Dear diary . . .

     I've been feeling quite happy the past couple of days. Why? I've played on the recorder and hammered dulcimer each morning and the notes I string together begin to sound like music . . .

     The St Peters choirs combined for Ash Wednesday Mass and imposition of ashes; so we had a lineup of four guitars, bass, piano, violin, bouzouki and me on treble/alto recorder for some songs and nine singers . . .

  
Elizaphanian's sermon is a good place to start for Lent.

     Meanwhile I'll just carry on playing music . . . feeding the cats, walking the dog, sending Kathy onto the roof to clear the chimney as the fire stopped drawing properly and we had a smoky house this morning. Cruel man sending his wife up onto the roof. I'm out of the habit of climbing onto high look-outs and have allowed myself the luxury of fear . . . I stop and think. It's the getting down that is the hardest part for me now.

     And now deciding to make a few notes of another kind here . . .

     I might be moved to browse a few more books; finish the third re-reading of The True Deceiver; continue reading the very fat GRANTA 109; breeze on through Homer and Langley and sip some more of the Power of One in which I've read some stark descriptions of bullying and I know there is more cruelty to come . . .

Christ's mass

     Now that he season that celebrates Christ's birth has finally arrived, many of the secular lights will be extinguished and trimmings taken down and the trees discarded or mulched. What of the other remembrances celebrated by the Church at this time? St Stephen, the first Christian martyr; St John the Evangelist; the Holy Innocents and the Epiphany and childhood of Jesus?

     I continue living in my own little world, that flow of the Church year learned as a choir boy and continued as sacristan at the parish church where I grew up. Christmas began for me then at 3pm on Christmas Eve with the live broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel, Cambridge.

     David Wilcox's musical influence seems to remain strong . . . and each year one new musical piece is commissioned . . .

     I wondered when I was little, "Who is this Mary? And what's a virgin?".

     I don't worry much about the pagan origins of some of the things we do at this time of the year. The time of year in the northern hemisphere when the long dark nights begin to shorten is a cause for celebration. A time to anticipate the first aconites and snowdrops . . .

     So, what did I do with the day? Mass to hear the Gospel . . . ultra-traditional goose for dinner, traditional carols to listen to and to play and sing;  and Kathy likes to watch lots of Christmastime themed movies . . .

The remainder of a white Christmas

Tempus Fugit

     So what have I been up to this past week? The usual which for me means walking with a neighbour who likes the company; collecting the mail, most of which is for Kathy as she manages to get on so many mailing lists from buying from so many catalogues, and getting lost playing music nearly everyday. There must be some sleeping, eating and household chores and the occasional honey-do each day, too.

     Oh, and reading. I received my Folio Society selections this week which included Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Seeing Stone.

This is an award winning book, a retelling of the Arthurian legend from the perspective of a thirteen year old boy at the end of the twelfth century when Richard Cœur-de-Lion is off on Crusade and Prince John is lusting after the throne of England. This is the first book of a trilogy written for young people.

The chapter 41 heading is Mouthfuls of Air. And that segues into Antony Burgess:

I haven't read this for a very long time. I was sent to the dictionary to look up hebetude. And that leads to the venerable O.E.D. Is this the only dictionary with a users guide?

 Simon Winchester has written about the making of the first edition of the O.E.D.

 

And before that he wrote The Professor and the Madman; an account of the extraordinary contribution to the dictionary of an inmate of Broadmoor and his correspondence with James Murry . . .  

Happy Thanksgiving

     Computer troubles resolved - for the moment.

     Started Tabula Rasa on a whim and was then bereft of ideas.

     Company just arrived to stay over Thanksgiving.

     Kathy had to rush over the hill to Show  Low for an appointment this morning after finding out today is the 24th not the 23rd.

     I may catch up with pictures later. Meanwhile I'll meditate and contemplate that for which I am thankful . . . that I woke up this morning, that I am able to play some music each morning, that I am still relatively sane (relative to what or to whom?)

Meanwhile here's another of Nick Bantock's books from my shelves

Take a deep breath

     Why is it that inspiration often comes just after you've lowered your body into a bathtub full of soothingly warm, lightly scented water? You soak in the water, mulling ideas (is that like mulling wine?) and desperately repeating key words that will help recall of the original idea. When you finally get to that special  writing space where the chair is comfortable, desk and notebook sloped at just the write angle and with your favourite pen in hand after having dried off, brushed your teeth, dressed, rescued slippers from the dog ; the words are gone and the idea has drifted into the ether . . .

     Same thing happens when driving. Pull over and stop to make a note? Not on your Nellie. Now where does that expression come from? Had a teacher who had a giddy aunt. And my uncle's name was Bill.

     Cats do some silly things. I just went down to the Post Office to pick up mail. A cat dashed across from the far side of the road in front of me; stopped on the edge of  the verge; saw me then dashed back the way it had come in front of me again and the traffic coming from the other direction.

     Caught up with some of my Radio 4 listening this morning. Open Book  invited ten writers to choose books they thought deserved rescuing from neglect. Listeners will later choose the one they would like to hear adapted for radio. In next week's programme Howard Jacobson will give his reasons for choosing Samual Johnson's Rasselas which I know should be on my shelves somewhere. The Snow Goose is Michael Morpurgo's choice.

     Think I'll take an inspiring bath now. Typing gets in the way, too. F'rinstance it's taken me the best part of an hour to dash off this post.

Not again?

     Yes, another week-end getting away to play some music in the open air; walk rocky trails; read, write and shelter from the rain. Oh, and enjoy a camp fire. It's taken a week for Kiki to realize that dead fires are nothing to be afraid of and that barking does not make the flames come back.

     Still not finished Lanark. Am now reading Christopher Phillips's Six Questions of Socrates. I finally did a little recording of the dulcimer, too. Just a couple of traditional tunes that I like. No embellishment; no harmony. Jamie Allen and Winster Gallop.

How rocky are the trails? Well this is a bit OTT.

 

And this is about as dramatic as the skies get.

Is Sassy bothered?

Are we done relaxing yet?

    Another week-end camping in the trailer. The camping part is accomplished by burning those awkward pieces of gnarled juniper and cedar that cannot be split small enough to fit into the wood-stove at home. The black archipelago of the cloudless starry sky before the waning moon rose is a wonder to behold. The Milky Way is particularly clear at these latitudes, about 33°N. The trailer provides the messy comfort of a home in miniature.

    We kept ourselves busy walking, reading, playing music, watching the first series of Robin Hood , star gazing and otherwise being idle . . . the fire did get going and wasn't this smoky really.

    And Kathy rescued another dog, Kiki, of indeterminate breed.

    I rushed off to take a few snapshots of Escudilla before sunset yesterday, Wednesday. And then drove thirty-odd miles west up to Point of the Mountain trail head and walked to Apache Vista to take some more shots before dark.

    Round Valley just after the sun set. This overlook is just over a mile from the trail head and I hoped I wasn't going to meet a bear on the way. The only wildlife I've encountered here before are elk and wild turkeys. I have had the luck to glimpse the occasional Mexican grey wolf, a controversial re-introduction.

    The last snapshot is a view from the ridge about halfway on  the way back to the truck. By this time I was clapping my hands and really watching all around me.

A Found Week-end . . .

     Kathy's parents spend each summer at Burro Mountain Homestead. They usually visit us each spring and fall on their travels to and from Desert Hot Springs, CA. Kathy's eldest sister and her husband spend their  winters in Las Vegas and stop by on their journeys to and from their summers at Burro Mountain. This autumn their visits with us coincided and whilst Kathy's parents looked after the cats we took the opportunity to get away to Lyman Lake State Park which is not far from St Johns, AZ. Frank and Karen joined us.

     Isn't it always the case that locals rarely visit nearby tourist attractions? People from the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix) visit the mountains regularly in the summer months to fish, camp and hike and in the winter months to ski or hunt. There are archæological digs to explore; the Petrified Forest National Park is just up the road. there are local hunters and fishermen to be sure. I'm often asked if I do these things which seem to be expected of you if you live in the White Mountains. But I do ski, just not so often now, and I do like to go camping (no longer under canvas) and walking in the woods and by lakes and streams.

     I need to verify this but I am lead to believe there are only two natural lakes of any size in Arizona. All recreational waters are on lakes created by damming streams. Lyman Lake is one such. For the past three days we've been relaxing, crocheting, playing music, fishing, walking and taking pictures, admiring the full moon through a telescope, catching glimpses of wildlife and just generally taking time to do something a little different from the quotidian round.

Friday night jam with Frank: Red Haired Boy (hornpipe)

     Each evening we relaxed round the campfire and watched the sky whilst the sun set and the full moon rose.

A fuzzy shot of the rising moon.

     The rising sun the following morning. At this time of the year it gets quite windy too. And it did blow. This is also the time of the year for tarantulas to be on the march finding shelter for the coming winter and we saw a few. Rangers are happy when we don't indiscriminately kill the local fauna from fear.

One unlucky angler . . . but the ladies were productive crocheting and chatting.

     Did I mention the fourteenth century pueblo ruins? Much of the site is covered to preserve what remains after the looting of the white man. Ancestors of the Zuni and Hopi or the Mogollon people or perhaps the Anazasi built these dwellings along with a sacred kiva.

     An immature buteo possibly a Swainson's or a red-tailed hawk, I'm not an expert.

     A snapshot taken on one of my walks . . .

Notes from another also ran . . .

     I tweaked the sidebar. Did you notice?. This is an attempt to organize the growing list of blogs I  have marked to follow. I was a boy who used to start the school term with a beautifully tidy desk -  the old fashioned kind with the sloping lid  - which by mid-term was a hodge-podge of text books, exercise books, pencils and papers. My room still gets untidy and I now have so much more stuff to unorganize. When I look for a book I usually remember the shelf it's on. I run my fingers along that row of books until I find it.  If I don't find it I then satisfy myself that at least I have touched it and that my eyes were too quick to see it. And then I find the book in blue covers not the red I had imagined. This was always so when I went looking for dad's copy of  The Ingoldsby Legends. No good me trying to be a librarian. Oh, yes I have heard of the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system; doesn't mean I have to use them at home.

     The side bar is tidy compared to the mess of blogs I have listed under the dashboard. What criteria to use when deciding to follow a blog? Is it the page design? The pictures or the writing? Is it about a subject of which you are particularly fond? Is the writing authentic, that is, from the heart? No time to read more. Time to copy the URL or hit the follow link. Quick! follow publicly or hiddenly (Huh?) .. er .. how about covertly?

     The list under the dashboard grows until one day you try to follow a blog and blogger says, "You already follow {title of the blog}." So that one must be worthwhile if I think it's worth following more than once. Isn't it? Or I link to a blog I marked to follow and a month has gone by since the last post. I begin imagining all sorts of gory* endings to a life;  or under what circumstances one might cease blogging. One might have just got tired of it and stopped. Didn't I read somewhere (probably on another blog) that the majority of blogs last no more than one year? My sceptred isle blog lasted just the duration of the trip, and a couple of addenda. There's another category: travel blogs . . . I feel the need to go tweak some more.

     Family blogs, sports-fan blogs, cliques of memes, tagging . . . oh, like the real world it gets very messy.

*I resisted punning on Gorey and gory. No I didn't. I just did.

Mug shot. Thank you, Kathy.

    I think I noted somewhere that I need to grow my beard back; I don't like shaving really. I had a good night's sleep for once. I awoke once lying on my back, something I rarely do. I dreamed dreams: a small house like a semi-detached. I'm sitting with friends in overstuffed 1930s easy chairs, settees and armchairs. Paul McCartney comes into the room; gives me a twelve string guitar to tune. The strings are surprisingly slack but in tune. Out side the back deck looks like one attached to a house we used to live in and someone is saying, "Oh, they filmed a scene for that movie in the back garden of a house in Great Falls."  I wander to another room where a tall young man is playing LPs on a transparent vertical player, recording them to CDs. I'm driving a pick-up truck too fast along a road I know has curves and bends ahead, I brake and the road becomes a dirt track through earthworks. Huge piles of dirt and heavy earth-moving machinery dodging between me and the piles of dirt. Just as suddenly I am walking in a field of young sweetcorn stepping across the rows.

Labor Day week-end

    Kathy has spent the last week visiting with her parents and sister at Burro Mountain Homestead near Silver City, NM. I joined them after church Sunday morning. The rain followed me and going over the pass between Nutrioso and Alpine the road was covered with what seemed to be slushy snow but was more likely to have been fine hail and lots of it.

    A large group of cyclists were enjoying the finer weather and open road between Alpine, AZ and Luna, NM. I felt quite unfit watching all these people cycle up these long mountain passes and remembered the days when I did a lot of cycling in England . . .

    The only notable wildlife I saw this trip was a group of javelina or peccaries. The week-end before I glimpsed big horn sheep on the side of the highway. The road passes through the Apache and Gila National forests. Aldo Leopold spent the early part of his career with the National Forest Service in this part of the country. A mountain man also associated with this area is Ben Lilly

    I didn't have any encounters with bears or mountain lions this trip, but they are out there . . . lured perhaps by the presence of humans who aren't too careful with their trash sometimes, or by the many mule deer which frequent the area. Such close proximity of wildlife in their own environment and human activity is not always in the best interest of either.

Kathy, Mom, Dad, Karen, Frank, Steve and Chris gather for supper at the club house on Labor Day.

Pinch and a punch for

the first of the month.

    This is becoming Arizona's driest monsoon season on record. The day temperatures have been hovering in the low 90°s F (30°+C) here in the mountains; goodness knows what the temperatures are like in the low desert and I don't really want to know because I'm not going there any time soon. Horrible wild fires ravaging the San Gabriel mountains in California. Any hope of Jimena cooling and damping us down? Maybe I need to look at a newspaper or watch a news programme on TV. Duh.

Personal stuff

Dreamed. Went to the doc this morning. Stopped procrastinating for today only? Caught up on reading blogs. Practiced mandolin, guitar and dulcimer. Listened to radio programmes. Walked. Watched a couple of episodes of Foyle's War. All the cats are safely in for the night. Oh, I haven't introduced all the cats. Later. Now I'm ready for a nigh-cap and a few more chapters of The Hummingbird's Daughter . . . what can I say? I'm a slow reader.

Words, words, words

I dipped into Poets of Our Time this morning and read John Betjeman's London. Here is the last fourteen lines:

'Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim forgotten fanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past,
With a slight sense of something unfulfilled;
And yet another feeling drew me there,
A sense of guilt increasing with the years -
'When I am dead you will be sorry, John' -
Here I could pray my mother would not die.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.
How trivial used to seem the Underground,
How worldly looked the over-lighted west,
How different and smug and wise I felt
When from the east I made my journey home

I consulted the Chambers English Dictionary see what it said about "fane". Dad had a copy of Chambers 20thCentury Dictionary he dipped into when completing cryptic crossword puzzles. He said it contained a good selection of unusual words more often found in larger dictionaries. I've since obtained a copy of the compact OED and in the past had a copy of the American Heritage dictionary. I've never had the inclination to buy a Merriam-Webster . . .

Words, Words, Words I thought was the title of Jean Paul Sartre's autobiography but a quick search disabused me of that notion. It is Les Mots (Words).

Some words I've had to look up in the past include desuetude, crapulous, pranked, caducity, esurient, catamite . . .
And some of my favourite words - mellifluous, horizon, crepuscular, amanuensis (I wish I had one of those)

The dictionary is always close by. I need to use it more often. Fane? a temple. Oh I miss John Ciardi.

I'm still here

"Procrastination . . . the thief of Time . . . " I'm not at home at the moment and of course as soon as I try write here all the ideas for themes, topics and trivia that I have not made note of are gone from my mind.

I have been browsing, and marking to follow, many blogs and I feel such an utter inchoate novice, if that isn't a tautology, with my little effort here which has no focus; and which I have left far too long. We are each the centre of the universe. I imagine myself as a signpost in a vast desert; the many arms of the signpost point to the horizon, to the sky, to my feet. Some of these blogs I follow publicly giving you the chance to explore them through the links in my profile . . .

Much time has been used playing country dance tunes on the dulcimer. Some time was rescued taking pictures of wildflowers; a project much mulled over for several years.

Any idiot can face a crisis.

It's this day-to-day living that wears you out. (Anton Chekov) Which is why I haven't been here lately to focus on what I am seeking. I have been dreaming. I have been bemoaning the heat. I have been watching gathering clouds each afternoon; wishing for more than a sprinkle; hoping we won't be deluged. I sleep, eat; stare at a computer screen wondering where the Muses hide . . . I talk to my sister on the 'phone; I raise my voice above the hum of fans, air-conditioner and humidifier to talk to Kathy across the room. I watch a little TV and finish reading A Plague of Doves; I continue dipping into Sailing Home; re-reading Blue Highways. I play a little music on the dulcimer and recorders; I listen to selected programmes on BBC Radio4 . . . I write very brief journal notes in the morning. I browse others' blogs. I receive a letter from a dear friend . . . he plans to visit this fall. I think of the things I am not going to mention here . . . I wait in hope of customers at the bookstore . . .

I read the Declaration of Independence once again and think of Thomas Paine sitting on my bookshelves . . . spent the Fourth in the mountains near Silver City, New Mexico . . .

The day . . .

started at six o'clock this morning with coffee brewing. Aaah. Then walking Zoë our aging Siberian husky. Out to breakfast: one egg over-easy, wheat toast and more coffee. Home to make international 'phone call then played dulcimer: scales, arpeggios, a couple of dexterity exercises, Swallowtail, Jamie Allen, Winster Gallop, Liberty, Red Haired Boy, Blackthorn Stick . . .
Errands to bank and drug store. Formatted, printed and made up itinerary-cum-journal for the trip to England. Checked e-mails. Guitar class and home to BBC News America and Top Gear then caught up here (where-ever 'here' is) . . . .