Hello, lovelies. And thank you for buoying me up last week when I temporarily reached the point of ‘stop the world, I want to get off’. Much calmer now. 😌
Still no rain here, and non in the forecast. We are due another heatwave next week, though. We had rain on the window one day last week, but unfortunately it didn’t make it onto the ground. The garden is crisp. Weeds are doing well. On Friday there were three small-ish cliff falls on the east beach. It’s prone to falls there, and there are signs up to tell people not to use this part of the shoreline, but what do you know, numpties go on there from time to time, even though it’s actually quite difficult to get there with the river and fences and groins (groins?) GROYNES in the way. Hey ho, some people are like sheep—they spend most of their time looking for ways to die. Or is that chickens? And speaking of sheep, on a walk through the arboretum last week (at least it’s shady there) sheep had escaped from the top field and were enjoying themselves on the longer, greener grass available to them. Their own field was dry as dust and a bit of yellow fuzz on the ground so they obviously saw better times ahead and broke through the fairly feeble fence. They stared at us a bit, but were largely unperturbed. I was worried that they might eat something that wasn’t good for them (rhododendron, yew, wild cherry, oak leaves can all cause sheep issues) so I rang down to the visitor centre and asked them to speak to the farmer to come and corral them back in. To be honest, I didn’t blame them for looking for something a bit more appetising; a couple of the more adventurous ones had made it out and onto the show-jumping arena where the grass is watered and quite lush!
It’s been Folk Festival this week, so apart from one day when we go for a look round and a listen, we avoid the town because it’s rammed and people are arguing over parking spaces and sauntering about where one needs to get one’s shopping. The cafés are full (good for business) and the Esplanade has little tents for traders, but the best bit is the park where all the street food traders hang out. All human life concentrates in our little seaside town and there is more patchwork and plaits than you can shake a stick at. And that’s just the men. If you don’t want to attend a venue to hear music, there are plenty of buskers—this year I heard Northumbrian pipes, a bloke playing a piano from Land’s End to John O’Groats (he hadn’t got very far), a zither, a saxophone quartet (they were really good), and a duo of guitar and banjo, all ‘playing real good for free’. That’s a Joni Mitchell ref. I enjoy the dancing most of all though, everyone looks so jolly and it’s seems so joyful, leaping about in bells, or whacking sticks together, or clacking clogs. And there’s nothing like the sound of accordion and fiddle to get the toes tapping. Here’s a little taste:
No new reading this week - I’m still enjoying Jenny Uglow’s A Year With Gilbert White. Gilbert is also complaining of drought in his records for August 1781. His well is almost too low to supply the water for brewing, but he manages. He grows his own hops but buys in the mashed barley. He also takes advantage of the low water levels to clear out the silt from the bottom of the well and finds glass marbles and ‘taws’, thrown in when he and his siblings were young. Uglow imagines the children leaning over the well-head, dropping their glass marbles and listening to how long it took to hear the ‘plop’ below; so very evocative of childhood. But Gilbert’s love of examining and recording is never very far away. He visits the Duke of Richmond’s estate to see an American Moose which has been gifted to the noble lord. Unfortunately, the moose died before Gilbert arrives and the Duke has had it hung up in an outhouse for interested parties to view. Notwithstanding the smell of putrefaction, Gilbert gets in there with his ruler and does his best, noting that from the fore-feet to the belly it was three feet and eight inches, with much of the length being in the lower part of the leg (the tibia) which he thought ‘strangely long’, but failed to measure it exactly because he had to dash outside to get away from the stench. There is a fine engraving by Eric Ravilious of the visit, clearly before Gilbert was overcome by fumes:
The moose in question was, in fact, the female of the species, but Ravilious took a little artistic liberty and gave it the horns of the male. The female may be more deadly (to paraphrase Kipling), but the male is more interesting to draw.
In a little reading time without Gilbert, I have started a Winifred Holtby novel. I have noted several writers on here extolling her talents as a novelist and so I ventured to my favourite online second-hand bookstore and picked up a copy of The Crowded Street. I’m only a few pages in, but I’ll let you know how I get on.
As per last week’s post I bought a sketchbook and a set of drawing pencils and have started making a little sketch every day. Well, not quite every day because we had a visitor this week and I didn’t always have the right headspace for it. I’m not very good, but I am enjoying sitting down and making the marks and concentrating on drawing what I see, rather than what I think I see. So far I have three torturous sketches of a Jersey Tiger Moth, my own bare foot, and a robin. And no, I’m not sharing them with you. But when I get a bit better at it and less embarrassed by my efforts, I will. Maybe.
And I think that’s enough for this week. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll write again soon. x
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