Aug 21, 2010 | Uncategorized
It’s pouring with rain outside.
Today was relatively routine – down to the barbers for a trim and then into town for a wander about although the only thing I bought was a sandwich for lunch. It was quite pleasant this afternoon and I spent a lot of it outside with an oil stone and some oil sharpening up several penknives.
A number of these knives are quite old and I’ve been easing them up with 3-in-1 oil over time to get them back into working order and slowly trying to clean off gunge and corrosion as best as I can. The majority are Sheffield made and still have sound mechanisms. Of the more modern ones, one is a small Victorinox which I was given as a gift by the Dutch cadaster in 1997 or so when I went out for a visit; the other is a pruning knife hand made by Trevor Ablett, one of the last two Little Mesters in Sheffield still making knives (and the other is mostly retired!).
Needless to say anyone reading this who has any old pocket knives or penknives sitting in a shed or an attic somewhere doing nothing, please feel free to send them to me for some TLC.
Aug 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
Further to my last, I was not only contented but also mellow this evening. This afternoon I bought a length of chain, some hooks and some tea-light lanterns. The chain was fixed between two of the uprights of the pergola and the tealight lanterns, complete with tea-lights, hung off it.
After a pleasant barbecue I stayed outside as evening fell and lit the candles. I stayed out for a further couple of hours, not doing a great deal more than watching the occasional satellite through binoculars and generally chilling out (literally, the temparature dissipated quite quickly in the cloudless night sky).
I also took a guitar out and had a great time just playing away to myself – some blues, some folk tunes, some more blues and some Paul Simon and Tom Paxton stuff. And then some more blues.
Aug 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
I am a contented man
We have had our aged and decrepit old paved patio replaced by decking with a pergola above. The pergola is bare at the moment but tonight, as I write, I am sitting outside with some tealights burning in the decorative lanterns on the table next to me.
Also on the table is a glass of Grappa. This is not an Italian summer’s night but that doesn’t matter. I am sitting out under the emergent starlight and quite happy.
Of course, we still have a lot to do around the house (we have, after all, only been here for fourteen and a half years) but the decking and pergola make a significant start on some long-standing plans – I bought those tea light lanterns with a pergola in mind when we were on holiday in Germany in 2002.
The next significant work, when we have some more money, will be the front garden and, of course, my man-shed. Also, the decking is bare and we need some pot-plants and furniture out here. I’m also thinking of planting two desert apple trees nearby. We already have a venerable old tree producing cooking apples which I have recently begun pruning hard. Two good dessert apples, chosen for restricted size as well as their flavour, would be a very good addition. I’m also thinking of a couple of plum trees for out the front in due course.
But that’s for the future. Tonight I’m watching satellites through binoculars and drinking grappa by starlight.
Aug 4, 2010 | Uncategorized
A year and a half ago on my old blog I wrote the following:
25 January 2009
I’ve just had the oddest flashback. I was sitting on the settee reading science fiction and on the cd I had Camel’s Snow Goose playing. Camel are a band which lodge affectionately in my memory as being the first band I ever went to see play live (1976, Glasgow Apollo, Moonmadness tour). As the music played I had a mental throwback back to sitting in my room in Glen More one winter’s evening doing precisely the same thing with the same music. It was real and powerful and the sense of location was acute down to the dark curtains, the red angle-poise lamp and the momentum in the music. Most disconcerting was the realisation that that was more than thirty years ago: how can that be true?
Most powerful of all was the sense that I could put down my book and go downstairs for a cup of tea and a chat with my dad. My dad passed on a long time ago now although he is never far from my thoughts and memory, but this did not feel like a memory so much as a strong sense of being in that moment: a strong sense that despite the years he was still a real presence in that moment and there to be greeted were it not for the irritating inconvenience of the time and space that separates us.
Doodlings
I’ve had a couple of similar flashbacks since, usually triggered by music – most recently by Help Me from Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and Astronomy from Blue Oyster Cult’s Secret Treaties. I had another this morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror and recognised my dad’s fringe and the pebble dash of white and grey there – as I remember from when he was my age.
These are not always as vividly real as that one in 2009 but they do strongly evoke a time and place and, more powerfully I think, a sense of connection with a former “me” as compellingly as deja vu.
Our sense of conscious awareness of a continuous present, subdivided into moments which pass into some strange realm of the past is a curious one. I am coming to cherish these flashbacks, these resonant resurgences of a long past awareness. This is, perhaps, not only because of the link to a happy time in my life when the future seemed longer and my dad was with us, but also because it helps disguise the awareness of aging.
I don’t want to make too much of this – I am only 50 after all – but I cannot ignore that bits of me now creak which previously did not. Nor can I dismiss the irritating and ever present thought that, at 50, I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.
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