over the sea to Skyros

 Euterpe Parry-Hughes, Swansea shipowner, despairingly closes the slim volume of her dilettante husband Dylan's latest poetry, "from which", as posterity has drily noted, "the dust is seldom blown". She gazes across the Bay to the Mumbles, and considers shipping him out on one of her Chile-bound guano schooners, and having him dropped off on Juan Fernandez as they go. "Maybe he'll find his muse there," she thinks. "Or a goat. Wotevs."

One Alberto Granados is trying to find out more about this painting. Any clues, or further interpretations, more than welcome!

one in the eye for the starlings

Four weeks short of the winter solstice, the days are shortening so fast it's hard to keep up with them.
"I'll pick you up at four," I told Mal, when we agreed to pop up to New Passage to watch the starling roost.

But by three o'clock the shadows were already long, and the sun slanting almost horizontal across the chimneys and rooftops.

So we went earlier.

Coming over the ridge at Kingsweston and seeing Avonmouth and the Severn estuary ahead of us, though, we'd obviously already  missed the sunset. As we bounced past the old zinc works, Mal started to tell me about Queen Victoria's last words to Disraeli (she'd asked him to pass a message on the Albert). "Yellow card, Mal", I said - this is the safe word for a story-that-you've-heard-before; in this case, earlier that afternoon at the anti-Costa demo.

And it was twilight by the time we trundled to a halt by the Victorian letterbox at New Passage.

And a great cloud of starlings, circling that very spot.


And Prince Charles, taking his dog for a walk.

"You look just like Prince Charles!" said Mal. "Do you get told that a lot?"

"Fairly often," he said; "If you look in Take A Break next month, I'll be in there with the Queen and Camilla."

It's come to something when royals appear in the sort of magazines that have exclamation marks in their titles, let me tell you.

The starlings passed low overhead, their wingbeats thrumming the air, like a gale in beech leaves, or rushing through close-hauled rigging. Then a gentle splatting as starling poo spattered the road around us in their wake.

"I've got one in the eye," said Mal. "That's a year's good luck!"

Walking down to the sea wall, there was a great chattering of the birds that had already roosted in the conifers by the path. Then the rasp of a bird of prey - a sparrowhawk, perhaps- and the roosting birds exploded into the air, and flew as a cloud to the main flock; the wing noise became a roar as the two formations swung into each other and coalesced. 

And then, after another circuit or two. the cloud of birds bounced up like a swell slopping on a breakwater, and became a whirlpool, sucking itself down into the trees.

And they were gone. Except for the great chattering in the trees. And the starling poo all over the car.

work in progress

I'm working on a cover for Nicky Jones' new book, The Changeling Tree. Here's some progress shots:



The waterfall is loosely based on Sgwd yr Eira, upriver from Pontneddfechan.

Having got the picture finished and scanned, I took these starlings

...which I had prepared earlier for this purpose. I removed the background

...and layered them into the picture.

...which just leaves the words. Here's a couple of options, though as yet nothing's certain...

Their Transsexual Summer

So there's a new reality TV series about Teh Tranz. My Transsexual Summer started last week, and such was the interest aroused in it that I went over and watched it on the Channel 4 website to see what the hoo-ha was all about.

Last time I watched something similar was when Nadia Almada was on Big Brother in 2004; so I tuned in, for the one and only time on that show; she came across rather well, but... "Crikey!" I thought; "Trash TV or what?".

Similar format here with MTS; seven trans people are put together in a big house and get on with it, whatever 'it' is. A process that seems to involve hours of putting make-up on, and screeching at each other over bottles of white wine in the kitchen. Getting past my initial discomfort at watching a group of people whose common denominator is that they want to appear on a reality TV show, though, it (and they) managed to be quite engaging, in a way that the Big Brother people generally failed to achieve, in the one episode I watched.

There had been high hopes for this series, not least because Paris Lees, a bit of a rising star on the trans scene, consulted on the programme, which was made after C4 signed up to the Memorandum Of Understanding with Trans Media Watch, back in March. The idea being that media people should know where to find information about trans stuff, and that trans people should be involved in the process of portraying them, rather than simply being something in the specimen jar.

Were those hopes realised? We did get to tick off a whole bunch of cliches in this episode; plucky Karen goes off for her op; voiceover tells us that it will "give her the vagina she had always wanted." Fox is said to worry about "how far he has to go to become a man." Lewis "is having a wardrobe crisis". Make-up. Make-up. Talking about make-up. Make-up.

The participants' use of the term 'tranny' has caused a bit of a ruckus online; maybe we'll go into that sometime else (I write about my opinion of the word in the  soon-to-be-published META online magazine).

Participants in this sort of programme are always going to be hostages to fortune, in the shape of the programme maker who wields editorial control and the voiceover microphone. Max, who on present showing seems the most thoughtful of the participants, has already expressed his disappointment with the way the show ended up.  On the one hand, we have the standard tranny-on-the-telly tropes, and can perhaps understand why, seeing this programme, Michael Pilgrim (in the Telegraph) should think that "being convincing, of course, is the aim of the transsexual". If, at least, we were being charitable and didn't have much regard for Mr Pilgrim's intelligence in the first place.

And on the other hand, and despite the tinkering, we get to see a diverse bunch of trans-identified people getting on with stuff. And see things from their point of view. And care.

poppy

poppy, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

I leaned out of the kitchen window at 11:00 this morning, and watched the breeze in the trees, the blue tits zipping between trees and a pigeon landing in the neighbour's garden. And thought my own thoughts.

This picture is intended as a reminder that not everyone we remember today is English, or a soldier.

acts of remembrance

I was hitching along the A30 from Shaftesbury towards Salisbury. An MG stopped; the driver said that I was welcome to join him if I didn't mind the labrador on my lap.

I didn't. We sped off. The brass disc on the labrador's collar identified its owner as  Lt. Col. Awdry. We passed the badges on the hillside at Fovant; I'd not seen them before. My host pointed them out.

"Had some of those CND chappies up there the other week," he said, "carving their badge. Took us all weekend to fill it in."

 I kept quiet about my allegiances. I was pro-CND, and fairly pro the armed services- it was only a small accident of biology that had stood in the way of my hopes to be a fighter pilot, after all. At a time when the government was contemplating axing conventional forces in favour of more nukes, it didn't feel like a contradictory position.

I got to meet a fair few retired military types in those days of the late 70s and early 80s, when I hitched a lot. Nice chaps, often with harrowing stories of war, quietly told.

One November, I wore a white poppy and a red poppy side by side. The slightly rottweiler-ish landlord of my local in Portsmouth ordered me to take the white one off. "I'm not having that in here," he said. The other regulars rallied round, and he backed down.

(His predecessor at the pub, the 5th Hants Volunteer Arms, was Major Gladys Walker, formerly of the ATS. One day I went in in an army surplus greatcoat, with Major's crowns on the epaulettes. "Take those off!" Gladys barked (she was good at barking). "I had to earn mine." It was a fair point, and I did, gladly.)

I've seen a couple of examples of ostentatious badges of remembrance recently. This horror, on Ebay. And the biggest poppy you ever did see, on the front of a Land Rover Freelander that was parked (where else?) on double yellow lines....  they make me uneasy, reminding me of Sassoon's 'Blighters' who 'mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume".

....and a few examples of rather militant snark about people not wearing poppies. By people who put poppy twibbons on their Twitter avatar, that sort of thing. Here's a bit from Kipling's Stalky and Co, where a politician comes to the school and lectures on patriotism....

And so he worked towards his peroration—which, by the way, he used later with overwhelming success at a meeting of electors—while they sat, flushed and uneasy, in sour disgust. After many, many words, he reached for the cloth-wrapped stick and thrust one hand in his bosom. This—this was the concrete symbol of their land—worthy of all honor and reverence! Let no boy look on this flag who did not purpose to worthily add to its imperishable lustre. He shook it before them—a large calico Union Jack, staring in all three colors, and waited for the thunder of applause that should crown his effort.
They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before—down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton Sands; above the roof of the Golf-club, and in Keyte's window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eyes? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.

..and here's my own contribution.

The bigger and redder the poppy

On front of the car or lapel

The more you're allowed to be stroppy

At those who remembrance less well.

Photo of Fovant badges: Trish Steel [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

attack of the Costa Monga

attack of the costa monga, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Bristol City Council is considering taking action against a branch of Costa Coffee, which is trading on Whiteladies Road despite having no permission for change of use from newsagent (the former business) to cafe. Meanwhile, the franchise holder, Stuart Montgomery, is developing another premises on Gloucester Road, again without planning permission. As Richard Leonard, who organised a petition against the Gloucester Road development, said; "Apart from the fact people don't want them in Gloucester Road, they are blatantly ignoring the wishes of local people and the council."

I was down at the Central Library yesterday, for the monthly Poetry Can lunchtime session. Called in at the Occupy Bristol site to drop off a bit of firewood; every little helps, after all. Later, talking about the Occupy Bristol site with someone I always thought of as a bit of an old Tory, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was supportive of the movement. Which is heartening.

Alana Farrell read some work-in-progress, a ballad about the Dale Farm evictions, using quotes from the protagonists. I learned that a neighbour to Dale Farm, who is apparently active in the anti-traveller campaign, is himself on an illegally-developed site, though one which has been granted retrospective planning permission. An option which does not appear to have been considered by Basildon Council in the case of Dale Farm.