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.

Best in show

Coppered

Gilded

Silvered

Speckled

Splashed

Nibbled

Contrasted

Flamed

Floated

Illuminated

Balanced

Noted

All at The Savill Garden.

Must end soon.

Rave review

In this stupendous work, we scarcely know which to admire most - 

the extensive erudition, or the unwearied, 

we might say super-human, labour of its author.

Dr P. may well exclaim, with the Roman bard,

'Momentum exegi aere perennius.'

Dr Johnson's great Dictionary, in four volumes, 

cost not one tenth the pains and research that

 Dr. P's Pentaglot must have done.

Dr P. will not be rewarded during his life-time, 

for the labour he has undergone

 and the wear and tear of mind and body 

which he must have experienced in the construction of a book,

 that might be considered a hard task for a long life of

 literary drudgery in the study,

 free from every other avocation or pursuit. 

What, then, must have been the destructive toil 

by the midnight lamp, stolen from rest and sleep, 

during the compilation of this 

immense cyclopedia of dry technical terms,

 definitions, and derivations.

 A genuine review for the life's work 

of a distant forbear which it was my privilege to peruse
in the British Library yesterday.

If only I could say,

'Momentum exegi aere perennius.'

about my humble scribblings.

In fact I have no idea what it means as Google translate 
is no help at all,

so unless Mr M. is looking in...
I must just hope that it isn't rude.

Je cherche

Marie Josephine.

I would want to find her,

even if we weren't related.

This sweet portrait,

by Jean Francois Bosio is called

Girl Feeding a Canary.

I have to confess,

it may not be her,

but she had a pet canary

and it escaped from its cage.

She followed it into the vineyard and called to it 

and returned to the house

with the bird perched on her finger

which pleased her people so much that

 they had her portrait taken lifesize

with the bird on her finger.

So it will do for me.

Brain gym

Please excuse the brevity of my posts for a while.

I have been firing up the little grey cells,

unaccustomed as they are 

to the rigours of academe,

in the pursuit of an elusive ancestor;

a fugitive of the French Revolution.

Good advice...

... in ten words,

with no word longer than two letters:

If it is to be,

it is up to me.

A pithy mantra from an essay called,

The Pleasure of Litter-picking by Valerie Grove

in Simple Pleasures,

Little Things that make Life worth Living

produced by The National Trust.

Happy Valley

A walk first taken over thirty years ago,

and revisited today.

A golf course has taken some heathland;

a new housing estate encroaches,

but not all the jewels were plundered.