raven

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed.
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Edward Thomas

No pictures of rooks, unfortunately.

Nor any pictures of what I saw over at the edge of the Gorge the other morning,when I paused there on my way over to Clifton with some books that I'm touting around the shops, including the new pirate one.

It was a glorious day, calm and clear, with a bit of warmth in the sun. Very high up and to the west, a raven was circling in an updraft. It was so far up that I only thought that it might be a raven, until it dropped into a vertical dive, throwing in the occasional swoop and flick-roll, until it dropped into the quarry opposite and landed on a tree. That's a raven, all right.

Then there was a kerfuffle from the peregrines that nest below the viewpoint, and one appeared, circling in the Gorge until it too caught an updraft and spiralled up until it had gained enough height to drop down into the trees of Leigh Woods, where it flicked around the branches and out of sight. Ravens and peregrines are a bit Jocks and Geordies. I wonder if it had gone over there to irritate the raven?

springing on

It's beautiful weather, and I pop up onto the roof every now and then to witness the spring unwinding itself from the last of the winter.

Got a call last night from C. Her car's in the menders and she needs to get out into Somerset for work. Can she borrow the Morris?

Yes.

We go out for a run so she can get the hang of things. It's quite funny when someone is not used to old cars.

"This is the choke..."

"The choke?"

We kangaroo up the hill, pause at a junction and go hippity-hop upward in second gear with the engine screaming and the clutch making a worryingly toasty smell...

Things get better soon. C is very adaptable. I wave goodbye as she and the Trav disappear into the night, with the faintest crunch of the gears.

playing around with pictures

I'd been looking at the cover design for The Bald Blackbird, and not been happy with it but couldn't quite work out what to do. It just looked wrong, and lacking in something.



So I did this picture of hawthorn blossom
And then I removed the background from it, and copied and rotated and resized it a bit...


...and cleared some space behind the foreground things....



...and then stacked all the images up in layers, and ended up with the final version that I put at the top here. Fairly happy now. Paintshop Pro is really very useful.

On the other hand, it would be nice to create pictures that were finished entirely on paper, too. I was looking at some of David Inshaw's pictures the other day and thinking how nice they are. Bet he doesn't use PSP!

Norwich

Hey, we managed it! Richard and me, in the same place at the same time doing a reading!

Not only that, but we even managed to be on the same train, which I joined at Bristol and Richard at Didcot.

The countryside was powdered with snow. I admired the muddy inlets we passed around Ipswich, reminding me of Arthur Ransome stories. And a plastic egret guarding a lonely pond in a big field. And a rail-side chapel with a hoarding that warned us to PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD which I thought unnecessarily alarmist.


We had a quick explore of Norwich (Richard used to live here in his UEA student days, so he can hardly be blamed that we got lost several times) and then joined Natasha, who had invited us and organised our reading, at a tea party in celebration of the work of Barbara Ross, who has been doing good work for the TG community for some years



Here's Barbara, with the dynamic Shelly Telly, who's been very active in Norwich's LGBT History Month events.

In the evening we went to UEA's Drama Studio, and gave our reading and then had a Q and A session, which I always find a bit tricky because I'm not good at ad hoc talking. But it went well (I think) and it got me thinking about things too, which is probably a Good Thing.

It was good to meet so many good people who are busy getting on with stuff. I came away feeling rather sluggish in comparison, and determined to do better. Thank you, Norwich.

dividing up

We went down to the harbour for the launch of a new book, Pirates and Privateers out of Bristol. There was shanty singing and people dressed up as pirates. There was also Matthew, the replica of the caravel in which Cabot had sailed to America. And lots of other stuff. But we didn't stay long because Katie expressed a strong antipathy for 'smelly men with beards'. Which wasn't entirely fair, but hey. She's a teenager.

Chris Bertram was wandering by with his camera while I was staring at the engine of the Traveller, contemplating wrapping some self-amalgamating tape around the radiator hose where it is beginning to split. So we had a coffee break, and he asked if I'd got anywhere with my quest to have books with transsexualism in them reclassified in the Dewey system.

I admitted that I have rather stalled on the project; I was distracted by my bike prang and then one thing and then another, and so on, and suddenly it is five months later and time to do Useful Things in the world again.

Talking about classification systems and their pitfalls and limitations, Chris asked if I knew the Borges one about animals. I didn't. So he later sent me a link. It's great.

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

falling out of a tree

It's a good time of the year to huddle over the desk swathed in fleecies and scarves, and get on with drawing. And procrastinate over doing the accounts.

This is yesterday's effort; a young crow getting into trouble while trying to perch in the midst of linden blossom.

on the roof

I was up a step ladder round at Marta's, fixing the thing that fits on the end of a gutter to stop it dripping onto the windowledge below. One pair of the ladder's feet was on the paving, the other was in the kitchen, and the ladder was at a bit of a jaunty angle. Marta held onto the ladder, just in case. "It's all slanty," she said; "How do you manage to stay on?"

"All those years of seafaring," I said.

On which subject, I listened to a dramatisation of Jack London's "Sea Wolf" on BBC Radio 7 last night. And then had nightmares about being back at sea again. It happens.

Eight years ago I was somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean about now, watching the stars and eating flying fish, and enjoying the company. So it wasn't all bad.

Marta's roof had moss growing on it, and it looked beautiful, especially with the pendant raindrops hanging off it.