The Promise

A couple of videos that my friend sent yesterday, the first two minutes long, shows a pair of nesting magpies where he lives in Cornwall, the second shows a crow helping himself to fatballs.  Happening in exactly the same way in our garden, as jackdaws and crows raid the feeders.  Survival of the fittest I think....

What else, 'the promise' is the opening of the foxgloves, magnificently identified by Paul as hollyhocks, he has the same problem with potatoes, he does not understand the difference between new and old potatoes, or, in fact how the various types of potatoes are used. Comes of living in Japan for such a long time!

I played around with photo imaging for the foxgloves, this one is called 'Icarus'. Well that pulled up a lot of memories from college, dissecting the following poem...... Icarus's little legs are just disappearing by the boat by the way, lower right hand of the painting.  Perhaps my title should have been 'futility' Auden was a miserable soul but the roses springing to life, the constant up and down of the great farm trucks rushing by with cut sweet grass for silaging tells me that life goes on no matter how much misery there is around.

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Breughel - The Fall of Icarus

Just set off all the smoke alarms in the house, electrically connected they make a helluva noise and all frantic waving of teacloths is useless, it was Lucy's dinner! still edible anyway, just overcooked..

And then the roses by the long wall of the church yard holding their promise of careless beauty, and I am glad that I did not have a bed dug out for more flowers here, the wall and the roses are just perfect.