distant drummer

The Bradford Flight (total locks: one) is border country; above it, the broad sunlit uplands of the upper Avon; below, the steep wooded valley that carries the river down to Bath and Bristol. And it is a frontier of the mind, separating out the more adventurous boaters from those few who prefer to keep their bimbling within the environs of Bath, and view Trowvegas as a Tudor seafarer might view Samarkand or Far Cathay, an impossibly distant place where strange folk do strange things.

We'd been as far as Seend, where the canal is closed while the bridge is being repaired; we'd struggled through ice to get back down to Semington; we'd kept watch for the barn owls that ghost the meadows in the dusk, and the roe deer that merge with the russet stubble in the dawn, their white rumps standing out like the smile of the Cheshire cat. The buck's new antlers were there, still in velvet, where, on our outward journey a few weeks back, its head had still been bare. Coltsfoot is in flower. The chaffinch has polished off its spring song, and the greenfinches are making snoozing noises. The seasons are spinning faster as we approach the equinox.

Now we dropped down through the lock to tithe barn, close to where the storms had rocked a big ash tree and caused a rockfall. The tree was down, and Jim and I scrambled up the steep slope with chainsaws, through the brash, slicing up the trunk and loading it into an old sailing dinghy to transfer it across to the boats. Hard going, but now there was a great pile of wood on Eve's roof, and Netty's foredeck, and the towpath too. We broke out the Famous Grouse, and celebrated.

I made a quick dinner of corned beef pasta and sat, too tired to go to bed just yet. Outside, a most spectacular sunset was developing. I popped out a couple of times to admire it, and the perfection of the layers of trees and fields receding towards it. Then it was blotted out. The prow of a boat right next to my bow had appeared, silent as the dusk. On the towpath was a strange silhouette, a tiny figure with a long tall head, like the Mekon or possibly the Alien off that movie.

It was Bongo George, in his rasta hat. 

Nothing could have kept me awake that night, and as I slid into deep sleep I heard the sound of not-so-distant drums.

Next morning my neighbour was keen to move as quickly as possible. "He doesn't move for a year," she said despairingly, "and then he sticks himself right next to us!" 

The other neighbour was even more forthright. "I'm a better drummer than that," she said, "and I'm not a drummer."

We loaded up the wood, and fired up the engines. Down at Horse Field, there was a huge space for mooring. A space that only endless bad drumming can create, and that we occupied gratefully. I pulled the engine kill toggle, and peace reigned.

 

up in the air

Jim arrived with a great bag of climbing gear on the back of his bike. "I thought I'd do that willow," he said. "And you could take some pictures."

Jim has an informal arrangement with the local canal people; he takes out trees that represent a potential problem or danger to the canal and towpath, and their users. It saves them admin and bother - the canal volunteers can't move without a risk assessment and piles of hi-vis safety gear - and he gets firewood. I sometimes help, too, because I like doing that sort of thing. The willow was a pro bono job because the timber is pretty useless for burning, and not much use for anything else, unless you want to make a cricket bat.

"I said five years ago I'm getting too old for going up trees" said Jim. He's three years younger than me, but I didn't mention that. My younger self would have thought it surprising that people pushing towards 60 years old should be scrambling around in trees. But then my younger self was ageist.

He clambered into the harness and leg spikes, and we went to the willow tree whose bough was overhanging the towpath. Space's boat was underneath it. "He's a late riser, is Space" said Jim, knocking on the boat's roof.

Space emerged, blinking in the noontime light. "I'm moving in a few hours," he said. "You can do it then."

"Sorry, Space, got to do it now" said Jim. "We won't even touch your boat."

"If you do I shall be very annoyed," said Space, retreating into the dark fug of his boat.

Jim scrambled up through the ivy, dislodging a squirrel's drey that showered twigs down on him and looking more like the Green Man with every move. Having attached a rope high on the trunk, he swung down onto the limb that was sticking out over the canal, and as he lopped off sections of it, I swung them down to the ground. Space and his boat remained unsullied.

And then we had a glass of whisky and I drew Jim's picture. 

plain words

a slight adjustment....

In my school days, I was conscious that the essays I wrote were always very short, and wondered if perhaps I should fluff them out a bit to increase the word count and add some heft to the pages.

 Then I read Sir Ernest Gowers' Complete Plain Words and, for good measure, George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Both texts were hugely influential on my attitude to language; I have always aspired to write in a way that both these chaps would approve of; simply, and clearly.

So it was a bit of a rude shock to find that this blog has been subject to a Manual Action by Google (bear with me, please, these are terms that I am fresh to, as well). It has been rendered invisible to search results using Google, because

pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Most worrying. Had I been hacked? I changed my passwords, and hunted through the blog. No obvious messing around had been going on.

I joined the Google webmaster forum, explaining what had happened, and asking for advice. A respected member of the forum replied

Your content doesn't seem to make sense, almost gibberish or poorly auto-translated. Here's an example:

Such a long, still autumn was bound to come to blows eventually, but I was grateful for it while it lasted; the mild, still days succeeding each other, as the woodlands’ colours insensibly varied and deepened; olives, russets and deep scarlets that slowly turned to ochre and umber. In the thinning woods that overlook the cut, the stars can be seen at night; the fox barks, the tawny owls call to each other in the half light, and a single cronk announces start of the heron’s day shift. 

http://dru-withoutamap.blogspot.com.br/2015/11/rough-winds.html

Why should it be indexed?

maybe the problem's in here?

It's a bit dispiriting when your carefully-chosen words are read as gibberish, obviously. With some further discussion and input from other contributors, the commentator (not a native english speaker) accepted that what I'd written was at least not nonsense...

I've requested a review of the blog from Google, though as there's nothing that I can see that is wrong, I am worried that they will confirm their previous judgement.

Interesting times. As a canal dweller, I do use some words that are specific to my environment, such as cratch, or... actually nothing else comes to mind at the mo. But you get the picture. Lots of subcultures have specialised language, and it's a lingo that may be incomprehensible to an outsider.

And I sometimes write and even publish poetry; a sort of writing that is perhaps (or can be) different from everyday patterns of language, but one where every word has (or ought to have) an important job to do. As with my prose description of autumn, cited by the commentator above; the language may be dense, but it is hopefully coherent.

I have also written instruction books. The one I was most pleased with was a guide to the engine room systems of the ferry Havelet, written with the aim of saving time explaining things to new crew members. That was used as part of the company's ISO 9000 quality management certification... a good manual should have something in common with anything else well-written; it should be luminously clear in its meaning.

I started blogging eight years ago, because I wanted my own little soapbox, after having had lots of other people write about me, both personally (as a result of my prosecuting a successful employment tribunal against P&O Ferries) and more widely, because of my identity as a trans woman. It is very frustrating having other people say silly things about you without having any means of reply, let me tell you.

Since then, I've written and done some things that I believe have been useful, in LGBT politics, press freedom in the context of Leveson, local politics (ah, the Tesco riots!); I've even shown you how to fix a toilet. Oh, and poetry! And publishing it! And more widely, hopefully, I show that trans people have got more to them than simply being trans. And we have and deserve a voice in the world. Nothing about us without us, and so on.

It's a salutary thought that there should be such a gulf between what I intended to convey, and how it was received by someone appointed as the arbiter of that which is deemed valuable and worthwhile.

maps, storms, pictures

The map of the Kennet and Avon Canal's West End has been selling like hot maps.... it's also available in my Etsy shop, should you like one; both on A4 and A3 sizes. 

The storm have been making life lively on the canal; I must write about that soon, but just now I'm on the hop, piggybacking wifi and catching up with admin, as you do. Here's a picture I've just done for my nice canal neighbours...

the K&A West End map

At last, I've finished this map. It's the West End of the Kennet and Avon Canal (that is, the section between Devizes and Bath), and includes as many as possible of the names by which the local places are known on the canal, as added by the K&A Facebook group members on this Google map.

Crikey! It took far longer to draw than anything I've done before. The first version got junked because it looked a bit rubbish; it's difficult trying to represent something that's essentially linear, on an oblong. The dimensions are dictated by the intended use of the map as a double page spread in the book I'm working on; but I'll also be doing some prints of the map, as it seemed so popular when I uploaded it last night.

After four days scarcely stirring from the drawing board, it was time to shake off the cabin fever. I took the panniers out to the bicycle - and was snapped at by the arctic gale that howled round me like a pack of hungry steppe wolves. It can get a bit harsh up here in the wide open spaces of the upper Avon valley, let me tell you.

So I went back in again, and stoked up the stove.

Fortunately, I have dried milk powder and flour, so I can still make a decent cup of tea and bread. Having skipped lunch yesterday I was achingly hungry, so made bread dough and, as soon as the wood in the stove had burned itself into a bright glow, I added the wire shelf and flattened out some balls of dough. Putting them onto the shelf inside the stove was rather difficult, as they were of course floppy. But after a very few minutes the underside was a fine colour and hard to the touch, and it was a doddle to take them out and flip them over; at which they obligingly inflated, and then came out, like puffballs but rather nicer smelling.

glowing nicely

flipped over and inflating nicely. The embers are still glowing, honest; the flash hides them

ready to eat! -after I've added bacon and egg, obviously 

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.

another starry picture

....here's Leo, and a fireball, and the Alton Barnes white horse as seen from the canal near Honeystreet. Just a picture I wanted to do; and the generator charged up the boat batteries while I had the big computer running so that I could do the digital processing....

Been v busy sending off Christmas orders lately. I did a small print run of cards for my own use, like this- life on board nb Eve...

...I scanned it before I coloured it; was thinking I might do a colouring book, as they seem quite popular at the mo. If that is your thing, feel free to download the pic and have a go!