don't confuse the narrator

squaring the spiral

It’s Sunday evening and I still haven’t posted anything on the blog this weekend. I’ve been out and walked and taken pictures – it was the most glorious morning here today – but I haven’t written anything. There are too many impossible tasks to deal with at the moment and the words seem to have slipped through the cracks.

So, with impossible tasks in mind, I thought of squaring the circle, and from there it was a short jump to this photo:

And from there it’s a short jump onwards to an old poem which has appeared both here and elsewhere on the web before, but seems relevant enough to justify reposting:

Elliptical Thoughts

The lives of parallel lines are uneventful:
no sudden twists or unexpected turns disturb
their single track monotony. And yet they dream
of non-Euclidean space where rules are bent
and of that infinite horizon where, at last, they’ll coincide.

Concentric circles, on the other hand, have
no such hyperbolic hope. They know their limitations.
Destined to be solitary cranks, they circumlocate,
make roundabout excuses and observe their fellows
from a distance. They never socialise.

timber!

I went for a walk the other evening and found my path blocked by a tree.

There are, of course, a host of literary connections I could make: Birnam Wood; the Ents of Middle-Earth; the “very, very country dance” of the Narnian trees that Lucy dances her way through to reach Aslan in Prince Caspian; the trees that “walk[…] down the side of the cutting” in the landslide scene of The Railway Children…
Continue reading

500 million

After several days of glorious summer, the solid rain that woke me early this morning reminds me that “bad governments bring bad weather” and here in the UK it’s the day to head to the polling station.

Fifty pence coin sufragette commemorative issue

The BBC website reminds us:

On 22-25 May voters in the EU’s 28 member states will elect their representatives in Europe. Their choices will affect 500 million EU citizens.

The futures of 500 million people is a big responsibility; under our current system it is also a shared responsibility. I wasn’t really thinking of the bigger picture when I sent off my postal vote a few days ago; now I rather hope some of those voters in other countries are thinking more about me than I did about them.

what are you reading?

I don’t know what the book was that caused this damselfly to go bug-eyed and blush right down to the tip of his tail, but I think he looks as if he wants to tell someone about it:

in Catalonia II

L’Escala: thunder blue,
the Mediterranean
beat her lace-frilled cuffs against
the coast’s ridged washboard rocks
while the cobla band played on
in brassy silence.