cheese dreams

Insomnia found me browsing the web when the headline Cheese fire causes traffic meltdown in Norway tunnel caught my eye.

As a cheese lover, how could I not be interested in a story that starts:

Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.

mountain goat

Twenty-seven metric tons of toasted goat’s cheese: a turophile’s delight!

(I gather brunost is made either from goat’s milk or a mixture of goat’s and cow’s milk, though perhaps not from the breed of mountain goat whose rather hazy photo I snapped in the Sierra de Francia, Spain.)
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a hook to hang things on

I typed “a hook” into the Google search box and was surprised to see that the first auto-complete option was “a hook in writing”.

hook & chain silhouette against sky

At the moment, I have no idea of how to grab my readers’ attention half as effectively as this photo is likely to, nor do I have any ideas for a poem that might be hung alongside the image.

So I guess I’ll just have to leave you all in suspense…

sun, snow, sierra

Yesterday at 9am it was still so dark I was hardly able to see whether the garden was still there or whether it had either disappeared under flood-water or been blown away by the wind. Today, though, at around 8:30am:

Early morning mountains sprawl
pink-blanketed
on the horizon

Gredos snow at sunrise

dictionary delight

When I visit my elderly mother we usually spend the evening with the newspaper puzzle page. (A single crossword can distract from many cross words.) It’s the cryptic crossword that we enjoy most and, between us, we often complete it. Yesterday, we attempted the one from the i newspaper, abandoning it with some half dozen clues unanswered.

reference books
The crossword always seems easier the next day – I suspect it’s telepathic communication with all those readers who’ve checked their answers early on! – so we had another look this morning and finally had it completed all but one clue.

The clue was “A free broadcaster?” and the letters we had were:
A _ N _ I _
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sunday afternoon

Looking through some old photos, I came across this:**

Tomb sculpture: Reclining lady and baby.
It seems a fairly appropriate picture to post on a Sunday afternoon, especially with some accompanying quotations. First from Susan Ertz:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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