anti-social networking

What’s the good of having a personal blog if you can’t use it occasionally for a personal rant? Today is one of those occasions.

Yesterday the subject line of an email urged me to PASS IT ON; the content of the message was simply:

VIRTUAL FRIENDSHIP IS AN OXYMORON

I loathe the impersonalisation of communications on the web. If someone wants to tell me that they’d like to keep in closer touch, I’d like to see something in the message indicating that it was intended for me personally.
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hoy por ti

chestnuts

The first time I heard the phrase Hoy por ti; mañana por mí I was amazed at the no-nonsense approach to helping others that it seemed to encapsulate.

The closest we seem to come to it in English is “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”, though I don’t think that’s quite the same, as the English idiom implies a real one-to-one reciprocity.
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bird on a wire

starling on pylon

 

From his aerial perch
a starling
chips at the wintering sky

 
 
I’m much better at recognising birds when I see them than by their calls, but I’ve started to recognise the jays and the azure winged magpies, though I really only know one from the other by the number of voices heard at once; the hoopoe is quite familiar, too, and I’ve now come to associate a sort of hollow rattling cackle with the starlings. (I was going to describe the noise as a ‘grackle’, but find that that is actually the name of a bird, which is a bit confusing.)
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gossamer thoughts

cobwebs

There have been a few news pieces recently about the world’s largest spider’s webs. There was one back in September, where the web in question – found in Madagascar – seems to be that of an individual spider and is the circular ‘doily’ type.

Then there was the huge sheet-like web found in Texas recently, that is more likely the work of many spiders.

I have no idea how many spiders there are down in my laundry room, but they have been busy, as is clear from the photo (which really doesn’t do justice to the sun sparkling on the dust motes caught in the filigree of the web).
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winter approaches

When the white clouds lifted, they left behind
a hint of snow along the mountain ridge. The sky
is blue as any summer’s day and I walk to the village
in unbroken sunshine. On the way back, a neighbour
eases his donkey from amble to pause and greets me.
He wants some windfall apples “pa’ el guarro”. I agree,
but would so much prefer to let the patient burro
mumble fruit from my palm, not help to fatten
the squealing pig for Martinmas.

 

(First draft – which means I’ve only rewritten it half a dozen times and juggled the line breaks back and forth and to and fro, but haven’t added in additional material or stepped back from it very far.)
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