steepholm

Okay, I'm probably the last person on the internet to notice this, but - well, yay! I've been checking in now and again for about two years, hoping Allie would follow up her hilarious-yet-devastating post on depression, and now she has - with another hilarious-yet-devastating post on depression.

Curiously, both this and "To Kill a King" (see my last post) are about severely depressed and blocked writers, and both were put on the net on 9th May, 2013. Can this possibly be a coincidence?

(Yes.)

This is well worth a look - Hamlet in 198 programmes and films (but less than 15 minutes):

Just a little way from Steep Holm (which belongs to England) is Flat Holm (which belongs to Wales). I love this video that the Flat Holm people have put up, which reminds me very much of Sweetholm (which belongs to neither, but owes much to both), the setting of Calypso Dreaming:

I put some Jacob sheep on Sweetholm, but watching this makes me wish I'd sprinkled it with a few Tamworths too.

i) My mother showed me the Grove Park Jubilee Anthology - a collection of poems written between 1896 and 1946 by pupils at her Wrexham grammar school. It includes three poems by her: a Keatsian pastiche addressed to a cello, a poem about "stooking" (something she did as part of her "bit" during the summer holidays, sharing the fields with Italian prisoners of war), and this one, which I include not so much for its quality as poetry - though I like the sly satirical note in the last line - as for its 1941 topicality:

( Read more... )

ii) The green space in front of Romsey Abbey used to be a graveyard. It still is, in the sense that there are scores of dead bodies buried there, but in the early '60s the gravestones - mostly 18th century - were taken down so as to open the space to the living. Many's the time I played on the Abbey Green, for my primary school ran on one side of it, and home was just five minutes' walk away. They did leave a couple of box tombs at the edge, which I suppose would have been hard to move (but good for hide and seek); and I understand one family objected to the removal of their loved one's gravestone, so that was spared. It stood there solitary towards the back of the field throughout my childhood. Then it was vandalized and the carious stump sat for several years more. Finally it was removed altogether, family objections or no - though whether by the church or some less official vandals, I'm not sure. I can find no trace of it today.

Generally, I'm all in favour of giving the living priority - let the dead bury their dead, and all that - but I jib at what they did with the gravestones...

( Behold... )

iii) The electricians who came to fix my mother's outside light are based in the nearby village of Baddesley, not Ampfield (a couple of miles away). But they call themselves Ampfield Electronics: "Because it sounds more electrical". Subliminal advertising is alive and well in rural Hampshire.

iv) Finally, thanks to Cheryl Morgan for alerting me to this manga - which I so want to exist on the other 364 days of the year, and not just April 1st. Won't someone make it happen?

Why is it that small ghostly girls are so much scarier than small ghostly boys?



Is it simply because they trigger memories of The Exorcist, The Shining, The Ring, etc.?* Or do those films themselves draw at some more ancient well of horror? Either way, if that had been a six-year-old boy I don't believe people would have been quite as freaked.

* None of which I've seen, by the way: just reading the Wiki entry for The Ring spooked me for days.

Connoisseurs of snark will enjoy this post by Clémentine Beauvais, whom I've known for a little while online but met in the flesh only last week in Cambridge. She's another children's-writer-cum-academic-critic, so I naturally feel a kinship.

Did I ever mention that Machaut was one of my favourite composers? Well, he is - and hearing the Festival of Nine Lessons on the radio this afternoon got me to thinking how I'd really rather be enjoying the Messe de Nostre Dame, which led in turn to my happening on this remarkable performance:




I've heard several versions of the Messe, but never with this wobbly note thing going on (forgive me if I'm getting too technical), so reminisicent of Arab and Middle-Eastern music. Maybe this is the way everyone does the Messe these days, in the light of historical research? I must remember to ask my brother when I see him in a couple of days. Anyway, once I got over the cognitive dissonance I liked it a lot.

As long as I'm with Monsieur Machaut, let me give you my very favourite piece of his - a simultaneous setting of three of his own love poems, for of course Machaut was an important, Chaucer-influencing poet as well as a composer. This one would definitely be one of my Desert Island Downloads. Think of it as Morrissey for the 1320s.

Midnight, one more night without sleepin'
Watchin', till the morning comes creepin'
Green screen, what's that secret you're keepin'?


This post is dedicated to the political insomniacs of the United States of America; last known whereabouts, north of Mexico.

Wish I'd seen this! (Thanks to Cheryl for the link.)

For years, Transport for London's lawyers chased the hilarious London Underground Anagram map around the internet, only to find that it was as hard to catch as a train to Mornington Crescent. Now, it seems the guerilla sign writers have ventured from the web right into TfL's secret underground bunker.

My favourite? "For a more efficient service, please alight at the next stop where a team of heavily drugged sloths will drag you to your destination."