Month: November 2007

save on plastic

… response to another post

well that’s a fine idea, hopefully most people do that anyway, far too much horrible (yet often useful!) plastic in the world.
My one concern would be that i once read somewhere that it actually took more energy to heat water to wash the ceramic cups, than to produce the plastic? but that’s complete counter logic and obvious nonsense.

I liked the indian solution, which was that you’d get your cup of chai in a disposable terracotta cup. amazing little artefacts, a lump of clay, hastily thrown on a potters wheel.
Once i’d finished i’d do a little foot stamp olé, then in the manner of cossacks by the fireplace with a shot of vodka i’d hurl it down to smithereens against the railway track! such fun.
the good thing being it would crumble back to dust (ashes to ashes, dust to dust), no rubbish! Mix-a-ma-religions, but one day the clay would be scooped up again to make another cup, rather hindii, karmic wheel law of eternal return. Recycling.

… on a rather more prosaic note, has anyone seen that glass, that looks like a nutella pot? you know the one with the love hearts around the rim. It’s always been my fave, so i hope it’s just being hoarded under a desk somewhere and not smashed, none of that keatsian “beaded bubbles winking at the brim”, just supping from crushed love hearts. mmm

it’s raining, it’s pouring

dank and drip dropping out there!
Wwe were in Merida, high in the Andes, it rained for ooh 40 days and 40 nights, just bucketting down. the drainage system couldn’t cope and all the water welled up and out onto the street. It would gush hurtle along through the gutters in a torrent.
Nothing to do, so we’d spend all day playing hands of Bridge in the veggie cafés, drinking Polar Beer.
Folding the paper napkins up into Origami boats, then racing them along in the stream
pell mell but peaceful

dum di dum

I keep on bumping into that busker round town, the latin american looking one, playing classical spanish guitar. just lovely

puts me in mind of the fact that John Williams the classical guitarist, think cavatina, think the deer hunter, the hamlet cigar advert, well him, he was raised by wild and wooly monkeys on the rugged rocks of the cornish coast!
… kinda
his dad set up the Looe Monkey Sanctuary in cornwall, which rescued monkeys, it’s a great place right on the edge of the cliffs
when we visited a few years back the colony was dying out, thankfully people are much kinder to monkeys nowadays.
and 90% of the monkeys left were useless blokes, was much like being amongst programmers

MelanchololoIic! I like to think tho’ of the young John Williams practicing his oh so, so sad spanish guitar, surrounded by a bunch of mournful, lachrymose monkeys


oh and how he looked back in 1978, i do like the t-shirt over a big collared shirt look, i shall be modelling such next week
the lp is seemingly called something ponce!
(what ? who? was ponce de leon? I have no idea)

apologies
i just wikipedia’d juan ponce de leon

he was a very interesting fellow!

‘As a young man he joined the war to conquer Granada, the last Moorish state on the Iberian peninsula. Ponce de León accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. He became the first Governor of Puerto Rico by appointment of the Spanish Crown.’

apparently also
Ponce de León was looking for the waters of Bimini to cure his sexual impotence, when he discovered the fountain of youth and also by accident Florida, the name of which means ‘Flowery’

wow!

Rumination

I love Kemp Town. I stopped to ponder outside a pet shop on my home, it was called ‘Paws Fur Thought’
When i’m older i’m going to get a shop of my own there, just so it can jostle alongside shops, such as, the hairdressers, famously ‘Ba Ba Blacksheep’
and my own fave, the flowershop ‘Aloe Petal’

here be pooches…

knobbly knees

we-e-ll as the days are getting shorter the troosers are getting longer
i’ve finally abandoned my summer garb, shorts are just so last season, doncha know
it’s blooming odd going on a bike tho’, you have to tuck your trouser leg into your socks
does that action alone allow me to be a free mason?
in the words of bartholowmew simpson…’ eat my shorts’

shakespear

…. in response to an ed post
……..

hot date!

well i’d watch the Polanski film version of the play, whatever you may think of him personally, it’s a fierce, brutal, visceral interpertation.
It feels grimly scottish and even survives comparisons with monty python and the holy grail!
when we studied it for o-levels, we got to watch it in class, which was just fab
….and much better than say RE, where Mr Blanchflower, one of those blokes like Michael Eavis, with an upside down head beard thing.. oh and he wore a string vest under his shirt and just dreadful tediously monotone read excerpts from the bible. oh woodworm dull, waste of my life

… back to the film… plus bonus, that bloke from the proffesionals, martin shaw(?) plays banquo and his ghost
once you’ve grasped teh story then you can concentrate more on the text for the stage version and it really is beautiful in places!
famously:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

free food

…. reply to a foraging post
……….

a dismal drizzle lunchtime, still rain like this, then a couple of days sunshine and mushies will be springing up just everywhere!

…. as for Sweet Chestnuts, how about trying Petworth?
slightly beyond our usual stomping ground, but a lovely place
Theres a big grove of truly ancient sweet chestnuts up on the hill,
an ‘old chestnut’, but imagine gathering chestnuts from a tree that was full grown, when the Prince Regent, in his breeches was sprightly about brighton!
them be huge trees, a falstaffian girth, proper gnarly. full of brooding spook faces
obviously not quite the spirit vibe of oaks (ancient oaks are called dodderers!) but fantastic none the less
The sweet chestnut is not actually a british native but was bought over by the Romans, who were rather partial to chestnut paste.
togas and peanut butter and jam sarnies?

… forgot to say my 2 fave tree books are

Jacqueline Memory Paterson – Tree Wisdom: The definitive guidebook to the myth, folklore and healing power of Trees,
a curious tome by a druid, she ought to look like the piccie above
book is full of stories like Odin hanging upside down in the branches of yggdrassil, the world tree for 3 nights, in order to obtain knowledge… and why that tree was an ash

also

Meetings with Remarkable trees – Thomas Pakenham, lots of glossy piccies (tree porn?), he’s a pleasantly fusty raconteur

… and

the word deodrant? is that from the aroma of the bark of the deodar tree?

the other day i took the kids up to Nymans, we found a giant Sequoia, obviously but a titch of a thing compared to the ones in colorado,
but still took five of us, finger tip to finger tip, to encircle it.
face pushed right against it’s soft, warm red spongey bark
It rubs off on you like rust!

instant (pot noodle!) nostalgia

in the evening reading S a story, the evocative pong of the tree still on our jumpers.