more bats and bell towers

bell mechanism, Brecon cathedral

Yesterday I quoted Claude Debussy as having said:

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

I’d found the quotation on the web, but, as with so much information out there today, there was no source cited and no original French.

So I went looking and found this in a footnote of Debussy: his life and mind, Volume 1 by Edward Lockspeiser:

J’ai en ce moment l’âme gris-fer et de tristes chauves-souris tournent au clocher de mes rêves!

Which makes it look as if the quotation is genuine.
Continue reading “more bats and bell towers”

(not) a batting title

blue sky with faint clouds and oak tree buds

Against a spring-blue sky
the twitch and loop of flickering wings
says: pipistrelle!

 

Of course it’s saying it in Spanish, and I see from the IberiaNature glossary that there are some two dozen species of murciélago in Spain, so I may be mis-hearing what’s being said.
Continue reading “(not) a batting title”

loll cat

From the Chambers Harraps website:

loll verb (lolled, lolling) intrans
1 (often loll about) to lie or sit about lazily; to lounge or sprawl.

tuxedo cat asleep on sofa

If anyone wanted the other lol cats, they can, of course, be found over on I Can Has Cheezburger?

a promise of lilacs

early lilac buds against blue sky

Surely it’s April that should be “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”, not January? But here the buds are already beginning to show signs of breaking into life.

Mind you, unless there’s some rain soon, I don’t quite know how much energy the trees will have for producing flowers, especially as I forgot to dead head them when they finished flowering last year.

At which point, it seems appropriate to post this abandoned draft from a few years back:
Continue reading “a promise of lilacs”

miaow, meow, miau, miaou….

Tuxedo cat face close up
How do you spell that word?

Not that it really matters, but it seemed the right noise to be making since I just discovered I have an identity on the WorldCat website.

This being the internet, I’m rather surprised that the site has nothing to do with cats.

In fact it’s a searchable catalogue of library collections and it also includes a fun facility to follow connections and explore relationships between the identities held on file for people, things, characters and corporations. It’s a bit like playing six degrees of separation, but I haven’t yet worked out the route to connect my id with Kevin Bacon.