the Lundy rabbit's complaint

Who’s this odd bloke puffed up there outside my hole?
I only nipped out for some dandelion, and when I got back
There he was, bold as you like in his black dinner jacket,
Saying “Come in here dressed like that? That won’t do at all!”

The cheek of it! We came over with the Normans, I’ll have you know.
In fact, my people have often dined with royalty.
And now here’s this blow-in, shirt still wet from the sea.
Maybe he’s drunk? He’s got a nose on him like a rainbow.

Ouch.
Nasty nip to it too.
Says they’re only here for the summer season
And then they’ll be off cruising down to Spain, when the puffling’s
Gone away to college. Empty nesters eh, he said, feathers ruffling
Not empty enough if you ask me thought I, with reason,
Thinking of the kit’s old nest down there, my belly fur and hay,
The pong of fishbones and old guano that’ll never go away



...I started off writing an entirely different puffin poem, but there you go, you never know what'll happen when you start writing. Here's more

You often read nice things and stuff in

Books for kids regarding puffins

But sadly there is not a jot

On gannets, or the guillemot

new map of Genderia

Three years ago Yvonne Aburrow mentioned their survey of the continent of Genderia, demonstrating that it is rather more of a complex landscape than often represented by a binary, a line or spectrum. And I did a hasty map to accompany that work. But we thought it was time to update and improve it, so here's the new version. Yvonne's blog is here.

You won't find the Secret Volcano Base of the Trans Cabal, of course, because it's secret. But there is Transgender-am-Berg, in the Transalpine region across the hills from the happy village of Little Cisgender on the Wold. Upriver are the mountains where the Fierce Femmes hang out, while down in the Queer Archipelago there's all sorts of nonbinary stuff going on. 

You can get a copy of the map in my Etsy shop; it comes in A4 or A3 sizes. Here's the A4. And here's the A3.

stop me and buy one

I had a large order of greetings cards to drop off at Harvest Wholefoods in Bath, and while I was at it I thought I'd do a stop-me-and-buy-one with the calendars as I went along.

Canal towpath trips always take ages, because you're always meeting friends. I also bumped some nice folk from Devon who'd moored up on the Widcombe flight in Bath, who'd recently bought few of my things online, and it was nice to meet them in real life too.

And here's Sebastien and Louise above the top lock at Widcombe, with their new book of canal life in photographs, 'An Uneasy Paradise'. I was uneasy in town all right; it was thronging with people, shopping like there's no tomorrow. So I did my essential drop, and scarpered home

 

some weird tribal shit in Conkwell woods, where you're always being WATCHED

Billy rocks the contre-jour look at Diggers

winter flocks in Pewsey Vale

Over to Devizles to drop off more calendars at the bookshop. Then along the Vale of Pewsey to the Barge inn at Honeystreet, to deliver canal maps and see Peter on Grey Hare, and Weasel, his newly adopted dog. 

There was a chill mist hanging on the Downs, and where it thinned the quality of the light was really quite something. But, like a starling flock, it's best just experienced. So I failed to capture it on camera.

We did trudge around a big muddy field where some extremely photogenic sunflowers were growing back in the summer, trying to get dramatic views of the starlings who were fossicking in the stubble. But they refused to perform, the dark rogues.

There were also redwings and fieldfares, stripping the hawthorns on the track to the All Cannings long barrow, built not by druids but by Mrs Beynon's Billy.

this is a redwing. Coming over here, taking our berries...

all along the hedge are redwings and fieldfares

the starlings reluctantly move along as I approach

the melancholy remnants of the sunflower crop

keeping warm

The mist stuck around in the valley all day, though the sun breaking through made everything very picturesque, even us unsavoury boaters. 

And at three o'clock the air took a serious chill to it; I watched the space station fly over at 5:10, then went secured the boat for the night. The cratch cover was already iced up. Bank up that stove!

The painting is 'Winter's Night Near Alton Barnes'. I just realised I hadn't got it listed in my shop, and have now remedied that. 

the Dangerous Brothers come visiting

Jim and Harry dropped by with some firewood, as payment in kind for the flyer I designed for them. They barrowed it down, then chopped it up on the spot. It reminded me of the time, before I'd joined my first ship Karen Bravo when she was in Egypt, and they were victualling, and the meat arrived on the hoof and was slaughtered and butchered there on the quayside. Or so at least I was assured. Another time, further south, the crew change was accomplished with the aid of a couple of french mercenaries flying a Dakota, that they were flying freight and passengers with while saving up to buy a fighter. So it's entirely probable; sometimes life at sea was too interesting anyway to bother making things up.

But I digress. Here's the flyer I did for them

I picked it up from Minuteman Press in Bristol on Friday, and also collected my new badges, the K&A West End Antifa ones. Look closely and you'll see our secret volcano base, deep in the heart of Wiltshire.

The KAWE Antifa took off when an awful person on our local canal community Facebook page posted up some hate stuff about a woman boater whom the Daily Mail had suggested was connected with Isis, and not only that but was living on a boat! and claiming benefits! and was a single parent! -so obviously she was a fit person against whom to level threats of arson, sinking and death (these threats were on some awful Brexity Facebook group, not our relatively civilised canal one, I hasten to add, and were presumably made by choleric folk who don't get out much. 'Others, I am not the first, have willed more mischief than they durst'... But even so. 

Anyway, we objected vociferously to her rather lunatic allegations, and were accused by her of being Marxist Lefty Antifa hooligans. Well, there are worse things to be accused of than being agin fascism. So it goes.

So I fed Jim and Harry a tot of rum, and off they went. Presently this old lifeboat came chugging by. Once upon a time it had a more adventurous career, on an oil platform in the North Sea. Observe the pipes running around the uppers, to spray water over the superstructure to stop flames from cooking the occupants, if chugging through a sea on fire.

And the sun set, and there was suddenly a chill in the air and it was time to get in and light the stove, after watching the moon rise.

An Uneasy Paradise; living on the waterways

Sebastien called by yesterday with a copy of the book that he and his partner Louise have been working on and which has finally been published. They are both canal folk and excellent photographers, and have been recording life on the Kennet and Avon Canal for some years now. And this is the outcome of their work. It's predominantly visual, and gloriously so, but with accounts of canal life by their subjects, and an essay to finish with.

Here's a link to their website, where there's more stuff, and a video to accompany the book launch, and you can buy a copy there.