narcissus

This picture was irresistible as it seems clear that each narciso (as they are called in Spanish) is enamoured of its own reflection.

Daffodils in a flooded flower bed

Looking for an apt poetical quotation, I find that Sir Aubrey de Vere described the daffodil as “Love-star of the unbeloved March”.

Well, it’s certainly March, and the weather here is undoubtedly unlovely. (That flower bed is at least two inches deep in water at the moment, and it’s at the top of the garden; I dare not venture down to see if the trees in the orchard are knee deep, but I suspect they must be.)

voices from the past **

My past has caught me up: this afternoon
I checked my e-mail, as I always do,
and found a message from an old flame who
I hadn’t seen since school. Out of the blue
a bolt that sends me tumbling through the years
to adolescent angst and teenage tears,
to poems scrawled in chalk while classmates jeer
and playground fights that fade when Sir appears.
I was his One True Love, there’d be no other.
At sixteen I was far too young: I fled.
But now he’s tracked me down; who needs the men
from Pinkerton’s when Google is your friend?
(Though Google’s failed me time and time again
in my attempts to trace his younger brother.)

Continue reading “voices from the past **”

abridged

I knew that la crisis had forced lifestyle changes on everyone in Spain, but I’m shocked to find it has apparently made inroads into a tradition that lies at the very heart of the Spanish psyche: el puente.

multi-arched stone bridge
No, not that kind of puente. I’m talking about the puente that connects a public holiday to the weekend with an additional – official or unofficial – day off.

Tomorrow is San José, which is a fiesta for some comunidades. Usually, such holidays are celebrated on the actual day on which they fall, which means that when there’s a Tuesday or a Thursday fiesta lots of workers take the intervening day and make a four-day weekend of it.
Continue reading “abridged”

“the dreams of Gods”

pink water lily blossom

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to locate a half-remembered short story. My “google fu” is not what I thought, apparently, and the story remained unidentified until I reached home and had access to my own bookshelves. Here, I found the story in the first book I opened.

It was Lovecraft’s Poetry and the Gods. (Easily found online now I know precisely what I’m looking for.)

Skimming through the story, I find this lovely snipe at modern poetry: Continue reading ““the dreams of Gods””

plagues & pests

locust on bead curtain

A BBC website headline announces “‘Black Death pit’ unearthed”, and is followed up with a story starting:

Excavations for London’s Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

When I read the news, my first thought was of Quatermass and the Pit, so I hope they don’t find any bugs like the one in the photo.

The bug – a langosta in Spanish – has been there for weeks, hibernating discreetly on the bead curtain. At one point there were two of them (hibernating discretely, I suppose).

It looks like a grasshopper to me, but langosta translates as locust, so I guess I should just be glad we don’t have a plague of them.

Which bring us full circle to the Black Death and that burial ground.