Monday -

Warrior's Dyke, the stones are the foundation of hut settlements

Nostalgia on a miserable day!!

The wind has started up,  grey and wet, Autumn is making her presence felt, someone on TMA has been to an area I know well, St.Davids and it brings back memories of wandering with Moss in the Welsh landscape......

Sat on the floor in front of my books, can I throw any away, no is the answer, they are the ones that accompanied me on my divorce, these must stay even the archaeological ones.  I pick up the old exercise books I have recorded in so many years ago, they are commonplace books, written so neatly in that  slanting writing I learnt in the drawing office of my almost first job. Old poems, sayings current at the time, Ruskin is there talking about the Pre-raphaelites, Dosteyevsky's chapter on The Grand Inquisitor, Goldsmith's poem of course and there is Thomas Hardy poem's with his bleak lamenting at the grave side for his former wife, the poems the children wrote when young. So what would I choose, well maybe words from the Iliad, there is a phase in this quote that often drifts through my mind 'soft as the fleeces of descending snow'.

But when Ulysses rose, in thought profound,
his modest eyes he fixed upon the ground,
As one unskilled or dumb he seems to stand,
Nor raised his head, nor stretch'd his sceptred hand;
But, when he speaks, what elocution flows.
Soft as the fleeces of descending snows,
The copious accents fall, with easy art
Melting they fall, and sink into the heart
Wondering we hear, and fix'd in deep surprise,
Our ears refute the censure of our eyes.

These words come from four eighteenth century books, written in that funny print of the time. John Ruskin next, I got rid of some of his books, but kept several, such a prolific, one might also say boring writer!

The largest soul of any country is altogether its own.  Not the citizens of the world, but of his own city - nay for the best man, you may say, of his own village. Patriot always, provincial always, of his own crag or field always.  A Liddesdale man, or a Tynedale;

Angelico from the Rock of Fesole, or Virgil from the Mantuan Marsh.  You dream of National Unity! - you might as well strive to melt the stars down into a nugget and stamp them small into coin with one Caesar's face.     Ruskin - Art of England.

I wonder how he would have viewed the world today, though the truth of the matter is that we haven't really changed.........