What goes up...

is often a lot of hot air. In my mind I soar like an eagle, but my friends say I waddle like a duck.

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Location: No Man's Land, Disputed Ground

Flights of Fancy on the Winds of Whimsy

Thursday, May 31, 2007

F-f-f-f-fortitude

And so the month of May slides to a soggy end; it began with a promise of rain thirty one days ago, made good on that promise in between, and finished with the smugness of a job well done, a wet morning and overcast sky.

We have had the fires going for almost half of the month now. The small Rayburn stove, (alas, not a proper range, just a small enclosed fire with a back boiler,) has to be lit each day just to provide hot water for the bath, but for several days and nights I have also switched the central heating pump on. Little petal feels the cold almost as much as the tabby cat, who we found snuggled into bed between us a few mornings ago when the outside temperature had plummeted to less than seven degrees.

The office fire, an open hearth fire for burning wood and junk mail, has also been working hard. Visitors to the station come in and exclaim how much they like real fires. Indeed, but would they love the dust and ash and labour involved in carrying in the fuel and sweeping out the remains? I suspect not.

The Rayburn emits a very fine ash that rises in the draughts and hangs from cobwebs and collects on any high surface around the bedroom. I worry about what it is doing to our lungs. Readers of this blog who have been here from the outset will remember my first posts were about the joys of early-morning coughs. As someone who smoked almost non-stop for more than half my life I can accept it as a normal way to start the day, but little petal is an asthmatic who can't abide tobacco smoke.

Every now and then I have to climb up a ladder lugging Henry Vacuum with me, and try to remove this awful black dust, and it is of course typical that the phone should ring just as I have managed to wedge myself into position and switch on the vacuum. And it is also just typical that after I have leapt down and managed to get to the phone, hoping it will be a sale of car-parts, it should instead be a daughter asking if her mum is there, and when told that she isn't, saying that it doesn't matter. If it doesn't matter, little petal's little petal, don't make the call.

"You have reached the answering service for little petal. I'm sorry she's not here to take your call, and that the tape is now too full for you to leave a message. Do please f-f-f-f-f, oh, phone some other time."

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Monday, May 28, 2007

Sunday Lunch, Unplugged

The rain that they had threatened came. Tabby cat sensed its arrival and wailed piteously in the bathroom at a few minutes past six in the morning, a wail that meant if she wasn't allowed outside soon she would use the bathmat. I got up, opened the door for her, (for some reason she will come into the house through the cat flap, but not go out through it), and noticed a fine rain had just begun to fall. I hung around for long enough to check that the water butt was empty, waiting to be topped up, and then Tabby cat was back at the door. I let her in and went back to bed.

When I got up again three hours later, the rain was falling harder. I risked a slight soaking to check on the water butt and found it overflowing. Half the length of my 24 paces drains into it, so now I know what the refill time is, and how many extra water butts I would need to buy to ensure that not a drop of rainwater is allowed to go to waste down the drains. More than I could afford.

We drove up to Shaftesbury to have lunch with some friends in a restaurant at the top of Gold Hill. Gold Hill, for those of you who don't know, is the very quaint and unbelievably steep hill on which the bread adverts were filmed, where a Yorkshire lad pushes his bicycle up the hill to the strains of a colliery brass band. Only they couldn't find anywhere in Yorkshire that either had the cobbled hill or a working colliery, so they came down South instead. The restaurant looked dark and closed as we trod carefully down the slippery slopes around the side to the front door.

Inside, we found our friends, and no lights. There was a power cut affecting one, some, or all of the properties in Shaftesbury. We would be restricted to salads and cold drinks. But no matter, for this restaurant can produced wondrous food no matter what the restrictions. We began to talk, little petal to male friend about the web-site she is building for him, and myself to female friend about pedal-power.

"I saw you the other evening near Pytt House club," I said, "but I don't think you recognised me. I was on my normal bike. I was going to flash you, but realised how difficult it is on a bicycle." She accepted the ambiguity gracefully. She and he both cycle terrific amounts, far more than I do at the moment. He drives each morning into the outskirts of London and cycles the remainder of the way into the college where he works, she will think nothing of riding up places like Bullbarrow Down that I at the moment would struggle to even raise my head to look at, never mind half-surmount. They are both older than I, but much fitter. To celebrate, they have bought a motor-home to drive their bicycles out to fresher pastures.

The waitress flitted from the gloom ready for our orders. Her metal earrings danced and twisted and shone little rays of light around her neck as we studied our menus in the half-light. I asked her if she would twirl again for me so I could watch the light a second time. She did so, and was also nice enough to let me change my mind, cancelling the prawn component of the prawn and avocado salad when I heard her tell my friends that there was some special smoked salmon in that day. I played my substitution card and brought on the fish. 'Is it called Billy?' I asked, but they were none of them Viz readers, apart from the Tynemaiden, who pointedly ignores all my whimsical witterings.

We had our salads, wonderful simple food that excelled because of the selection, preparation and presentation, without any units of carbon-derived energy having been used to transfer them from the larder to the table. I must learn some of the skills involved. The day before yesterday I ate the first produce from our 'garden', if you can call 24 yards long by 2 point 2 yards wide of industrial specification concrete a garden. Little petal had grown a lettuce in a pot as a proof-of-concept exercise, but then declined to eat it, on the grounds that it would probably taste bitter as it had just started to bolt. I picked a handful of dandelion leaves growing from a convenient crack, (and that is at least one thing I'm not too short of), chopped up some garlic and fresh ginger, and dashed a little Sushi vinegar over the top of them as a dressing. 'Delicious,' I told her. She wrinkled her face. That garlic must be strong, I thought.

I manfully resisted the sweet menu, explaining to them that my dietary concept was to eat minimally and simply, and restrict myself to half of what I would instinctively eat. Part of my problem is the convenient size of tins and packets. For example, I like red kidney beans, and for years I have opened the normal sized can, poured away and rinsed off the sugary solution they are packed in, and cooked the beans. I realised a few months ago, in my calorie counting phase, that I was effectively eating two peoples' food. That was not a problem years ago when I was a fit, manic, and physically active person. But now, when all I have left is the manic part, I have to think before simply emptying the can.

But when the ice creams arrived, my resolve flickered out like the electricity had done some time earlier, and I called the waitress back and asked her for 'whatever he's having.' Well, I could justify it. When I got home, I had to go out and saw wood for a while so that little petal could sit inside and be warm in the foul and squally weather that had finally lived up to the threats, so I probably burnt up all the ice-cream in warming myself up as well.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007

Waiting for the rain

They are threatening me with rain this weekend. I am sitting out in the last of the daylight on the platform, in my bathrobe and slippers, safe in the knowledge that no-one overlooks me, and that someone on a train going past at over sixty miles per hour is not going to see enough to complain about. I am cooling off after my evening bath. Either side of me lies the result of my labours this past week; nothing. No clutter, no junk, no obstacle course or invitation to play hopscotch from one bare space to the next. I now have twenty-four paces of uncluttered stones to walk along. All it needs is some rain to wash it clean.

They have been threatening me with rain since the start of this week, when I looked at the five-day forecast and saw three days of sun, one of mixed weather, and a very black-looking picture for Friday. As Friday approached the black picture shuffled away, wandering across the midnight boundary into Saturday. Friday dawned bright and sunny, I unfolded my solar panels and pointed them upwards.

The clouds rolled over after lunch and played briefly at looking dark and menacing, but the sun still shone through them, and I decided to take a bike ride anyway. The threatened rain stayed back for the hour that I was out. I came back and put the bike away in the small bicycle shed I have built for it at one end of the platform. A railway station should always have a bike shed, it isn't complete without it. I sat inside at the computer and fiddled for half an hour. I knew I should be getting down to work, transcribing more of the thirty hours of so of tapes I recorded all those years ago, but outside, the clear light of the evening beckoned.

I put on my socks and track shoes, picked up the waist bag with the poncho and water bottles, took the baby telescopic fishing rod I had bought in Japan years ago and never used, and went out for a walk to see what fish there might be in the River Sem. I knew there would be none, I just knew it, but still I went to try my luck.

River is too grand a term for the twisting little channel that winds between the trees, so narrow that you can often leap from one bank to the other, so shallow in some spots that you can walk across it on the tops of the stones, so quiet that the wind in the treetops often drowns out the ripple of the water. I dangled the spinner through dark pools under trees, towed it up placid little runs of no more than eight feet, and jigged it in and out of the deep patches where the sharp curves had scoured into the steep banks to leave earth cliffs all of six feet high. Nothing tugged at the hook except for weeds and twigs. But I was expecting nothing, I just enjoyed the activity. It started to rain very lightly on me when I was at the far end of my walk, but by the time I had put on my poncho and got back inside the friendly trees it had stopped.







'He called me the Wild Rose, though my name was Eliza Day...'

The wild roses are just coming out. I don't know if they're early or late. I feel like Sam Pearce saying that, the ghostly soldier who haunted the platform of the derelict station Tamasin Bridge, in the Sapphire and Steel series I watched so avidly ten years ago. I still don't know if I saw it through to the end. The last episode I recorded finished with the station platform full of queuing spirits. I set the video to record it at the same time next week, and found something else on instead. It might have been a cliff-hanger ending, or the satellite channel may have got bored showing it and decided to show something completely different. Analogue satellite was a bit like that. I don't mind. I have never seen the end of my favourite film either. I recorded Andre Tarkov's Stalker years ago, not realising that with the adverts it would run to more than three hours total time, and I had only put a three-hour tape in the recorder. My copy finishes where the protagonist has returned from the zone and is walking along past the yellow polluted pools with his daughter, Monkey, riding piggy-back on his shoulders. What happened next? I may never know.

But Sam Pearce would have known the order in which the flowers would appear, and he would have known if they were ahead of their time or behind it. I still want to know how the series should have ended. Would the spirits of the untimely-killed have negotiated terms to allow them back amongst the living? I would offer them some time back at my station if they wished, now that the platform is clear again. Twenty-four paces, that's just over seventy feet. A man can get fit pacing that distance several times an hour. But they are threatening me with rain this weekend, and so I am going to have to stare out of the window at my twenty-four paces of clean wet stones.

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Friday, May 25, 2007

Jettison the ballast

My tidy-up tasks continue to eclipse even Hercules' efforts; yesterday I tackled the mount of old metal and glass fibre and fence poles that covered the old compost bin from ten years ago; that's going to be ripe stuff when I finally dig it out of there.

It was a painful process, I had to throw things away. There was room to redistribute everything, but I have come to realise recently that I can only look after a finite number of things, and so I dragged three old bicycles to the boot of the Tynemaiden's car. I say dragged, it was an awful time. They clung to anything they could, desperate to avoid being bundled roughly into the back of the Renault. One, in particular, was a bike that we had called the Phoenix, because it was an old frame that I had found over 23 years ago and had put back together with parts from other bicycles. But normal bikes are no longer in fashion, they have to have thumb-shifters and big knobbly tyres and more gears than spokes nowadays.

We arrived at the dump, and once again the bikes fought to avoid being lifted out of the car and carried the few feet up the steps to the scrap metal bin. But I did it. I almost put the Phoenix to one side, but it too went in, destined for a blast furnace somewhere. Maybe in China. It would be nice for it to see a bit more of the world.

As usual, I didn't leave the dump empty-handed. At the foot of the bins was a small bench, waiting for a kind-hearted soul to say 'you're too good to be thrown away.' I was that soul. I paid the yard man his preservation fee, and put the bench in the space where the bikes had been.

Back home, we sat it on the platform. It will want some repairs to stop it wobbling from side to side; it is yet another example of work where triangulation is assumed will just happen. Maybe re-tightening all the screws will do for a while, but I suspect the previous owner had already tried that, so I shall look at dowels, or possibly notching in some of the transverse bars to create proper wood joints.



But I didn't dream last night. Is this a punishment for burying the Phoenix?

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A scientific basis for faith

It seems a female hammerhead shark in a zoo gave birth without having had contact with a male. DNA tests show the young shark has no paternal DNA. Virgin birth seems possible in some species of fish.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6681793.stm

So does this mean Jesus was a shark?

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Dehydration

"Those who cannot learn from History are condemned to repeat it", wrote George Santayana. Remembering the past is only half the key, however. Understanding it is crucial.

I went fishing for grayling years ago, in a little river called the Shreen which runs between Gillingham and Mere. The fly fisherman were a little annoyed by the grayling, which they felt were competing too successfully with the trout for food. I took my telescopic rod and a selection of spinners, put on rubber boots, heavy cord trousers, and a thick black jacket for protection against brambles and thorn-bushes, and started off upstream. I passed by the shallow stretches, since I could see the trout in them, and there was no sign of a different shape, longer, scaled, and with a dorsal fin three times the length of other fish. I came to a stretch where the river was so narrow you could jump across it, and although it was four feet deep, it was so clear you could see the insect life living on the weeds at the bottom. I flicked a spinner into some of the darker pools and got one trout, which I put back again, I wasn't interested in them that day. I crawled through heavy tangled growth for several hundred yards to try each pool where the branches allowed a rod to be poked over the water, with no better result than another trout.

Finally, I came to a more open section, where the tangle of grasses and wild parsley along the bank was chest high, and found a deep pool just below a large solitary tree, where in in the bottom of the water I could see four fish, totally unlike trout, holding position against the slow current. I towed a spinner over the opposite side of the pool. They didn't move. I tried it again, this time just over their heads. They still ignored it. After a few minutes I had to admit that they were not going to chase some bright glittering toy for the fun of it, as a trout would. I looked around me for something in the nearby bushes, a spider or a bug or some larvae with which to try and tempt them. There was nothing. I had to tramp nearly a quarter of a mile to the first field where there had been cattle recently, and rake through some large cowpats with a stick to get half a dozen leathery cow-fly grubs. I put one of those on a small hook, and drifted it down through the clear water, no float or shot, and was rewarded by the largest fish taking it. I had caught my grayling. I wrapped in some dock leaves and walked back to the car, only a couple of miles away, sweating profusely inside my thorn-proof jacket as I baked in the afternoon sun.

I ate the fish soon after I got back to my sister's house, where I was living for a few months while I completed a contract at Southampton. Soon after finishing the meal, I began to experience blinding headaches, and found my limbs heavy and painful if I stayed immobile for too long. They immediately suspected the fish, and were going to call the doctor, but I felt that to be premature. I lay down for a while, but felt worse, and when I got up and moved around I felt, maybe not better, but not quite so bad. I drank some coffee and almost immediately felt the pains subside. I decided that I had gone for too long without coffee that day and was experiencing a mild form of cold-turkey.

In fact, I was simply dehydrated, and had made the mistake of eating food before I began putting the missing fluid back in. But in my superstitious mind I believed it was because I had killed a fish that day but hadn't thanked the river for it, and ever since then I have apologised to the rivers or to the seas whenever I have killed one of their creatures.

Last week I began to experience aches and pains during the day. I have been on a diet for quite a while now. Nothing clever or complicated, simply restricting what I eat to about 1000 calories below my estimated daily requirement. Two pounds of fat equals 7000 calories, simple division by 7 gives the daily reduction necessary. My little petal is still in a huff because I am doing things my way and not letting her feed me a calculated nutritional diet based on her course she has recently completed. But I managed to lose a stone and a half last year on my own, and was convinced I could lose two pounds a week by eating carefully and being physically active. The aches, however, worried me, because I did accept that my little petal could be right, and I might be depriving myself not only of enough intake, but also of vital vitamins and minerals.

I dangled my question 'aches and pains while on a diet' into the sea of google, and got several pages that suggested eating too little could result in you not only not losing weight, but actually storing it up as the body went into a 'prepare for famine' mode. One site even offered a suggestion that 800 calories less than the estimated daily intake could be a mistake, and that 500 was a safer and more sensible figure. Eat more, to lose weight. Can you not see how appealing that might be to someone who loves food like I do? It could almost be the subject line in a spam message. 'Eat our specially-formulated bars and lose weight while you sleep, no exercise needed'. I did actually wander into the kitchen and look longingly at the loaf of spelt bread I had bought in Frome market. I even touched it and stroked the bread knife against it. But then, I noticed that the aching feeling in my arms and lower back which had been worrying me didn't seem so bad after getting up and walking through to the kitchen. I had a cup of liquorice tea instead, and walked around outside when the rain stopped briefly. That's when I remembered the episode of the grayling's revenge.

Reliving that day triggered a far more recent memory from last year when I was struggling to lose weight despite cycling for an hour, four evenings a week, and limiting what I ate to half of what I would have eaten. I broke the plateau mode then by going on a low carbohydrate diet for a while, but also by drinking a lot more water throughout the day. One of the sites that had popped up in response to my google enquiry 'eating less but still not losing weight' suggested that you need to drink a lot more water when trying to burn up stored fat, because the liver and kidneys need it in order to function properly. I looked back through the google hits for my recent question, and found that, several hits on from the 'eat more to lose weight' pages, were one or two pages suggesting that you need a lot of water in order to help the body turn fat into fuel. Oh, cynical me, who could have made sure the 'eat more' pages came up first in the search, I wonder?

Losing weight is really quite a simple concept; turn your stored fat into energy. The tricky part is making that process happen regularly enough. I have a suspicion that the body sometimes forgets to do something, or learns new habits such as storing fat instead of using it. For the past few weeks I have been fretting, because although I got my weight down from 13 stone 5 pounds to 13 stone exactly in the first three weeks of April, I then stayed resolutely at that figure, despite cycling regularly, sawing lots of old wood to burn on the boiler, and generally doing much more than simply sitting at a computer all day long. Now, I realise, I had forgotten the important lesson I learned last year, drink lots of water.

Today, a week after that lesson in the importance of regularly reviewing the past, I have reached the figure of 12 stone 11 pounds. It is a stable weight, because I have seen it for three successive days now, and I know that once more I have broken the plateau. It is not a new low for me, because I recorded this very weight at the end of September last year, after my trip to Kent to cycle around the remains of the old coalfields looking for the ghost of the East Kent Railway. But then, the autumn came, I stopped cycling in the evenings because of road-safety fears, and instead spent my evening time in front of a laptop trying to recreate the East Kent Railway in the Microsoft Train Simulator program. Despite my walking in the dark episodes (What goes up...: Back in the darkness again), my weight crept back up again, and by Christmas I had once more reached 13 stone 7 pounds.

Still, I have learned my lesson, yet again, and will go forwards knowing that water is the key to life. Nice, pure, sparkling water. Or not, as in the case of the hard, bitter-smelling, appliance-scaling stuff that comes from our tap and is really only fit for flushing down the toilet. I won't even water the house-plants with it now, the Avocado plant and Maidenhair fern in the kitchen both developed brown leaves after being fed tap-water for a few weeks. It's good business for the water companies, and just as good a business for the companies who sell filtration products. The whole civilised world seems to me to be nothing but a large market for corporate ambition. How long before we're all buying air-filters to reduce pollens and particulates inside our homes?

Whatever happened to quality of life? (Nothing actually, it's still there, as I found out last weekend, you just can't get it delivered to the door after buying it on ebay. You have to go get it.)

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Sunday, May 20, 2007

Casting about for inspiration

I went fishing with my youngest brother. I haven't fished for nearly 15 years now, and had to hunt around to see if I still had rods. I did, luckily, there was a glass-fibre fly rod that I use to dangle a cork from to tease the cats, and my old telescopic fishing rod I took round Scandinavia. I decided to get that mended and do some spinning.

"No spinning allowed,' said brother, ' this is a purist's water."
What could that mean, I asked?
Fly-fishing.
Oh well, at least I had a fly rod, could I use a little fly-spoon on it?
No, purists fish dry-fly, upstream.
Uh-oh. Although I did have a fly rod, and amazingly, a fly-reel, with even more amazingly some line on it, I was sure I wasn't going to be able to flip a fly across the room, let alone 30 feet upstream in an overgrown and reeded river. I had a week to practice, a week during which the sun shone briefly for no more than two hours on two days, and the wind never dropped below blustery. I practiced dangling corks in the wind to amuse the cats, and resigned myself to busking when the day came.

So, today arrived, almost cloudless and windless, and I arrived beside the river, nearly clueless and useless.



Looks too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, it was. The banks were six feet high, with an electric fence barely a foot away from the precipitous edge. I was able to practice casting, but knew that if I hooked anything more than a minnow, I was going to have to jump into the water to get it into my small fold-away landing net. Purists don't dangle their fish from the rod and swing it up through the air to land in the grass and the cowpats. Fortunately, I didn't catch anything in that pool, and learned that on this stretch of the river, the policy was catch and release. That means letting them go, to those of you without a purist translator plugin to your google toolbar.

My brother had given me a small selection of flies, a mayfly, an emerging mayfly, a mayfly nymph, and, because he thought the fish might be interested in other flies as well, an Olive, and an Adams. "Is it Morticia or Gomez?' I asked, as if it would make a difference. I discovered that I could still thread the line through the tiny eye of the hook and tie a knot, but it took me a bit longer than I remembered in the past, mainly because of all the fumbling around for reading glasses. My brother produced a pair of pliers and crimped closed the barbs in the hooks. Purists don't like using barbed hooks. Damn masochists.



Downstream from this pool, the river turned into a more typical fast-running weeded up river. I longed to send a pair of flies downstream attached to a bubble float as I had been taught to do in Finland, but of course, there was always the risk of the purist-inspector popping up out of the reeds with scuba gear and a waterproof notebook to fine me senseless.



And we weren't the only ones enjoying a day out in the meadows. Despite what people think, swans do not scare the fish away. They do irritate anglers, however, but that just shows how single-minded you have to be if you insist on catching something no matter what it takes. A few years ago I would have fretted and cursed at the interruption, but now I just get the camera out and wait.



Whilst I was blundering through the chest high mass of stinging nettles and other less aggressive plants, I came upon this.



And the air was full of these.



It is almost impossible to film them in flight, they move so quickly and unpredictably. They have four wings, not two.



And they were obviously up to something that day.



This is the reason that we were down there, a Mayfly, here in the last stages of its life, having laid the eggs somewhere and managed to not be eaten by a fish during the process, it will soon die and fall back to the surface of the water, usually to be eaten by a fish. I wonder what Mayflies think of purist fisherman who put the trout back.

Sadly that day there were no fish around. Well, there were some chub lazing under a tree close to where I took the shot of the swans, but the coarse fishing season hasn't started yet. I worked hard all morning, and was finally able to get a fly out into the middle of the stream. I discovered, after one or two back-cast problems, that the electric fence wasn't turned on, which simplified my task of untangling the fly from it each time I let the line droop too far behind me. I lost Morticia or Gomez, I still didn't know which one, to an annoying tree that just wouldn't keep out of my way in that oh-so-big pool, and had already claimed my mayfly.

I moved further down the river, trying to dap a nymph over the edge of a particularly overgrown bank, and had a brief glimpse of a bronze flash as something rushed up, checked it out, and rushed off again, probably laughing.



After another back-cast problem I discovered I was wrong about the electric fence, it was turned on, it had just been in the resting phase the half-dozen other times I had untangled flies from it. Swearing and cursing from the jolt, I flailed my bare arms through a patch of stinging nettles. I found this in amongst the dock leaves that I went to for help.

Later in the day there was a brief hint of luck for both of us in some pools further down the river as something snapped at the flies half a dozen or so times before losing interest, far too quickly for me to strike and hook. A small grayling, my brother thought, and confirmed it in the last few minutes of the dusk by catching one, five inches long. Apart from being too small to take, it was again a coarse fish and out of season. And anyway, purists don't kill the fish they catch, they put them back again. I suppose I accept that now, there are just too many fisherman for the numbers of wild fish in the rivers.

But don't think I didn't enjoy myself. I did. I walked miles along the banks and through the meadows, without having to rush to be somewhere at a specific time. I could once again reach for and clutch the insubstantial strand of a nylon line, and feel the satisfying swish of a rod through the air. The joy of being out in the open air beside a sweet-smelling and un-polluted river more than made up for the lack of fish, I was able to finally get some good shots of the blue dragonflies which had eluded me all of last year, and I had almost forgotten the drudgery of checking emails and deleting masses of spam.



The end of a perfect day

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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Super Superstition

Since I got the old bike out two weeks ago, it has rained almost every day. I've managed a few rides of twenty or thirty minutes in between bouts of heavy rain and forceful winds, but I've had to accept drizzle in the face and swept-back hair as inevitable.

Since I bought a solar panel for charging batteries a week ago, the sun hasn't really shone. I've dashed outside and set it up when brief tantalising rays appeared, only to dash outside again and bring it all back in when long infuriating bouts of rain followed. It has been wet and cold and windy, and the fire has been burning non-stop for more than a week.

So today, I tried an experiment. I went outside with a hand saw and cut up enough wood to last us three days in the stove. There was distant thunder as I sawed up the first couple of fence posts. My old opponent the wind blew playfully along the front of the house in defiance to the direction the clouds above were moving in, as if to let me know I was not forgotten, not too insignificant to be toyed with if it felt like it. It opened and closed the unlatched front door as if to invite me back inside, to concede defeat and run for the warmth and shelter. I sawed up another couple of old fence posts. Rays of sun appeared. I dismantled and turned into firewood an old door that has been annoying me for years. The sun shone brightly through the clouds that scudded faster across the blue skies.

I took three bags of firewood into the house, and took the solar panels and batteries outside into the sun. They are still out there, soaking up the free energy. I heard no more of the thunderous mutterings, and felt no more spatters of rain.

I think I am going to pay less regard to the scientific methods I have used these past few years, and go and speak to the butterflies instead, to see what they can tell me about the wind.

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Monday, May 14, 2007

Love in a desolate spot

The week the king was dead and buried - part two

It's been cold, this last week. The day I took my mother out to the post office was the last clear day we've had. It was also the last day I posted anything. Could there be a connection? I put off lighting the fires for a while, but as the rain set in the Tabby cat started dropping hints that it was cold.



I had another quick look through the retro pile, and this caught my eye almost immediately.



I always thought that in-flight refueling was developed after the war to help the jet fighters stay aloft long enough to have a chance of intercepting angels at 15,000 feet, but here it is, in 1939, announced as a breakthrough for mail delivery to America to help deal with the increasing amount of letters and parcels. The flying boat which carried the mails across the Atlantic needed more fuel for the trip than it could take off with. The solution was for the flying boat to load up the mails and as much fuel as it could take off with, then rendezvous with a converted bomber for a top-up. The flying boat let out a line with a weight on the end, which the tanker grappled, (hopefully not with the propellers,) and attached a fuel line to. The flying boat then hauled in the line, connected it to the tanks and filled up, then departed for the big place over the other side of the pond. The aircraft illustrated, for the anoraks amongst you, are an Imperial Airways C class flying boat, and a converted Handley Page Harrow bomber.

And the location is, I am fairly certain, the Solent, although I am wondering if it might not be Poole Harbour.

Three years and six months earlier, the Empire was in shock following the (not unexpected) death of the reigning monarch. The papers, not surprisingly, were full of it. It even managed to affect the football. 13 pages in, and we read that:

"Following hours of dilemma in sporting circles, uncertainty was set at rest last night by the Football Association's announcement that all matches in the FA Cup, fourth round, will be played on Saturday as arranged."

The problem, it seems, was that if it were to be left to the clubs themselves to decide whether to play or not, there was no guidance to say what should happen if one of the two teams set to play decided that they would rather honour the dead monarch. Should the other team gain a victory by default? Should the team deciding to cancel their appearance to show respect for the King be given points? Play on, they said, and to hell with the icebergs.

I have been scanning the papers from that week looking for anything that didn't directly involve the dead monarch, which in the Daily Mirror, January 22nd, one day after the death of the king, amounted to about 5% of the paper, not counting the adverts.

WOMEN DEFY WOLVES

British Drivers' Risks in Great Car Rally.


A report on the Monte Carlo Rally, due to start that day, mentions that previous contestant have had to contend with huge wolves lying in wait for cars at the Dragomans Pass and chasing them out of the forests on to the plains. (Who said eco-warriors were new?)

Lining up to take on the vulpine, and other challenges, were Miss Joan Richmond (Triumph), Miss M. Anderson (Riley), Miss J. Astbury (Singer), and Mrs, A. Gordon Holmes (Standard).

Of the 105 entries, Great Britain ranked first with thirty-three, and it was stated as also significant that of the twenty-two cars in the small-car class (under 1,500 c.c.) fourteen were of British make. We used to make cars, you know.

And so to the final story that caught my eye, this time with no connection at all to the main events of that week, apart from death. As last time, I have blanked out certain of the names.

TRAGIC ROMANCE IN A MENTAL HOME

Lovers Who Escaped Found Dead on Hillside


A secret romance between two inmates of a mental home, which ended in their flight for freedom and their death will be revealed at a Bodmin inquest tomorrow.

Seven months ago, -------- --------- of St. Blazey, Cornwall, and -------------- ------------ of Lanivet, Cornwall, decided to escape from Bodmin Mental Hospital. They had met in the institution. Friends believed that they fell in love.

Last July they disappeared, and the authorities guessed they had run away together in the hope of finding happiness. Nothing more was heard of them until this week.

Then Mr. Albert Truan, a beater, was out with a shoot at Lanhydrock, the seat of Viscount Clifden, near Bodmin. Hidden beneath a bush on the hillside he discovered the bodies of a man and woman. From scraps of clothing and personal articles the remains were identified today as those of the runaway lovers.

Warders at the mental home were able to tell the Bodmin coroner's office that --------- and ----------- had formed a deep attachment in the home. At every social gathering they were together, and at dances they were always partnered.


The Sopwith Camel is fascinated by death in lonely spots, Mallory and Irvine on Everest,somewhere on the upper slopes slowly bleaching in the sun and the wind, Maurice Wilson lower down refusing to stay buried despite two attempts several years apart to hide his bones from the light of day, Boardman and Tasker many years later repeating Mallory and Irvine's disappearance even to the detail of one body of the pair being subsequently discovered but the other remaining steadfastly lost; and now these two, who preferred a short spell of exposure in the open air to a lingering confinement in the bricks and rules of an institution.

I think that this world needs more people who are prepared to try and live outside the boxes that the bureaucrats would have us live in. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is nearly always death. Or ridicule. Or not having an internet connection.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Superstition in the spring

My mother phoned me up this morning, asking me if I could go and get her some live yogurt and a few other things. She has just finished a course of antibiotics, and they tend to empty the gut of essential bacteria. I was meant to be going across anyway to take her a Dysentia that the Tynemaiden had promised her, but when I went to dig it out from the mass of other plants in which it had self-seeded, I felt an ominous crack and realised I had snapped it off halfway down its root-system. So I stuck it in some compost in a pot anyway, zipped around the supermarket, and drove over to her cottage. She liked the Dysentia, and I do really hope that it takes; I have this horror that if I have given her a plant that dies she too will take a turn for the worse.

Why do I have this superstitious streak in me? I am an engineer, I've looked after engine rooms in ships, and computers; I've rebuilt derelict cars, and still I have the same sort of mentality that led South Sea Islanders to lay out symbols on the ground to try and attract planes to land. To illustrate just how bizarre my obsessions can be; I have been reading my diaries of a cycle trip around Scandinavia and the horrendous weather I encountered as I rode through Holland, Germany and Denmark. The weather now, outside, has changed to violent gusts of wind and rain which echo that trip. Have I created that local weather just by reading about myself 21 years ago? Do I create the world around me just from willpower and whim? Should I section myself for the good of humanity before I cause a hurricane to visit our shores?

Anyway, she insisted on paying me for the shopping, and although I had no need of the money I saw that it meant a lot to her, and so I drove her along to the post office in the next village, and then we returned home by the back lanes. As I turned off the High Street she said 'This is going to be a much longer... Oh, what lovely flowers!' And so we wandered back through lanes where the wild parsley was brushing both sides of the car, and the Campions mixed their pink with the Bluebells' blue and the ever-present Hawthorn Blossom's white. England in flower is a sight to remember for ever.

She was tired by the trip to and from the post office, so I left her to take it easy, and drove over to Blandford to see if I could get my old collapsible fishing rod mended. It's a foolish thing to do because I could buy one for next to nothing on ebay, but it kept me alive all around the Lapland and Norwegian fjord areas, and I feel I owe it something. There's my superstition coming out again. I believe that some of the things I own have a spirit, and it is my duty to care for them in return for the help they gave me in the past. If I stop doing this, I will no longer be entitled to the good luck I seem to have enjoyed so far.

I walked along the street in Blandford towards the sports shop, and suddenly saw three or four schoolgirls start screaming and waving their hands around their heads. As I reached them and then passed them, I looked across the road to see what was going on, and saw a swarm of bees. I started to open my mouth in astonishment, and felt the temporary crown drop off the upper left canine I had broken on a piece of filo pastry last week. Quick as a flash I got my tongue to it, and then a finger, and pressed it back on. Most other people would simple let their jaw drop in amazement, but not me, I have to go that little bit further and make a spectacle of myself.

The sports shop turned out to be a total waste of time, the only person who could have helped me was off for the day, fishing. So I went back along the street to the car park. This time, the bees had clustered all along the bottom of a shop window, and a man in olive overalls was kneeling in front of the window, feeling the swarm with his bare hands. I stared, fascinated, and then decided if it was safe for him, it should be safe for me as well. The shop manager was also out there, in his shirtsleeves, with a small cardboard box.

The man in the olive drab overalls was a passing bee-keeper, and he was trying to identify the queen bee. As we watched, he lifted out a hand covered with bees and looked at them, muttering 'no, she's not in this lot.' In answer to my questions, he told me that the bees would not sting when they were swarming like this, they would only get aggressive after a few days in a hedge with no sight of a suitable hive space. He found the queen, and persuaded his companion to empty out his pack of cigarettes and make a couple of air holes in it. Carefully, he lifted the queen away from the window glass and, after a few false attempts, got her into the empty cigarette pack.

I wish I could have stayed to watch the whole process, but I only had a short time on the car ticket, and they had got me once before in this town, £60 for parking overnight in the car park without a valid ticket on display. There are some things more painful than bee-stings, and being stung by the local council is one of them.

I hope the bee-keeper got the swarm away safely into the box. There have been news reports lately that the bees have been acting strangely this spring, not swarming as expected. If the bees stop visiting the flowers, will the flowers stop growing? If the flowers stop growing, will the bees stop visiting England? What would England look like if it was just a green and sceptred isle, without the many-coloured spots and patches? Should I start laying out brightly-coloured patches on the platform to attract the giant silver bees I see so far above me to come down and bless the Tynemaiden's flowers?

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Sunday, May 06, 2007

A year and a lifetime ago

Last year, on Mayday, I bought a bike. It was a mountain bike, an Apollo. I bought it to replace the other mountain bike I already owned, which I just couldn't seem to get on with. That was a Durango ladies bike I got from a garage sale four years previously, and I had hardly ridden it, because it just didn't agree with me. I called it my lesbian bike. Today, I've given it away. It's going to one of little petal's daughters, the one who I sometimes call hundred-pound-buttocks. She is taller than me, and most definitely bigger than me in nearly every respect. I hope that she gets on with the bike, the story of which can be found here What goes up...: I was riding on a Lesbian bike.

I got that bike because I wanted a mountain bike, and the two other bikes I owned weren't really rideable. One was mouldering away outside the house, and the other, my proper bike, was mouldering away inside my stores, having stood on the platform for 10 or more years being choked with bindweed. I recently took the other bike up to the dump when I cleaned up the platform ready for the party. Yesterday and today, smitten by pangs of guilt, I got my proper bike out of the gloom of the stores and did what I could to make it rideable again. It and I go back a long way, and I feel guilty about ignoring it for so long. But, like Mr Toad, I was smitten by a vision and left sitting in the dust going 'poop-poop'. Like Mr Toad, I have recently come to my senses, realised what I have nearly lost through my profligate nature, and like Mr Toad, I am reclaiming that which was mine and was neglected.



This is my bike, as it was when I rescued it from the stores; chain rusted up, tyres flat and cracked, saddle dry and mould-covered. But 21 years ago, it and I were inseparable. I never let it out of my sight.

So what happened? Why did I stop riding it and leave it standing outside, and then bury it away in the stores to gather dust, when it had meant to much to me? I'm ashamed to admit it was purely pride. I got tired of being jeered at when I rode it around in England. Abroad, in Scandinavia, it had been a talking point. But back in England, it was an oddity, a laughing-stock for teenagers, and I became embarrassed by it. When a new fancy came along, just like Toad, I followed willingly, caught up in a new dream.

But now I've made amends. I've cleaned it up, put new tyres and tubes on the wheels, and a new chain, cleaned up the front Dynohub, freed the sticking cables, un-jammed the rear derailleur changer, and put a modern bag on it so that I can take the camera out and wander round the lanes again.





And here's what we found in the hedgerow just behind where I took the photo. The cornflowers are out already.

I shall probably sell my mountain bike I bought a year ago, because I realise now that I have too many toys to look after. I can't love them all as much as I should, and I owe a lot to my proper bike. It and I go back a long way, and travelled a lot of roads together, and I hope I shall start doing it again in the future, when things have settled. It still needs a lot doing to it; all the ravages of 5000 miles in Scandinavia, all the neglect of 15 years disuse, and the out-dated equipment; those things won't be put right in a Bank-holiday weekend. The main thing I need to do is get a better saddle, that old one nearly broke my knackers.

Afterthought:

In case you're wondering why I feel such an affinity to my old bike, try reading Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman.

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Thursday, May 03, 2007

Who's been raiding my mind?

I have been listening to myself from 21 years ago, a voice from a micro cassette recorder, and I have been reading the accompanying notebook entries. The handwriting is small and precise, for me, and I marvel now that I was ever able to write like that, but it was done in the early days of computing when I very rarely used a keyboard. The voice, by contrast, is unchanged. I set the recorder playing on the table where I was working, and Tabby Cat pricked up her ears and moved to sniff the speaker grille, then looked at me with a puzzled frown. Even with the flutter of a tape running at the slower recording speed, it is still my voice.

I have been reviewing memories from so long ago, and although I came across detail I had forgotten, when I read the notes or heard my description I could remember it. For example, I listened to my anger and frustration somewhere near Beerta in Northern Holland, as I crouched in a bus shelter barely 10 inches wide, trying to shield my little solid fuel stove from the gale force winds, desperate to have a hot drink inside of me. When I put down the box of matches to pick up the saucepan the wind swept the box away under the gap beneath the bottom of the bus shelter and I had to scamper after it. The stove, of course, was blown out by the time I returned.

As I listened, I could picture the metal-framed structure, and I could sense the relative positions of the bike, the shelter, and myself. I was facing northwards, with the bike to my right. The stove was directly ahead of me on the ground. I had come from the left, and I was going to the right. Although I could not describe every crack or scar on the lower panels of the shelter, I could feel what it looked like. Fair enough? I know we all remember things slightly differently, but that is how I generally expect things to pop up inside my head, a definite sense of direction and alignment, a vague sense of colour, a general idea of shape and form.

A little further on, In Germany now, I read of how I rode along a dirt track in the darkness beside an autobahn until I came to a drainage ditch where the track stopped abruptly, because the ditch ran into a culvert beneath the embankment of the autobahn. In my mind I saw the rising ground to my left where the lights of cars rushed past, the blackness of the ditch running from my right to my left into the white concrete of the culvert, and the lights of Itzehoe further over to the right beyond some low trees. The sense of location, position,and direction is all there, as is the pale whiteness of the concrete parapet gleaming in the moonlight, only a foot wide, across which the track appeared to run. I slept underneath a tree a few yards back the way I had come, and pushed the laden bike across the parapet the next morning.

So, to the shock. Someone has stolen something from my head. I know it was there, because I listened to my voice describing it, and I read the entries in the notebook which I had written only a few hours later. I heard my voice describe my arrival at Spodsbjerg in Denmark, on the island of Langeland. My voice told me that:

"I wheeled the bike along a sandtrack for a klick, and parked it against a giant piece of old tree trunk in the sand grasses. Three hard-boiled eggs done in seawater, and a cup of hot chocolate, roggerbrod, cheese and an apple made an excellent supper."

"I fished for a couple of hours but had no luck, so at midnight I went to bed in the mist, with the sound of fishing boat engines muttering somewhere in the darkness. The sky was clear through the mist, stars and a half-moon D showing, so although I had the bivvy sheet ready, I slept uncovered in a grass hollow beside the bike. There were one or two blue flashes from Rudkobing way, couldn't be a train as there are no railways on this island, but no thunder either."

But I have no memory of this. Did I go North or South from Spodsbjerg? Was the log to my right and the sea to my left? What about the fishing, did the spinner make a plop as it arced out into the water? Did I sleep with my head towards the rear wheel or the front? Was the moon to my left, or my right?

Try as I might, I cannot recreate a single image or sensation of this, which, compared to the turbulence and frustrations of the other two scenes, must have been a pleasant episode. It's gone, some bastard's half-inched it. Do we only store vivid memories of painful experiences? Or has a passing spacecraft lifted some of my better memories out of my head for their entertainment?

I feel robbed, incomplete, taunted even, knowing that I experienced something, but am unable to recall it. What has captured my attention is that, in this case, I know a crime has taken place and something stolen from me because I have the records to prove I used to own it. But how many other things have I possibly lost, that I didn't write down or describe to a cassette? How do you know you've lost something if you have no memory of ever having it in the first place?

They say that you carry all of your memories within you, for all of your life, although they sometimes get locked away. Is this true? If I were to visit a hypno-therapist, would I be able to unlock this scene, and would there be others like it? Supposing I regress too deeply and see the flashing lights and the little green men with the memory-suction device going zzob-zzob-zzob-zzob, would it drive me insane? I'm scared now, I don't know what to do about it.

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Ronin

A masterless Samurai, a knight without a liege, a priest without a faith. A missile without a mission.

I am struggling to adapt to life with no purpose. I have a list of jobs that totalled 137 active entries the last time I looked at it, but not one of them could be described as a reason for living. I have entered into mothering-mode, multi-tasking throughout the day as things happen, or not, but it means nothing to me. A job ticked off the list is no more meaningfull than a pimple squeezed, you just do it, right?

A friend mentioned this to me when I muttered darkly on the phone about the awful emptiness of afternoons. He also suggested that the other problem was that I no longer had anywhere in the house that I could call mine. The office is shared, the sitting room is shared, even my workshop and stores over the road are shared. There is nowhere that I can call mine, no place where I can strew things around and leave them strewn until I return for another strewing session. I have become put-things-away man, one who fills cupboards and closes the door on them. My future is to file away, I can strew no more.

'A man with no future will always run to his past', from Due South. So, true to that series, I have run to my past, and, strangely, found myself a future. Does that seem odd to you? It seems both ironic and appropriate to me. I love the past, I am fascinated by the two world wars, by the early attempts on Everest, the mysteries of the Hunley, Erebus and Terror, Nobile's lost crewmen, America's lost aviatrix.

Sometimes when the path ahead is too tangled to allow a view, it makes sense to go back a way and study it from behind, or in reflection.

A ronin was expected to commit suicide, or suffer great shame. Or, find another way forward. I never liked the idea of serving anything anyway. Except for meals. I'll always serve those.

Watch this blog-space.

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

The Week the King was Dead and Buried

Part 1 - they don't make them like that anymore.

I did say, a week or so ago, that I had another interesting find from the auctions, but as you'll have seen, things got in the way and I had to leave my time-capsule opened but un-blogged. But now, the time is right, I'll show my case, and lift the lid upon its contents.



It caught my eye because it was so unusual, a wooden suitcase with a diagonal-planked top. It was crammed so full of papers and magazines that the lid wouldn't close. I riffled around and pulled out a folded sheet of paper containing the plans for a Spad.



The Bleriot Spad was one of France's most famous World War 1 fighter planes, together with the Nieuport, and many of the American pilots who slipped surreptitiously across the Atlantic before their country officially entered the war flew these planes. The British had the SE5a, and the Sopwith Camel, and the Germans had the infamous Fokker, together with the sturdy and dependable Albatros. (Heh, some of you old poster-peeps thought I was a bleedin' seabird, innit).

After bidding successfully I got the case home and rummaged. There were no more plans of planes, most of the case was full of issues of a tuppenny-weekly A3-sized paper called 'Modern Wonder', and a similarly-named 'Modern World', dropping to A4 size for a modest increase in price of a halfpenny. Between them, they covered the late thirties through to the middle of World War 2.



I skimmed through a couple of issues, and was amazed to find that televison pre-dated the war; the first regular transmissions were already underway by 1936, with yellow being the fashionable colour for shirts worn by leading men in drama productions because it produced a better image than white.

There was a small cluster of papers lower down, nine copies of the Daily Mirror, recording the death and subsequent funeral of the king, George the Fifth. Nearly nine-tenths of each issue was taken up by this, it even displaced the football section of the paper for several issues, apart from reporting on the discussions as to whether the league matches should be postponed or played.

In typical scurvy-knave style, I found myself looking through the papers to see what non-royal news made the pages. The serialised 'Saint' stories continued each day, and I found this little gem on the ante-penultimate page of the January 21st issue, (which broke the news of the King's death to the nation.)

PHANTOM AVENGER "RULED" BY URGE TO BE WRECKER

"All my life I have had an impulse to destroy - an uncontrollable impulse."

This remarkable statement was made by a "Phantom Avenger,"
(name not reproduced here for sensitive reasons), twenty-one, of Wyke Regis, when he was sentenced at Dorsetshire Assizes yesterday to twelve months' imprisonment for fire-ricking and threatening to set fire to a dairy.

Mr. W. Maitland Walker, prosecuting, said ____________ wrote to Mr. T. Sapeworth, a farmer at Wyke Regis :-

"I shall destroy your dairy within a few days, whether you have a police cordon round it or not, as my highly scientific and complicated method of rick-firing cannot fail. --- The Phantom Avenger."


{snipped}

Asked by Mr. Justice Hawke if he had anything to say, _______ replied:

"If you sentence a man for an offence done on impulse, very likely you make him an enemy of society; but if you deal with me leniently, I shall always remember it as a kind act, and try to do my best to obliterate this blot on my character."


It makes you realise just how far Britain has declined since then, when villains and arsonists wrote to tell their victims in advance that they were to be targeted, and now, when graffiti artists are likely to spell innit with two T's. You've got to admire him, haven't you? He's almost Captain Queeg, solving the mystery of the strawberry ice-cream by logic and geometric proof.

So if they had had the internet back in those days, what would flaming have been like? "Sir (or Madam), be advised that upon the 13th inst, or thereabouts, I shall attend upon you through the medium of usenet, to denounce you for a person of little import, a shallow copier of other people's prose, a top-poaster hacing (sic) no more flair and style than a Babbage calculating-engine, whether or not you net-kopp me, for my methods are derived from Godel and Hilbert and are algorithmically sound.--- Teh Emporer of teh Greater Web, First Sealord of the Gobi Desert, High Protector of the Disbelief."

Nowadays all we get is 'ATTENSHUN, USENET, ALL YOUR VASE ARE PWNED!"

Yeah, phear me, phlorists and phlower-arrangers. Byrn teh suxx0rs. A p0x upon their keyboards.

There will be more anon, if it pleases you, my hordes.

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