5/12/2025
May. 12th, 2025 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrkinchSo not exciting but beautiful in a green and shiny way.
No way this could possibly go wrong....
May. 12th, 2025 03:57 pmoursin(Larfs liek a hysterykle drayne.)
The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was fascinated by Stonehenge, using what he described as “the temple of the winds” both as a setting for one of his most striking scenes and as a lifelong inspiration, a pathway back into ancient times.
In what is being billed as a unique performance, the life and work of Hardy is being showcased at the great stone circle in Wiltshire as part of Salisbury international arts festival.
....
An orchestra will play music, ranging from the sort of folk tunes Hardy may have been familiar with to pieces by Gustav Holst and Peter Warlock.
....
It is believed to be the first time that a performance incorporating Hardy’s life and work has been staged at Stonehenge.
Lesser said: “Hopefully* it’ll be lovely weather and you’ll have this marvellous atmosphere as the evening develops with the light changing and these wonderful words of Hardy.”
*Cue: Thunderstorms! Torrential rain! Unseasonal snow! First earthquake ever recorded in Wiltshire!
I don't suppose they are going to represent Hardy in his lighter and realistic vein:
I.e. successful ruined maids who go and live a profitable life of vice in Dorchester.
Culinary
May. 11th, 2025 07:01 pmoursinLast week's bread held out very well, right up until the point when it did something quite spectacular in the mould department, fortunately there was still a roll left from the weekend.
Friday night supper: (I had been hoping it would hold out for frittata, sigh) ven pongal (South Indian khichchari).
Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 Marriage's Light Spelt Flour (end of the bag), and Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, which worked rather well.
Today's lunch: sweet potato gratin, shallots rather than onion as I had some left from the other week, and kalamata olive tapenade; served with spinach sauteed more or less according to Dharamjit Singh's recipe in Indian Cookery (really doesn't need added water), and gingery healthy-grilled baby courgettes (teriyaki rather than tamari, and I really didn't think marinade needed extra salt).
A bit Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, do we think?
May. 10th, 2025 05:18 pmoursinThis week's You Be The Judge column in Guardian Saturday: My dad wants to track my location on his phone. Should he leave me alone?:
My dad and I disagree about whether he should follow me on the Find My Friends phone app, which lets you track people in real time. He used to, but when I went to university I removed him as a follower. I don’t think he needs to know where I am all the time.
I’m 27 now, but it’s still a bone of contention. Dad says I don’t call him enough – I think that’s why he’s being so persistent about being re-added. He says: “I would know what you were up to if you let me follow you on Find My Friends.”
But I don’t want him tracking me, as he used to take it too far when I was younger. Once, when I was in a coffee shop, he texted me saying: “Hope you enjoy your coffee.” It’s nosy and I felt like I was under surveillance. It was funny for a bit, but then I thought: how often is he looking? That sort of thing happened several times as a teenager.
Okay, I will concede that I come at this as someone From A Different Era, who was traveling in distant parts of the world (parts where the folks at home might, actually, have had some reason for concern about me) and communicating by airletter &/or postcard with my family. By the 1990s I did make the occasional landline phonecall to partner and parents when I was on research trips etc, partly because there were various wheezes of special numbers to call via designated credit card which were not ruinously expensive.
But honestly. She's just going about her usual normal daily business. We think Father needs to get a hobby, and to reconsider the claim that 'it’s not stalking, it’s love' (surely what all stalkers think/say?).
Am having visions of Victorian Papas putting Airtags in daughters' crinolines.... wouldn't they have been all over it, eh?
'Very useful in life: it generates kindness and consolidates society'
May. 9th, 2025 07:13 pmoursinDr Johnson on card-playing.
Thoughts and reminiscences evoked by liv's post on board-games, which are not so much about that specific issue of 'games all the family can play' across generations, although some of these we must have done.
Not sure there was always generation of kindness, because there was a certain degree of e.g. sibling competitiveness in play with certain recreations.
These would be played within family and sometimes also with family friends.
Various pencil and paper games - my maternal grandfather was very into these and as I recall even had duplicated blanks made up.
Board games such as Sorry, Monopoly, Scrabble, Scoop, which I have never come across anyone who has played - there was also a very old Snakes and Ladders board, where you went up a ladder for doing a good deed, and down a snake for committing A Sin, but I'm not sure we ever played on it. And later on, Trivial Pursuit, well, we would, wouldn't we. (Original classic edition, I guess? it had only recently come out.)
Mainline, a card game which is now a rare vintage item, apparently, in which you had cards with bits of railway line and had to fit these together within certain rules, and honestly I can't remember what the ultimate outcome was meant to be.... the description there says to get rid of all the cards in one's hand.
On a less cerebral level, Pit - as I daresay is common, the Bear got very tatty and had to be very carefully concealed when trying to pass.
5/8/2025 Inspiration Trail
May. 8th, 2025 04:05 pmmrkinchA California Scrub-jay at the north end of the trail was making a racket and eventually forced an owl to fly off. Didn't get a good look at the owl but probably a Great Horned.