the eternal optimist, indefatigable after a lifetime on the twail of the clapham common meta-wabbit

later ... i wonder if it's too late to call a cab and knock on the door of 221b Baker Street ?

of course, if it happened in aberystwyth, then ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Pryce

after my pocket was picked in jermyn street this afternoon ...

... i went in to the churchyard of saint james' in piccadilly and sat on a bench until i'd regained some of my composure.  On weekdays the flagstones are usually hidden by stalls selling books and trinkets.  Today I found this stone laying right at my feet. James Gillray !


















A favourite illustrator ...

... so just thinking of him lifted my spirits !

3BT

On a straight path across the Common, in pouring rain, a figure moves briskly from my left to the centre of my field of vision, then turns and walks quickly ahead of me and the old dog.  An athletic young woman, lean and shapely, with black hair, in a black sweater, black tights and black boots, carrying a black rucksack.  She moves with metronomic elegance.  The soles of the boots are a pinky sort of red, like a water melon, and she is walking beneath a brolly of the same colour.  Boots and brolly are diffusely reflected on the wet asphalt path. 

On the 87 bus which is trundling from Battersea Library towards The Aldwych, a lovely and vivacious British-Jamaican lady wearing a scarlet coat wedges herself against a rail near the front and preaches loudly to the packed and captive audience, her voice full of raucous energy and laughter, on the theme of being grateful to Jesus for Life, and then she sings All Things Bright And Beautiful … badly, but with amazing grace.

At the Wellcome Foundation there is a book-stand in the shop, displaying the short picture book for the exhibition, a rich yellow jacket, the colour of English mustard, lettered in black … Death, it says on the side of the stand, books and gifts to die for.  A small boy appears and stops there, wearing the same colours, yellow jeans, black T-shirt, and with the palest freckles and pale ginger hair. Life !

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/death-a-self-portrait.aspx

off to Fortnum's later to check out their stock of Plymouth Sloe Gin

the burning question is .. can this year's window dressers attain the standards of the last ?




















see the blog for last december 24th ...

http://thenewemotionalblackmailershandbook.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_01_archive.html#1209936624159919784

bad advice just pours out of me and my big mouth

after baring his chest for the cardiologist, a friend just learned that he has an inherited heart defect

so now he is sleepless and panicky

i consoled him with the notion that he has already survived sixty years with it

but then i couldn't stop myself from blurting out

"perhaps you should be baring your chest down at the tattoo parlour ... capital letters instructing DO NOT RESUSCITATE !"

time the coastguards put out a general mermaid warning to all shipping ...

http://doyoucomeyeroften.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/notes-and-observations.html

finished work just in time to catch the last wild flower in our wood

only five months 'til spring, sez old schrodinger's sweet william

old neuro-science, well 2007 ...

http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/images/42753

3BT, 11th November 2012

One.  After four or five days of prevarication, I find a suitable sentence to end a letter, using a freshly discovered story about real people who are long gone.  A story that still has no proper ending but will leave my readers’ eyebrows shooting up with a mixed note of suspense, incredulity, and scandalized laughter.

Two.     More than twenty years ago, some friends took me up on to the roof of Painswick House on a moonlit night.  You could make out distant hills and woods whilst the polished sky was so bright.  We had explored the lovely library of the house and I had re-discovered there that slightly scandalous poem by Edna St Vincent Millay which begins “ I being born a woman, and distressed …”   and so I showed it there and then to a third party whose willing person I was developing a passion for at that time, a passion that growed and growed, but has long since been set aside.

I, being born a woman and distressed 
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

A lovely moment that I had since forgotten. But, anyways, The Loved One hath brungen home a precious and scholarly booke, Sir Roy Strong’s The Artist and The Garden, and she placed it on the lectern by the window after I’d hurriedly read the first two chapters.  So, this morning, sleepless again, after about a week of intermittent and aimless page-turning, I was looking at one of the less spectacular brown pictures, printed small, and was admiring it’s decorative painted border.  

It was painted by Thomas Robins in 1748 and is a poorly drawn representation of the “folly” named “Pan’s Lodge”, in the grounds of that same Painswick House, but is an imaginatively and splendidly preposterous invention on the part of the Artist.  As Strong puts it, “Robins turns the grounds of Painswick House in to a rococo reverie of frolicking satyrs”.  However, Robins’ value as an artist was in his talent for lively incident and he had produced a border full of birds, and even a bird’s nest, so that the border distracts the viewer from the picture's subject.  

It was about five in the morning when I discovered this picture and a bright crescent moon had just appeared outside my window, next to a brilliant star.  In that moment, which only lasted a few seconds, whilst my swivelling eye began to take in the details for the first time, and as I compared Robins' delineation of the two owls, so there came from the dark trees only a few feet away, the real hoot of a real owl.

Three.    Later still, whilst re-reading between the lines of a very good book that I’m “editing” about those dead persons, making some new intuitions, joyfully, though too late in life to be of great use, about what is sensibly called “Women’s Intuition.” A subject which should be part of the National Curriculum.

the guardian prints an extract from an Owen Sheers poem which seems entirely appropriate for this weekend

photo from the internet .... (Reuters/USAF/Senior Airman Tyler Price)

Home to Roost (extract)

By Owen Sheers

• 
  
• in0Emai
  l

• The Guardian, Friday 9 November 2012 22.55 GMT

I don't remember any of what happened.
Just those howls, like dogs, as we drove out.
The fields and trees all black and green.
Perhaps some of the very first rounds.
But nothing else.

I had to pick it all up second hand,
as my hearing came back in the chopper,
and then again in Bastion.

How when my driver had reversed
he'd hit a roadside IED.
How the explosion had hit a fuel tank, or ammo tin
right under me.
Shot me out, like a jack in the box,
60 feet. And then how it had all kicked off.
Rockets, grenades. The lot.

They took me straight to Rose Cottage.
A special room in the medical centre
deep among the tents and containers of Bastion.
A room for the lads or lasses who'd taken a hit,
which even the surgeons on camp couldn't fix.

It was manned, back then, by two blokes,
staff sergeants Andy and Tom. It was them
who took me in, off the ambulance,
and into their room. It smelt of sweet tea.
"That scent," Andy said to me. "It's the Eau de Toilette. Rose.
The Afghans insist we spray it on their guys."
"Don't worry though Arthur," Tom added on my other side.
"You'll soon get used to it. We did."
And then they laughed. Not for themselves
but for me, I could tell. And they carried on talking too,
chatting me through all they'd do,
as they put what they'd found of me onto a shelf,
saying "sorry it's so cold Arthur",
which it was, like a fridge.
Then they said "sleep well" before sliding it shut.
My first night of three in Rose Cottage.

I saw them again just before I left.
When they slid me out into the light again,
still passing the time of day
as they placed me in the coffin
that would carry me home.
Always calling me by name.
"Not long now Arthur."
"You'll be back in no time."
Gently, they lowered the lid
then, like two maids making a bed,
they unfolded, smoothed and checked for snags,
before draping me in the colours of the flag.

• From Pink Mist, a verse drama by Owen Sheers, to be published next year by Faber. Theatre of War, a documentary about the play Sheers created with wounded soldiers, The Two Worlds of Charlie F, is on BBC2 on 13 November.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/09/poem-home-to-roost-owen-sheers?INTCMP=SRCH

in oxted churchyard

sweet voices of reason ( part 99 ) ... oliver sacks talks about what hallucinations can tell us about human conciousness

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/oct/30/oliver-sacks-shares-hallucinations

http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html

and a subsequent book review from will self ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/08/hallucinations-oliver-sacks-review?INTCMP=SRCH

and one from new york

http://nymag.com/news/features/oliver-sacks-2012-11/

turned out nice again ...

in conversation with dev ...

i took dev by surprise for this picture, holding the camera in my lap whilst we talked on a sunny park bench

we'd been talking about kindness and tolerance and he suggested that england was a far kinder place than india

we have pensions and welfare, and he has no fear of being neglected here on account of age and infirmity

then he went on to talk about dogmatism and conformity, saying that in india a family would often expect an unmarried daughter to commit suicide if she was having a child

and then he said that although he no longer believes in heaven and hell, he'd rather go to hell in the company of a "pandit", than go to heaven with ten thousand conformists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandit

the vulcan can no longer fly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-19952395

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan

when i was a teenager, during the difficult times we called the cold war, one might sometimes hear a single vulcan on its way north during a still night

they were armed with atom bombs and were supposedly prepared to cross the baltic if required, on their way to bomb strategic targets in russia, if war had broken out between east and west

the idea was that they would fly in beneath  the radar whilst everyone was watching the exchange of inter continental ballistic missiles far above them

the engines crackled and roared like no other plane i knew and sometimes i fancied you might glimpse the flames as the plane climbed

i often used to wonder if tonight was the night ?

but the thought only came to me some decades later that we had been living "in a moral vacuum"

one of the great william claxton's photographs via the "every day i show" blog

http://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/189434.html

schrodinger's old tom kat joins neutrino safari

visual logic dancing ... i wish i'd seen this when i was eight and struggling to avert the violent rage of my primary teacher because i was last in the class to read and multiply

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/