My gardens

My gardens and all 197
Originally uploaded by Lynners59

'Sally Holmes' in early morning light

My gardens

My gardens
Originally uploaded by Lynners59

Roses from my garden. 'The Friar' 'Iceberg' 'Perle d'Or' and 'Gruss an Aachen' . The rose outside the window is 'Remember Me' and the items on the table are all second-hand goodies from church fairs.

Another part of the wood

Went to get my car's warrant of fitness on Monday. I'm going to a new place called Straight Torque (!) in a part of the city that I usually drive through. I had 30 minutes to wait, so went for a walk around the area, an industrial/light industrial part of Christchurch. It's were all the real things get done, full of automotive repairs, plumbers, gasfitters, chandlers, printers, sign writers, glass fitters, and demolition sales yards, with a huge depot for empty containers (the big ones that sail on ships) stacked thirty feet high in the old railway yards. I really enjoyed my walk, very different to the leafy suburb where I usually exercise. Things are ugly and utilitarian, but in a good useful way. Not a place to go at night though. I felt like I'd been in another city, a leaner, meaner one that didn't exist in the tourist promos but interesting all the same.
Just finished reading a life of Katherine Parr. ("Katherine the queen" by Someone-or-other). The question I'm always left with in these biographies of the long-dead is how we can claim to really know what their lives were like, or empathise with them. It was another world, full of extremist religious beliefs and great cruelty, where people's motivations seem quite inexplicable. Fear of eternal hellfire and damnation didn't seem to be a detterent for doing bad things, though. I suppose if you repented on your deathbed and gave your worldly goods to the Church you got out of punishment. This was only really an option for the aristocracy; ordinary people with no money or property just had to burn.
Henry VIII really was a shit. No tolerance for differences of opinion there.

PS.

Apropos of Florence Nightingale, her sister's name was Parthenope. I think it means "virgin-place", or something to do with virginity, parthenogenesis being the term for something that is born without being produced by sexual congress, mitosis as opposed to meiosis. The Greek goddess Athena was Athena Parthenos, as she was "delivered" full grown from the head of Zeus, hence the Parthenon, being her temple in Athens. Parthenope was the Greek name of the city of Naples. This may be useful information. Some day. There is no such thing as useless information, only information that doesn't yet have a use.

Thing-O-Matic

Reading yesterday about the Thing-O-Matic, a doohickey that makes 3-D replicas of objects, a 3-D printer if you like. I first read about this in a novel by Cory Doctorow "The makers" during my cyberpunk phase last year, so I was well stoked to see that reality has cought up with fiction in only about 6 months. Mind you, I'll bet that Doctorow knew all about the Thing-O-Matic being in development, and used it (or something very like it) in his novels so that he would seem wonderfully prescient.
Now all I need is a transporter device, so that I can get to Italy instantly without paying any money or travelling for several days in a tin can to get there.
I'm writing this at the library. I never realized before how noisy the librarians are! Bang that trolley, slam those books down. Mind you, there is a numpty sitting beside me whose phone is vibrating and so is he. Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle. If we could wire him up to the national grid he'd power the city for days. Perhaps he's the source of all the after-shocks we have.
He stinks, too. Of sweat-rotten sneakers and old testoterone. Goodnight, sweet prince.

A winter on the Nile

Just finished a great book titled A winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert and the temptations of Egypt by Anthony Sattin. Nightingale and Flaubert were both in Egypt at the same time, although they never met. Both were in quandaries; both knew that they were destined to do great things, but WHAT? Nightingale was wrestling with her family and convention that denied her calling to nurse. Flaubert wanted to write the great novel. He wrote one called "The Temptation of St Anthony". It took him three years. When he read it to his friends and asked them what he should do with it, they told him to burn it! Discouraged, he decided to take a trip to Egypt to clear his head.
Part of the fascination of this book is that our protagonists saw two very different Egypts. Nightingale visited temples and hospitals, discovered the roots of Christianity in ancient Egyptian religion and heard God calling her to commit to her destiny. Flaubert visited brothels, bathhouses and taverns, and came to grips with the reality of the "mysterious Orient" that he had fantasized about in provincial France. Knowing little of Nightingale and even less of Flaubert, this book has remedied some of my ignorance. Perhaps the moral of the story is that travel doesn't only broaden the mind, it focuses it on the true nature of the self. (Yes, I know how pompous this sounds).
The cover blurb says that Sattin is to Egypt what Dalrymple is to India, so I must try to find more of him.

Vado a Venezia

I'm trying to get a cheeapish flight to Italy in May, but on enquiry the cheapest seems to be by Aeroflot via Shanghai and Moscow. The spirit quails at this idea; in fact I had a nightmare about it last night, crashing into the frozen wastes of Siberia in a rust bucket full of loose bolts. Oddly, my ex-husband was with me. He usually appears in my nightmares, proof of indelible trauma.
So I've gone off the idea of travelling. Should I stay or should I go? It would be less anxiety provoking if I didn't but...I kind of want to.