noraura

Owlhoot on the hill.

One by one the stars take up

their rightful places.

There was much talk of a magnetic storm last night, at least over on Twitter, and the aurora was heading south. So I got out the camera and tripod and set up on Smelly Bridge, the closest vantage point that I could get to without squelching through fields... as you see, a thirty second exposure gives a nice view of the skyline, the Plough, and... no aurora. Hey ho. Maybe Smelly Bridge isn't high enough, and maybe it isn't north enough.

Prelim sketch for a tattoo design for someone. Hares' faces are an interesting mix of colours.

This morning the sky is clear as anything, Venus is so bright that I thought at first there was an aeroplane with a searchlight on, till it hadn't moved for long enough to make that improbable. Before I could detect the first signs of dawn, the heron crooked from the river as it does every morning - a single cronk as it sets off to work - then the crows answered, and presently the bare trees on the skyline showed against the sky, and the robin began singing. Soon, if the last few days are anything to go by, the mistle thrushes will be calling all up and down the valley, holding firm in their belief that if they call loud and slow enough, we'll understand.

Happy solstice! We've reached the turn.

new cards for Christmas, or possibly Winterval *cough*

 

I picked up the first batch of this year's Christmas cards from Minuteman Press yesterday. They've turned out nicely, I think!

This one is inspired by Thomas Hardy's poem The Oxen

...and this one is called Christmas on the Cut. Because it's been quite a canal-orientated year for me...

I've got them up for sale in packs of five, on my Etsy shop. If you would like lots, do get in touch and we can try to sort something out! ...I'm learning about selling as I go along, of course....

Saint Werburgh and the goose - cards

I thought that the story of Saint Werburgh and the geese would make a good subject for a seasonal card, not least because the central goose in the story is resurrected after having been eaten. A good story for a  gluttonous festival.

And now the cards are back from the printers (those nice folk at Minuteman Bristol), and available from my Etsy shop:

Pack of 5 cards for £5

Pack of 20 cards for £15

...though if you want more than that or fewer than that, just say the word and we'll sort something out!

knitting

The longest night of the year merged into a muggy dawn, which I ignored as I was concentrating on the picture I was painting. Come 9 o'clock, I finally got up and opened the curtains, and found a big sky full of blue. 

We just had to go out into it.

Not too long later we were rumbling across the Severn Bridge, admiring the milky sunlight on Avonmouth, glinting on the wind turbine blades. "Open the Cherry Coke, please", I asked Katie as I munched my way through the bag of special offer Christmas pretzels. We'd stocked up on fuel at the Shirehampton filling station.

She put down her strawberry flavoured Wonder Winder for long enough to pass the Cherry Coke. I gulped briefly and handed it back. "Thank you. Just think of all the adventures we've had that started off with us driving over the Severn Bridge and drinking Coke and eating crap," I said. "Remember canoeing round the coast in Pembrokeshire?"

"And me saying 'I'm tired' and lying down in the bottom of the canoe."

"And falling asleep instantly. Dead impressive, that. I was paddling for ages against that tide and getting nowhere. Those were the days, when we did stupid dangerous things together."

"And I was too young to know any better."

"Too young to know that you could say no..."

These days, expeditions are by negotiation. Today Katie's here by her concession, and we use our  history as a tentative shared language, a touchstone.

"That's a rain cloud," she observed. "Sunny in Bristol, look - head to Wales and it starts raining."

"There's a patch of sun over there on Twynbarlwm," I said. "If you don't like the weather, something different will be along in a minute. Purse is in the bag; sort out the toll money, would you?"

I threw the £5.70 in loose change into the hopper on the toll booth. Coins chinged down into the rejected coins bowl. I pulled them out, threw them back in. The barrier lifted, as more coins spat out into the change bowl. "Come on come on come on," Katie said anxiously as I grabbed the change and passed it across. We accelerated sedately away from the toll booths as cars  and lorries hurtled at us from both sides. Scary places, motorway tolls with everyone pretending it's a Le Mans start at the other side. "Whoo, one pound forty. That's good."

"It's an omen."

We passed the waypoints of our westbound journey- the stalinist fortress of the Celtic Manor, the eagerly-looked-out-for Castell Coch- and arrived at St Fagans, the open air museum on the western fringe of Cardiff.

I'd not seen the celtic huts before. We entered the smoky one and crouched near the fire. The woman looking after it was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. "My flatmates complain I come in stinking of smoke," she said. "It's not so bad if you get down close to the floor; the smoke rises."

They'd had a solstice feast, a few days back. She described the preparations; a chicken, rarely eaten as valued more for the eggs, but killed for the ceremony; spelt flour for the bread, ground twice in the quern because it's so hard. "The stone gets ground into the flour, so their teeth wore away quite quickly."

We wander around buildings that have been familiar to me for over forty years, and see the dark interiors, smell the woodsmoke and polish, miss the tang of the animals in the Rhayader longhouse.

"I like the idea of sharing the house with the cattle; it must have smelt really nice", I say. "If you like the smell of cattle..."

"They'd be kept in over the winter," said the guide. "They'd keep the hay up there in the loft, and milk them. They'd give milk through the winter, then."

We warmed ourselves at the fire. "People say it must be nice just sitting in here all day," he added. "I say, you try sitting here next to an open window..." 

I remembered the first winter I came here with my parents, in the 1960s. It was snowy, and we sat in a settle in a big fireplace and warmed ourselves and talked with the guide. It was a glorious memory, and one I hold on to. Now my past is mixed up with the history.

We went into a recent addition, a small schoolhouse. "It looks very much like my school at Llanfrechfa," I told Katie. She looked pained; I'd already commented on the familiarity of the Workmen's Institute and the ironworkers' cottages. I admired the school room's big coke stove, and recalled the milk bottles ranged round it to thaw out, to the woman sat at the teacher's desk. "Lots of people remember that," she said kindly, pausing from her knitting.