Air frost at New Year

This is perhaps my tenth New Year post (I've not checked if I did one the first year), it's something of a custom to commit to doing one. I've always been something of a party-pooper about New Year at the best of times, often tending to a Jeremiah-ish mood, and indeed,  these are not the best of times, in many ways, and it's difficult not to feel lugubrious and apprehensive about the year(s) to come, on all kinds of levels from the personal to the global, including the intersection of the two which I feel has a more ominous reality than it has really had for me before. Likewise, on the personal and wider world spheres, this has been a year of shocks and difficulties. We have hopes and dreams of our own, beyond the shock reactions and urges to flight after the fire, which have calmed down somewhat, yet the path to get to them looks sometimes steep, fraught and uncertain.

As often I woke early after sleeping fitfully; my body and its broken thermostat and other inner chemical workings playing tricks on me I could really do without, lay with a lot of rather dreary thoughts and a few more cheerful ones, counted my blessings backwards alphabetically, (one of a number of devices not quite sovereign but sometimes useful against insomnia and anxiety), dozed a little and waited for the late, late daylight.

When it came, action, affection, tea and toast restored my spirits as they usually do, and it brought what seems to have become rare and lovely thing, as well as a heavy mist, a glorious air frost and light of pink and blue and gold, which prompted me to another rather unusual thing these days, to get the camera out,

though these were taken from the comfort and warmth of the kitchen:

But Elfie and I were eager to get out and get sniffing and looking:

The mist came and went and shrunk the world as it does, so the road out of our village disappeared into oblivion:

But this is the weather that Elfie likes, and so do I:

In the frequent fog we've had I've been nervous about letting her off the lead, as her usual running distance would take her out of sight, but on this occasion I did, and she always kept in sight, and seemed to love the crispness underfoot and good smells.

The frost continued to form as we were out, making fine filaments in the fur round her ears,

and at one point I put my hand to my own hair and found it stiff with ice too, yet it turned to wet as soon as we got indoors again, rushing in, in vain, to show Tom the phenomenon.

Many wonderful things have happened to us this year too, as I'm sure they have everywhere. Tonight it will be guinea fowl pie, the last of Christmas dinner, and a dvd, and I imagine we'll be in bed and asleep before midnight.

Happy New Year.

Iceland, sunsetting

The last Iceland post and the last of the the year. 

I spent my birthday on the Golden Circle tour, in a comfy minibus driven by a charming, funny, knowledgeable man named Thor, in the congenial company of a dozen or so others. Mid-morning, still in pitch darkness, we visited a town sitting on so much volcanic and seismic activity that they baked bread in the ground, grew peppers and tomatoes all year in geothermic greenhouses, and where one of the sights pointed out was a big hole where a house had fallen into the ground one morning. After that is was golden waterfalls, churning geysirs, the old site of the Allthing, and a lake so deep and clear that there are three separate species of Arctic char each evolved for a different depth of water, and scuba divers get vertigo. And much more besides. 

The following morning another minibus picked us up early and took us to the airport, where security waved through our souvenir heavy metal horseshoe complete with spiky nails when we said we wanted to keep it because of the wonderful time we'd had with the horses. We spent our last krona on miniatures of Schnapps, and as I was going through passport control the dour young man frowned at me as he looked at my passport.

'Did you have a good party last night then?'

Was I looking that rough? I wondered, then twigged; I'd been having such a good time for the whole time I kept forgetting about it.

'I had seawolf with lobster sauce, a candle in my ice cream and some very nice schnapps,' I replied.

We landed late but comfortably at Luton in the fog, and went through an hour or two's insignificant but anti-climactic hassle trying to get on a pre-booked bus to Stansted. Once on board, the comparative dreariness and the excruciating easy listening station (I never knew there were so many profoundly mind-numbing cover versions of already mind-numbing smoochy ballads...) was alleviated by exchanging text messages with my lovely niece and her chap waiting to pick us up at Stansted, so neither of us worried about the others too much, and with Glenn here at home, who reminded me that the day, December 13th, was St Lucy's day, and Radio 3 was playing some lovely music from Nordic countries.

I promised myself to look this up on the i-player when I next could, and found it was part of a whole Northern Lights season (most of the programmes are still available to listen), which I'm still relishing discovering, including the 20th century Icelandic composer Jón Leifs. 

I took so many, often rather haphazard and blurry photos of the Golden Circle and its sights and a few videos too. There is so much to photograph and so much to be said about it but so little perhaps that hasn't been photographed or said before or better, so I thought it best to stick them all together into one montage video, and was able to track down the Jón Leifs Requiem piece to put with it. I'm quite pleased with the video, but especially want everyone to hear the music; it's about five minutes long, so if you have the time, please adjust the volume, put on headphones etc as necessary, and maybe even view it full screen? 

~

So it only remains to wish everyone the very best for the coming year. The difference between my own blessed state and that of so much of the world can never be reconciled, I know, I've no new platitudes to shed on the matter. 

But I'd share my happiness and good fortune if I could. Happy New Year.

Oh sod it it'll have to be some knitting

Can't seem to get a proper post together, so it'll have to be some more knitting, including Tom in a hat.

The hat in this picture in fact, featuring all Tom's knitted Christmas presents, none of which were ready in time for Christmas:

These items include the epic merino/cotton half fisherman's rib sweater I think I mentioned a while back, which just about came out OK, proves not to have enough warmth in it to be worn just now, and I was so fatigued by the sight of it after about half a million tiny half-fisherman's rib stitches by the time I'd finished that I was not sorry to see it put away for a bit. Also featured are a pair of green and black striped thick socks, and said hat.  This is the second hat I have attempted to make for Tom; the first was too big, too fuzzy, too fussy and, ultimately therefore, too feminine. Odd this masculine/ feminine knit thing, it really is quite delicate, anything too fuzzy and chunky, however sombre the colour or plain the stitch, is just not right. Tom didn't complain of it in those terms, but nevertheless that was the fact. 

This one, however, seems to have worked. The red and grey pattern was derived from an old chart to be found on the Estonian museums public portal. Despite careful transcribing of it onto big squared paper, my maths still let me down and there's an odd jog in it so it doesn't flow freely round the hat, but Tom, like Eric Morecambe, says you can't see the join. Also by the time I'd accomplished three repeats of it the hat was already too long so I had to rather hastily bring it to a conclusion by means of gathers rather than decreases, but, even so, it is a satisfactory garment and has already been christened on a wet and windy beach.

The other noteworthy thing about it is that I started and completed it in a single day on New Year's Day, which listening to BBC Radio 4 FM's all day dramatisation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which was very good, and which the sight of the hat will always bring back to me. I did take a break to eat mid-evening and so missed the battle of Borodino. (Finding that link has just revealed to me that the actor playing Pierre Bezukhov, Paterson Joseph, is black. I love radio.)

So here is Tom wearing his hat (I've noticed he's often a crowd pleaser, so I'm shamelessly exploiting this):

Books and boots and collages and goodbye 2014

Before any Old Year's Night meditations, I want just to share the delights of my Christmas haul of books and music:

This is mostly acquired by ordering the things I want over the preceding weeks and months, then Tom snaffles them away and brings them out for me at Christmas. I do the same for the things he orders. This works pretty well, ensuring each of us gets what we want, with even the occasional element of surprise when we forget what it was we ordered in the first place.

Also, though again not really a surprise as I had to try them on, but an unexpected pleasure nonetheless, since I didn't know such nice ones existed, the Best Pair of Wellies Ever. I have long needed a new pair of possibly what are the most important items of footwear, along with good slippers, for my mode of living, since the old ones, either by the action of garden tools or by the weakness of polyurethane or whatever they're made of these days, acquired a small hole just before the toe, leaving me always with an annoying wet patch on my sock, where the bunion would be if I had bunions, which I'm happy to say I do not, since I have always used my feet well, run around barefoot through most of my childhood and beyond and never worn stupid shoes. Flat-footed feminist and proud, that's me. Anyway, these are not only quite beautiful, with their foliate decoration, but also very comfortable: snug, supple and warm, they do not pull and twist one's socks off inside and are easy to pull on too. Who said progress isn't what it used to be? (And yes I know I've said more about the boots than the books but I've worn the boots and haven't read the books yet, or only a bit.)

~

So, the end of 2014 is nigh.  The year when I said goodbye to the dearest of beings, and cried an awful lot. When paid work and poetic inspiration finally dried up altogether, and I let them go without much struggle; when it seems to me a process of stripping back and stepping back, of detachment and patience and acceptance has been required. And yet, it's also been the year when things and creatures and places and people were found or re-found, or they found me: Jordi Savall and Patrick O'Brian, sculpted stone and Quess'quitricote and greyhounds, Père Lachaise and the Ile de Batz ... and more and others I'll not name but treasure them up in my heart. 

And I continue to come back here ( more often this year than last, in fact, 90 posts this year against 75 last, for what it's worth) and to treasure and appreciate my friends here, old and new, for new friends continue to appear, to my great satisfaction. So thanks and love to all, and may all manner of things be well for you for the coming year. 

And on that note, my final end-of-the-month collage for December, followed by all of them for the year past. I'm pleased I've kept up this practice, albeit erratically, which seems at once to show how long and rich and change-filled the year has been, and also, paradoxically, how it has flown by. 

December: 

1. Winter wheat field.
2. Meadow pipit; winter bird flocks are mixed and indistinguishable, sometimes the camera allows an id I wouldn't get just by eye.
3. Ditch water. Not as dull as it's made out to be.
4. Redcurrant jelly, from the summer's crop, with Port. Very good.
5. Sushi birthday.
6. First frost and slippered feet.
7. Christmas Eve.
8. Christmas Day dinner. Guinea fowl and three types of stuffing.
9. Hat and gloves. What to wear when taking a turn in the frosty garden.
10. Frosty garden, from the bedroom window, New Year's Eve.
11. Ivy on the compost bin.
12. Rosehips.

~

(For the rest, month titles link to original posts.)

January

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February

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March

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April

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May

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June

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July

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August

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September

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October

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November

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Begin again...

Smitten, as ever was.

On the last day of the year.

It's been a quiet Christmas here, which is fine.  We had good food and drink, mopped up the water that the quite exceptional wind and storms before Christmas drove in, had a modest and manageable amount of social contact, perhaps the best bit of which for me was meeting Iso in Lamballe a week or so before to give her the pullover I'd made her - she'd chosen the wool much earlier in the year but only on-line, and hadn't seen it - and also the scarf and hat which I'd quickly also done for her Pascal and Princeling respectively.  I asked her what she fancied doing; normally tireless, a walk, some window shopping, browsing in the bookshop might have been on the cards, but she just said that in fact she was rather knackered and could we just go and sit in the salon de thé? So we did, for over two hours just drinking hot chocolate and café crème and nattering, and a couple of times our husbands rang, mine to ask advice on making hot lime pickle and hers as to whether she might like and be available to come and see a show with him in Rennes in January. I'd wrapped the knitwear up and made her promise they wouldn't open it till Christmas day, and in the evening of the 25th I got phone pictures of them all posing festively in their garments, looking fairly merry, including this one of Princeling in his striped ear-flap hat with matching cracker:

Way too big, like his jumper which he's now just about emerging from, with the sleeves turned up, poor little waif. I put some matching candy canes in with the hat anyway.  I think that's just water in his glass.

I managed to complete a fair amount of knitting for presents, in fact: at the last count, one pullover, one scarf, two hats (plus one for myself),two pairs of slipper socks, three cowls and four pairs of gloves.  Lest I become one of those sad and tiresome archetypal females of a certain age who embarrass their unfortunate family and acquaintances with ugly and unwanted items of needlework which they then have to go through the misery of wearing so as not to hurt feelings, I enclosed a 'knitted gift pledge and returns policy' in each parcel which read thus:

While I make every effort to observe and remember which styles and colours people like (or perhaps more importantly, don't like), making presents for others is a hit or miss affair.  However, unless requested to do so, I would not generally make you anything which I would not be happy to keep for myself.  So, if you find that you could or would not ever wear or want to keep anything I've made you, you are free to return it to me within an unlimited period, and no umbrage will be taken. Alternatively, feel free to swap it or otherwise pass it on to anyone who likes it better, regardless of whether I might see them in it or not, and likewise, no offence will ensue. You'll just get a jar of jam next year.

The returns policy does not, of course, apply to kids' stuff, since I can't usually wear that and Molly won't either, but as most people with kids know other people with kids then just give it away.

Most of the yarn I knit with is fairly easy care and should wash well on gentle cycle, though some darker colours may run a bit, and drying flat and pulling back into shape while damp is efficacious. But you already knew that.

Hope you like it anyway!

So far no one's taken me up on it; Dutch E and B the German Doctor were both to be seen wearing their cowls (joined-up scarves) on Boxing Day; E e-mailed me more than once to tell me she was wearing hers at that moment and seemed genuinely enthusiastic, B was still wearing hers the next day when I ran into her by chance in Ecomarché when she didn't expect to be seeing me, so that was a good sign.  And since they're Dutch and German they're pretty rubbish at dissembling so I think they must really have been pleased. The Quiet American said his gloves were all right but I didn't seem to have finished them. Ha ha, very funny. They were of course (currently very trendy) fingerless gloves which you can use for reading maps or anything in a chilly environment, using camera or phone, drinking coffee on outside terraces etc.  My stroppy teenage step-grandson Benj, to whom I also sent a pair, didn't get the returns policy but I put in a note saying if he didn't like them not to worry, give them to someone else, but if he did please wear them for anything and everything, they weren't precious or to be saved but used.  This was all the encouragement he needed to wear them throughout Christmas dinner, quoting the permission slip at his sister when she told him to take them off or he'd get food on them.

Other than that, we haven't gone much on presents; we generally don't but some years we order ourselves things and hand them over to the other one as they arrive to exchange on the day, but we didn't much this year. However, I did remember to order a CD I've been meaning to get hold of for a little while.  This is Contratopia's Smitten.

I have no idea whether this group is well known in the US, I'd not heard of them until a while ago when I was googling myself, as you do, in the context of this blog, and I came across a reference to a track on their first album called Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp.  This was nothing whatever to do with me, the album had been released well before I ever started here.  I chose the name of this blog rather haphazardly; I grew up under a box elder tree, a fairly unusual species to find in a small town garden in the English Home Counties (we didn't even know what it was and simply called it the maple tree) and a fairly large specimen at that, and I was fond of it. In the film Patience: After Sebald I saw recently, based on a work in which connective elements of coincidence and serendipity/synchronicity are fundamental to the structure and content, one of the contributors remarked that one's own coincidences are rather like one's own dreams: meaningful and fascinating to oneself and boring and insignificant to anyone else.* So I don't really expect anyone else to find this event as magical and remarkable as I do, but I had to act on it. I listened to the sample snippets (as you can on the cdbaby website in the link above) and thought it sounded pleasant, and now I have the full album, I quite love it.

Contratopia (their website) are a contra dance band from the Midwest. Contra dance comes from the French contredanse, a kind of dance where two lines of people danced opposite (contre) each other, a false etymology derived from the English 'country dance'.  It went from England to France and back, then to America, then nearly died out... It's a most interesting story and subject and the link wiki link will tell you more. The music, from fiddle, mandolin, piano, oboe and others, is melodious, rich and varied, its repetitions contain swirls and flourishes and grace notes and key changes and all kinds of things I know nothing about and am not sure I'm using the correct terms for but which please me anyway, and it's instrumental so there are no distracting words to worry about. Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp is a quirky swing number, I'd be happy enough to have it as a theme tune, and there are jigs and reels and airs and waltzes, tunes that make me smile and my feet tap, that make me want to get up and dance (and sometimes I do), and others that are lyrical and poignant and bring tears.  There are tunes you could imagine Emma and Mr Knightly and little Harriet and the obnoxious Eltons dancing to at the ball at the Crown Inn, and others that sound wild and Celtic and mysterious. There are tunes that take you to places in the back hills of America, and others that take you somewhere else entirely.

And not least I love the title, Smitten. Because I realise that I always have been and still am.  Sometimes it's just a passing thing, sometimes, happily, it's for the long haul, but I realise that for better or worse, I've always been smitten by something or someone, and I hope I always will be.

So those are some of the things that have been making me glad at this turn of the year.  There is worry and sadness too, as of course there always is somewhere, but it has come closer; losses and fears are felt keenly, whether our own or others', if one can even clearly make that distinction.

But at this moment, the latest lot of wind and rain has blown over and the sun is shining for a time.


The photos in the video slideshow below were taken earlier this month, the morning of the first real frost of the winter, in the Mayenne.  My brother had been in hospital going stir-crazy, we were about to come home.  He suggested a walk with the camera around the fishing lakes up the road, which their seasonal English neighbours had lately bought, drained and refilled, the same ones where Belle had shown her swimming skills back in the summer.  We left our loved ones, animal and human, at home, and he and I made a long leisurely circuit, with much stopping and looking and chat, ending with some scrambling over chain link fences and sluice gates and concrete ledges where the path ran out.  It was ever my brother's calling to lead his kid sisters clambering in somewhat precipitous places; we had a lovely morning. When we drove home later in low, bright winter light, there were still many autumn leaves on the trees, and they shone as if they'd been burnished. Within a week or so of sudden winter - for this is a year when all such changes have been sudden and surprising, the seasons shocked and hurried into readiness - most of them were gone, but they were lovely while they lasted.

The music is the title track on the Contratopia album, Smitten. (The full set of photos is on a web album here)

~

Happy New Year.

~

* unless transmuted into something worthwhile as art, was the coda.

Temptations of (shared) solitude, and a walk on the beach for New Year.

'Do you think we talked too much when B and the Quiet American were here?' I wondered aloud.
'I don't know.  I often think I drivel too much when I'm on my own ground.'
'Me too.  I mean, I think I drivel too much, not that I think you do.'

In fact I fear we both do.  Introvert stuff, nervousness, wordy and unchannelled thoughts spilling out randomly, distracted by being the hosts and attending to dinner means I chatter with only half my mind on what I'm saying, being at home and not having to drive back (and it's our wine), means we drink a bit more and so get more loquacious.  We exceptionally have coffee after dinner to keep ourselves going then wake in the small hours tormented by a sense of fear and foolishness, and certain the meal must have been inedible. Our interests and topics of conversation are surely obscure and bizarre, our manners too earnest and intense, our worldly experience slight and uncertain, doubtless we leave people embarrassed or nonplussed... What should be a normal social arrangement almost seems to require a day's convalescence.

Moreover, it gets worse, not easier, as one gets older.  I say 'one', I mean 'I'.  Doubtless no one else on earth suffers from such hopeless, immature, ridiculous angst about having a couple of friends of ten years standing - whom we hold in much affection, and who have given us ample reason to believe think well enough of us, don't find our company disagreeable, and generally appreciate our food - round for moules frites of an evening. No one else except Tom, I suppose. Which is a comfort, I suppose.

'In fact I drivel on other people's ground too,' I add 'but I feel I've a bit more control over it.'

This makes him laugh, and we both feel better.

'There's worse sins,' he says.

A friendly, chatty e-mail later in the day from B herself reassures me that our discomfort was unfounded, but settling back into our own quiet is a relief.  I remember reading (I think it was at Beth's) about a husband who said of his marriage: We protect each other's solitude. Which is good, it seems, except where does protecting end and imposing begin? In Victoria Wood's excellent TV play the other night, Loving Miss Hatto, the dying Joyce in conversation with the critic who begins to suspect the couple's deception, says that her husband as a young man was vulnerable, that she supposed they both were. He, the critic, suggests gently that vulnerable people can look after each other.  Yes, she says, but they can also compound each other's weakness, but that is the chance you take with marriage.

And that was our main bit of socialising.  Otherwise we've watched TV, engaged on the satisfying work of making space in the 'fridge, and read and read and read. The rain it raineth every day; we sleep later than we mean to each morning, not least because it's so dark with cloud and being further west than most of Devon but in the same time as eastern Germany, and I wake from dreams of rain pouring through the roof, through plaster and floorboards and insulation. Hitherto sound bits of road hereabouts are going into potholes, the roadside ditches are constantly in danger of overflowing, and I know in many parts it's worse. Tom grows disenchanted with working on the bathroom he's finishing upstairs because of the constant hammering of rain on the skylight, I have made it once down the garden to pick a bit of salad.  Molly gets her walks when she gets them, sometimes with her coat on.

Yet yesterday the rain and wind suddenly let up for a whole half a day; we looked up from our afternoon adrift in our books and somnolence, saw the sun, and within minutes it was boot, saddle to horse and away with us, stopping only to check the tides in the Almanach de Facteur, as you do, to make sure there'd be some beach to walk on at Morieux.

And somewhat to our surprise, with it being, I suppose, the Sunday between Christmas and New Year, and the first helping of sun for a long time, and indeed an afternoon of low tide,the wide grey expanse of the bay was a relatively gregarious and convivial place. 

Not only did we share it with the butterflies of upturned empty mussel shells,

colonies of living ones, casings of spider crabs,

groups of gulls,

and lonely egrets,

and troupes of turnstones, sanderlings and knots, the last whose running back and forth, chiding the waves' progression, earned them their name, etymologically the same as that of King Canute,

but also even with a few other members of the human species. Some walking dogs and children,

some foraging for cockles in the sand and mussels on the rocks,

some simply playing.

I think to be a big strong dog, with good sight who loves to run, galloping with horses on the tideline must be a wonderful thing to do.

Whether as coloured dots in the sun,

or as pin-people silhouetted against it, in their smallness within the scene, the ripples and glitter of sand, the distant dark marks of mussel posts and white lines of surf, they had a miniature ephemeral, brave loveliness. 

Coming closer, their charm did not evaporate but evolved.  The family group of perhaps ten, one of whose number climbed to the top of the conical rock, progressed with cheerful shouts and calls, tossing a rugby ball between them, a bright, intense teenage girl, rosy-faced, strawberry-blond in peppermint-green jeans like a little parrakeet, chasing it more eagerly than anyone, her father perhaps, in a silly woolly hat, older women following in pairs, absorbed in talk. Their clamour and stir was heartening, playful, not intrusive. Along with the large lady with the Finnish spitz dog, the sprightly one with the terrier which bounded up to Mol and bounded back again to her again without drawing breath, the two Dutch women who looked cold and pink and like they'd been walking for miles who asked us the way to the village to find coffee to warm them, the old boys with the buckets and spades for foraging, could all be met with a smile, a wave, a greeting.  There was room for everyone.

We made our way back, thinking we'd pick up the Dutch women and give them a lift if we saw them, but we didn't, and miraculously, even the bar in the village was open this winter Sunday afternoon, so presumably they were warming themselves there, or on their way homeward.

I don't mind people really, especially with a lot of space around them.

So tonight, needless to say, conviviality and rubbing shoulders with others is not on the cards. But writing a substantial New Year's Eve post here has become a kind of act of sociability, and in my seventh year of blogging, there's an element of auld lang's syne to that.  And if it would only stop raining for long enough, I might feel moved to start sloughing off this end of year cocoon.

But then there are still some leftovers in the fridge...

Happy New Year.