.  His wings hardly move, but each time I think I see him curl the most extreme feather tips of one wing, and then the other.

At the perimeter of Gatwick Airport, whilst the never ending procession of heavy jets carve their noisy paths along the runway, only fifty yards away from them, a kestrel dances on air before making a long low swoop in to the rough grass.

extemporized speed warning in ashdown forest ... where 284 deer died on the roads last year