A magpie's miscellany
Well Andrew managed to upload my video from the phone to the camera. Of course obviously he can as computers are his work. Now I go round singing to myself "Hey you get off of my cloud". The earwig for the day!
I notice it is on a rolling link, and no interruption between stopping and starting. It is there purely for family entertainment and is 8 minutes long.
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| The Bybrook which ran past the Roman Temple at Nettleton Shrub |
The Roman Temple of Nettleton Shrub
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| Claude Monet's Bridge |
Water is probably the most important part of a garden, here you can sit awhile and experience the life forms of the garden. Newts and frogs or maybe a toad or two. Or the miraculous birth of dragonflies or demoiselles. I have a photo of two damselflies mating amongst the bright colour of the nasturtiums flowers resting lightly on the water.
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| Claude Monet's Water Lilies There was a time, the time when I collected books, that the picture below was the fashion in the early 20th century. Monet in his garden had that formalised appearance, a repetitive nature of one type of edging plants in front of a flowerbed of the main display. Every small suburban garden would have its edging of white, blue and yellow plants. Order was called for, a rigidity of preciseness, though William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll with their wider expanses of garden to play around with went for the 'wild' garden, drifts of flower edging woodland. Whilst the formal long flowerbeds had colours drifting through the spectrum. Clever use of planting was an art form. |
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| I think these are peonies |
The idea came into my head the other day how much we are influenced from our early years. But our ideas mature through to old age. So the exciting times of the 60s would be its music and parties. Funnily enough it is music that triggers the mood. Donovan's 'Yellow mellow' mentioned by Y/P the other day had me humming its gentle though slightly ridiculous tune all day. Our need for music, whether to sing or dance, is part of our lives. For instance I was never too keen on the Beatles but loved the Rolling Stones. Nick Drake replaced Donovan, and then Simon and Garfunkel - Hello lamppost, what you knowin come to watch your flowers growin, complete nonsense but seeing the world at a different level.
Films passed me by, but the two that remain with me were 'West Side Story' and 2001 Space Odyssey. Of course Hal the computer with his frightening voice taking over the space ship was totally scary and a reminder that things didn't always go the way we wanted it to.
Then my first husband introducing me to the Tolkien books and I was lost in this immense world of imagination, of good and bad, of courage and daring do. To think that I can remember still the 'Spaghetti Westerns' that Nick so loved. And today can read that they were so called because they were mainly produced by Italian directors. And who can forget the April 1st joke played by the BBC as they seriously featured 'spaghetti trees' in Italy growing the pasta.
Now I can flick to Wikipedia to look up a fact, someone, somewhere is bound to have covered it and those giant encyclopedias have become a thing of the past.
We hold our learning lightly, but can measure the steps we have taken by the writings and ideas that have come across our journey.
This Friday we shall journey on the train to Surrey for the weekend, I still have not learnt how to do train tickets on my phone, mine resides on my daughters. This failure niggles me but I am terrified that my phone will hold too much information about me. Like a worm, the intelligence that is unleashed through technology is waiting out there ;)
Yesterday coming back from the shop I developed a migraine, with aura beforehand. I become aware of an upcoming headache by those wavy lines that blur my sight, making in impossible to use the computer or read. I am glad of the warning and the fact that though I have sickness and headache it is never so bad as past migraines.
So this morning I have travelled over Bath City by drone on my computer and thought what a beautiful symmetrical city it is. No terrible skyscrapers, just an ordered city sitting within the seven hills surrounded by trees. The Green Belt has of course protected it, also the hills of course but it is the vigilant eye of such places like English Heritage that keeps a wary eye on the grade listed buildings.
Goodness knows where the next lot of new housing will figure in the English countryside but we desperately need new affordable housing for our young people.
I have been watching McDonald and Dodds television series, two odd characters that solve crime in the city. Of course it makes me homesick to watch all the shots of Bath, but at looking at some of the houses that are filmed it. Boy there is a lot of money around in the fair city, also of course tourists but floating above it all it still looked beautiful.
Also listened to Anthony Scaramucci and his prediction that Trump will bow out. Maybe, maybe not, but I would rejoice having the name Scaramucci.
Also debating a book written by CEO of Microsoft A1,Mustafa Suleyman. The book is called 'The Coming Wave' and is all about A1. I have become very suspicious of an awful lot of what is written and the photos I see on the net is their capacity to fool you. A1 is an enormous breakthrough but has an incendiary nature to go off into realms we had not even thought of yet. Can the human race keep its head above water? We developed the Atomic bomb which had a catastrophic effect in the cities it exploded in, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Whilst nuclear rockets hang in perpetual threat above our heads. So does what ever technology we create, once given flight, remain with us forever or do we try to regulate.
Anyway, a more peaceful end to my witterings, the video on Bath.
Lillie at 7.0. clock comes in dressed to the nines. It's result day, I wish her luck and tell not to bend down too quickly with the short skirt she is wearing. After she has been to college, she and her friends will go out to lunch and we will have a takeaway this evening to celebrate. There are three big Ikea bags of stuff to start her new life, she is looking forward to going to London.
But before that happens she is going to Glasgow on a birthday trip this weekend with her mother, not sure of the reason why but they have booked themselves into a good hotel.
Which brings me to the astonishing news about Stonehenge and the Altar stone from Scotland no less. For a good read on this, you must turn to Mike Pitts on Digging Deeper. He has written so much about Stonehenge he must be the expert to beat all experts on the subject.
Stonehenge is made up of several assemblies, the great sarsen stones come from the downs around, within a 20 mile distance. The Welsh blue stones from the Preseli Hills. The stone discovered to be Scottish from the North-East of Scotland. It is Old Red Sandstone of the Orcadian Basin and is the Altar Stone, buried deep by time and the toppling of other stones, it lays half hidden in the grass. Mike Pitts jumped to the same conclusion I did when he learnt it was from Scotland a 'recumbent altar stone' something you find in this part of Scotland.
So what are we seeing, well the interminable question that has haunted the Bluestones, how did they travel from Wales to England, by land or sea? Now of course we have a much longer journey from Scotland, land or sea?
Note, Pitts makes a little jibe at Brian Johns for his theory of glacial movement but it is extraordinary to think that these stones both from Wales and Scotland made the journey down South. Was this the first Brexit, a mini market like Europe, makes you think! Well done to the team that analyzed it, I think it was done in Australia.
Nearer to home, my patchwork quilt is coming to an end, I had made squares of 16 small squares in four different colours loving the way colours match, or do not. My worry yesterday was the backing material, Cotton Patch materials are very expensive, but I managed to find some 'fat quarters' on the net so it should all come together.
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| the Prescili Hills |
Guardian news on the subject
I only wrote seven blogs in that particular month, so what to choose, there is this one on dyes and thistles, and even today I laugh about Moss who so delicately lifted his leg against this beautiful thistle plant. I wonder what happened to 'Miss Whistle', she was an American who came to England every now and then to see her mother.
"Such a nostalgic trip back into English history are church fetes, they embody all that is good, kind and giving in people who are of the christian faith. So where did this fete take place? It was at Ingatestone in Essex, we had gone to look at the prehistoric stones , and the sight of stalls and a marquee in the church graveyard was a surprise. I bought a corn dolly from a man who was patiently weaving them in a corner, his wife sat at the front of the stall with baskets of them to sell. We sat in the marquee and drank tea and ate homemade cakes, one a little rice krispie chocolate cupcake that fell to pieces, a reminder of all those children's cakes I had baked in the past for parties. A gentle soul talked to us of circle dancing that evening and closing the marquee flaps. Up on the tower a man's head peered over as he let out a rope for a bucket mysteriously being pulled back and forth.
In the church great vases of flowers beautifully arranged, and local paintings on display for sale, the vicar happily walking amongst his flock, ordered a ploughman's lunch in the marquee. Genteel England in all its beautiful old English charm, slowly dying but never gone - for to lose this facet of our world would be like losing a great jewel of the past - a gentle muddle-headed way of past traditions enacted in a church, that once not so long ago, recorded our coming into the world, marriages for life and the final end as the dead were laid to rest in the earth. The small parochial way of life, community and certainty wrapped round the central hearth of the religious church - paganism still quietly lurking in the graveyard with a prehistoric stone that had never been removed"
I chattered on to myself, in a world that was changing. Today I listened to the fact that Elon Musk was buttering up Trump, I think it was on X. I have wondered whether to join this notorious website, but I have a feeling it is far too evil for me so will refrain.
I have been reading Bensozias writing on the war between Russia and Ukraine, and this somewhat surprising move by Zelensky into what Bensozia calls 'The Ukranian Offensive Update. All I can see and feel is the death of the soldiers as they once more fight pointless wars over territory.
So to complete the 2008 August, I of course gathered the Saxon history of Broomfield church in Essex, and found a poem by R.S.Thomas, I know a favourite of Weaver. But he was such a miserable old bugger!
Japanese anemones: From May 2007 I have written to myself about the happenings around me. Actually further back then that but I deleted the earlier blog because of a troll. So as it is August I shall pick up this 2007 August blog. I actually went to Google Earth and looked at our old house and garden, not wise, it had been turned all to lawn, apple trees gone and pond. Sad but inevitable.
"In my garden are two great displays of these tall Japanese anemones, far too early for this time of the year as they are supposed to be autumn flowering. There exuberance is extraordinary probably down to the strange weather we have been having this summer. But suddenly I realised that they have a story behind them. A small plant of these flowers was given to me about 25 years ago by a person who lived in Box in Wiltshire, and they have now grown from small beginnings to giants dominating their positions. The garden they came from, had the remains of a large roman villa under its surface. This villa was enlarged in the 3rd or 4th century by a wealthy owner, and apparently has the largest collection of roman mosaics in the country, with mosaics being found in 20 of the 41 rooms in the complex. The villa was excavated by Hurst in 1967, there are probably pottery and mosaics at Devizes museum somewhere in a dusty box." .....
It is the 200 year anniversary of the RNLI - Royal National Lifeboat Institution. An institution you will see everywhere round our island's coast line. Paul supported it and we had a sticker on the back of the car.
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| by Thomas Musgrove Joy - Grace Darling at the Forfarshire |
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| Henry Freeman |
You will notice the cabling on his jumper, there is another tale to be told here. Fisherman's wives knitted these hardwearing jumpers in a multitude of patterns. The reason why though was sad, for when the dead bodies of those that have perished out to sea came ashore, the jumper was the only way of identification.
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| Robin Hood Bay I have never understood what Robin Hood is doing down here so far North when everyone knows he lived in Sherwood Forest but there is another tale about life boats here. A ship the 'Visitor' had been driven onto the rocks by a storm in 1881 but there was no lifeboat at Robin Hood Bay, so the people of Whitby dragged their lifeboat to the village. It was six miles in deep snow, 200 men and 18 horses, they dug out the snowdrifts as they went along and had a steep precipitous run down into the village but they made it. The storm raged, on the first outing six oars broke but eventually the stricken crew was saved. You can read a much better longer version of the story if you can find it. The the link is not working, search engine Visitor ship/Robin Hood Bay should bring it up. What comes across of course is the effort to save lives, the ability to put one's own life in danger to save another. Today the RNLI is proud of its achievements, they are often more caught up rescuing foolish people from the sea, who have no knowledge of currents and tide and how fierce the sea can become. But those early heroes live on just as today's heroes capture the headlines and we should do well to put a pound in their boxes. |
My two favourite commentators have returned to the screen, Rory Stewart has been in Afghanistan, which accounts for them not being around....
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| Whitby harbour |
Well on trying to work out the Roman burials around Bath, I went off-piste down another rabbit hole, but all to do with the Lansdown and getting muddled over saints.
It starts with a pub called the Brathwayte, just by a golf course and Bath Racecourse. Across the road from the pub is a farmhouse that still has parts of Lawrence Chapel in its front facade. Also not so far from here a well called St. Alpege Well.
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| Chapel Farmhouse, Lansdown |
But apart from St. Lawrence (AD 225 to 258) there was also a St. Alpege well in the neighbourhood. Alphege was much more interesting as he had been born in the village of Weston below the downs. He had an illustrious career in the work of the church but met a terrible death which you can find in the Wiki below.
̠lfheah (c. 953 Р19 April 1012), more commonly known today as Alphege, was an Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester, later Archbishop of Canterbury. He became an anchorite before being elected abbot of Bath Abbey.
He was stoned to death by the Vikings at Greenwich, though his Viking friend tried to stop the killing. The Viking was called Thorkell the Tall, his intervention came to nothing, having offered everything he had, except for his ship and the wretched Alpege was finished off by an axe blow to his head by another Viking. But Thorkull changed sides because of the brutality, and went over to Cnut's side.
More information here on St.Alphege from 2008
Walking lightly on the news: Southport is of course out there and the riots initiated by the EDL (English Defence League) who like a good riot on a sunny day.
Someone described them as being too old to be football hooligans so they have moved their aggression to the racist right. As you may know of me, labels do not sit easily in my writing. For instance where is my political leanings, well probably liberal but to the left and socialism but that label does not brand me. But from that viewpoint I can speak out, without hatred, about how I feel about what is happening around us.
Quite a few towns and cities have been effected by the rioting, the police out there trying to bring some law and order to the situation, and also there is an opposing force to the far right EDL and they are also on the streets chanting 'anti-Nazi slogans. See how slogans fit in so easily but in truth they have no legitimacy in fact.
What gets hurt, beside the people, is the businesses, private properties, the mosques and vehicles. Do you know the people of Southport were out there the next day, after the shocking news of the attack on the little children and were clearing the debris off the streets. Builders were mending, for free, the brick garden walls, also the mosque damage.
Most people in this country are not rampant idiots, they are the people who actually run this country. Whether in the police force, councils, churches or mosques, people gather together quietly and help each other.
Asian communities are part of the life blood of the Northern cities, they run shops, businesses, Uber drivers and live compatibly beside us. I can hear the voices rising already, "What about the boat people?". Truthfully I do not know the answer to that one. I suspect leaving those that have arrived in this country in limbo land is the political answer. Hoping they will go away, a somewhat childish response.
My daughter is a manager in an RSPCA charity shop, she is in the fashionable part of Manchester, so I asked her what it was like. Well the buses and trams seemed to have disappeared and there were drunk men around but the shop had the same number of customers as usual for a Saturday. There is also a 'gathering' at the end of the road. A local business sells out maybe 500 t-shirts in the street, and the company arrive to the large crowd that is waiting on the corner and the t-shirts sold, that went as normal. The young do things differently!
If it had rained yesterday, the whole thing would probably have been called off. Also the Labour Party really had nothing to do with it, Starmer in his prosecuting role is already talking about 24 hour courts. Unfortunately the prisons are full, someone forgot to build more prisons under the last regime. mmm
Up on Lansdown above the city of Bath.
"Also of course, the ghost stories someone told me of the 'Roundhead' soldier that marched down the path one evening, a Civil War escapee from the battle at Langridge. I have traced the 17th century banks and ditches of this war, stopped in solemn silence to read on the notice board of one Royalist friend fighting and seeing his old friend a Roundhead killed. My ghost, I kid you not, was he real? was spied early one foggy Sunday morning a Scottish man complete with kilt and hat walking along the path, Moss went berserk as first the hat appeared and then the kilted man walked into view through the fog and he strolled by with a pleasant 'good morning'!
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Maybe he was just out for an early stroll I will never know but at 6 in the morning and no dog? And Moss had never shown such fear before.
I went to another meeting at the Folklore Centre, this time about the Legends and Folklore of Todmorden and the lecturer John Billingsley mentioned a story which brought the above to mind.
In his story he had been walking up on the moors along the road and had just come to a stack of rocks, they are rather ugly rocks around here, fashioned by the ice ages, they are rounded and bold but of course attract their own legends. An expensive Land Rover pulled up by Billingsley and out got a middle-aged man who strolled over to him. He then asked Billingsley if he had seen a small pack of hounds running around. A strange request in the middle of nowhere, the man then blew on a hunting horn but nothing happened. Off he went and Billingsley heard the hunting horn across on the other side of the valley later. A couple of days later he heard of a deer that was found dead, after an apparent fall from some stones. The deer's head had been decapitated. So had the hounds chased the deer till it fell from the rocks and who was it that had taken the head? As a trophy to hang on the wall, though it would need some sort of taxidermist work. And why did the man in an expensive car not have a horse ;)
A folklore tale to take forward, and perhaps embellish through the years. For those of us who recall our Celtic tales, visions of red eared white hounds, the Hounds of Annwen running through the sky will immediately colour our thoughts.
So the premise through the talk was how and why such stories came into existence, did we story the landscape to give it a meaning. Did a 'happening' in the village become so unexpected that it was told through the ages.
One of the other things he talked about was the 'brocken spectre', which is created by a misty morning and the sun shining directly behind a person and casting a long shadow in the mist, pretty scary if you don't know anything about the phenomenon.
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| A Brocken Spectre on the Isle of Skye taken from The Scotsman |
Bang! I have spent the last hour trying to remember the name of the system I bought to play music on, tapes and the radio. Silver coloured long line it had that wonderful slow rising lid, like the slow shutting drawers that you now see on kitchen cupboards. It was of course Bang and Olufsen. Something like this.
I still love its line, smooth and sleek it looked grown-up!
I shall never get to Machu Picchu, but I really don't want to go, that it exists is enough. It is another civilisation that has lost its way and become a relic of its own past. Empty of its inhabitants, tourists flock to wonder at its magic amongst the mountains. Not understanding the message it is giving out "this too will pass".
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| Chauvet Cave in France some of the earliest cave drawings |
Being in a reflective mood is not good but we are slowly, whether we like it or not, seeing Western civilisation float away. The good things of course are captured either in music or paintings, the written past. The individual undertaking to create is always there. From those early cave paintings of animals we can but quietly try to make our brain wonder at the intelligence of prehistoric man, but forgetting we are no more than that person, just with a dash of technology added.
Now for my rant moment! Who the hell thought A1 into the world, can I believe anything I see on the computer anymore? That person are they real or a composite figure. I read about cookery books being written by this robotic nature, plagiarism writ large of the recipes, and auto word correction, slightly gone astray.
And now for my music choice, years ago I loved Gregorian chant, so as I have been writing I been listening to the music below. One criticism, the bird tweeting along must surely be an artificial add on, and it annoys the gentle tranquility of the music.
