May 31, 2021

Bank Holiday Monday. What was I doing on Bank Holiday Monday 2020? Let's consult the diary!

Just when you think this sneering bunch of feculent shits can't get any worse, they actually actually do - we are now in the realms of Trump and Brazil. It wasn't just the chilling cold-hearted arrogance of Cummings' behaviour and his sneering contempt for the journalists who pulled him up on it, it was the lies, and the Prime Minister's lies in defence of the lies, the sheer dishonour of all involved, and now today all the toadies are out in force lining up to say it's all fine and justified. 

It makes me feel sick. I cried last night reading countless tweets from people unable to go to a loved one's funeral, or go to an elderly parent who was lonely and afraid. This just goes on getting worse and worse. How can anyone begin to think it's ok to drive 250 miles up a motorway with your kid in the car when you have coronavirus not once but several times and then visit beauty spots while you're up there? How are they looking people in the eye and saying that it wasn't against the rules, the same rules millions of other people have been following at considerable personal cost? I can't even think about this - it makes me too angry. They are all disgusting human beings.

Amazeballs, I've written pretty much exactly the same thing every day since!

On a happier note, last Bank Holiday Monday it was warm enough to sleep outside on the balcony, I found out a niece was pregnant, and I was enjoying dipping into a memory bank of places travelled to counteract the tedium of only leaving the house once a week to dash to Tesco.

I also asked, "is there some autistic commune somewhere I can go and live where I don't have to think about all the neurotypical shit?" - another evergreen sentiment.

This year, I walked round the lake very early to avoid the crowds, ordered a copy of the new Teatles book and wrote what might become a short piece for a future issue at the urging of its editor, and even managed a few hundred more words of the essay.

Ever felt bad about momentarily disturbing a sleeping goose with your stupid photography habit? I have:

 Today's Photo: Tree-mendous

May 30, 2021

Getting nowhere with this essay, and I'm running out of time now - it's due on the 7th June and I honestly don't know how to write it.

Seriously considering just handing in my favourite bit of Song of the Open Road in lieu and then resigning:

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,

Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

Listening to others, considering well what they say,

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,

The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. 

 

While it is true that this would mean I would whimper no more, postpone no more, and be done with indoor complaints, libraries, and querulous criticisms, doing that would take courage and I left what courage I had back in New Zealand.

Had to nip out to the Post Office and it was warm and sunny out there. Oh, the joy. 

 

Saw an excellent yarnbomb on the way:

 

 I was the person shouting "keep still!" at plants as they whipped about in the wind:

When I got home I allowed myself ten minutes mindless browsing while eating lunch, which paid dividends - Stewart Lee was on blistering form in the Graun, and at the bottom of the article was a bit saying rescheduled dates of his 2020 tour are now on sale, and long story short I got myself a hot date with Stewart Lee in February 2022, yeeha!

 

Today's Photo: Distant Dog

May 29, 2021

I've been trying to write the final essay of the academic year all day. And failing. Have managed about four sentences.

I'm so deeply bored with it all. Don't get me wrong: I've loved the lectures, reading the texts, being exposed to new ideas, discovering the myriad wonders of the ethnographic record.

But my god how I hate regurgitating it all once a month into a pointless unremarkable essay. 

Anyway. It is only a wild rumour that I've been considering not handing anything in at all, thus flunking the entire year, and then never thinking about academica ever again as long as I live. No. I will be a good girl and get something handed in on time somehow.

Other things:

One of the magpies came by just to observe me for a while:

How nice! This is for you, my piebald friend:

The air ambulance landed on the rec again! That's three times this year, up from a previous annual average of zero. It didn't stay long and I couldn't see it what it was up to as the trees have their leaves now, but I got a glimpse as it took off:

A Graun article about trees communicating with humans piqued my interest - transspecies interaction is something we've looked at on the course, and trees feature in my essay - and a subsequent web seach turned up the following:

An ebook called The Myth of Human Supremacy that looks right up my street, vehemently objecting as I do to human exceptionalism

A Radiolab podcast called From Tree To Shining Tree 

A New York Times thing discussing the social lives of forests 

And this video, which is all about how mushrooms will save humanity:

Dude also has a fine moustache.

NB - this stuff is entirely sort of relevant for my esssay and not merely distraction/procrastination, honest.

Why 'Bushman banter' was crucial to hunter-gatherers' evolutionary success is definitely essay-relevant and, happily, a cool read too.

Not essay relevant but mentioned in one of the textbooks I'm reading is Georges Hébert, accidental inventor of parkour. I went hunting for the film the textbook mentions he made; didn't find it, but found this bizarrely brilliant wee snippet instead:

I'm disappointed that eating spaghetti has never once prompted me to scale a building with a small boy on my back.

Forgot to have dinner today, due to all the exciting "research" activity.

Forgot that I was wide awake and wandering about at 3am this morning, until I saw the camera roll. 

Food, sleep, who needs it.

Today's Photo: 3am Kitchen Dreaming

May 28, 2021

Life's giving me a headache this week.

Not yet, Herr Nietzsche, not yet.

Today's Photo: It's Raining Again

May 27, 2021

Feeling tired and wobbly tonight, with zero spoons for cooking, so have just ordered a kebab from Just Eat because kebabs make everything ok.

Blogger's got a glitch at the moment re uploading photos, so I'll have to skip that for the time being. Imagine a photo of a blue blue sky.

UPDATE: Sky Kiss

May 26, 2021

Work. Only four and a bit more weeks to go until the summer break.

Lunch. Avocado and pretend ham.

News. A strange smell from London, like a sewer, or a pig farm.

And study. That was the day.

Today's Photo: Shadow Complexity

May 25, 2021

Among other things, I'm learning about kinship groups at the moment ("the family" is a cultural construct, folks), so this Guardian article was an interesting read:

At a time of crisis, I had no support network. So I made my own

As was this one:  'I was sleeping in laybys': the people who have spent the pandemic living in vans - because there but for the grace of God go I.

Living in a van used to be the dream when I was scruffing it around New Zealand, but here in the UK it feels more like a terrifying inevitability for someone like me who's never really got their ADHD head around stability or financial management and is now middle aged so highly unemployable.

Speaking of messy heads and the demands of real life ("work" is a cultural construct, folks) I've read a couple of New Yorker articles on burnout that I'll bookmark here:

China's "involuted" generation

Burnout: modern affliction or human condition?

Anyway, let's not think about these things just before bedtime. Happy thoughts only please.

I went for a walk after dinner to see the super flower blood moon. Here it is:

I didn't stand on a boat, mostly because it was full of rainwater:

While there was a plethora of swans up at the lake, I didn't see my cygnet buddies:

And how about this for a lush flower:

It was still light at half past nine.

Roll on summer.

Today's Photo: Raindrops on a Plastic Bench

May 24, 2021

My milkshake* brings all the boys** to the yard***:

Somebody just let off fireworks into this tender sky:

Today's Photo: Two New Lake Mates

* birdseed

** birds

*** windowsill

May 23, 2021

Another sofa day, just reading stuff and watching stuff and trying to get my head around the assignment.

Which is: Create an imaginary culture. Design it around the four concepts (power, belief, family and exchange) that we have explored in the course. Show how the lifeways you have imagined for your culture employ and produce each of the four concepts in social institutions. Make sure you illustrate how the ideas, meanings and practices all work together.

Right-o.

Here's something good I came across - Baku music:

A point of light in a dull day.

Magpie news: I put out some grapes as I've run out of sultanas. 

One of the magpies soon arrived to investigate. It wolfed them down, pecking out the flesh, leaving the skins. 

Then it peered in through the window, tapping on the glass with its beak. It's never done that before. Was it asking for more grapes or just being nosy?

I didn't get a photo but it was cool.

Today's Pic: Red Jumper

 

 

May 22, 2021

Oh dear. When I got up this morning I finally started researching the next assignment and now it's dark and I've spent twelve hours on the sofa.

Aside from anthropology and a quick glance at the Guardian (where I learned that Germany and I have digitalscheu in common), the only thing that happened all day was Captain Beaky figuring out how to get at the food on the windowsill at last. He later turned up with a mate to show off his new skill. 

I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this development. Magpies are cute. Giant bruiser gulls are not.

Today's Photo: Seagull Sinister

 

May 21, 2021

I've been fascinated by Easter Island ever since I saw this Smirnoff advert in a magazine when I was a kid:

I asked my dad, "what are those?" He explained, and I knew then and there I'd have to go see them one day.

That dream came true in 2013, after Dad died and left me some money - I wish he could have known where his casual description and hard-earned cash took me. 

Innate geekery prompted me to go into super-fixated research mode to prepare for the trip, which then got even worse afterwards as I tried to learn All The Things to keep the magic of that once-in-a-lifetime visit alive.

Which is how, when this Radiolab tweet popped up on my timeline tonight, I knew I was looking at a mo‘ai kavakava:

Radiolab is reliably brilliant, so I investigated straight away despite having decided to devote the evening to study (ha).

But I learned something new about Easter Island, so that's studying, right? 

It's an amazing story and the podcast is well worth a listen. 

(Spoiler: Easter Island harbours the secret of eternal life.)

'Islomania' - the condition of finding islands irresistibly, even obsessively, fascinating & appealing. 

Yes. Standing on that tiny lump of rock knowing there was nothing beyond except thousands of miles of ocean blew my mind. I'd go back in a heartbeat; I was utterly smitten:

I'd been worried about how Easter Island fared in the pandemic, so was very relieved to learn from IWGIA publication The Indigenous World 2021 that the Rapa Nui people actually did brilliantly (p.470). They told central government in Chile to do one after it tried to end the island's March 2020 lockdown after just nine days, then took matters into their own hands to keep everybody safe, fed, useful and cared for.

A lesson for us all. If only Britain were an island (ha).

 Today's Photo: Ann B

May 20, 2021

We're two weeks into this module and every time I think I should probably do some work, I start singing this instead:

The procrastination is strong with this one.

Heard a folorn cry from the balcony this afternoon and looked up to see this sad face staring imploringly back at me:

Captain Beaky has sussed I put food out for the magpies, and wants some for himself, but he's too big and too clumsy to perch on the windowsill where the morsels are. 

Believe me, he's tried. But he's all wings and self-consciousness and can't quite figure out how to do it.

So now he just hangs around on the crenellations, looking sorry for himself and asking for food as politely as a herring gull can ask for anything:

How could you resist a face like that?

The magpies objected to his visits at first, but now they're chill with it. They come and hoover up all the good stuff the moment I put it out anyway:

I worry about the magpies when the weather's foul like this. It can't be much fun living in a structure made of twigs when it rains all the time and there's a gale blowing.

Today's Photo: Neighbourhood Watch

May 19, 2021

Three things.

1. Last night I finally got around to watching the colourised film footage of London during WW2 and before, posted by Ian Visits a couple of weeks ago.

As ever, I kept a sharp eye on the passers by, looking out for my mum. I didn't expect to see her, but you never know.

Around twelve minutes in, the camera panned around a packed Hyde Park Corner. The split second before it cut to the next scene, I saw a very familiar face:

Bottom left, in the white blouse. I had to slow the video down to half-speed to get the screengrab.

Here's that person zoomed in:

And here's my mum circa 1935:

And here she is with her sister and a Maidstone & District bus in 1937:

It was something about the eyes, the cheekbones, the chin - but even more, the expression, the tilt of the head. The way my heart leapt - that jump of recognition you get when you spot a familiar face in a sea of people. 

In the absence of any first-hand witness to say it's not her, I'm prepared to believe that it is.

2. Nomadland

Now I've seen it, I realise I should've started off my post-lockdown cinema re-entry with something a little more upbeat. Nomadland, while great, was bleak. And far too close to home for comfort.

The most cheering thing about my morning at Chapter was hearing the Pearl & Dean music again. I left the cinema an emotional wreck.

Not quite as bad as when I saw Amy and had to calm down in a toilet cubicle for half an hour afterwards because I couldn't stop crying, but it wasn't far off. This time I went home and crawled into bed for a couple of hours to sleep off the despair.

I found two wildly diverging reviews of this film, and agree with both. It was serious and stunning, and yet it felt about three hours long. Halfway through I was mentally hovering a mouse over the bottom of the screen to see how long was left (NB this feature is not yet available in cinemas). 

I'm probably just out of practice at watching a film all the way through in one go.

There were 12 people there. Despite making me feel terrible, it was good to be in a cinema again.

3. Bike Ride

Once I'd recovered from the worst of the trauma, I went for a bike ride up the Taff Trail as far as Radyr weir, then back again as far as Cardiff Castle.

I can recommend a long bike ride next to a river in late evening sunshine to assist with existential misery. Just keep your mouth closed to avoid swallowing insects, that's all.

I met a lovely cat, but it was too busy staring at nettles to come and talk to me:

Saw a nice pylon too:

Having stopped to admire three weirs, I wondered if this made me a weir wolf:

Probably not.

I think I need a cuddle.

Today's Photo: The Animal Wall