Claustrophobia cure

The perpetual production of dust, grit, 

and little lumps of plaster, 

the sudden power cuts and cold draughts

from the ever-open back door,

the rucked-up dust sheets and the obstructing ladders,

became suddenly intolerable.
I made an abrupt decision to leave
and headed for the wide high spaces of Greenwich Park.

It is a good deal quieter here in winter

and if you avoid the area around the Observatory,

you can have the place pretty much to yourself.

The rooks watched me from afar,

dogs looked for their owners,

a tourist-fattened squirrel tried to mug me,
but apart from that

all was tranquil.

Cured.

The List

Every year the same thing happened.

At the beginning of November she made up her mind that this time,

for once, she would get her Christmas shopping done early.

She went as far as writing out a list - and there,

for several weeks, the matter rested.

At intervals she tried to pretend that Christmas Day 
fell on the 5th of December,

or, alternatively, that all her friends

and relations lived in South Africa

and that she had to catch an early mail;

but it was no use.

The feeling of temporal urgency cannot be artificially  reproduced,

any more than the feeling of financial distress...

Mrs Miniver knew perfectly well that Christmas 
was not until the 25th December,

and that all the people on her list lived in England.

From Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther

I remember when a Christmas list looked like this:

 bath salts

 handkerchiefs

pipe cleaners

 Black Magic chocolates

Princess Annual

notelets

rubber

*felt comb case*

*knit scarf*

 talcum powder

Everything could be bought on one exciting 

 dark, wet, shopping expedition

to Boots, W.H. Smith and Woolworth's 

and nothing had to be posted anywhere,

it just had to be well hidden in your bedroom,

(moved and hidden again,)

ready for wrapping on Christmas Eve.

How late do you leave it?

Floccinaucinihilipilification

The act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant

often cited as the longest non-technical word in the English language.

I am floccinaucinihilipilificating the fact 

that I have passed the two year anniversary of my blog.

Such a trifling matter was this event,

that it came and went unmarked back in October.

But the word may come in useful

and so I am going to give it a little airing.

Full etymology here.

Its first recorded appearance was in a letter from the poet

William Shenstone:

'I loved him for nothing so much as his

floccinaucinihilipilification of money.'

The first time I heard of him was at the Design Museum

exhibition Plain Space, about the work of architect John Pawson.

I like the idea of the eye loving liberty.

John Pawson likes it very much indeed.

I just don't think I could ever manage

to maintain such a pared down existence.

Where would I put all my jugs?

Head of Invention

Though human genius 

in its various inventions

with various instruments 

may answer the same end,

it will never find an invention

more beautiful 

or more simple

or direct 

than nature,

because in her inventions

nothing is lacking

and nothing superfluous.

Leonard da Vinci

on a sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi

on a dull day,

at the South Bank outside the Design Museum

and near to these offices.

I have been silenced online by

corroded batteries in my keyboard.

The good people at Apple have replaced it free of charge,

(no pun intended).

Wired

Should I write about the ghastly insidious mess 
spreading all over the house from the work 

being undertaken to bring our wiring up to date,

and the inevitable spoilage of much too recent redecoration;

or the thrill of being the first to sing 

Happy Birthday to our man on a futon over a Skype link?

Hip! Hip! Hooray! for electricity.

At the going down of the sun

I found this picture here,

and immediately remembered these words:

Ode of Remembrance

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.

Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

from Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen

first published in 1914

Thank you JofIndia.

The owner of a distressed chair

This chair went out into the garden

to make up numbers one summer evening

and was never brought back in.

It has already had one new lease of life -

I found it in a junk shop,

and re-caned the seat myself,

but I think it's too far gone now.

What a pity we don't have chair menders anymore.

The Chair Mender by Myles Birket Foster c. 1862

I wonder where the last one was seen.

Chair menders were classed as pedlars.

Section 3 of The Pedlar's Act 1871 defines them thus:

'any hawker, pedlar, petty chapman, tinker, caster of metals,

mender of chairs, or other person who, without any horse,

or other beast of bearing or drawing burden,

travels and trades on foot

and goes from town to town or to other men's house,

carrying or selling or exposing for sale any goods,

wares, merchandise immediately to be delivered,

or selling or offering his skill in handicraft.'

In The Law of Street trading including Markets and Fairs 
by Barry Hough

is this observation by J Hutchinson,

'If the distinction is to be encapsulated in an aphorism,

one might say that a pedlar is one who trades as he travels 

as distinct from one who merely travels to trade.

I do not mean that he must not stop...

the chair mender stops in order to mend chairs:

but the feature which makes him a pedlar 

is that he goes from place to place,

mending a chair here and a chair there:

He comes to the owners of distressed chairs, 

rather than setting up his pitch

and allowing them to come to him.'

And if you think that this fine distinction is of little relevance today

I discovered all this information on a local authority website

where it had been invoked to deal with

prohibited street trading in a shopping centre.

Next week:

How to be a costermonger.

You will need a large neckerchief.

A Wild Day

Looking up casually in the middle of writing a letter, 

Mrs. Miniver saw, through the back window of the drawing-room, 

something that she had never consciously seen before:

the last leaf being blown from a tree.

One moment it was there, on the highest bough of all,

wagging wildly in the wind and the rain.

The next moment it was whirling away across the rooftops,

a forlorn ragged speck.

The line of its flight was the arabesque

at the end of a chapter,

the final scroll under the death-warrant of summer.

...a few days before,

the weather had broken with a spectacular gale.

The old beautiful painted aristocracy of the leaves,

already tottering, had fallen in the night,

overthrown by outward pressure and inward decadence.

What remained were the essential masses of the tree,

bare and sober, with a workaday beauty of their own.

Through them, after a while, the sap would rise

into a new aristocracy, which would flourish until it, too,

had lost its freshness; and then fall.

There is no other way, it seems, in a deciduous world.

True evergreenness does not exist:

the word is only another term for the ability

to overlap the old with the new.


From Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther.

Lighten our darkness

Lightening our darkness here

and in Japan.

Blokeish

Took the car to my favourite tyre shop this morning -

a father and son outfit

with a fund of interesting car-related 

and road-rage stories.

I struck lucky, there was another customer

waiting by his Skoda,

and I was able to listen in on some Blokeish.

'Wossit got ven,

fur'ee, fur'ee two?'

' Fur'ee four that side

Fur'ee free this side.'

'Izat awight?'

'Wossit sposed ter be?'

Small side step shuffle while scrutinising the oily concrete.

Deep frown.

Thrust hands deeper in pockets.

'Me mae said it was ve wishbone.

Ain wo cobble roun lars time.'

Now he's lost me.

Inscrutable pause.

Pace round the car.

Bounce the car expertly one side.

Bounce the car expertly the other side.

'Where you go then?'

'Awover'

Wo? Sarf east?

'Awover.

Centrul.

Aw rahnd.'

Look up at sky.

Look alertly around at passing cars.

Glance uncertainly at me.

Look away quickly.

Take a phone call on hands-free mobile

plugged alien-stylie into ear.

Repeat most of the above

but louder, pacing in small circles.

Meanwhile my flat tyre has been removed

and inspected.

'Oh dear is it a nail?'

'It's not the naail.

It's where it's wearin' on the rim

with it being down.

Can't do anything with this I'm afraid.

Arl check the others.

Back one's legal.

This one's awight.

This one - s'awight bu..

Sympathetic grimace.

Close, not got long.

How rich are you feelin'?

And then I curious thing happens.

I realise that I have started to speak Blokeish too.

'Woss the damage?'

I've go' a drive tomorrow.'

Frown at car.

Look anxiously at bloke.

Suck teeth? No perhaps not.

'Change 'em both I would.' 

(Did he say mate? 

That would be the complete seal of approval.)

'Can I leave it wiv you?

I've gotta go down the dry cleaners.'

'Come far?'

'No jus' the top of the road.'

'Givus the key then.

And it'll be all done and dusted when you come back.'

'Cheers. I'll be back in thirty.'

It's not fluent, but it's not bad.

They say immersion is the best way to learn a foreign language.

Blokeopolis

As I paid up he said ruminatively,

'I look at those tyres and wonder

how many miles they will travel.

They tried to take a Mondeo round the world

without using any ferries.

They took it through a service tunnel 

when the Channel tunnel was being dug

but it got stuck on the ice at the Baring Straits.

They left the engine running all night

but the exhaust pipe still froze and they had to tow it away.'

Gotta dash.

Gotta see a man abaht a dog.

Balmy

It was warm enough to be in the garden in a T-shirt,

where I spotted this stray Nerine

and a single perfect rose.


 Tomorrow it is Guy Fawkes' night -
it should be freezing.
What barmy weather we are having.

Rude awakening

What would you rank as the worst possible noise

that could wake you in the small hours of the morning

in peace time?

A car crash? Heart stopping.

A child crying? Heart sinking.

A fight? Frightening. 

A battering ram? We heard that once next door.

Well last night at 1.15

it was a chain saw and an industrial tree shredder,

 right outside our house, but

we couldn't see which, or more pertinently

whose, tree they were cutting down.

It turned out they had been summoned to do the work

by the police because a dead tree had snapped

and fallen across the road.

Some of it fell towards the house next door

and now blocks their exit.

The remaining trunk is in urgent need of removal.

Judging by the neglectfulness of the landlord

this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.


Postscript. I was wrong. It has been removed, 
but only as far as the front garden.
They butchered a lovely damson for good measure too.
So much easier than taking the ivy off it.

Warthog Day

Not a day I would care to repeat,

filled as it was with the most

teeth-grindingly awful encounters with banks and officialdom,

blank-eyed computer operators,

 processes and procedures,

and above all Queues.

I tried three Post Offices with an urgent package,

and couldn't bring myself to join the first two

as they shuffled wearily towards 'cashier number 3',

who was the sole service provider for 30 people.

I queued incorrectly in a bank

and a department store

and had to start again.

I failed to acquire a vital stamp for vital documents

and was unable to replace a pair of trousers for

a new suit that had been borrowed, ripped and then lost.

Warty pumpkins.

But then things looked up.

Or rather I did,

and I saw house martins flying from the rooftops 

in a shopping precinct

and a giant fiery red sun

magnified in the gap between a church 

and a multi-storey car park.

Then as it sank,

I smelt the chill, damp,

sour apple-scented air

and decided to visit two people 

for whom a day like mine

would have taken a week to accomplish

without the ease of mobility that I have.