Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
i cannot properly imagine blindness
At first light when the world is still bruised by the night, I look out to see a yew tree dancing in the storm like a black flame.
A friend nearing retirement has worked as a postman for nearly fifty years. He has cataracts and holds each letter close to his face, interposing a magnifying glass as he struggles to decipher addresses as if through a smoke screen. He works more than twelve hours to complete his tasks on most days, even in the deepest frosts and heaviest downpours, and yet his managers seem oblivious of his plight and simply give him even more work in order to improve their own reputations for “efficiency”.
Yesterday I glimpsed a blind man using one of the modern sticks, a straight and slender white cane, five feet or more in length, tipped with a ball. He was finding his way briskly along a busy pavement with a chaotic border of gardens and hedges, holding the cane in his left hand, and a with a young golden Labrador on his right hand straining ahead on its leash.
I mused with some anxiety on how I might survive were blindness to afflict me and thought I might need to go back to my ancient home town in the Cotswolds, where I would arrive already knowing most of its walls and footpaths from childhood. But who would know me ?
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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."
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
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 !”
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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
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
Monday, January 24, 2011
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
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
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.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
... purpose
... i've photographed them before but there was a fortuitous sunbeam this morning as we waited to cram in to the final weekend of the monumental diaghilev exhibition
Friday, January 7, 2011
how others see things ... easy when you know how
Sub-confluent, interphase Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVECs) transfected with GFP-WT-MCAK (Mitotic Centromere Associated Kinesin) and grown in culture for 8 hours.
Cells were fixed in PHEM buffer containing 4% paraformaldehyde, 0.05% gluteraldehyde, and 0.2% Triton X-100. Cells were then labeled with mouse anti-tubulin detected by goat anti-mouse Alexa 568 antibody.
Cells were imaged on a spinning disk confocal microscope using a 60x 1.4 NA oil immersion objective lens on a Nikon Eclipse Ti equipped with Perfect Focus System and a Yokogawa CSU-X spinning disk confocal scan head equipped with a multi-bandpass dichromatic mirror (Semrock; Rochester, NY) and bandpass filters (Chroma; Rockingham, VT) in an electronic filterwheel for selection of GFP or Texas red emission.
Excitation light provided by a custom-built laser combiner module (modification of LMM-3, Spectral Applied Research; Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada) containing 500mW solid state lasers (488 nm: Coherent; 561 nm: MPB Communications; Montreal, Quebec) that were shuttered with electronic shutters and attenuated and/or directed to a fiber-coupled output port with an AOTF (Neos Technologies, Melbourne, FL) and directed to the confocal scan-head via a single-mode optical fiber (Oz Optics, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada).
A Coolsnap HQ2 camera captured images with 200ms exposure @ 488nm and 400ms exposure @ 560nm.
http://cellimagelibrary.org/home
designing her personalized karmic index
the news on radio and television, good or bad, is almost always followed with a brief summary of movements in the main financial markets around the world
perhaps those not even moderately wealthy in spiritual and intellectual capital needs must measure our human condition in similar ways
therefore, in an altruistic surge of activity destined to improve the happiness of the entire human race, i am prototyping and developing the loved one's karmic index
of course, in the life of an almost perfect woman, karmic index movements are generally upwards, but uncharacteristic glitches may occur
for instance, when i returned to the master bedroom after an unplanned visit to the loo before falling asleep last night, i was deeply disappointed to find that she had carried on reading her terry pratchett and had not even thought of plumping my pillows
i shall be posting frequent re-assessments using a simple logarithmic scale with the daily to-do lists that i like to leave around the flat for her
it is for her own good
perhaps those not even moderately wealthy in spiritual and intellectual capital needs must measure our human condition in similar ways
therefore, in an altruistic surge of activity destined to improve the happiness of the entire human race, i am prototyping and developing the loved one's karmic index
of course, in the life of an almost perfect woman, karmic index movements are generally upwards, but uncharacteristic glitches may occur
for instance, when i returned to the master bedroom after an unplanned visit to the loo before falling asleep last night, i was deeply disappointed to find that she had carried on reading her terry pratchett and had not even thought of plumping my pillows
i shall be posting frequent re-assessments using a simple logarithmic scale with the daily to-do lists that i like to leave around the flat for her
it is for her own good
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