Sunday 15th September - Real Poetry

I follow a number of blogs on various topics (using feedly.com. I used to use Google Reader to manage the blogs, but it has been discontinued which is a real shame)

One of the blogs is http://adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com/ which is about books.

Yesterday's post caught my attention: http://adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/on-finding-inspiration-in-the-unlikeliest-places-poetry-again/

about how "real poetry" should "get you where you live".

Anyway, the result of reading her post was that I downloaded "To Love and Be Wise" to my Kindle (I like a bit of Josephine Tey, and I discovered that I hadn't read this one) in order to follow up the comments on poety. (Oho - what a temptation a Kindle is! "One click" and the book is ready, waiting to be read...)

I enjoyed the book - I love the dated, period feel of this genre and period, and the snobbery and the class-consciousness - and I enjoyed the little conversation about poetry, and the poem itself:

Chief Inspector Grant, a sophisticated, educated man money and style and a palate for fine things (the palate gets mentioned more than is acceptable to my mind; that's what I mean by snobbery) quotes part of a poem about floods, and adds, 'Sadly old-fashioned. It sounds like poetry. A fatal defect, I understand.'

Here's the poem with the "fatal defect":
"Where once did wake and move
The slight and ardent grass,
Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove.

O Final Beauty, found
In many a drowned place,
We love not less the face
For lesser beauties drowned."

Inspector Rodgers, a countryman, thinks about this, and offers another poem, adding

'.......It wasn't poetry, properly speaking, I mean it didn't rhyme, but it got me where I lived. It said:

"My lot is cast in inland places,
Far from sounding beach
And crying gull,
And I
Who knew the sea's voice from my babyhood
Must listen to a river purling
Through green fields,
And small birds gossiping
Among the leaves."

'Now you see, I was bred by the sea, over at Mere Harbour, and I've never got used to being away from it. You feel hedged in, suffocated. But I never found the words for it till I read that. I know exactly how that bloke felt. "Small birds gossiping!" '

Another view of the Arun
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2609419
© Copyright Peter Trimming and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

I assume Josephine Tey wrote both poems. She's right - the first poem "sounds" like poetry but isn't. Presumably she constructed it as an example of something that tries too hard and is all clunking rhyme and clockwork rhythm. And the two "drowned"s. No, seriously, not. "Overworked", as Paul Hollywood would say in "The Great British Bakeoff".




http://www.thekitchn.com/bread-baking-tip-how-to-tell-w-156772

The second poem is much more effective. It completely explains the difference between the sound of the water, and the sound of the birds, by river and by sea.

And yes, I did read the whole book all in one go. I had a cyclophosphamide dose on Friday, and it leaves me all feak and weeble for a day or so afterwards, and reading is really all I am fit for until I get over it. It was the last of the six doses; more lung function tests (huffing and puffing into a complicated looking machine which whirrs and clicks and produces brightly-coloured graphs on a computer screen) to follow at the end of October to see if the immune-suppressant drugs have been doing me any good.

Wednesday 18th September - A Round Tuit

I was trying to think of something to take to Canada as a gift for the friends that we were staying with back in August. There were all the obvious things - like OXO cubes - that are hard to get over there. But I was trying to find something more personal.

In the end, I started collecting sayings, and favourite poems, and wrote them all into a little book.

(It is incredibly hard to write without making ANY mistakes. I was a dismal failure at that,  have to confess.)

However I will be continuing to look out for interesting quotes (interesting to me, that is!) and will  add them to a new page on this blog as and when I get a round tuit.

This one is gold and costs £244 from Amazon
 

Sunday 8th September - Canada Part 1

We've been on holiday!

Staying with friends in Canada! Again! 

If I were to blog about EVERYTHING that we saw and did, then there would be a zillion blog posts. So here are just some highlights. This post is all about Niagara.

 

The top of the Canadian Horseshoe falls at Niagara. You can stand really, really close to the edge.

and then the water just plunges over

 

 

 

The Canadian Falls from further downstream. You can just see the rainbow.

The American Falls are a little downstream from the Canadian Falls 

Then all that water goes thrashing through a narrow gorge

In a wild bedlam smashing thunder of chaos

Until it meets a sudden check, and turns right, causing a giant whirlpool.

If you are brave, or mad, or crazy, you can take a ride over the whirlpool in an antique open cable car. We didn't.

O wow! It is a totally all-encompassing experience. The noise, the sights, the - the - the -

no words really. 

Saturday 7th September - Wrong Wedding

Well, we've messed up our diaries on many an occasion in the past.

I was told months ago that my friend's son's wedding was today, and I duly put the date and the venue in my diary.

Many weeks ago the general email invitation to the congregation went out, saying we were all welcome. I saw that I had the right date and left it at that.

My friend apologised for not inviting us to the reception - I hadn't expected an invite as I know that there are many, many cousins and aunts and uncles and in-laws and great-aunts and great0uncles and nieces and nephews. I knew that the guest list was already a Hot Topic, without adding further fuel to the flames  by dumping family members for friends!

The day arrived. We rolled up at the church, in good time for the start, and were a little disconcerted to find that firstly they were already well into the first hymn - but we have a tradition of providing interest for waiting congregations by having music before the service in our church. So we sidled up a side aisle, and slid into the empty pew behind the early birds.
It was all very odd. Then we noticed that
The church was half empty. We expected it to be completely packed.

The people that were there were all Very Smartly Dressed. Apart from The Families, I expected everyone else to be just smartish, clean and tidy.

As we sidled into some empty seats halfway down the left hand side, it became clear that we didn't  recognise anyone there.

The clincher was that the names on the inside of the order of the service were of complete strangers.

So we sidled out again and went in search of the real wedding.

Which, as we discovered after checking back through hundreds of emails, had taken place at that same church but two hours previously.

MORAL - Don't leave checking dates and times until some time in the future - do it properly when you are given them!

Is it too late to blame it on jet-lag - we got back from Canada (more about that later) nearly a week ago?

More scientific jokes - boom boom. Groan

More jokes from http://quantumfactory.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/schrodingers-cat-walks-into-a-bar/



Helium walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bar-tender says "we don't serve noble gases in here." The helium doesn't react.

A neutrino walks into a bar. The bar-tender says "we don't serve neutrinos in here." The neutrino replies "I was just passing through."

A higgs-boson walks into a church. The priest says "Higgs-bosons aren't allowed in here." The higgs-boson says "but without me, how can you have mass?"

Sunday September 1st - Shrodinger's Diary

We have been away for a few days, staying with close friends, and I have been keeping two diaries of the holiday. One is a paper and pencil diary where I write just a series of short phrases and reminders of what we have been up to each day, in tiniest print in order to fit onto the page. The other is in the form of a blog, restricted to just the family and our friends, and is a much more detailed account of where we went, what we did, what we saw, and so forth, with lots of photographs.

Every night I made conscientiously wrote up the events of the day, and every morning, before we set off on our adventures, I tried to get up to date with the blog, so that family back home could share in our experiences. I also wanted to make sure that I would remember as much as possible after we had got home. Our friends live thousands of miles away so we don't see each other very often, and when you add in a trip to  Niagara Falls then this is one of those major events in one's life.

We did visit them two years ago, and that time I kept a full paper diary, and conceived the idea of writing it as a blog a month or so after wards. It was like re-living the holiday all over again - which I found immensely rewarding. Those days suddenly came to life again in full technicolour, after having been over shadowed by the hurly burly of normal every day life once we had come back home.

This time I was blogging as I went along - an entirely different experience. I was getting further and further behind; we were packing so much into each day that some days took five sessions/posts to get everything posted!

It became increasingly disorientating, especially when my body was still operating on English time; to be writing up the events of three days ago after breakfasting at 9am Canadian which is 2pm English time was brain-bending.

One evening, after a hard day's holidaying, we watched a recording of Alan Davies investigating the science of measurement, called "How long is a piece of string?". It was when quantum physics started getting itself tangled into the string that I realised what was going on in my head; am I here, or there? or in both places at the same time?



The quantum-mechanical "Schrödinger's cat" paradox according to the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation, every event is a branch point. The cat is both alive and dead—regardless of whether the box is opened—but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the universe that are equally real but cannot interact with each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

I really haven't ever managed to get my head around quantum physics. Neither has Alan Davies, by the look of him in the programme.


Heard any good jokes lately? Here's one:


A Cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.        boom ....

(filched from http://quantumfactory.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/schrodingers-cat-walks-into-a-bar/ )