Seascale and Sellafield...

Licenced today: Seascale, West Cumbria, with Sellafield nuclear power station in the distance… 

Vermeer...

Just read this article in the Guardian about Johannes Vermeer, and a forthcoming exhibition of his paintings in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Vermeer is a rather shadowy figure, with only about 35 paintings reliably attributed to him. This beautiful picture - of Delft - is apparently his only landscape…

"One Piece at a Time"...

There’s an old Johnny Cash song - more of a novelty song, really - called One Piece at a Time, which tells the unlikely story of a man who worked for many years on a car assembly line. Since he knew he could never afford to drive one of the Cadillacs he was making, he decided to steal the car components “one piece at a time”. After 25 years, according to the last verse of the song, he ended up with this…

Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
'57, '58' 59' automobile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67
'68, '69, '70 automobile

“One piece at a time” seems to be how I wrote the big book. Bolting ill-fitting parts together is not the recommended way to build a car or write a book, and it’s certainly been a long and bumpy ride. My number one priority, in 2023, will be to find out whether it's roadworthy... 

Seeing without interpretation...

“What do you mean when you say you see something? When you hear a word, because that word has a reference, you understand that word. Or do you hear the word and translate it according to your memory? When you say, ‘I see,’ you generally mean, ‘I hear the word. I have understood because you are speaking English, and that word has a meaning to me.’ So you are looking through a word at the thing, you are not looking – the word is interfering. The word, the symbol, the idea, the memory, all that is interfering with observing and seeing. So can you look, can you listen, without interpretation, without the word, without the memory?” (Krishnamurti, from a public talk in 1966)…

Taliban...

The ‘second coming’ of the Taliban in Afghanistan initially promised a less restrictive regime, but, day by day, freedoms are being eroded, especially for women. The latest edict, issued by the administration, is to stop women working for local and foreign NGOs engaged in delivering humanitarian aid. The reason? Because some female employees had flouted the Islamic dress code.

The ban comes a few days after women were prevented from going to university, a move defended by Nida Mohammad Nadim, the Afghan minister of higher education. “We told girls to have proper hijab but they didn’t, and wore dresses like they are going to a wedding ceremony. Girls were studying agriculture and engineering, but this didn’t match Afghan culture. Girls should learn, but not in areas that go against Islam and Afghan honour.”

Having banned girls and all female staff, including teachers, from primary schools, there is now in effect a total ban on education for Afghani women. This is how men behave when they restrict their reading to the Quran, claim to know the mind of God, and have access to an arsenal of modern weaponry. The Taliban doesn’t represent a particularly extreme version of Islam. These men just take quranic injunctions literally, and are prepared to hand out punishments for any perceived infractions.

Fieldfares and redwings...

Fieldfares and redwings come to Britain for the winter, and strip the trees of berries. They were active - and noisy - this afternoon at North Cave wetlands. Pic: redwing (Creative Commons)...

Windermere frozen..

A short article in today’s Guardian contrasts the recent blast of arctic weather with the memorable winter of 1962/3, when the snow arrived on Boxing Day and stayed until mid-March. I remember building an igloo (and if the snow had stayed any longer, I might have needed retrospective planning permission for it). I remember skating - inelegantly - on Lake Windermere with mum, as Arthur Ransome had done, during the Great Frost of 1895, when he was a pupil at Old College in Bowness.

According to this passage from his autobiography, “I had the great good fortune to be at school at Windermere, when for week after week the lake was frozen from end to end. Then indeed we were lucky in our headmaster, who liked skating and wisely decided that as we were not likely to have such an experience again (the lake freezes over only about once in every thirty-five years), we had better make the most of it. Lessons became perfunctory. After breakfast, day after day, provisions were placed on a big toboggan and we ran it down into Bowness when we tallied on to ropes astern of it to hold it back and prevent it from crashing into the hotel at the bottom.

“During those happy weeks we spent the whole day on the ice, leaving the steely lake only at dusk when fires were already burning and torches lit and our elders carried lanterns as they skated and shot about like fireflies. I saw a coach and four drive across the ice, and the roasting of an ox (I think) on Bowness Bay. I saw perch frozen in the ice, preserved as if in glass beneath my feet. Those weeks of clear ice with that background of snow-covered, sunlit, blue-shadowed hills were, forty years after, to give me a book called Winter Holiday for which I have a sort of tenderness”.

Licenced today: a street in Poundbury, Dorset, and the offices of Poundbury Wealth Management…