Random Ramblings


Rain drops on the windows, and a view that shows it to be either raining or about to rain, makes today a day to study the Newspapers rather than real life.

A lot of carbon, either in the form of trees for the paper news or coal for the cyber news, is being spent on the shock/horror of Charles and Camilla when they found themselves surrounded by revolting students. However, it is not just students in the UK that are looking bad these days. Patrick Grant in his acceptance speech for the British Menswear Designer of the Year Award, said UK men, as a group, have become scruffy. Charles had a specific exclusion from this general categorization, though. There is apparently a deplorable trend gaining ground of wearing suits without ties. President Obama was mentioned as falling into this dubious dress code whilst campaigning. Oh dear, where are the bowler hats and ties that were de rigueur for the City of London gents of the last century. Casual Friday’s have spread through the week like a cold in kindergarten.

There is an Associated Press report of vandalism to the famous Glastonbury Thorn tree. The tree has been sitting stubbornly atop Glastonbury Tor for many centuries, relentlessly blooming at Christmas and Easter. Last night, someone took their saw and cut all the limbs off leaving a stump four or five feet high. The last time it was vandalized was around 1650 by Cromwell’s lads. There is hope for its recovery though, if carefully tended. We all know that the UK is taking drastic economic action, but surely Christmas trees can’t be so expensive that the good citizens have to resort to hacking away at national treasures.

For the geeks amongst us: Glastonbury and the Somerset levels are the home for the Arthurian legends with Merlin and Lancelot et al. Tintagel, as the home, is just a Cornish suggestion; and is not as well known as its ‘pastie’ – a folded pastry circle with meat and potatoes stuffed in one end and apple in the other prior to baking. Dinner-on-the-go for busy tin miners. But no self-respecting Knight of the Round Table would make do with a pastie and ale. No, roast boar and a good French wine would be required after a hard day in the lists.

Adventitious Reflections


The warm sunny morning air is filled with buzzing as I stride purposefully towards the distant coffee pot; not the friendly buzzing of insects but the continuous monotone of leaf-blower engines reminding me that the end of the year is nigh. This is a theme taken up by Time magazine and other publications who are already reviewing the year. I’m not ready for anything so grave as the death of the decade just yet. After all, I’m just getting around to thinking about getting ready for the Christmas Holidays. To review the Year rushes me headlong into New Year Resolutions. That is heavy-duty contemplation when I’m in between the overindulgences of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The spirit of the Season is out there though. Our Heron and our Egret were in the same pond sub-division to eat breakfast in shared real estate. Even more remarkable was the presence of a goose on the three-bird log with two cormorant buddies.

Two large wire-mesh cages by the infall to the East pond strike a dissonant note. No bait or open entrance was apparent, and the only furnishing was a large bare log in each. Have these pond jail cells been set up ready for inebriated nutria or beavers who have been disturbing the peace when returning home from raves run by Parties on the Ponds?

Pond Life and Skimmers


I have pondered over this watery conundrum for the past few days: ‘why has the level on the ponds dropped by at least twelve inches when the river has risen by about eighteen?’ Some of the outer sections have become isolated, as mud banks have been uncovered. One isolated sub-pond was so isolated that it had just one mallard drake with two ducks; I wish him luck with that marital arrangement.

On a different topic, my e-mail turned up with some excitement this morning. My electronic voting form for the ALCS arrived. I hadn’t received any checks lately and so had forgotten that I was a member. Checks are a wonderful ‘aide de memoire’. Maybe this is why my short-term memory isn’t what it used to be – I think.

The Autumn ALCS News ( http://www.alcs.co.uk/news/the_shallows.html ) has an interesting preview of a Nicholas Carr book, ‘The Shallows’. I started to skim through Sanderson’s preview and had got my Kindle booting up and online to check if a Kindle edition was available, when I skimmed a section that was pointed out how even e-Readers encourage shallow reading. That stopped me. I realized that I had become a better skimmer than a pool–boy. These days I flit around the web gathering small nuggets lying in plain sight like an old time gold prospector.

Remorse took over and I went back to the start of the preview and read ‘properly’ so that, as my high school teachers used to say, ‘read, study and inwardly digest’. I’m not sure that I’d got to the ‘digesting’ stage when, although I sympathized totally with the concept that our work should be carefully and completely read, I began to think that the phenomenon of skimming started way before the Great Digital Era.

‘Speedreading’ was just for busy CEOs when I grew up, so I will ignore that as an odd gene mutation required to become a captain of industry. More pertinent, I read my first ‘Reader’s Digest Condensed Book’ too many years ago to count reliably. Even longer ago, I can remember getting condensed classics in school deemed to be suitable for 10 – 12 year-olds. Many of these, I haven’t felt the need to read in full unexpurgated form to date. I had better not mention the movies as this is inevitably skimming ‘par excellence’.

Skimming has clearly been going on for some time. But it is interesting to think of this in terms of the advice that we read in instructional tomes on the craft. I will leave you with one quote from Arthur Quiller-Couch given in Roy Clark’s ‘Writing Tools’ (Little, Brown & Co, 2008) – ‘Murder your darlings’.