don't confuse the narrator

in the pink

I was taking photos of sweet chestnuts the other day, but having transferred the pictures to the computer, it seems I have a problem. The sky really wasn’t that colour at all, but that’s the way the camera saw it, which probably means it’s time I got a new camera.

I wanted a picture to post alongside this ‘ku which is buried somewhere in a comment from this time last year.

smooth new lifeform
peeps from the belly
of a chestnut hedgehog

The camera has paid for itself over the years, providing the material for three published foto-reportajes as well as incidental illustrations for many other articles, including most of the photos on the blog. It’d be nice to have one a bit smaller and smarter, though.

Then again, there might be an advantage to continuing to use this one: it might help me look at the world through a rose-tinted lens.

competitions, compensation and closure

I had a friend who used to say that until a poem was published, it wasn’t complete.

I’m not sure whether he felt that once the poem had been accepted and approved by an editor it was fixed and he could stop tinkering with it, or whether the purpose of a poem was to reach a readership which only publication would provide. Whatever the reason, in some way, publication of the poem gave him ‘closure’.
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Polanski polemic

I don’t want to get involved with the rights and wrongs of the original 1977 Polanski case, nor even with the current extradition issue, but there is something disturbing about this juxtaposition of headlines from Reuters yesterday:

I wonder what the Poles would have done to him if he’d travelled there.

(I find the ‘video’ tab adds another slightly disturbing twist to the headlines, but maybe that’s just me.)

terror incognita

There is a phrase in the introduction to Heaney’s Beowulf (Faber & Faber) that caught my attention when I first read it:

“Nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about him and a unique glamour.”

It took me about five years before I found the poem where the idea could be used.

Of course it’s possible that speed isn’t necessary when we’re dealing with mountains, dragons and poetry.
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tall, taller, tallest

The rains have come, so we must get the windscreen wipers fixed on the car. That will probably entail a trip to the mechanic’s workshop – a trip to the taller mecánico.

Personally, I’ve always wondered who the shorter mechanic was, but perhaps you have to be over a certain height in Spain to be admitted into the secrets of the internal combustion engine.

Looking more closely at the photo, I see that this is not the competitive situation I had imagined at first: it’s not the taller mechanic and the even taller mechanic, just the same mecánico aiming his advertising at different levels. Perhaps he hopes that when Sultan Kosen does get a car that he can drive comfortably, he will take it to this workshop for repairs.