The weather in Spain is very predictable. Not just what weather there will be, but when it will happen. Last year, on September 10th I wrote about the first torrential rains of the autumn. This year, I received an email on September 13th including the phrase, “Greetings from stormy Madrid.”
As you can infer from the photo, a lot of the rain in Spain has fallen in my back garden. Whether the rains will last long enough to do much good remains to be seen, but, for the moment at least, I don’t need to do any watering.
Continue reading “having a good time”
Category: dates & time
international book day
One wonders – well, this one does – who decides which “days” are to be allocated to what worthy purpose and which are to be publicised and celebrated. Wikipedia gives a list of international observance, but these things seem to be fairly hit and miss.
However, although yesterday the Google site was displaying a re-designed logo for Earth Day, today there is nothing special about the google.com logo, and on the google.co.uk site the reference is to St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday. (In fact, the birthday is only deduced from the fact he was baptised on the 26th.)
Continue reading “international book day”
of branches and bunches
Half the people in the village this morning were carrying bunches of flowers and greenery, which reminds me that it must be Domingo de Ramos – Palm Sunday.
Ramo and rama are words I can never get straight. Checking today in the on-line Diccionario de la Real Academia, I see that rama is a branch emerging from the tunk or main stem of a plant. Ramo, on the other hand, is a secondary level branch that emerges from the rama madre, or, perhaps, a rama cortada del árbol. If branches change sex the further they get from the trunk or once they’ve been cut from the tree, no wonder I’m confused.
Continue reading “of branches and bunches”
cherry white
Having mislaid the cable to connect my camera to the computer I find my blogging is somewhat hampered: it’s easy enough to find things to write about, but I don’t want to make the page all text.
Fortunately, the cherry trees were in blossom last year, the year before and the year before that, so I’ve cheated and found an old photo to illustrate this Housman poem which pretty much describes the countryside round here at the moment. Mind you, I don’t really expect to have another 50 years to “look at things in bloom”, so I’d better get a move on and go out and look at them this spring.
Continue reading “cherry white”
first day of spring
Although the weather outside (here in central Spain) is hotter than a normal UK summer would be, I’m reminded by Google that today is the first day of spring.
This blog is in desperate need of an update, but if I want to get out there and enjoy the sunshine later on today, I’d better get some work done, so I’ll settle for posting a poem:
Spring
March skies leaked
milky sunshine; now it lies
in primrose pools on the embankment.From ivydark, zodiac
periwinkles blink, then stare
where caterpillar catkins dance
with bumble bees. Under the trees
a crocus campfire kindles.Gold permeates the air: the blackbirds
have been drinking
daffodils.
(First published in Poetry Scotland, 2005, which is quite appropriate, as the ideas started to germinate on a visit to Irvine some years ago.)
don't confuse the narrator 