Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Sunday, October 13, 2013

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)

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























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

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Thursday, October 10, 2013

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.

Thursday, October 3, 2013