Roundel

Tags

Buddleia, Painted Ladies, peacock butterfly, roundel, St Swithun's Day

Forgot to post this on St Swithun’s Day.  The weather was changeable, as I

recall, so this hopeful poem, written many years ago, may not be

appropriate for this year!  Still, one has to be optimistic.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade-

the humid air buzzing with insect life.

St Swithun’s Day has left us high and dry.

Forty days of rain we now evade.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade.

Buddleia blossoms to the ground are weighed,

where Peacocks, Painted Ladies are arrayed.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade;

the humid air buzzing with insect life.

(Wikipaedia and Wikimedia: photos.

Butterfly by Sharp Photography.)

Bears of Very Little Brain

Tags

Alexander Beetle, Alice in Wonderland, All Shall have Prizes, Christopher Robin, Cottleston Pie, Dr Giles Fraser, Eeyore, genealogy, Jesus, John Tyerman Williams, Malt extract, Pooh and the Philosophers, Popper, Prince Harry, Prince William, St Paul’s Cathedral, St Swithun's Day, The Prodigal Son, The Queen, Thought for the Day, Tractatus, Winnie-the-Pooh, Wittgenstein

Thursday

Dr Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor to St Paul’s Cathedral was on Thought for the Day and he spoke about The Caucus Race in Alice in Wonderland and the Dodo’s ethos of All Shall have Prizes.

It is forty days after St Swithun’s Day and I must say that we have not had constant rain, so there is a level of truth in the old adage.

Anyway, the Rev Dr declared that rewarding everyone undermined a sense of achievement.  However, success should not influence the degree of parental love.  The Prodigal Son found that the Father’s love was not dependent on his performance.   Dr Fraser spoke about the apparent unfairness of the parable of the workers in the vineyard all receiving the same wages, but explained it as how love behaves.  You can imagine Wills being annoyed that Harry gets away with his signature behaviour while he, closer in line, is expected, as the Elder Brother, to keep his nose clean.

Talking of lines to the throne, isn’t the genealogy bug gripping more and more people?  Apparently, if you go back 30 generations, then you would find that Jesus was related to King David, after all.  But so was every other inhabitant of Israel.

Trees become ever more branched if one widens the search and includes friends and relations, such as Rabbit and Alexander Beetle. Very Small Beetle was obviously staying overnight at Christopher Robin’s at the time of a census, but he may have gone round a gorse bush the wrong way and so disappeared off ancestry.co.uk and the International Genealogical Index.  That was why Rabbit couldn’t find him in subsequent records.

Too many amateur genealogists are not paying sufficient attention to Popper (Sir Karl, 1902-94) and his theory of falsifiability.  He said that no accumulation of instances could prove a theory to be correct.  However, one counter-instance could disprove it, at least partly. Got that?

You see, all swans might be white, but an instance of a black one would falsify the proposition.

We need a conceivable test for our propositions.  So, if we place a Rover robot with a plutonium battery that lasts ten years in a Las Vegas hotel room, we can verify if all Royals are white sheep, or if one black sheep exists.  That means that we can make a scientific judgement. (see Pooh and the Philosophers by John Tyerman Williams, p 103-4)

So, Harry must return to Grandmamma and hear what the Crustimoney Proseedcake is to be, for he is a bear of very little brain and long words probably bother him.  When he is asked why he behaved so stupidly, he will in all likelihood reply:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,

Why does a chicken? I don’t know why.

Eeyore could explain the whole sorry activity as Bon-hommy.

The Palace could refer to Wittgenstein and his observation in the Tractatus that what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Eventually HM might find a form of words:

Hello, Harry, wasn’t that you?

No, says Harry in a different voice.

Harry, says HM kindly, You haven’t any brain.

I know, says the Prince, humbly and then sort of boffs nervously as he swallows a spoonful of Extract of Malt. It’s just that it’s bad enough, granny, being miserable, what with no presents and no cake and no crown and no proper notice taken of me at all…

Well, now you know how your father feels  We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it

Can’t all what?

Gaiety..song-and-dance…bon-hommy.. There it is!

So what shall I do with this pole?

Give it back to the nice girl at the club, Harry. These friends – they are the wrong sort of friends..so I should think they would make the wrong sort of headlines.

So, what should I do now, Grandmamma?

Go on an expotition and keep out of trouble

It will rain tonight

Let it come down!

(Exit Harry, pursued but not bare.)

It is going to be squelching over the Bank Holiday Weekend.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

Sunglasses in the Rain

Tags

Ben Ainslie, Boris Johnson, Coltsfoot, Financial Times, Flybe, Jesus, matthew pinsent, National Trust, NHS, Prince Philip, St Swithun's Day, sunglasses, The Queen

Maybe I’ve got it wrong, I considered. Maybe it is Ben Ainslie who is going to carry the torch.  At least he won’t be fazed by a little water, since he is practically a Merman.  I admired his full page b&w endorsement of sunglasses in the How To Spend It section of The Financial Times, with his sexy stubble.

I like cool shades as much as I like cool dudes.  My optician advised me to wear sunglasses, even in the rain, as you could still be affected by glare.  A medic had commented, however, that over-use of reactive lenses was positively linked to high levels of neuroticism and madness.  Oh well, they are cheaper than a blepharoplasty and Jackie Kennedy carried them off.  The only problem is that I fail to see much in the murky gloom of the present summer and so I fell to wondering how Posh Becks could keep an eye on what her husband was up to, if she continually resorted to those owlish lenses.  They probably don’t prevent her from seeing well enough to put in his pin number, however.

You don’t see the Queen wearing sunglasses much.  Not that she’d needed to for her Regatta thingy, when a soaking band of singers stood before the Royal party and Prince Philip had nearly burst his bladder trying not to wet himself, laughing at the state of them. The old boy had become extremely enervated at the hornpipe music, what with having been a naval officer.  At least the rain had held off for most of the day, though you couldn’t have seen anything from the bank side, whether you were wearing sunglasses or not, I’d heard.

I also wondered if the Queen was a fan of Who Do You Think You Are?  Clearly, she is fully aware of her own identity, but she might have been alarmed that she was related to Boris Johnson.  Matthew Pinsent is less embarrassing.  So long as there are no Germanic links to Boris Becker or Angela Merkel!  As Pinsent rowed by, with his back between his knees, did she wonder if he had more of the seed of the Conqueror in him than she did?  All that barge stuff and burnished throne imagery might not compensate if he had.

As for Philip, he was Greek and possibly partly responsible for their huge deficit and possible default. However, he has always shown a good example as to how to survive a rainy stint at Balmoral, or wherever.  You’ve got to admire the man’s resilience: all those damp corgis and midge-infested  puddles!  Still, the water is soft in Scotland and gentle in a good malt.  So there are compensations.  But even a stalwart such as he had to be hospitalised after his thorough soaking.  The medics didn’t tell him there was no such thing as a chill or invite him to phone NHS Direct. He’s probably got BUPA.

Water- there is so much of it about this summer, I concluded. People used to say when I was younger that I had so much enthusiasm that I could have bottled it.  Now, with all the talk of water meters and reservoir repairs and Victorian pipework renovation there was a certainty that prices would rise.  The fashionable thing was to dig a bore hole.  I could produce my own label: Suttonford Soft – straight from Izaak Walton chalkstreams.  In smaller print: culled from the countryside of the Compleat Angler.  Maybe Alan Titchmarsh could launch it. He seemed to be everywhere.  Raymond Blanc and Jamie Oliver might take a few bottles for their local eateries.  It would be good to exploit the stuff that was ruining my life.  Maybe I could light a candle to St Swithun in Winchester Cathedral, begging for financial success, and, as a back-up, apply to The Bank of Dave for a handout.  If Theo is to be let down by his investment in Dyas, he may be interested in-say-a 40% stake for £100,000, reducing to 10% after three years of unmitigated success.  The thought of Duncan Ballantyne and Peter Jones fighting it out for my attention gratifies me.  Step back, Deborah Meaden.

Hello! I blinked. I’d wakened up and found that it was St Swithun’s Day.  Perversely, it wasn’t raining-at the moment- I qualified.  I was getting into the swing of  Mark Tully’s aquatic compilation of watery readings on Something Understood on Radio 4 with the joys of The Raindrop Prelude. One had to  admit that Tully compiles an interesting melange.  He included Longfellow on the dreariness of rain, protesting that behind the clouds, the sun still shone. Yeah, right. Maybe through a Flybe porthole, but not this far down.

Ella Fitzgerald had sung:

Into each life some rain must fall

but too much is falling in mine. 

Now I could identify with that.

It was all very well for Thoreau to say that rain made us feel at one with Nature or God, but he was referring to the Spring or Fall variety, not the unseasonable cascades we had been experiencing. Yet I seemed to recall an old part song called As torrents in summer, so all this perception of climate change might be old hat after all.

There might have been something Romantic about a full-blown orage, such as that portrayed in Debussy’s Jardins sous la Pluie and something very like special pleading in Sitwell’s positive focus on the rain at the Crucifixion.  Apparently it could not dampen Christ’s love for us.  Maybe it helped to wash away our sins.

Well tried, Mark.  You must have had some kind of placatory response from the Rain God after your paeon of praise for the pluie.  You seem to have held it off for one day, but let’s not get up our hopes too quickly.

In the couple of hours in which the drizzle desisted, I stepped out gingerly into my back garden, tripping over my Coltsfoot wellies, which I’d forgotten were sitting on the doormat and which were now waterlogged.   Cascades of rotting rosebuds and blossoms required dead heading.  However, the hostas were- as yet- ungnawed.  The dispersal of coffee grounds from the trendy shop had caused the slugs to limbo under someone else’s fence, in a caffeine-induced high.

Every time I type wellies into my computer, it corrects me and produces willies.  What is going on?  I thought willies was an acronym for people who work in London yet live in Edinburgh.  Somebody is having a laugh.

It had been announced by The National Trust that this year had been apocalyptic for birds and other wildlife, but slugs and mosquitos were lovin’ it.  I congratulated myself for having given them a hard grind- literally-by emptying out the cafetiere straight into hostas at my back door.  (Or is that hostae?)

I tried to harvest as many redcurrants and blackcurrants as I could, before the wood pigeons descended.  They were not having any kind of Apocalypse now, as far as I could determine.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

St Swithun’s Day

Tags

Coltsfoot, husband, Kirstie Allsopp, mobility scooter, Olympics, shoes, St Swithun's Day, Suttonford, tennis, Vatican, Wimbledon

15^th July

St Swithun by Peter Eugene Ball

St Swithun’s Day.. If it pours today, it will rain for forty days.  All because someone exhumed his sanctified body, or something.

Maybe the Vatican should canonise my husband.  He would never shift his body willingly and so we could all expect fine summers for light years.  Swithun’s claim to sainthood had involved the restoration of broken eggs.  So maybe we should beatify Robert Winston, if he hasn’t already beatified himself.  Anything to hedge our meteorological bets.

Maybe by mid- August there will be an Indian summer.  Yes, but in Mumbai, I thought.  Maybe I should book a holiday with Goa Compare, except that I hate that guy with the twizzly moustache.  He would probably be one of those who took up two seats on the plane and, knowing my luck, I’d be stuck next to him, or to the baby who cried through Wimbledon at match points.  I felt I could identify more with the frazzled housewife of confused.com.  Better singing too.  And with the rain, a similar hairstyle to myself.

I had put my shoes sensibly into the re-cycling bin, but couldn’t fish them out, even with a bent coat hanger.  I stepped back and was almost garrotted by an expandable dog lead attached to an Irish Wolf hound.

Keep that thing under control! I screeched and reversed into the path of a pensioner on a mobility scooter, who clearly thought the pavement was Brands Hatch or Silverstone.

Right. That’s enough, I complained. If it was going to stair-rod all summer, I was off to Coltsfoot to purchase a pair of floral wellies, which would probably cost the price of a Black Market Olympic Opening Ceremony ticket, but which might be covered by my No Win/No Fee compensation for having had my eye poked out by the spoke of a Keep on Keeping On umbrella.

Coltsfoot was the kind of shoe shop that kept the podiatrist opposite in business.  Occasionally one could find something that one’s foot could actually remain in for part of the day.  And those items of footwear were wellies with attitude.  The idea was to pretend that by sporting them you had a Kirsty Allsopp lifestyle with an invisible husband and a homemade house, actually produced by top British craftsmen, who indulged your fantasy that you could knit a kitchen or embroider money.  If you wore those wellies, everyone would think that your cupcake breasts were National Childbirth registered and authentic and your skip-rescued children were not so much the product of Natural Selection, as the living illustrations of a Boden catalogue.  Should you place these wellies outside on your Turtle mat, Phil Spencer would materialise and your house would sell in one open weekend.

All the fives were sold.  There was a pair of thirty nines left, so that should leave room for a pair of socks, since it was likely to be freezing as well as pouring for the rest of what was laughingly referred to as the season.  I thought Nigel Kennedy might have to revise the title of his Vivaldi programmes, as we didn’t seem to have any variation in the weather- just one big similarity and no enigmas.

My main objective was to acquire a Coltsfoot carrier- a bag whose logo was instantly recognised throughout Suttonford and which provoked a curious bowing gesture similar to Japanese acknowledgements.

Once achieved, I could allow myself to be seen popping into Aquanibble, the latest establishment, which was causing pavement obstructions from the gathering of foot fetishists who drooled over ladies who entered the establishment in order to pay shedloads to have their corns and callouses nibbled by embryonic Piranhas, leaving the aforementioned Ladies Who Lunch with flip-flop ready feet and their husbands with macerated monthly accounts.

But what was the point of having smooth skin on your feet if they were going to be encased in what virtually amounted to funky galoshes all summer?  As for additions to my wardrobe, the only relevant outlets to visit would be Monsoon, Twister or Tsunami.  That’s where those weather girls must have bought their jackets.  No sense of tailoring!

I appreciate, but cannot afford designer gear, so that is why I visit Help the Ancient so much.  Who knows?-  there may be a weather girl who lives in the vicinity- it is that kind of area.  The presenter might have to ring the changes for viewers and so might off-load some goodies from time to time, especially if she is an attractive one.  They usually find that they are impregnated shortly after becoming high profile. Then they will have no need of their ill- fitting jackets and can just donate them and live in Barbours like the rest of the not very yummy mummies on the school run.

I would draw the line at any cast-offs from Angela Merkel, though.  On the other hand, her sartorial inelegance doesn’t stop her from dominating the whole of Europe.  Go, Angela, go!

And what is it about jackets and Hilary Rodham Clinton?  What is the woman doing, letting herself go like that?  She could only have herself to blame if Bill did another Monica. But I don’t think their re- cycling bags will turn up in Suttonford somehow.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

St Swithun’s Day

Tags

Book of Common Prayer, BST, cow, deluge, drought, Olympics, Religion, St Swithun's Day, Summer 2012

If it rains on St Swithun’s Day, it will rain for forty days, I ruminated at the start of July.  I like that verb: ruminated.  It reminds me of a cow chewing the cud.  Lately I have felt that I have four stomachs where one should be, probably owing to constant grazing, so I might have to use a thumb index to find my navel at this rate.  Cows apparently don’t have four stomachs: they just have one big one with quadruple compartments.  Probably I have one as well, though it feels like it has multiplied fourfold. Does this make me a cow?

Don’t answer that.

Some would say that my character is not dependent on my anatomy. My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterate with cow and there are connotations with the adjective candid.  Never mind that there are also wider connotations with some kind of sexually transmitted disease.  I intended to come clean about my feelings and then decided that I would publish my observations on the climactic chaos that is/ was the summer of 2012.  I kept a diary, with a view to making it a blog, but wrote indoors, lest it become a Rorschach blob, if I wrote it in the garden.

About forty days ago, I determined that I would monitor the precipitation levels over this season of unexpected extremes, to test the St Swithun hypothesis. Everyone was hoping desperately that it would be dry for the Olympics. The Book of Common Prayer, I seemed to remember, included prayers for rain.  Maybe there would be something about appealing for respite, so I turned to my Folio Edition and found:

Send us, we befeech thee, in this our neceffity,  fuch  moderate rain and fhowers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort..

Yes, moderate, please.

While I was browsing I saw other sections which were headed in italics.

  For fair Weather:

O Almighty Lord God, who for the fin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight perfons.. and :

O Lord God, who haft juftly humbled us by thy late plague of immoderate rain and waters…[yet] in thy mercy haft relieved [us} by this feafonable and blessed change of weather..

Okay, I thought.  All this low pressure might be subject to change. I will see if I can butter up the saint, in preparation for his special day.  Lighting a candle at his shrine might just do it. I’ll let you know if it works.

I was unsure how to head up my diary: Somethingth Sunday after Trinity might be a reasonable starting point. Then I, Candia the Candid, would keep writing, right through the Olympics and would evaluate my research forty days after the Saint’s day, at the end of August.  If I enjoyed writing, I might extend my diary to the end of BST, on October, 28^th and- who knows?- ad infinitum, or ad nauseam to disaffected readers.

First had been the Drought, then there had been several deluges. I had felt like sending out a dove, the raven having disappeared three flood warnings ago.  The Hosepipe Ban seemed ancient history.

A couple of weeks before there had been a landslide on the East Coast Railway Line and a plucky little Scotsman had commented on how it had taken him fifteen hours plus to travel from London to Edinburgh, only partly by rail.

It had been an epic journey, worthy of a Boswellian diary entry.  Fellow passengers had endured flooding, hailstones and a fire on the train –everything except pestilence, he’d gleefully remarked, in that cynical humour characteristic of the Glaswegian psyche.

Pestilence could probably have been arranged, I mused, but not on an off-peak fare, or whatever they call such a tariff on their multiplicity of mesmerising day returns.

So here is my record of the week that preceded the saint’s day and the forty days that followed.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012