Beethoven, don’t roll over just yet

My fiddle teacher wants me to play something at the end of term concert.  Please bear in mind that though I went though a period of intensive practice a few(lot of) years ago I now only play about once a week and that rather randomly.  So I was a trifle disconcerted when she suggested the Beethoven Romance No 2 in G major!

However, nothing ventured and all that.  So we plodded and stumbled my way through it a couple of times.  Then, just out of, um, a vague need to know what the real thing sounds like (I kow the tune but I can never remember how all the very fast, very high twiddly bits ought to sound because I never play them up to speed and when real players do them I don’t recognise all the notes because they make them sound so easy) I looked it up and found this.

Nice isn’t it.

I wonder if I could attach little ladders to my violin for my fingers to run up and down?

It’s snowing.  Just a bit.  And there’s a man outside pulling bits of metal fencing out of the hedge opposite.  He must be getting awfully cold hands.  I have a feeling he’s the man to whom I should be giving the water meter reading but somehow I feel that he might not want that just now.  Anyway, reading the water meter involves emptying a whole cupboard and removing the shelf and then crawling into it with a torch, a notepad and pen and a cobweb removing implement.  Indeed, every year I wonder if this will be the year I just get stuck in there for good. One year, the cat got stuck in there and had to be prodded out backwards with a cat removing implement pushed at her from the cupboard under the sink (and she didn’t even have the sense to read the meter while she was there).  If I get stuck it will be more a question of fastening ropes and haulage implements to my rear end and pulling!

Then there’s the contents of the cupboard.  Kitchen gadgets and useful plastic containers.  Lots and lots and lots of those.  I just can’t bear to throw them away.  Stacks of used soup cartons, and stacks of lids.  Lots of really neat little takeaway boxes and other boxes and sunflower spread boxes and more heaps of lids.  Isn’t it a shame that plastic packaging comes in so many shapes and sizes that the lids aren’t interchangeable?  Every so often I throw out all the ones I can’t find lids for.  Shortly afterwards I find the lids  - for which there are no longer matching pots or boxes.

I may be gone some time.

Wet, grey and mild.

A typical English Winter’s day.  And mood.

Meanwhile, I ask, how can a man lose a pair of trousers?

Half a pair of socks or gloves, yes.  The odd hat, ok.   Maybe even a shirt or two left in the truck or at the job on a hot day.  But a whole pair of trousers????

Here maybe? (hanging up under the tree, quite easy to miss really)

Well if anyone comes across a pair of dark green moleskins, washed up somewhere, please let me know.

Funny because as far as I know, he’s never lost a stamp!   And they are little and multitudinous.

His local stamp club is holding an auction and he foolishly took on the job of making lists of lots.  Not so foolish really because guess who does the scanning and typing and sending off to the bloke who’s co-ordinating them all : )  Though he (Barney) does have to check that each one is correctly described before sending them on.  You know, Belize commemorative of who knows what, $2, olive green/grey/ pink, good condition, £2.  Stuff like that.  I think he likes doing that.  He does seem to have a huge number of not very valuable stamps to auction off himself too.  We checked his list last night.  I just hope lots of people who haven’t already seen his swopsies will need just exactly that Belize stamp* for the gap in their collection.

I’m a bit cross with the stamp club because they nearly offered me the job of using a computer programme to set up the auction catalogue and they were going to pay me £100.  But the resident ex civil servant type decided he wanted to do it first.  Not altogether surprising I suppose.  Have to say, after checking a part of it last night, I would have kept the lines in the printout so you could follow from description to price without needing to use a ruler.  But who am I to say?

Wood.  For the trees.  See?

Not sure what I was meaning there.  Looking out the window and seeing something which didn’t really work when I got up close with the camera.

Ah well.  It’s been that kind of week.   Sort of vague and disordered.

*Actually, I hope not – I made it up.  It would be funny if there really was one of those  : )

Oops! A power cut!

So.  I was in mid comment when the power went and I’d just decided to hit save.  Too slow.

Right.  No comment.  No coffee.  No shower.  No hair sorting.  No heating.

How lucky that my mobile phone has some charge in it and so does my little tiny seashell netbook.  So I am able to witter a bit and to complain.  And to establish that the power cut has affected around 800 properties and should be back within about an hour.  I ought to get out the power-cut-phone I suppose.

Hmm.   One day, maybe I should look into battery powered wireless network connection.  I’ll ask Mr Treasure about that some time.  (note to self – make a list of things to ask Mr Treasure next time I see him)

Oops! Power back.

Oops! Off again.

Oops?

No.  Still off.

That’s interesting.  My seashell battery said it had 1hr 39 minutes when I started it up.  Now it says 2hrs 09mins.

It’s so quiet!  All I can hear is the dog snoring and the birds arguing outside.  What a lot of background noise we live with.

I’d better go and put on some more clothes.

The very good news is that after the power came back, I stopped getting that infuriating message saying one of the devices on this computer had malfunctioned and Windows couldn’t understand it any more.  It was one of my hard drives where last year’s photos are stored so I can look at them if I need to.  Not a disaster since they are also safely stored on another hard drive upstairs but it was annoying.  Anyway, the shock must have woken it up and it’s reappeared.

So, dirty, cold, without coffee but with hair looking as though it had been slept on, I had to set off to look at some rather clever computery music stuff that Barney wants for his birthday and this led to PC world, Currys and Maplins and I had quite a nice afternoon browsing all the nice toys  I might want to get some day.  Though I failed to get Barney’s thing.  One of the nice things about two of these places is that I seem to know more, these days, about what I want than the sales staff do.  On the other hand, that’s one of the irritating things too.  (At Maplins, even the teenage girls at the till are very knowledgeable and extremely helpful though they don’t have as many toys on offer).

Later, our son in law turned up with a cooker.  It’s not that ours is exactly broken, just that it doesn’t seem to do slow cooking any more.  And he had a working one that he was about to put in a skip because its previous owner had replaced it.  In what seemed like a flash, the old cooker was gone and the new one installed (note to self – really, really really must keep this one sort of a bit clean).

It’s been quite an electronic sort of day!

It’s a shame the fire wasn’t lit when the power went off.

Though if it had, I might have missed the brief sunshine in a traffic jam

And a chance to take a photo of this toy house on the way to Reading.

Well it’s been a busy day.

Sleep well.

Jam today – who cares about tomorrow.

So today, I had two teeth removed, (frighteningly easy, the nurse said) I ate one yoghurt, one banana and two bowls of soup (Chicken Noodle with the noodles and chicken removed though later I slurped the noodles down very carefully – woman cannot live by liquid alone).

Then I didn’t go to a fiddle lesson, anticipating huge discomfort when the anesthetic had worn off. I also took my last antibiotic capsule.  This means in theory I can drink again.  In practice I didn’t dare till just now when it seemed that all the anesthetic has gone and my mouth hasn’t started up a rock band all of its own.

Well!  Am I a jammy bugger or what?  We’ll find out tomorrow, no doubt.

Then, me and the dog went out in the dazzlingly bright moonlight.  And we liked it so much, we did it again later in the moonlight and frost!

And earlier, I went out and as I was about to leave, I saw this quite nice sky out back.  Oh, just a quick photo, I thought.  When I looked at it just now I realised I’d caught me a moon!  Quite a big one.

Oh and it snowed a little bit.

You wouldn’t believe how much trial and error (and photoshop) went into a photo with snowflakes falling but without lots of big blobs of it getting in the way.  Not beautiful but nonetheless I’m proud of the result.  There are white snowflakes in the sky!

Definitely jammy.

On the tooth front, apart from the possibility of the drink having its revenge tomorrow morning, there’s more to come.  Me and Mr Dentist discussed and agreed a strategy to save the one I really need and once the euphoria of not having extreme pain and distress today has worn off I suppose I’ll have to go back into acute anxiety/apprehension mode but for now I’m really quite a cheerful bunny.

Sleep very well and have really lovely dreams and wake up ‘freshed in the morning.  Really.  Do.

Every community should have some

Some things without which humankind would not be what it is today:

Fire

alcohol

weapons

drugs

wheels

Some more things – of a different nature?

medicine

agriculture

science

transport

tools

Yet more things – the difference being  in a whole order of magnitude

Earth

Air

Fire

Water

Light

I’m not a scientist or a philosopher so my categories are very rough and ready.  I’m sure a trained thinker would order these things a little differently and more appositely but I liked them to be in fives.  I know there’s a fourth category which some would call God and some would call religion.  I might call it adaptiveness, or seeking understanding or something like that.  And a fifth called curiosity or deduction.  Or something like that.

But let’s not go into metaphysics or the deeper questions.

Just, at times, all the above have been considered essential.  At times, a nuisance.  At other  times, dangerous, even in some cases, wicked.

The only thing that binds all these inconsistencies together is humankind.

~

Oh well, let’s go into deeper questions after all.

I was thinking, many of the things which I and most of my friends and aquaitances, revile and loathe and fear, like violence, cruelty and callousness have been essential survival tools for humankind for millennia.  As the above listed things have been essential resources.  Compassion and imagination has also been an essential tool and resource for the growth of communities during that time and I strongly suspect that our ancestors indulged in these at least as much as we do both for pragmatic and comfort reasons.  Co-operation doesn’t work well without them and one of the things that humans do almost as well as animals, is co-operating.  Another is survival.

Another thing which we share with the rest of life on Earth, is a kind of fatalistic drifting up and down on the tides of bounty and deprivation which the Earth offers us.  As we multiply and are perhaps a little too fruitful, the uncountable billions of other people in the world merge into our perception of those tides.  We’re not really equipped to understand the concept of each one of those billion ‘others’ being an individual.  So the compassionate, imaginative and co-operative skills of many are being gradually eroded by sheer numbers.  And so are the skills of violence, cruelty and fear.  The impulses remain but the ability to use them appropriately becomes more and more diffuse and confused.

I suppose, being brought up with Desmond Morris and Darwin gives our generation a tendency to look at ‘the whole world’ with a degree of  detachment, somewhat dispassionately.   But confronted with an individual, we are still, suddenly awash in a sea of emotions and needs in which our navigational aids have become entangled with each other.

On the other hand, the sudden outburst of communication via the internet and the subsequent sense of  intimate connection to physical strangers in far off communities has given us the opportunity to see another view.  A view of ourselves on the other side of a mirror.  The view that used to tell us that we are we and other is other.  Across the sea the map used to say ‘here be foreigners‘ and they’re not a lot different from dragons.  Now the map says,’ here be you‘ and you look a lot like me.  And you can peer into the mirror looking for things to define the difference between you and the ‘other’ but the mirror only shows you yourself – just as it always did.

And perhaps it’s worth noting that most of us think we’re the only ones who are really trying to make the world a better place – even terrorists, thugs, murderers and all those ‘others’ to whom you and I are merely ‘other’.  A whole lot more of us are trying to keep the world as it was because we think it was better that way.

To go back to that list then.  I missed out communication.  Not intentionally - I just hadn’t thought about it.  Those tools and resources which we’ve had for a long time, together with communication (and probably a few other things I didn’t think of) haven’t made us all that special really.  Like birds, we flock and squabble and peck.  Like Apes, we gather and groom and chatter.  Like Elephants, we plan and remember and protect.  Like dolphins and whales we sing and talk across oceans.  We treat  the stuff on that list (as long we have access to it)  as part of the Earth’s bounty.  And we mistreat most of it too.  And yet, now and then, we use some of those things wisely and now and then we indulge in mighty outbursts of compassion, imagination and co-operation.

So it’s not all good, how we use our tools and resources and I don’t need to go into any detail about that,  but it’s not all bad either.

And since I am not particularly good at thinking, that’s where I give up and return exhaustedly (after so much thought) to the bounty of my own patch of Earth.

Well a borrowed patch from the Grand Onion Canal in December.

Soft food and mild weather

The mild weather seems to have given way to a touch of frost tonight. Still, the way the weather has been over the last few years, I wan’t much surprised today, to hear the sounds of birds quarreling outside the window.  Three blackbirds were having a good old barney and there was a lot of decidedly spiteful chasing and pecking going on.  I imagine, over territory, in preparation for Spring.

And on QI, the other day, we learnt a surprising fact.  It seems that Spring (as indicated by its effects on flora and fauna) moves Northwards up the country at a rate of 1/2 a mile an hour, taking eight weeks* to travel from the Southern tip of England to its furthest Northern extremities (The Orkneys?  Hebrides? One of those anyway).  So when your spring buds and sap start rising in Cornwall, it’ll be eight weeks before the same thing happens on the far Northern coasts.

How about that?  You could walk faster than Spring is sprung : )  Makes me feel quite young and limber! (as long as I sit still while I think about it).

Sadly, I’m back on yoghurt, bananas and soup.  (note to self – get bananas) My abcess has returned.  So now, I have to dole out antibiotics to the dog and me as well as his aspirin mixture.  Since him and me are both on amoxycillin, I need to remember that the big pink ones, twice a day, are for him and the small yellow ones, three times a day, are for me.  Must get the doses right!  Mustn’t give him three and me two.  Must remember to take mine with food.  Mustn’t confuse my breakfast with his snack!  Ooh, this is going to confuse me a lot!  Definitely mustn’t give him my paracetamol or me, his aspirin.

If Barney gets ill we will be in trouble!  If the cat gets ill I shall leave home! (taking my pills with me and leaving everyone elses’ pill behind).

However, the best thing is, the antibiotics, or the aspirin (or both) are doing the dog a power of good.  He’s got quite frisky and is able to get underfoot much faster than he was last week.  Fortunately he’s also faster at getting out from under when he trips me up.

The edge of the woods at twilight.

The open road (though not quite as envisaged by Mr Toad)

*I’m not sure about that – but it seems to work out fairly close if you look up the length of the country.  I would have said it was closer to seven weeks  but maybe Spring gets held up crossing mountains and such.

I really shouldn’t blog before I’ve had some coffee

I need that coffee to wipe the sleep out of my eyes and the grumpy out of my head! (not that I’d waste any coffee on eye-wiping).

It’s a funny thing but as I get (a little bit) older, I seem to be quite unable to get up unless I’ve had a good eight hours sleep. Ridiculous.  I’m sure I used to manage fine on anything from four to fourteen, randomly arranged across an average month.

Oh well. Me and the little nutcase both.

Him and me, trekked to the vet’s today and by the time he’d run round and round the pee post and knotted his lead up thoroughly and poohed on the (pooh?)lawn – such thoughtful people the vets – and been cleared up after and unknotted, we were both wheezing a bit.  Then we went in and his tail vanished, as it does when we go there, and after wondering why the waiting room (so full of enticing smells) made him feel so deeply depressed and anxious, he got the call to enter the surgery and he remembered the whole thing about that special room where once upon a time his toenails, his dignity and his person were ravished by strange people who later sat on him and stuck needles in him and made him feel very very sick.

Well he didn’t, clearly, remember <i>all</i> that because he didn’t, this time, curl up in a small ball under a chair and watch the evil people out of one disney-dog eye, but mooched around nervously, giving the vet mistrustful looks.

Since she was a kind and sensitive person,and was prepared to treat him respectfully, all he got was felt a lot and listened to.  No injections, no ravishing or penetrating of any of his orifices.  As a result he behaved very well and we went home with some antibiotics and a kind of aspirin for dogs which might bring down any temperatures he may have and will probably help with his probably achy joints to boot.  He was pronounced good for his age and while he might, if the antibiotics do no good, need an xray later on, for now, he’s saved.  And hasn’t been too  much alarmed by this latest visit to the den of iniquity.  Even, he accepted a couple of treats and snuffled around after the vet when she went to get his medication.  I think it puzzled him a bit, that we went to the terrible place and nothing terrible happened!

The other thing of note, that I’ve done recently, is to set up a Redbubble account with which I can sell stuff – photos even.  Redbubble displays the photos and offers prints, framed or matted or mounted or on canvas and greeting cards for sale.  They charge the customer a base rate and I, the, um, the other thing,  Oh, the artist of course, add whatever mark-up I feel I can get.  Also they provide a facility to create a website for a more elegant display of the art work.

Should you be at all interested (though you’ve probably seen most of what’s on the website at the moment) there’s a nice new link over on the left somewhere.  Yep!  That works.

Once a week I shall get an email telling me how many visits I’ve had and how many pieces I’ve sold.  Hmm.  Proof, pudding and eating come to mind.  But it all looks quite nice so for the moment I’m pleased.

As I said, it snowed yesterday.  I spent a few minutes in a concerted effort to catch the actual snow, falling.  I’m glad I did because today it’s all gone.

Sleep well.

Fresh out of titles – make up your own?

I’ve stocked up with a bit of extra shopping as they’re promising more snow.

I’ve finished the Elegance of the Hedgehog and it was good.

I’ve made the dog an appointment with the vet.

The Bin men came!!!!

It’s all been a bit tiring.

On Sunday, we went to the Pot Kiln and excitedly shared snowed-in stories with every one else.  This was so exciting that when I said I ought to go home and check the dinner, everyone said “Oh no – it’ll be fine” .  So we stayed a lot longer and then it was quite seriously overdone.  Not burnt, very tasty but quite dry.  So I followed Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s suggestion for leftover pork and fried some chunks of it yesterday (in lots and lots of olive oil) and I have to say this was a very good idea.  As was keeping it warm in a hastily concocted cream and wine sauce.   I am good at hastily concocting sauces.

Of course, last night (after making the vet’s appointment) the little nutcase trotted up the road with enthusiasm and back home with reluctance but few signs of distressed breathing.

I’m pretty sure it’s asthma – I don’t like to consider other possibilities like cancer – I just discovered that because he hasn’t had an annual dental check up (!!!) his insurance is probably invalid. Last time he went to the vet, they politely declined to take his temperature or investigate his mouth in any way in case he responded in kind.

I wonder if the hugely increased incidence of hoovering just lately (log basket leaving a twiggy trail, boots coming in from the snowy outdoors and a lot of visitors just around Christmas and NYE), may have stirred up allergens and caused the increase in dog wheezing.

Anyway, it’s snowing again.  Sort of wetly so I don’t think we’re going to be shut in again which is a relief, though it would have been nice to have had another few fairytale days.

Right.  I’m in the middle of a new venture about which I shall let you know, shortly.  It’s hurting my brain somewhat.  Oh and I must make a note of the password and username quickly before I forget!

Goodnight, sleep tight, I won’t mention bugs in case it makes you think they bite.

News, good bad and forgotten

Well the good news, obviously, is that ’shot is back.  It may have taken me a month or two to notice (Chrome doesn’t support RSS feeds yet) but it’s wonderful to see his blog again.  Also I’ve successfully updated my widget page (WordPress does support RSS feeds : ) which is so clever of me.  (Really, it is).

The bad news is that our dear old idiot Nutcase dog is not very well.  He’s been wheezing a good deal for a while and finding long walks a bit strenuous but last night when I took him up the road, he could barely make it back  and I could see him straining to get his breath.  Perhaps it’s just asthma.  Trip to the vet to be organised.  (He hates these just as much as Mandu did but he’s a good deal more robust than she was and I’m hopeful they will have something to help him)

Other bad news comes regularly about the tragedies in Haiti and I find it hard to enjoy our comfortable life when hearing about the appalling suffering over there.

So I was reading a discussion thread on Flickr about Haiti and came upon a link relating to the war in the Congo.  Forgotten by the media, this war has been going on for many years and as my Flickr friend says

Why do we get no media attention on the war in the Congo, which in terms of implication, duration, intractability, casualties and horror is of a different order of magnitude from what has happened in Haiti?

I can only suppose that the answer is, indeed, cynicism. It’s a tedious struggle somewhere in the rain forest. It’s very hard to get there, it’s full of disease and biting insects, it’s dangerous as hell, far from any modern communications – and it’s a struggle between various ethnic groups nobody but them cares about.

The fact that it is a decade-long genocidal fight for control of strategically vital minerals – including rare earths necessary for our civilizations – seems to be missed by all the world’s press. They say millions of people have died, but who’s counting?

I’m not putting a link to the news item I read because unless you want your heart broken it’s just not good reading.  Look up war in the congo if you think you can bear it.   That’s not a challenge, it’s a warning.

~

Aha!  Some other good news.  And I’ve only read the first chapter. In view of the reviews I just glanced through, it might turn out to be only medium news.  But I’m enjoying it so far.

And then , I’ve just read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and found it good.  Some of the characters lived on Himmel Street which, I gradually became aware, can be translated as ‘Heaven Street’.  Wasn’t there a famous German called Himmel?  There was a composer called  Freidrich Heinrich Himmel.  Freddy Henry Heaven!  How poetic : )

Experimenting with softness.  A soft, mild breeze and soft fluffy clouds.

The little car catching the last light of the day

Blinding sunlight on dirty windows.

Got to go to bed now.  Have a lovely Tuesday : )

Rubbish Trash Garbage Waste Junk Litter – oh and parties

If I needed confirmation that landfill should be reduced we have it outside our front gate.  Also in a black plastic bag by the back door and also in two more bags in the shed.  Oh and one hanging up outside the garage.

I also have a new understanding of the importance of recycling as suggested by two boxes and a bag at the gate plus a heap by the back door and another heap growing on a shelf in the kitchen, of bottles, tins and plastics.

I think, though I’m getting confused, that it’s approaching the end of a third week without  sight of the bin men.

The first week, the snow was new and everyone knew they wouldn’t come.

The second week it was still a bit snowy and although the roads were passable, they had too much backlog to deal with to get round to us.

If they don’t come this week I shall be a bit cross.  Well. very cross actually, like steaming and spitting and cursing like an angry er, well a very angry little thing.

As if that wasn’t enough, Tosca, our little black and white cat, just brought me a muse.  No, a mouse.  A muse would have been interesting and useful.  A mouse just makes me wonder why she can’t dispose of her own rubbish! Now she’s gone out again, no doubt, to look for more mice.

I am now going to look at photos I took last night at the fancy dress party.  Several of the photos were taken by other people, either trying out the camera or just for fun because I took one of them.  There was a tendency for people to look suddenly thoughtful once they’d got it in their hands and you could see them imagining themselves out there at the frontline ‘getting the shot’.   Or more likely at the touchline.  Or just behind the goal. Then the roar of the crowd faded and they just took photos of me  Not half bad either.

I hope you’re impressed by my home made plaits

Abandoned Indian headgear

Abandoned cowboy builder’s hammer

Three cowboys.  Spot the builder.

Large, wet, disgruntled cat abandoned in the rain.  He told me exactly what he thought about parties while I was having a ciggie outside.

Now I have to do something or other.  I wonder what – ah!  Put the rubbish out!

Goodnight.