A new year

Tonight's the night dreaded by introverts. Time to batten down the hatches and make sure I have earplugs at the ready. I can hear "Them" over the back fence warming up already. I still think the new year thing is weird and arbitrary; isn't every day the start of a new year? Having lived through 56 of them now, the only one that really stands out in my memory is one when I was lived in an old house in a seaside suburb, and got up at dawn to wander the beach and welcome in the new day. Blissfully quiet, the light flooding in across the sea, just me, the seagulls and a sleeping drunk bedded down in the sand. Perhaps I'll do this again tomorrow?
     Hope you all have a fruitful new year full of good things.

At last - a summer day

Nice hot day today, no wind either, so great to sit outside for dinner. This is a rare event in Christchurch, NZ; often we have a freezing cold wind in the evening.

Raspberries have been quite successful this year. Collected this handful this morning from the garden

Lillium regale - in New Zealand we call this the Christmas Lily. Fabulous fragrance, when in a vase these are overpowering at night in a small room, so I move mine into the conservatory.

I went away to get a cup of coffee and someone pinched my chair....

Poppies in the garden

Seed from this poppy can be used in baked goods

The seed-heads are very attractive too

This poppy is like a big marshmallow or a wedding dress. The other plants of this type of poppy are all red poppies; this is the only white one.

Tootsie (1982) My Christmas tradition - rewatching Tootsie

Damn it!

We've just this minute had another big earthquake! It seems like every public holiday when we all start to relax, it happens again. Hate it.

Merry Christmas

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Isn't this a stunning photo? One of the Asiatic lilies glowing in the dappled shade. Sometimes you just know you've got a winner.

So the year is trickling to its end. I always think that this time of year life is like a piece of old chewing-gum, there's no flavour left, but you keep on chewing anyway. We start to pin our hopes on next year. It will be better, we say to ourselves, knowing all the while that next year will be much like this, a mix of good and bad and the sublimely ho-hum. There's a poem by Robert Frost, I think it's called The oven bird:

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a midsummer and a midwood bird, 

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again....

The question that he frames in all but words,

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

(Apologies to R. Frost for any inaccuracies in quotation). 

This time of  year does feel diminished to me. Spring and early summer have slipped away, and now we look at ripening fruit with autumn behind them. As an atheist with pagan tendencies, the birthday of Jesus leaves me unmoved, and the commercial whirl is not my commercial whirl. So, it will soon be time to make New Year's resolutions, the same resolutions I made last year and failed to carry out. Have more fun, be more social, be more creative, etc., etc., etc. Next year looms warm and bright, as we cast off the old year and its dreary worn-out clothes.

Lillies are starting...

First day-lily

Not very successful pears - experimenting with salt to give a speckled grainy look. OK but composition is faulty - two pears on left look not right, they should have been overlapped more. Colour a bit dull too.

Watching this DVD at the moment. Interesting theories, one that Shakespeare was born in Italy and was in fact Italian. His surname is not a common one in England, but is common around Palermo in Sicily, as Crollalanza. He may well have been born in Italy and travelled to England as a young teenager, so they say. The other theory is that he lived in Italy as a young man. There is a seven-year gap in his life-story, when scholars don't know where he was or what he was doing. Italians say that his obvious knowledge of cities like Venice, Padua and Verona indicate that he must have lived or visited Italy during this time, and that Shakespeare's portrayals of emotion and tragedy are very Italian in feeling, not English at all. Fact is often stranger than what we suppose to be true, so who knows? I'll watch part II tonight, about the Roman plays of Guglielmo Crollalanza.

Christmas is coming....

Painted this Christmas card at art class last Friday. It was partly an experiment with throwing salt crystals on to the wet paint to give a speckly effect (the blue bit). It's a copy of an existing card, but I didn't have room for the Three Wise Men, so settled for shepherds with blue sheep (white sheep wouldn't show up) and an angel, feet dangling from under his/her cassock. The baby is little more than a blob, and the stable looks like a pile of twigs. One of my classmates made me laugh when he admitted that his Joseph looked like Homer Simpson!
     Not much happening, as usual. In a bit of a funk at the moment, boredom and depression combined. Our weather is rotten, cold and rainy, so I've been staying in bed far more than I should, eating chocolates and drinking coffee. Of course, tomorrow, when I go back to work, the weather is supposed to be fine. Bleh! 
     Read an interesting but gloomy book "Stranger to history; a son's journey through Islamic lands" by Aatish Taseer. Taseer was born in Delhi, to a Sikh mother and a Muslim father, the result of an extramarital affair that his father was ashamed of and didn't like to acknowledge. Taseer travels through several Muslim countries, trying to find out what made his father consider himself a "cultural Muslim" as he himself phrased it. Taseer finds a Muslim world with deep political and theological divisions, which he finds most chilling in Iran's conflation of religion and politics. An argument for the separation of church and state if ever there was one.
    And here in the West we have our own troubles. We have identified an ancient religious celebration with our true religion, Getting and Spending. The malls are full of worshippers at the Shrine of the Perfect Christmas, making sacrifice unto the God of The Economy with this year's earnings and probably part of next year's too. I loathe this time of year, when people have license to do all sorts of noisy, crazy stuff because it's Christmas. Introvert hell! I was kept awake last night till 1.30ish by partying neighbours, and once I'd fallen asleep I was woken up by an earthquake at 2.36! You just can't win sometimes.

Back in time

Looking through some of my photos from my trip back in April/May, remembering what a very good trip it was.

  
                     Spring flowers, Villa d'Este, Tivoli

Fine carving on the Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome

First meal in Florence

Buongiorno, buongiorno, Ferdinando! Florence

Gargoyle water spout, Boboli Gardens

Terracotta dog, Giardino Bardini, Florence

Iris from garden at Villa i Cancelli, Florence.

            The Basilica of the Porziuncola, view from Assisi.

Irises at the old Benedictine Convent, Bosco di San Francesco walk, Assisi

View of Assisi from Piazza di Santa Chiara. My favourite photo

John the Baptist speaks to the crowd, sculpture from the font at  Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, San Sepolcro

                   Beautiful view from the city wall of Arezzo

Marzia and me, Eremo Natura di Giglione, hills near Arezzo.

Orchid, Chiusi La Verna

The Santuario di San Francesco, La Verna.

Bits and pieces

The Amazing Artichoke, picture a bit fuzzy because the best view is through the window. I probably won't eat it, just paint it. Looked up on youTube last night about how to cook them, it seems like a lot of effort, and I think this is not one of the best kinds to grow anyway.

My first zucchino. I know that in three months time I'll be saying "no, not another bloody zook" when they've grown into whomping great inedible marrows.

This is an apple I painted at watercolour class last week. I did a green apple at home, but that didn't work out so well.

Tidy painting nook before

Untidy painting nook after. Note that the green apple is missing - I ate it.

Painting class again this afternoon, at the local Baptist church. I hate to offend all you Baptists out there, but I really don't feel comfortable there.  There is one woman in the class who is a born-again, and she keeps bringing the Lord into conversation. "The Lord told me to..." "The Lord spoke to me and said.." I have no problem with people having a faith but this just makes me cringe. It's a sort of spiritual exhibitionism. I'm not really sure why it bothers me so much.  Is it the sin of spiritual pride, to go on and on about how you and only you have a hotline to God that obviously lesser people (like my atheist self) don't have? I think so. "God talks to me, OK, not to you, you miserable sinner".  She wants to go to Japan, both to see the culture and the art, and to evangelise a little on the side, because "they've had such a bad time with the earthquakes and such". What makes her think that they need her? What makes her think that her beliefs are so much better than theirs? Perhaps I should phone the Japanese ambassador here, and tell him another disaster is on the way.

PS. I received my end-of-year holiday bonus yesterday, yay! it's been a horrible, nasty year at work, and I feel that it's some compensation for the mental anguish that's been going on. One of my colleagues has now been forced into early retirement; I don't think it was what she wanted at all, but I'm relieved for her that she will be out of the fray and can get on with her life. No doubt the powers that be will look around for other target/s now; we've seen our team picked apart in the last nine months. Painful and distressing, this has been a textbook case of how to take a good, functioning team with high morale and convert it into people who just don't care anymore.

Garden pics

Lime green nicotiana and pansies

Double blue Campanula persicifolia. Note cat in background!

Birds! In the tree!

My artichoke. I think this is variety Purpura de Jesi. Not very plump chokes because it hasn't been watered enough, but aesthetically pleasing all the same.

Reading

Having a little mini-holiday at the moment, just for a week, so I've been reading non-stop (apart from gardening). Two recommended books:

The Asylum by John Harwood is one for Vic-lit fans. If you like Sarah Waters and Wilkie Collins you'd probably enjoy this. It's more Gothic than Sarah, but very plotty just like Collins. Mistaken identity, betrayal, dark pasts, a lost will, insanity, spooky old buildings and a little hint of lesbianism make this a worthy entrant on the Vic-lit list. Not the best I've read, but certainly not the worst either.

 I've just started Ailsa Piper's Sinning across Spain, but it seems promising. Piper decided to walk across Spain on the old Moorish road, the Mozarabe, from Granada to Santiago de Compostella, and hit upon the novel idea of financing the trek by carrying people's sins for money, and to drop the sins off at the shrine of St James. Apparently this was something done in medieval times by poor people who wanted to go on pilgrimage but had no money. Whether this is theologically possible or morally reprehensible (shouldn't people carry their own sins?) are questions she address thoughtfully. Sin isn't a concept you hear talked about much these days, so it's interesting to read the sorts of things people consider to be sinful. My big sin is probably sloth; I am a lazy, lazy person and tomorrow is always soon enough for the completion of any task, particularly if it's an unpleasant one. Lots of things to think about in this book. 

   I have to go now, and get off my slothful behind to go and throw paper balls around the living room for Thomas' playtime. It's raining and cold again, so no outdoors run this evening.

Bits and pieces

       View from my sunroom window. Roses are Peace in foreground and Phyllis Bide in background.

Not much going on at the moment. Lots of roses in the garden, but the weather continues very unsettled, windy and hot, windy and cold, windy with rain and hail. One minute I'm watering the vegetable garden in 27 degree heat, the next I'm covering up the tender stuff from the cold night air. Weird.
    Nothing much on the reading front either. I had to give up "The book thief" because I found it too depressing; I think this was why I avoided it for so long. I'm now reading "The shadow queen" by Sarah Gulland, about Madame de Montespan. I really enjoyed her books on Josephine Bonaparte and this seems to be quite promising too. I've returned to re-reading Georgette Heyer, continuing to look for cheap copies in second-hand bookshops and fairs. 
  Of course, we've started the run-up to the dreaded Christmas, the annual lunacy foisted upon us by retailers; it's not really about Christianity anymore at all, just who can spend the most money for the most "perfect" Christmas, people being persuaded to put themselves in debt so that the kids can have enough plastic rubbish. Another thing about my fellow human beings that I just don't understand at all. How can they be so stupid? 
   Speaking of stupidity, I've been trawling in some of the darker areas of youTube, no, not porn, but conspiracy theories and alien abductions. So many of the films of aliens are so obviously faked with people dressed up, but many of those who comment are convinced that aliens walk among us, but as one nay-sayer commented, isn't it strange that in this era of exceptional digital image quality, the films and photos are so poor? Well, the answer is that it's because of the negative force field that aliens generate around them. I just made that reason up, but it sounds very convincing when you've been reading some of the comments on the videos on youTube. Ah well, back to funny kittens, they're much less controversial.

Today

Here's a picture of my conservatory, with the grapevine growing outside. I do like grapevines, they give a nice Mediterranean air of ancient civilisation and domesticity to a place. This is a cutting of an old one that was already growing here, what it's name is I don't know. It is a small white grape with a rosy blush, very nice for eating. I've never made wine with it, as I've never had enough fruit from it before, but I'm starting to think about wine-making with some of the fruit I have here in the garden. My dad made lots of fruit wines when I was a kid, and very nice they were too. Peach and apricot were especially effective, I remember. It will require some outlay in equipment though; I'll have to see what I can get for nothing or next to nothing. The weather has finally got a bit warmer, and I've been doing more gardening, cutting off a branch from my ornamental cherry that was sticking out over the footpath. I liked the way it made people bow and genuflect as they went past my house ("a goddess lives here"), but the thought of someone braining themselves on it was beginning to be a worry. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult and makes the tree look more balanced.

Roses are blooming all over the garden now. These are Peace and Buff Beauty.

Gruss an Aachen

The only problem with roses is hay fever. I took a sniff at Gruss an Aachen about half an hour ago, and boy did my nose run! Dinner tonight was Improved Macaroni cheese - I put red peppers and herbs in it and blue cheese (yum) and a salad from the garden. I think I might bake a chocolate cake next, I feel a cake coming on!

Roses are coming out

Lots flowering going on at the moment.