Chinese New Year – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

roost, rooster, roostest

I first came across the word “palimpsest” years ago, when I was training to teach English as a foreign language: in one of the classes we were given a list of words that we were not expected to know and asked to chat with a partner and guess their meanings.

Presumably, the idea was to simulate the stress suffered by the students we would encounter once we qualified, but, of course, our situation was vastly different as we were all native speakers and there was really no great pressure to get the answers right, anyway.
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home to roost

In the Chinese calendar, the year of the rooster starts today, 28th January 2017, so it seems a good reason to have some cockerels, roosters and chickens on the blog this weekend.

The photo at the top was taken at the Bristol Balloon Festival some ten years ago. I feel it’s a bit cartoonish to go with this poetry vignette of dawn breaking in the Spanish pueblo where I used to live, but I don’t seem to have many photos on file that are right for the topic.
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baa, humbug

Alternatively, Happy (lunar) New Year.

And a fragment of a poem, which at least has sheep tracks if not the animals themselves:

   I’ve walked the sheeptracks of your dreams
in search of unicorns, but they have fled.
   Now they graze where honey flows in streams
       through pillowing hills.

Though perhaps it should be goats not sheep in the photo, and Chinese dragons not unicorns in the poem.