Month: March 2007

look at the head on you, and the price of cabbage

sm….

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.

squizzers!
has everybody seen these amazing things. Finn got some for Christmas, but he’s been too stingy to let me bring them into work.
Then the other day in the National trust shop at Nymans Gardens i found a whole stockpile of them! so now i own my very own.
Basically they’re a couple of bullet shaped very strong magnets.
What you do is throw them up in the air, they attract one to the other, then oscillate
the outcome is a beautiful screechy squizzer racket. fantastic.
like lots of whooping stag beetles, clicking their heels together
Another thing we discovered, (accidentally, at home) was that if you accidently bring them near a tv or computer monitor then the whole screen goes tie dye groovy colours.

……… old email …. as no magneto without electro
balloons and hair
I used to do the Christmas post , one year i worked in the sorting office, good fun, burly, hefty hoiking sacks of mail around.
One job was to empty the sack of fresh cold mail into a trolley, neatly fold said sack and put it in a pile.
chain gang, prison routine.
nylon trousers? nylon shoes? nylon hair? for some reason, folding a few bags used to leave me incredibly electrostatically charged.
You could almost imagine the crackle, hairs raised on the back of the neck.
I’d walk over to my friend Tania, then ,’ET phone home’, reach out with a finger, Mr Sistine Chapel South Bank Show God .
Zzzap! huge spark, blue flame crackle. Brilliant!

accchh guess thats the trouble when you have sisters, never can stop the teasing

i’ll bring some milly molly mandy in for you steve

morose reads milly molly mandy
much like monroe reading ullysses

There’s a Milly and a Molly in Ulysses (daughter and mother). Not sure about a Mandy though
….later after some glum posts

thread despair… and Ginger Rogers?

ooh the sea life center is great, it has a marvelous dank clammyness to it.
jack the ripper victorian sewerage meets 1970’s damp brown carpet shabby Colombo
I’m sure it’s cruel keeping the turtles in that tank, but when your in the tunnel of psychedelia and they serenely glide over your head. majestic! Beautiful.
They Fly!

oh and

As I was cycling in this morning I saw some bloke in his car brushing his teeth!
Hands Free?

The other day, I was full pelt along the undercliff path towards Rottingdene, up ahead I saw a man mumbo Jumbo wafting his arms around. I thought aaah a Tai Chi head.
They’re always such calm friendly folk… despite the regulation issue shaven heads.
but this fellow dashed off a couple of spin pirouettes.
Fox trot Fandangos, he was ballroom dancing! alone.
Clasped tight to his bosom an imaginary partner, seaweed for hair… dancing to the swelling crescendo of the white capped, wind whipped waves
(either that or he had a mini nano ipod (other mp3 players are available))
I was tempted to hop off my bike and join him!

Jess…….
would you have been the lady, richard?
Me……..

2 left feet me, so certainly wouldn’t have been leading.
dancing i prefer freestyle waving my arms about, that and simultaneously hopping on 1 leg
jonny said my forum personna was quite camp

Once I was in the Southern Indian city of Madurai, the Hindu temple there is just magnificent, one of the most

pleasantly odd and sacred places on earth.
the whole town is dominated by the sprawl of the building and peered down upon by it’s many towers.
Such towers, these are a gallimaufry of carvings, crammed full with the soap opera pageant of Hindu gods and

goddesses.hello dayglo!
the temple is unusual in that it allows non Hindus to roam through it’s many rooms and various spaces.
Much of it is shrine room after shrine room, all supported by ancient carved stone pillars, the stone here is smudged

to blackness from centuries of exposure to candles and incense.
In every nook and cranny a god.
Each deity flower garlanded,forehead daubed with coloured ash, surrounded by gifts and offerings.
The best bit though is the seemingly random acts of worship.
from somewhere behind an ululation, then you are engulfed and overwhelmed by the surge of people.It’s a gong

banging procession
This time, the worshippers are all clad in black,like a gang of ninja assassins, they have bandannas tied around their

foreheads… their all crying.

Later i was sitting peacefully beside the sacred pool, the bathing ghat, which acts like the town square and public

meeting place. None of that hushed European solemnity here. All is abuzz with natter and gossip.
I was approached by two young men. They were smartly dressed in white shirts and black chino trousers, about 19, your

typical, well educated, friendly students, curious and interested.
one of the things i always liked about Indian trains is that not only would people talk to you, but usually strangers

would strike up conversations between each other.

‘What Religion are you?’, a traditional opener.
I was keen for the company, not really having had a conversation in the previous week!
‘Christian’
next it was ‘And what is your good name?’
‘Richard, and what is yours?’
One of them replied ‘why, I am Lenin’
Vladimir Illych! For a moment this threw me, but then I recalled that the neighbouring state, Kerala, had hada

Communist Government for the previous 20 years, I’d already met a couple of Ivans and kinda imagined the young

Trotsky and Stalin, hair pulling tussle, fighting it out in the Indian playgrounds!
i turned to the other ‘And what is your name?’
he muttered back something along the lines of ‘lenin’
doublet and hose, double doppelgangers!
I said ‘gosh that’s unusual, both of you friends have the same name… and Lenin at that’
one look perplexed, a smile broadened, ‘no! like Ringo’
together they said ‘John, Paul, George and Ringo’
‘Lennon!’

Bolshie Scousers and Bolsheviks!
more famous than Jesus, but possibly not than Shiva
made me chortle. all together now: ‘so you say you want a revolution, whoooah!’

* gallimaufry, i have no idea if i’m using this word correctly, but i have always presumed that here i mean,
galleons of sculptures, a surfeit, a glutton abundance of carved garudas, a satiation, a full Devon creams tea worth
of cathedral gargoyles, you know, when you’ve licked out the cream and jam pots. Just Blossom marvelous

what does anyone make of our local drummer, haphazard slapdash every time you step out the front door
i like Matt’s idea that Indian Tabla players are not allowed to touch the sacred Tabla drum, until they can use their mouths and body to make every noise the drum can make.
I can see them sitting about in a circle, blowing Raspberries, else, ‘how about this one’, making squelch noises with a hand under their armpit
The trouble with drums is that theres utterly no way to practise quietly,
with most things you can work on it in your room, then tantarra the full fanfare of talent!
With drums, every belly flop, every missed beat, every heffalump fumble is awful audible for miles around
………….. from an old email, tom tom, muffle mumbled, but i guess, the gist is there
……………..
…………
When i lived in the caves in Granada (las cuevas de sacremonto), for a while i shared a cave with 2 turkish drummers, wild hair, calm, stern faces, wicked grins.
Making my way home in the evening, you could hear the call of the drums, ahead, above.
Walk on, past the gypsy caves, then through the hole in the wall, which was literally a rubble hole through 14th century crenellated battlements, above it crudely daubed graffiti, ‘ojo ladronnes’, sorta ‘beware thieves’

follow the goat paths, down skirting past the junky valley, up, on, towards the green valley,
always the sinous drum sound, repetitive, sometimes sounding nearer, sometimes further away, snake guile guiding me home.
look to the right, above the city, beyond the valley, across to the Alhambra, toad squatted on the hill, beyond even that the snow clad heights of the Sierra nevada

sunset, fulcrum of the day, drum, the heartbeat of the blood red sun setting in the west, drum, the rhythm backbone of the bone ivory full moon rising in the east

Turn the corner, there they’d be, squatted by the fire, pummeling out the mesmeric rhythm.
These two believed in making their own drums, a laborious process of strength, mingled with blood sacrifice.
The first step was to find the right type of tree, the right size, carefully selected, chopped down, harvested. next, the slow process of gouge, hollowing out the trunk, then slowly hardening and seasoning the wood.
The blood sacrifice, to make the djembe drum live, this was to kill, then flay a goat. kid gloves.
my friend made the grim, universal finger across the throat gesture.
I was very glad not to be around for that!
Once the skin was finally ready, it would be drawn taut, with ropes, across the hollowed trunk.
Brute heaving, theres a real bundled up force, a power in a drum, this which makes it sing so loudly.
Then all the time they weren’t pounding, they’d be heating the drum by the warmth of the camp fire, tightening the ropes, the subtle, supple adjustment of the tension, all to soften, modulate, perfect the sound

boom badda bing!

once i was trekking in the mountains of Slovenia, a beautiful land, alpine meadows, the clonkle tonk of cow bells.
waterfalls and hurtle fearful cataracts.
I was slogging diligently up one steep slope when a yellow butterfly alighted on my hand, groovy, within minutes, several more descended and refused to leave. hands cloaked with butter coloured butterfly gloves!

Obviously i know the scientific reason for they’re rapture, but nonetheless I tell people I ascended the mountain, in a cloud of butterflies, wafted aloft by the wingbeats of brimstones!

Elly and Jen are off soon
I was trying to think of books to recommend to them

all i can think of is ‘the continuum concept’ , by Jean Liedloff? or somebody
i’ve only read a couple of chapters of it, but it was very interesting, more anthropology than child rearing, how children are loved in amazon tribes, it had a great sense of wonder, basically it reckoned, babies should be carried everywhere and integrated into the natural rhythms of life, light and day, warmth and cold

I never read ‘spiritual midwifery’ by ina may gaskin, but it had some brilliant hilarious pictures of beardie hippy hill billies, all the women dressed like little house on the prairie

anyone any other suggestions?

first babes are a lovely miracle, but an obvious shell shock, what with the demise of the extended family and everybody only have friends about their own age, nobody has much a clue about babies nowadays
when we had Finn, i don’t think we even knew which way up to hold him, the gorgeous mewling scrap.
Sibéal was much easier, i employed the male survival tactic of accidentally sleeping through every and anything….

http://www.continuum-concept.org/cc_defined.html