Thursday 29 November 2012

Booking Through Thursday: Being A Reader

btt button

is  a weekly meme about books and reading, hosted by Deb. This week the prompt was longer than usual – please read it all at BTT. I quote only part of her post here, leading up to the questions at the end:

--- In my daily life, it seems like almost no-one reads anything more than a newspaper or a fashion magazine. I only have one person I can truly chat about books with --- I love following an intricately plotted story (the more layers the better). --- Can you imagine NOT being a Reader? How does it shape your life? Your perception of it? How does being a Reader affect your relationship with all those folks who are looking at it from the other side and simply can’t understand how you can sit and READ all the time? ---

I would indeed find life a lot poorer if I could not take part of “plotted stories” in between all the fragmented pieces of news and gossip that wash over us daily.

My social life is not what it was, as I neither work now nor “hang out” with as many people in other contexts either, as I used to… On the other hand, in recent years I’ve come to count certain internet friends as part of my daily life, and some of you do read a lot!

So, thinking about it, I come to the conclusion – somewhat surprising to myself – that I don’t really share Deb’s experience of being surrounded by non-readers.  I still often feel like there’s no one to discuss a recently read book with… But really, that’s often more about not being in sync than about the people in my life not being bookish at all.

Then I tried to think if I know someone who reads fashion magazines, and found I have no idea. If they do, they don’t talk about it with me!

I’ve always been a reader even if sometimes more and sometimes less. After I got problems with neckpain after an accident I had to change my reading habits physically but I still had a need of “stories”. So I listened more to audio books instead.

As for relating to “those folks who are looking at it from the other side”…  4½ years ago when I moved to where I now live, I hired help from a removal company, to both pack and carry. I packed some personal things like clothes etc myself, but left books and china to the removers. When they arrived, one of them went for a look around before they started. Then he came out to me in the kitchen, and said: “That’s a lot of books. Have you read all of them?” I said yes, most of them. The he said: “When you’ve read them, why don’t you throw them away?”

Now that’s a kind of question that leaves me lost for words… I do see the need of a clear-out now and then; but from there to treating books like newspapers … No. I really can’t imagine my home void of books!

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Shortcuts make for long delays

We have an old proverb in Swedish: “Genvägar är senvägar” – meaning that trying to take a shortcut often makes you late instead of saving time. When I searched  for an equivalent in English, all I found was a quote “Shortcuts make for long delays”, accredited to J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings. I think he probably borrowed that from the Swedish saying…! But it’s the “point” I’m after here, not the origin.

Have you ever done anything that you thought was going to make things easier or save time, but that ended up the opposite? I did, this week. (And I’m not referring to the time spent in search of impossible translations.)

Next weekend is 1st Advent Sunday, which is the proper start of Christmas preparations and celebrations here. And of course that means we need a pre-Advent week (at least) to get ready for Advent… I do, anyway!

So I started this weekend by putting up my “Christmas” curtains in the kitchen. We do that in Sweden – change curtains for Christmas; especially in the kitchen. Mine are red-and-white checkered and as they have a neutral pattern like that I usually have them up from mid/late November until mid/late February. (In the other rooms I don’t change curtains. Not this year anyway.)

I also usually start early with my outdoors lights on the balcony, and that’s where I ran into trouble this year. I decided to “make things easier” for myself by buying a new set of lights enclosed in a plastic tube, like this (this is not the one I bought, but similar):

 Outdoor Tube Lights For Trimming Your House and Yard

I bought it in good time, and this weekend I put it up. It was indeed easier to put up than my old kind of arrangement (which involved fake spruce garlands and a separate strand of little bulbs). I was also quite pleased with how it looked. I could have lived with it… If not for…

CIMG1972

… the problem which arose after I’d had it on for about 30-60 minutes: Gradually, as I sat in the living room watching TV, I became aware of a very irritating humming, whirring, noise…

At first I thought the sound came from the timer I had connected the lights to – it was a rather old one. So I removed the timer. But soon the noise started again, and it turned out to come from the transformer…

No, no, no – not that kind…

(blame it on Google image search!)

That’s more like it.

So I tested the lights on and off for a while… It turned out that when the transformer had warmed up a bit, it started to purr. Put the lights out and let if cool off, and then it was quiet when I turned it on again… For half an hour or so. Then it started again.

The sound was much too loud for my “comfort” and I decided it would soon drive me mad. But this of course meant that I had to get out on the balcony again the next day and unwind and disassemble the whole thing, and leave the lightsnake to dry, and then make it go back into its little box (which at one point seemed impossible, but at last I succeeded).

Yesterday the weather was so miserable outside that I really did not want to set foot outdoors at all.

Today, however, I took the box back to the supermarket where I bought it, and said I wanted to make a complaint. Of course the first girl behind the counter could not handle something as complicated as that, so she had to call a supervisor; and then I had to wait while the supervisor “tested” the appliance – even though I explained carefully from the beginning that the noise does not appear until after half an hour or more. She tested it for half a minute and said she could not hear any noise… Duh! She then said that some of the various lights they had on display in the store also make a noise. (Duh! again… Very reassuring…) I said well, I have several other kinds of electric transformers in my home, and none of them makes a noise like this - I don’t consider it acceptable, and I want to return it! So eventually I got my money back.

Then I went into the store to buy another set of lights. As I did not trust the kind I had just returned, and that was the only “tube” lights that they had, I went for another type this time. I also took the trouble of checking those on display… following the cord to the transformer plug… and listening… (hoping no one to be watching!) Finally I found one that seemed to be able to shine silently, and, fingers crossed, bought one of those.

This time I first tested it indoors, spread out on the living room floor for about an hour, to make sure that this one would not get into humming mood too, as soon as it had made itself at home.

CIMG1989

It remained quiet, however, so then I took it outside. Of course the trouble with this one was, instead, that it liked to tie itself into complicated knots while I twined it round and round and round four meters of balcony rail (with my fingers getting ice cold from the rain).

After finishing the job, and testing that it worked… I sighed. No, it was not humming… But it just did not look right. Even though it had LED-lights, and twice as many lights as my old strand of bulbs, this one too really seemed to cry out (silently) that it would be much happier in the company of some fake spruce twigs, and not just the bare metallic rail…

So I had to unwind the whole chain again… go down to the storage room and get out the spruce garlands… then prepare the rail as usual by winding plastic clingfilm around it (because the wires in the garlands tend to leave marks of rust if I don’t), then put up the garlands, and then do the whole round-and-round twirling of the long knotty strand of lights again…

But now it looks good! – and hopefully we’ll have a bright and quiet Advent and Christmas together…

CIMG1994

Sunday 25 November 2012

Sepia Saturday – Greetings from the Past

May I draw your attention, please, to my blog

2012_11_24 Greetings Header

Greetings from the Past

where I just added a new post and also updated the introduction pages and the layout a bit.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (here), I recently got an email out of the blue from a distant cousin, who had happened to find my blog and recognized our mutual relatives in it. He managed to fill in some blanks for me concerning my grandmother’s older sisters – the essence of it summarized in today’s post.

I also recently found the blog Sepia Saturday with a weekly meme based on old photos. I will try to join in there from time to time (from the Greetings blog), using their prompts as one tool among others to continue to explore the old family photos.

Ester o Gerda porträtt A

My grandmother’s half-sisters Ester and Gerda, probably around the time my grandma was born, which was 1900.

Last night I also scanned another dozen or so old postcards and I hope to be getting on with posting those soon. Posts for the Greetings blog tend to be rather time consuming though, partly because I’m keeping them bilingual (English and Swedish), and partly because I never know when I start out, where the research is going to take me! Hopefully, some of the new facts I learned will be of help as I continue to try to interpret the messages written on the postcards.

By the way, as I followed a few links from Sepia Saturday today, I learned a new word : deltiology.

Deltiology (from Greek δελτίον, deltion, diminutive of δέλτος, deltos, "writing tablet, letter"; and -λογία, -logia) is the study and collection of postcards. Professor Randall Rhoades of Ashland, Ohio, coined a word in 1945 that became the accepted description of the study of picture postcards. It took about 20 years for the name to appear in the dictionary the first time.

And if you devote yourself to deltiology, then you are a deltiologist.

Saturday 24 November 2012

Weekend Reflections: Buddy Bears

CIMG1963-001

It seems Buddy Bears will be invading our town this December, replacing the usual Santaland in the town square. I found this preview of miniatures in a window belonging to the tourist office.

CIMG1962-001

Linking to Weekend Reflections.

Thursday 22 November 2012

Thankful Booking Through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme about books and reading, hosted by Deb:

“It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so … what are you thankful for this year, reading-wise? New, favorite books? New gadget for reading? New comfy chair? Bonus time to read? Just the mere fact of BEING a reader? Having the internet to share ideas/recommendations/conversations about books?”

As I live in Sweden, I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend. (There is a Thanksgiving Sunday in our church calendar, but that was back in mid October, and it’s not a big one in our traditions.)

But of course there’s a lot to be thankful for whenever one takes the time to stop and think (as I know one or two of my blogging friends are actually in the habit of doing every Thursday). And with a theme like books and reading, and all those suggestions already given by Deb… it’s certainly not hard to join in. In fact I am very thankful for all of those things she mentions. (My chair is not new, but it’s still comfy!)

For a number of years I’ve had increasing difficulties reading printed books because of a combination of neck pain and eyesight problems.  As regular followers of this blog know by now, one solution for me has been audio books (which I still much appreciate).  But the Kindle Touch I bought a couple of months ago now also makes it easier for me to read a bit more “with the eyes” again – another reason to be thankful. On top of that, the Kindle also gives easy access to a lot of free classics; and as I do love English classics, that goes on the thankful list as well. As does being able to discuss and share books and reading experiences with others on the internet.

Now to some titles I’ve especially appreciated in 2012:

Kate Morton – The Forgotten Garden
Terry Pratchett – Snuff

Audrey Niffenegger – The Time Traveler’s Wife
Tea Obrecht – The Tiger’s Wife
J.K. Rowling – The Casual Vacancy
Hope Mirrlees – Lud-in-the-Mist

Mitch Albom – The Time Keeper
Mitch Albom – The Five People You Meet In Heaven

At the top of my blog is a tab My Book Reviews: there you will find links to some of my book reviews.

I don’t write a review of every book that I read. For example, I don’t usually see much point in mentioning Swedish books and authors here unless I know they’re also available in English translation. I also often find it difficult to summarize books I only listened to (one disadvantage of audio books is that it’s harder to go back and check details). So the ones I do end up writing reviews of are only a selection from my total read.

CIMG1945-001

Monday 19 November 2012

Mosaic Macro Monday

2012-11-15 reading, windows, indoors, flowers

“Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”
~Pearl S. Buck~

Mosaic Monday and Macro Monday

Sunday 18 November 2012

Hair

This post was inspired by a comment to a post on my other blog, linked to this week’s Friday My Town Shoot Out theme: Self-portraits.

Shabby Girl commented that for some reason she always pictured me as a brunette. Actually, my hair colour has been something of an enigma even to myself over the years. It probably was to my mother as well, because back in the days when she cut my hair herself, she saved some locks and put into my photo album:

CIMG1932 CIMG1931

I was born with dark hair (see below), but by the time I was 1½ years old and had my first haircut, I was light blonde. At the age of five, I was more like medium blonde, and at 13 my hair was so dark that some might consider it brunette. (My passport from age 16 still says medium blond, though. )

I remained dark/medium blonde through my twenties and into my thirties. In my forties when I first began worrying over grey hairs I tried to better the colour from time to time (but without straying too far from my natural colour). In my fifties I gave up and decided to consider myself “ash blonde” until some day when I’ll have to drop the “blonde” part altogether…

Lilla Ja

1955

2 years

Growing up - 2 years old!

13 years

13 going on 14

21 years

Twenty-One. (Sometimes I had braids!)

40 years

40

CIMG1574-004

2012 (please do the math silently)

These days it depends a lot on the light – and perhaps my mood?? – what I see when I look in the mirror (blonde vs. grey). Two things there is no mistake about:

1/ I’m definitely not brunette.
2/ Even if I wished to, I would no longer be able to grow my hair to the length it was in my early twenties. 

~~~

“My real hair color is kind of a dark blonde.
Now I just have mood hair.”
~Julia Roberts~

~~~

Thursday 15 November 2012

Booking Through Thursday – Where??

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme about books and reading, hosted by Deb. Her question this week is not about what or why or when, but where to read:

What’s your favorite place to read? Do you have more than one? Can you read anywhere, or do you need things to be “just right?”

Bonus points for sharing a photo of your favorite spot. (grin)

I’m afraid I do fall into the category of readers now who need things to be “just right”. I was more flexible about that when younger, but now, with a combination of neck- and eye-problems, I find it difficult to read anywhere and at any time.

CIMG1900-001

In daylight, I prefer sitting in my lounger in the livingroom (also my TV-chair), with the book/Kindle on a pillow on my lap; or sometimes lying down on the couch behind it. Both these places make good use of the light from the window. A third alternative (preferred at night and in the morning) is my bed in the bedroom.

CIMG1921

Lying on the bed I face the window, which is not optimal for reading – but all the more perfect for listening to audio books… watching the clouds drift by in the sky… or the raindrops on the window.

PS. One place for reading I never understood is the bath tub. How do people DO it without getting the book all wet? Now I just have a shower and there I definitly do not read ;) …

Tuesday 13 November 2012

Midweek Blues: Looking into the Future

CIMG1755-001

They’re building a lot of new apartments in my town at the moment. Behind the blue containers the town’s highest building yet is going to rise: 20 storeys. That’s twice as tall as the highest one in the neighbourhood so far. I suspect the top of it must also change the skyline I see from my kitchen window, but I’m still having difficulties imagining quite how. “As the crow flies”,  I live about 500 m from the site (and between here and there, there is the 10 storey building, which I see the top of in winter). 

This photo was taken from the walkpath directly across the river from the building site; which gives me something else to ponder about, from photographer’s point of view: Is there an angle from where the new highrise building’s reflection will fit in the river???

We might have to wait until 2014 to find out…

Linking to Rebecca’s Midweek Blues.

Monday 12 November 2012

Sunday 11 November 2012

Weekend Reflections: November

CIMG1762-001

A puddle reflection for Weekend Reflections

It’s November. This is about as exciting as it gets!

We’ve had a grey week and an even greyer weekend.
Earlier in the week I did a bit of early Christmas shopping and even had an attack of creative mood and got started on my Christmas cards…
Today however it’s been so dark it’s felt like evening all day, and I’ve just been sleeping and reading and sleeping (yes I know I already said sleeping, but I fell asleep again!) - with pauses for breakfast and lunch - until finally, around 3 pm, I got myself out on a short walk while there seemed to be a break in the rain. But of course someone turned on the tap again while I was still out.

The book I’m engrossed in at the moment (when not nodding off to it) is The Golden Acorn by Catherine Cooper (2010), which I downloaded for free to my Kindle from Amazon.

It’s the first in a series and of course only the first is free… Remains to be seen if I get caught up in it enough to buy the next two. It’s a British children’s fantasy book, involving Celtic and classic folklore and mythology, and “so far, so good”… One thing I do like about my Kindle is the direct access to dictionary and Wikipedia while reading… not least when one keeps coming across hamadryads, spriggans, bogies, brownies and the like ;) Even if (or because) each fantasy writer may give mythical creatures his/her own twist, I enjoy learning about the sources as well.

Friday 9 November 2012

Friday My Town: Gravity at Play

CIMG1775-001

When I first caught sight of the cat in the tree, she was playing with the tallow ball like with a toy. However…

CIMG1776-001

… there were more interesting things in that tree than the tallow ball… Notice her gaze… Unfortunately I was unable to catch the whole scene with my camera, but there was also a small bird involved… For a while, he sat boldly on the furthest edge of that branch, making noises… I’m not sure if he was just expressing his anger at having had his lunch interrupted, or if he was actually thinking that he might be able to lure the cat out on a twig too thin to hold her weight!

CIMG1778-001

She did seem set on going after him, but then she was distracted again by the feeder.

CIMG1779-001

Hmm, nobody seems to be at home…

CIMG1780-001

This is no fun any more… Stupid birds!

CIMG1781

I’m off home!

… And I’m linking this post to Friday My Town Shoot Out, where the theme of the week is Gravity at Play…

Thursday 8 November 2012

Booking Through and Thankful Thursday

Booking Through Thursday is weekly meme with questions about books and reading, hosted by Deb. Last week there was no BTT post, and it turns out ‘Sandy’  and a 5-day (!) power outage is to blame for that.

I’m glad to see Deb and BTT back in the bloggosphere again this week. Her inspiration for the questions of the week is not too hard to guess at:

1. How do storms affect your reading? Do you go for comfort reading?

2. How do you deal with power outages? Do you read by candlelight? Flashlights? Use a self-lit e-reader or tablet? Skip reading altogether for the duration and instead play games with the family?

DSCN1693

This reminds me of how very fortunate I am in this respect. I don’t think I’ve had to suffer a 5-day power outage in my whole life. In my childhood we did sometimes have power outages in connection with stormy weather, especially in winter, but I doubt we were ever without electricity for more than 24 hours in a row, if even that long.

Collage2

Since I left home at the age of 20 (back in 1975!) I’ve been living in town(s) and I can’t recall having had to be without electricity for more than a few hours. In the countryside people have to be prepared for longer power outages in the winter, but in an inland town like where I live, if there is a powercut it’s usually back on before one has time to get seriously worried. 

So I really can’t remember the last time I had to deal with the question of reading in a power outage.

I do have a couple of flashlights (and I know where they are), and spare batteries and candles and matches, and (just checked) also a small radio that works on AA-batteries (which I try to always keep a supply of). I even still have one or two old cassette tape players/recorders that run on batteries too, and a few old cassette books sitting on a shelf… so if not enough light to read, and if not wanting to use up the battery in my smartphone or computer, I might give those a go.

CIMG6911-1

I really am thankful, though, to be living in a country and place where I very rarely have to think about serious emergency strategies. Even in the worst winter storms, so far I’ve always been quite safe just staying in. (And for that I do try to keep prepared.)

CIMG1258-001

As for the first question… Yes the weather does affect my mood, and thus also what I feel like reading or watching. It’s not quite predictable though – I can either choose something to take my mind off what’s going on outside, OR it can be the other way round, i.e. I choose something that is worse than what is going on where I am. I’ve noticed, for example, in my choice of films… that I’m more drawn towards watching snowstorms in the winter, and hot climate films in the summer, than the other way round. Maybe to remind myself that “it could be worse” ?

(The photos in this post are all from my own archives.)

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Fill in the Blanks Day

This morning when I woke up, I had a surprise email waiting for me – from a relative I did not know about. Our grandmothers were half-sisters, born 34 years apart… which makes him my… what? Second half-cousin or half a second cousin or just a quarter cousin?! Laughing out loud Anyway, although he is only two years younger than my dad [would have been if he’d lived], in the family tree ___Cousin and I are in the same generation and share the same great-grandfather.

AND somehow he had come to stumble upon my blog Greetings from the Past here in this tiny little world of the Internet, and recognized the family presented there, and decided to send me an email to say hello. He also had a few additional bits and pieces of old family gossip for me. Fascinating. In the family tree sketch my dad made (some thirty years ago) this 2nd cousin is just a blank square with a question mark, so I did not even know his name until today.

As November is rather a dull month from photography point of view, I think I’ll take this as double reason to get on with scanning the old postcard collection and put some more posts up on that blog soon.

Not today though, because today is almost over already… (not sure how that happened, but somehow, evidently, there were enough things to fill in the blanks)

 

 

Thursday 1 November 2012

The Casual Vacancy and Lud-in-the-Mist

CIMG1137-001

I wonder what the odds are… That right after you’ve finished reading a newly published book… you happen to pick up a book written nearly 90 years earlier, by an author you never heard of until just recently (and that only because a fellow blogger happened to find a second-hand copy of it)… and during the reading of that classic, you become convinced that this book must have served as a major source of inspiration for the brand new one you just finished reading…?

CIMG1117-001

Last week, in BTT: The Book and the Cover, I mentioned J.K. Rowling’s first adult and ‘non-fantasy’ book The Casual Vacancy. I did not go into much detail of the plot, because I did not (and still don’t) want to spoil anyone else’s reading experience. I also did not mention, partly because I could not quite define it even to myself, my feeling that in spite of this book not being in the fantasy genre, there is still “something about it” that gives a hint of fairytale. One thing that creates this effect is the author’s choice of names for some of the characters; the obvious (a little too obvious…) example being Barry Fairbrother (who dies right at the beginning but still remains an important character throughout the book).

Being well aware of Rowling’s love of names since the Harry Potter story, I suspect there is probably a lot more subtle meanings hidden in names even in this book, if one takes the time to look into it.

CIMG1118-001

Pretty much right after I’d finished The Casual Vacancy I started reading Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy story written by Hope Mirrlees in 1926. I had never heard of neither this book nor the author until they were just recently mentioned by my blogging friend Scriptor Senex of Rambles from my Chair, who found the book in a charity book stall back in the summer. He happened to post about it the same week (at the beginning of October) when I (at long last) bought a Kindle. I searched for Lud-in-the-Mist as e-book, found it, and downloaded it. (It wasn’t free but very cheap.)

Lud is a fairy-tale/fantasy kind of book. It keeps you on your toes because the meaning or quality of certain things in it is far from obvious – or at least, they weren’t to me. So, being occupied with trying to figure that out, it took me a good while to also become aware of something else that kept nagging at me. For one thing, the very geography of the place felt strangely familiar. At the back of my mind I kept searching for comparisons, and at first of course I just kept trying to think how it might relate to other fantasy books. It wasn’t until I was at least half-way through, that I suddenly also saw the resemblance between the town of Lud-in-the-Mist, and Rowling’s small town of Pagford in The Casual Vacacy

What first made the connection click in my mind was the name Aubrey used in both books, for characters in similar social positions in their respective society.

I just looked up the meaning of that name now,  and find it to be: “elf or magical being, power”…

CIMG1138-001

In Lud-of-the-Mist, Aubrey is a deceased duke, whose ghost or influence still lingers, and acts as a sort of connection to the forbidden Fairy land.

In Rowling’s Pagford, there is also an Aubrey – or in fact two (father and son) – who was vs. is “lord of the manor”. Furthermore, a “ghost” does also play a certain role in The Casual Vacancy, although it’s not the classic ghost-story kind of ghost.

CIMG1125-001

Here’s a description of Lud-in-the-Mist from Wikipedia:

In this novel, the prosaic and law-abiding inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist, a city located at the confluence of the rivers Dapple and Dawl, in the fictional state of Dorimare, must contend with the influx of fairy fruit and the impact of the fantastic inhabitants of the bordering land of Faerie, whose presence and very existence they had sought to banish from their rational lives. When the denial proves futile, their mayor, the respectable Nathaniel Chanticleer, finds himself quite reluctantly at the center of the conflict and obliged to push beyond the boundaries of both his conventional life and those of Lud-in-the-Mist to find a reconciliation.

Between Lud and Fairie-land, there is also a sort of boundary area which includes the Elfin Marches and the Debatable Hills.

CIMG1122-001

J.K. Rowling’s small town of Pagford is geographically situated very much like Lud. There is a river, and the town is surrounded by hills; and beyond one of those is a bigger city, Yarvil. Between Yarvil and Pagford lies a much debated (!) area called The Fields, which was sold to the city of Yarvil by Old Aubrey Fawley. This has grown into a modern housing estate with lots of problems.

While the inhabitants of Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist are fighting to keep their town free from all influence from Fairyland, the inhabitants of the modern small town of Pagford in Rowling’s novel are concerned with unwanted influence from Yarvil and The Fields. Some of the members of the Pagford parish council argue that The Fields should be Yarvil’s responsibility rather than Pagford’s… Others take a different approach.

The parallels between the two stories are not so obvious that you can tell by one what will happen in the other; but once I’d picked up on the Aubrey reference, I began to see more and more likenesses. Enough to be convinced it’s not a coincidence. Especially since, in Lud-in-the-Mist too, at one point in the story, there arises a political ‘casual vacancy’…

CIMG1123-001

Now I’m very curious whether any other reader on the planet has yet drawn the same parallels. None of the reviews of Rowling’s novel that I’ve come across so far seems to have thought of it.

I suspect that once again J.K. Rowling has written a book with a lot more layers to it than is obvious at first. And perhaps Pagford is not quite as far removed from “Fairyland” as may be our first impression either. (Or the other way round!)

 CIMG1136-001

 

Quote from The Casual Vacancy:

The Fields polluted and corrupted a place of peace and beauty, and the smouldering townsfolk remained determined to cut the estate adrift. Yet boundary reviews had come and gone, and reforms in local government had swept the area without effecting any change; the Fields remained part of Pagford. Newcomers to the town learned quickly that abhorrence of the estate was a necessary passport to the goodwill of that hard core of Pagfordians who ran everything. But now, at long last – over sixty years after Old Aubrey Fawley had handed Yarvil that fatal parcel of land – after decades of patient work, of strategizing and petitioning, of collating information and haranguing sub-committees – the anti-Fielders of Pagford found themselves, at last, on the trembling threshold of victory. (p. 59)

CIMG1139-001

 

Quotes from Lud-in-the-Mist:

death – the state that will turn one into a sort of object of art (that is to say if one is remembered by posterity) with all one’s deeds and passions simplified, frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people gaze at, and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them

“When Aubrey did live there lived no poor…”

The original meaning of Fairie is supposed to be delusion. They can juggle with appearances ---

Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats – delusion. But man can’t live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion – the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart’s content.

There is no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales.

Who can say that the dead are not grateful for the loving thoughts of the living, and that they do not rest more quietly in their graves when they have been avenged?

 CIMG1131-001

As for the photos in this post… They are the results of me playing around with some of the few “fairy fruits” (and empty husks) I got off my Physalis plant on the balcony, before frosty nights set in and took the rest.

Other names for the same fruit are Cape Gooseberry, Golden Strawberry or Chinese Lantern. It may be eaten raw or used in salads, desserts, as a flavoring, and in jams and jellies. (Not that I got enough of them from my little plant for any jams or jelly!)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...