Observing silence for free speech

Lamballe, 8/1/2014.

Tom's hands, placing those quintessentially French items, mustard glasses, with candles in, at Lamballe's beautiful bronze horse fountain at tonight's vigil.

There are more photos, just seven, and not great quality, but I love them for the atmosphere and feelings and expression, the variety of human life (there were some dogs too but I failed to capture any of them), that they contain. I decided against posting them here as they are of people, and it seems a bit intrusive perhaps, though they mostly aren't recognisable and the only one who clearly is I asked her permission, and there were plenty of of press and other photographers, but still. However they can be seen on the web album here.

Good things # 4: cards, solstice, and another marvellous machine

And of course I had nice cards for my birthday too. An odd thing is that the half-dozen or so I generally get are often thematically quite similar every year, though they are sent by different people who don't generally know or see each other. The themes vary from year to year; one year it might be bold blocks of jewel colours, another there might be more photos; this year it was fine line work with subtle, somewhat 'dirtied' colours (which I love), foliate forms, repeating small motifs and insect wings - butterflies, dragonflies and a saucy Victorian naked fairy! (I also had a Quentin Blake illustration and a primary coloured bit of typography, but I've left those out of the picture for aesthetic consistency).

But the cards are down again this weekend, as we tend to put up the Christmas ones and fairly simple amount of decoration around this solstice time, and light plenty of candles. Tea lights and glasses are so cheap and plentifully available, there's no reason one couldn't do this all the time over the winter, yet it feels like a luxurious extravagance.

As I say, not oodles of decoration and only from the solstice to Twelfth Night, which is about the right length of time, I think. We have a very small artificial tree which we've had since our first Christmas together, some twenty-two years ago, and a collection of bits and pieces of varying degrees of charm and tawdriness. Seeking out holly, despite our village being named for the tree, is a bit of a waste of time, as the birds have usually stripped any berries off it long since, but ivy is most certainly not in short supply, and I do bring in a bit of live evergreenery.  I was rather taken with my own tastefulness in the arrangement over our Chartres labyrinth:

And finally, not to be outdone by the cider press, Tom got out the new garden shredder, which is fortunately a much quieter and more compact thing, and made a start on the mountain of hedge cuttings. Half and hour and several large bin bags of minced up leaves and branches later, there was no noticeable dent made in this, but we have high hopes, and Tom had fun, as can be seen in this wonky little video.

A very happy solstice to all.

'The general balm the'hydroptique earth hath drank...'

- St Lucy's day. The yellowed copy of the Penguin Metaphysical Poets, passed down from my sister Alison, via my brother Phil, I think. I can't always tell whose writing it is in the margins with the rather lame, A-level notes, mine or theirs.

As often, a remarkably light-filled day, the house filled with sun till it went down behind Victor's barn some time between four and five. 

As always, it was my birthday yesterday. It rained most of the day, so though we went out we didn't walk, but I did today, just from home,

and a number of wonderful and delicious, small but perfectly formed, things have happened, many of them happenstantial and unlooked for, so I will post about them over the next few days.

More experimenting with the camera

So, yes, the viewing screen will take a bit of getting used to.  The kestrel hovering over the field by the road gave me a few seconds before it was over the hills and far away, and with a viewfinder I could probably have captured it, but I got nowhere near.  Though with the Panasonic, unless I'd remembered to switch it to action mode it wouldn't have focused quickly enough; the first Canon would have done, even with its smaller zoom and mere half a dozen megapixels.  But perhaps I'll get better at it.  I managed to zoom in on this ascending jet:

And for close ups, with or without the zoom, as I say, it is better:

 It doesn't have quite the same lovely shallow depth of field of its Canon predecessor, so that the object in focus pops out nicely from a blurry background, which not everybody wants for everything, but being fond of detail I tend to appreciate it,

but again, it's not bad.  Perhaps if I read over yet again how to use the manual aperture setting, and tried to get it to stay in my head which seems to have no retentive capacity for inverse ratios and the most basic theory of optics, I could enhance this. I tried to bend my mind to this matter with the Panasonic, just about held onto the knowledge for a brief spell, only to find that the aperture setting wouldn't allow for any more reduction of the depth of field than I could get with the automatic macro anyway (not much), so I promptly forgot it again. Trouble is with this new camera, that setting is on the same dial as the 'discreet mode' which, at a single stroke, switches off the flash and gets rid of the little yellow light that lands on things you're trying to photograph (good for luring and tantalising cats but I've never known what else) and the horrible artificial shutter noises ( which are, it seems, partly there to alert people to the fact you're photographing them; they can't do much about protecting their privacy but do at least know they've lost it).  If I start fiddling with the aperture will take priority over discretion. 

However, the possible handicap of the camera's tendency to over expose can produce a different but perhaps equally interesting intensifying of attention on the subject, in that in bright light things not immediately in focus tend to blur off into whiteness.  You might not want this, or if you did could quite likely achieve it through some kins of clever photo-shopping, but as I don't do that either, I rather like the idea of using it to serendipitous effect.

At this time of year, when there is sun in the afternoons, as occasionally, even this year, there is, it pours into the room.  This bowl came from an open air event at the Briquetterie in Langueux, where a potter had a wheel and a mud-built kiln set up. 

Quite an unusual hexagonal pattern in the flare too.  Is that something to do with bokeh?

In the next shot you may observe how dusty my kitchen window sill is. 

The last of the dry stalks of coriander are in a jug there, picked for its seeds, and then because I just quite like it there.  The coriander in the garden always goes to seed, despite freezing it and using as much of the leaf as I can.  But then, especially since Tom has been on his Indian food kick, we do use a great deal of coriander seed, so it's worth harvesting that too.

Low light and camera shake

Left it late to get out on a glorious ormolu autumn day.  Thought I'd take the camera anyway and see what inadvertent effects might be achieved.  Not much editing involved beyond wilful ineptitude and a bit of cropping.  

 

Kitchen, Breton clichés in onions and books, and a shadowy angel.

More from the diary of home improvements.  But it is something to be quite smug about: top cupboards all done. We got spice racks that hang on poles from Ickier-and-ickier, then my motley collection of ancient and encrusted old spice jars, reused jam jars etc didn't fit and really looked a bit yuk, so for the first time in my life I have a set of matching, spring clip spice jars (not from Ickier), all lined up and new and shiny.  My slight unease that I may have sold out my make-do and mend anti-consumerism, that I have descended into the final stages of Stepford wifedom and my brain has shrivelled to the size of a pistachio, is easily allayed by the sense of order and the quite immoderate delight I take in spring clips.  I didn't throw out the old spices, mind.  I observe that I own very few dried herbs, only really oregano and tarragon, preferring fresh ones.

The only cupboard remaining to be built is the one over the cooker hood. We had begun to hate the old cooker hood, which was quite a few years old now. It was noisy and inefficient, bits had broken off it, it had sharp edges inside which would cut us when we tried to clean it. Tom tore it down and took it to the tip. I understand steel, which it mostly was, is totally recyclable and recycled.  We got a new one, from aforesaid  Swedish-home-store-bent-on-world-domination-much-hated-by-many, with charcoal filters.  In the picture above it can be observed held in place by a piece of kitchen string, an interim arrangement.  It came with its own screws and rawl plugs, Tom began construction of the cupboard above it, removing the string, believing he could trust said fittings for a short time while he did so.  He stepped outside the door to cut a piece of wood, where I was already to be found, probably doing something pumpkin related or putting away the deckchair after an interlude under the sumac tree with a cup of tea and Mr Weston's Good Wine, for such is the indolent and whimsical life I lead while my husband toils to improve our worldly lot. 

We hurried inside when we heard the crash.  The hood lay prostrate on the cooker rings; it was still plugged in though the pins were rather bent, but the motor and even the bulb still worked.  Our beloved yellow tea pot, Tom's new china tea mug with the periodic table of the elements on it, and various other important, cherished or simply potentially messy items which were close by the scene of the catastrophe were mercifully untouched. A saucepan of peas defrosting on the cooker had been interestingly catapulted across the surrounding area, but there was no water in the pan, and they were easily picked up and rinsed, though one or two showed up in unexpected places later. Tom was mortified and could only see the calamity, while I could only imagine how much worse it could have been and felt rather silly with relief.  I don't tend to think of myself as a glass-half-fuller; I suppose if it had been something for which I had felt responsible it might have been different.

The screws turned out to be pathetically inadequate wood screws, and barely to make an impression in the ill -fitting rawl plugs.  They were replaced by something more fit for purpose, and as I write now, the whole structure is much advanced, the cupboard largely built and, like the rest of the kitchen for which Tom had sole responsibility, it is of industrial strength and solidity.

~

And while we're in the kitchen, I did the done thing with the Roscoff pinks, or the ones which were up for being kept, there were a few which were damp affected and needed to be used straight away.  It's not exactly a bicycle-handlebars' worth, but they're very good and satisfyingly strong-stemmed for plaiting.

~

Mr Weston's Good Wine. Though I'd read a few John Cowper Powys books over the years, and knew about this one by his brother Theodore, for some reason I'd never picked it up before, and can't remember quite how I came to decide to do so now, except I've long been fond of Salley Vickers' Mr Golightly's Holiday, but only lately understood its debt to Powys's earlier novel.  Though in an afterword Vickers acknowledges this debt, while asserting that the essential idea which they share came to her initially independently, I hadn't quite realised quite how much of an after type of work Mr Golightly is. I felt somewhat cheated, as the whole conceit of that book, which ideally one shouldn't spot immediately, but which once you do, makes you want to re-read it again to pick up all the previously unseen pointers, jokes and references (such as the line about how, within the firm, Michael was considered to be a 'perfect angel', which the first time I read it was unconsciously with the stress on the word 'angel', then, with hindsight, it shifts to the word 'perfect') seemed so original and surprising, whereas now I know that if I'd been acquainted with the earlier work I would have seen everything straight away and wouldn't have been so pleased and surprised. 

I  had a bit the same experience reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty before I read Howard's End.

This doesn't constitute a review, and is somewhat elliptical, I know, but I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't read the books but wants to.  I don't actually like trying to write reviews; picking up that Wiki link about Zadie Smith, or anything of the kind really, gives a glimpse into a world of ideas such as hystoriographical metafiction which I am too atrophied, dull and limited, and always was, to gain admittance.  Never mind, there are always kitchens and pumpkins.

I keep wondering whether to give up on contemporary literary fiction altogether.  One way or another I often seem to finish up feeling cheated and or unsatisfied, but then I'd miss out on so much too, cutting off my nose...

B the German doctor passed on a Joanne Harris, Coastliners.  I really wish she hadn't, I'd given up on her (JH) once but felt I ought to try again as a friend had offered it. Anyway, I just found this review of it which made me heave a sigh of relief that it wasn't just me who felt that way, but in the same sigh made me miserable that I didn't have the courage of my convictions, or couldn't have expressed them so forcefully, or that even perhaps I saw something of myself and what I do here as practising something of the same crass romanticising dishonesty ... 

Anyway, at least I didn't waste my time trying to finish it, and my excuse when I returned it was a genuine one, that I really can't cope with the strain of dialogue which is supposed to be in French in the story written in English.  I don't know how this can be done well, or at least to my satisfaction; it will either sound like it's written 'with a French accent', using words and idioms conveyed as transparently and literally as possible, which ends up sounding cod and self-conscious, or else you write in ordinary, colloquial English which is equally unconvincing because of course language isn't only about expressing the same ideas using different words, the words actually shape the ideas, people think differently, express things differently in different languages, or even different dialects or versions of the same language, which is why Americans writing as Brits and vice-versa can seldom quite pull it off.  I just keep finding myself thinking, yes but can you, would he, no you couldn't ever say that in French, or if so, how? It may be partly a block of my own; I'm frustrated that I wouldn't know how to say those things in French myself, and the strain is greatly increased when the characters concerned are Anglophone's supposedly speaking French amongst French people, so that a sense of jealously mingles with the unsuspended disbelief that they should achieve such a degree of mutual ease of expression and comprehension when I can't. Whatever, it gets in the way. It got in the way of my owning the conviction that Joanne Harris writes totally meretricious rubbish (at least in this book, and in the other French set novels of hers I've read, I quite liked that spooky Victorian Gothic pastiche she wrote before she got famous with her winning formulae), because I thought perhaps it was just my problem, and it perhaps gets in the way of my appreciating better writing when I can't get past it.

Don't know if this makes any sense, or if it matters or is of any interest. 

~

Jean-Paul has finished at last, and his work is beautiful.  More on that very soon.

~

Angel in the house.

~

Looking nature in the eye (and grouching a bit about Picasa)

Bits and pieces, all with something of an eye-balling theme.

~

Just as Tom was about to go out and check the post today, (we have external mailboxes here, of course, though ours is only a step from the house, and our regular posties tend to wait for us to come out and hand the mail over), there was an enormous thump on the window which made us nearly jump out of our skins.  It was not one but two squabbling cock chaffinches, so absorbed in their quarrel they forgot to look where they were going.  One of them landed, punch drunk, on the fence post outside the window.  At first, he was very wonky, his sides heaving, so knowing that having time to recover from shocks like this can make the difference between life and death for small birds, we waited for him to fly off at his leisure, before going out for the post.  

After a bit he straightened up, and started to look around him, including at us through the window, and at the rival, presumably, he had been scrapping with, who was taunting him from the house guttering above.  He must have stayed there a good ten minutes, then I remembered that the surest way to make any creature move off is to try to photograph it.  I took half a dozen or so pictures of him, then sure enough he flew away.

One of the nice things about creatures, like chaffinches, which have clearly differences between genders is one can refer to them as he or she without feeling sentimentally or childishly anthropomorphic. The wall brown butterfly, above, on a dandelion (which seem especially early and prolific this year, but don't they always...) I couldn't have been so sure about; the butterfly book (companion volume to the seashore one a couple of posts back), told me

the male and female are quite distinct, the former having an oblique band of scent scales on the fore-wing, which are said to smell like chocolate cream...

Mm, scratch-and-sniff butterfly.  Even so, the pictures in the book weren't really clear enough to be sure, but the internet came to my aid.  This one's a girl.

If I could have got close enough to smell the chocolatey scent scales (which she doesn't have), I'd have moved that grass blade across the top of the wing.  There was a bit of an exchange somewhere recently about how we tend to feel slightly guilty about rearranging nature to suit our photographic purposes, even in small ways, and how that's really a bit silly.  I don't know how it compares with retouching the photo.

This Normandy cow is also a girl, of course, or she would be a Normandy bull.  I'm very taken with Normandy cattle, which are more and more unusual hereabouts, being superseded by the ubiquitous Holstein-Frisian black and white standard Common Agricultural Policy issue.  There is an old rare breed of native black and white Brittany cow, apparently, but I don't know any.  They are small with rather delicate, dished faces, and beautiful upswept horns, but though their numbers are healthier than they were, there are only somewhat over a thousand in existence, and they mostly live south and west of here.  (I could become something of a livestock anorak, I fear, I love rare breeds...)

I find it is often a problem photographing animals like cows and horses, as they tend to dip their heads down to look at us, and then there is a strand of electric wire across their faces.  In the above picture I touched it out, with Picasa's increasingly easy to use retouch button.  I did it very carefully with a small brush size, but I can still where it was.

~

Talking of Picasa, they've messed about with it again, so it's now Picasa 3.9.  It's no longer so evident how to make collages. The big collage button on the bottom menu bar is no longer there; you can collage every picture in a folder, by clicking on the small icon at the top of each folder, but it won't just collage selected, pinned pictures in the tray like it used to, which I liked because I could just flick through selecting the pictures I wanted then make them into a collage straight off. I feared I would have to export selected pictures into new folders especially, which would have been a pain.  Eventually I found you could do it as before by pinning them in the tray then going to the 'create' tab along the top, and then to 'Picture collage'.  It's only one extra click, so I shouldn't grumble, and doubtless I could have found it out quicker if I'd read the help forums or the blog or whatever, but I was slightly distressed to find the familiar button gone, it seems like not an improvement to a popular thing.  As to all the new effects - comic book, invert colour, Orton-ish, Holga-ish, posterize, heat map etc etc - they're quite fun, but mostly novelty and gimmick, so far I've only felt incline to use the 'HDR-ish' one and then only a little bit (in the photo of violet syrup last post).  I always rather liked Picasa because it was intuitive, I didn't have to be techie and clever, it wasn't Photoshop and the choices were limited.  Now it still isn't PS, because it can't do the really clever things that can, which actually take skill and know-how and aren't intuitive, like layers and levels and tools and so on, it's just trying to stick on some of the frilly bits.  Still, I suppose there's no harm in it.

~

And then the other morning there was one of those strange and rather magical low-lying mists, which made us feel as though we were a ship afloat, or dwelling in Avalon, or something (my charming sailing niece really does dwell in Avalon, it's a suburb of Sydney, a very nice one, mind, and she lives on a boat).  And the great eye of the sun gazed at us across it, and though one shouldn't, we gazed back.   

This from the bedroom window.

Chatting to my blog

That's what I should do more of, in the way that I used to write letters of old, rather than aspiring and failing to say or show anything original or self-consciously beautiful or structured or important.  In fact the blogs I read that continue and continue to be enjoyable are possibly, I think, by the people who are least concerned with any sense of their own importance, and just do it anyway, without it claiming too much of their own or other people's time and energy.  The tendency of my memory to go into holes troubles me somewhat, here as elsewhere ; I often do think of or see things which I think would be worth putting on here, but by the time I come to sit down with the computer, they have completely evaporated.  Carry a notebook, of course, and remember to the use it.  I don't how people manage to tweet all the time; I suppose they carry mobile devices, and remember to use them.  I lurk on Twitter enough to know that much of what people say there is drivel, but sometimes it's not, but witty and creative.  

~

Sunday afternoon and I took myself off to Viscomica's place to see puppets, with Iso and Princeling.  We had understand it was a Guignol show, the seeing of which is one of those things in my bucket list (being very backward, I've only recently learned of this expression, though I've had one for a long time), not an important thing it's true, but one of those easily accomplished things. It turned out to be Polichinelle, a French version of Pulcinella, and a kind of  forerunner of both Guignol and Punch and Judy.  The puppets were beautifully made but there weren't many of them, the story was insubstantial, too long for children and too simple and repetitive for adults, and too samey for both, and everyone grew bored before the very charming, faun-like young man whose show it was even embarked on his lecture on the history and etymology of the genre.

But it didn't matter, because the main thing was it was one of those glorious early spring days that take you by surprise, every time, when the low warm sun makes everything flat and pearly, and we sat outside on the grass before and after, and with the change in the hour - not a thing I usually feel very merry about - we did so until quite late in the day.  Last time I saw Princeling and his mum back in the winter he was having a bad day and I was grumpy and critical and interfering, and the memory of it was sour, but he raced round and beat on the car door as I pulled in, hugged me cheerfully, and then there was a small troupe of sturdy, friendly children for him to play with, and best of all a fabulous big old gentle dog, who should have been Nana in Peter Pan and who could catch and manoeuvre a large squashy football between its paws time and again, never letting it roll towards the drive where the cars were occasionally passing.  Sun and spring worked into us and loosened up the stiff places, the boy rolled around and got covered in grass cuttings so he looked like a green shaggy monster, there was a bar with beer and apple juice,and we relaxed and enjoyed each other's company.  We'll get to see Guignol another time.

~

Another thing, which hardly quite constitutes a placing on the to-do-before-I-die list but which I've been meaning to try for a while,

violet syrup. I was wondering in fact about the alcoholic version, crème de violette, which you come across occasionally, offered as an alternative to crème de cassis in kir and suchlike.  Flower flavours - elderflower, rose, limeflower, orange blossom etc always intrigue me, and the colour of this stuff was especially beguiling, but I have an abiding memory of buying Parma violet sweets as a child, expecting them to be like sherbet or  Refreshers, and being disgusted with them as tasting like soap or talcum powder.  So I thought before shelling out on the boozy stuff I'd try the cheaper non-alcoholic syrup first.  The colour is weird, and does look a little like methylated spirits, but is very appealing all the same, so unusual and delicate.  The flavour? Hmm, still a bit scenty, and improved by the acidity of a slice of lemon, which also adds a wacky bit of lurid complementery colour.  It is rather nice, and goes oddly well with sheep's milk cheese and winter's sweet pickled figs.

~

The beeswax candle in the glass candle jar goes into meltdown.  'Quick, before it goes out!' says Tom.

~

Nuccio's Pearl.  This camellia, only planted last year, is flowering quite late, but that's all right.

~

I saw the first swallow a week or so ago, crossing the field below the house.  I waved to it but saw no more.

Today, sitting out in the warm sun, my hands rough and scratched from dry soil and weeding, I heard a 'kee-wik, kee-wik' overhead, and for a moment I barely noticed it, the combination of summer sensations seemed so normal.  Then I remembered there were no leaves on the trees yet, and it the only flowers were daffodils and hellebores and the brick-red wallflowers,  for the sake of whose spicy perfume, as much as the sunshine, I've been snatching all the time I can to sit outside.

Now the swallows, are clearly back in earnest.  The one above was singing on the old TV ariel, and preening his magnificent tail forks, which have seen him all the way from Africa.  

~

In the same spot, in the pitted and uneven soil where the old grease trap used to be, a number of wild bees are nesting, and taking advantage of the wallflowers.  A huge black-and-white-and-orange-jerseyed bumble bee, its legs clad with heavy pollen sacs, buzzes in to its home.  It seems to have trouble sometimes finding the entrance, but once it has disappeared underground it is often there for a long time.  Its food-collecting absences are also lengthy.  Though I am sitting very close to the nest sites the bees show no concern or aggression.  Other bees in the same spot are a small amber orange bumble-type bee, and another like a large honey bee, liberally dusted with bright golden yellow, whether pollen or its own colouring I'm not sure.  If you see a two types of bee going into the same hole one after another, there's a strong possibility they're klepto-parasites.

~

Planted the window boxes with orange ranunculus, white double daisies and pansies like big blue ink blots. 

Peas are putting their heads up above ground, the herbs - mint and marjoram, lovage, sweet cicely, chives and fennel - are throwing shoots lustily.  Odds and ends in the cold frame, but I am always slack about writing labels, and now I can't tell my nasturtiums from my sunflowers, as I can't always tell my marmalade from my chutney.  Ah well, the proof of the pudding...

~

Enjoying EM Forster out-of-copyright (mostly) on the Kindle.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it's no good moving from place to place to save things, because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you're worth, facing the sunshine.


(A Room with a View)

~