Sunday, February 08, 2009
Garden down
Just made it down the garden for the first time since the snow. The pond, from which I had removed the leaking liners (the new on top of the old), remains resolutely full - despite the fact that leaking through bird or animal bitten holes in the liner being the reason for removal in the first place. The ground must be completely waterlogged. The small yew tree in the middle of the wild patch badly bent by weight of snow it had been carrying. Hopefully it will spring back before BH feels the need to lop lumps off of it. The small leaved evergreen hedge at the back of the wild patch completely borne down. May need to cut it back so that it can shoot again from the base in the spring. Thought required. The exotic grasses - thick shiny green leaves - perhaps up to two feet long with a pronounced fold in the middle - with lots of pendant flowers on long shoots - perhaps two feet long again - looking rather unhappy. I suspect they originate from a climate where frost and snow are unusual. Quite common in woods in this country but never gotten around to finding out what they are called. On the other hand the snow drops look rather well, poking through what remains of the snow and the daffodills are pushing.
Yesterday to Battersea Park where we found the snow mostly gone. On the other hand we came across a young lady riding a very fetching folding bike, illustrated in the previous post. A folding action I had never seen before and a proper Brooks leather saddle, none of this hard foam business. Other unusual features included a rubber (aka Kevlar) chain, no gears and what looked like disc brakes. But not sure I am going to stump up the £400 needed to get to know the thing better. Also came across a lot of odd trees which we were unable to name, the lack of on-tree leaves drawing attention to their oddity. We learnt that the chief parky keeps some sort of a catalogue of the odd trees for those interested but we did not come across his den. Festival fountains turned off and the Temple of Peace looking well. Bit of a mystery that this 20 year old temple remains looking so smart and new. Not a hint of a graffitti anywhere. Maybe someone comes out at the crack of dawn each day and scrubs the thing. We managed to get lost on the way back to the car, coming out on Albert Bridge Road instead of Prince of Wales Drive. Which meant that we must have rather badly lost our sense of direction coming out of the sub tropical garden and probably completely misdirected, with great confidence, a couple who wanted to know where the river was. Hopefully they got there in the end, they had an hour or so before it got dark.
Rather put down by a short note on the back of this week's TLS. A propos of a book aimed at budding writers, it explains that the explanation mark is the most widely misused punctuation mark. Guilty as charged I think! It then goes on to say how terrible it is to have wandering points of view. Should not have more than one to the page. It gives as an example: "Nunavit sighed as she saw the ragged band of her fellow Eskimos returning exhausted from another failed walrusing expedition". Now this is an invented example so one ought to be able to see the point of the complaint loud and clear. But I fail miserably. A rather dead bit of prose but I can't see what 'L.D.' is on about. So I presume I must be doing this one all the time too.
Note in passing that I am in good company. One Sir Roger Penrose, of whom more anon, is also very fond of exclamation marks.
But encouraged by the discovery that there is now a sub-discipline in university departments of literature called forgery studies. Aka cultural forensics. It seems that deception and detection are among the central preoccupations of such eighteenth century philisophers such Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Well I never did!
Yesterday to Battersea Park where we found the snow mostly gone. On the other hand we came across a young lady riding a very fetching folding bike, illustrated in the previous post. A folding action I had never seen before and a proper Brooks leather saddle, none of this hard foam business. Other unusual features included a rubber (aka Kevlar) chain, no gears and what looked like disc brakes. But not sure I am going to stump up the £400 needed to get to know the thing better. Also came across a lot of odd trees which we were unable to name, the lack of on-tree leaves drawing attention to their oddity. We learnt that the chief parky keeps some sort of a catalogue of the odd trees for those interested but we did not come across his den. Festival fountains turned off and the Temple of Peace looking well. Bit of a mystery that this 20 year old temple remains looking so smart and new. Not a hint of a graffitti anywhere. Maybe someone comes out at the crack of dawn each day and scrubs the thing. We managed to get lost on the way back to the car, coming out on Albert Bridge Road instead of Prince of Wales Drive. Which meant that we must have rather badly lost our sense of direction coming out of the sub tropical garden and probably completely misdirected, with great confidence, a couple who wanted to know where the river was. Hopefully they got there in the end, they had an hour or so before it got dark.
Rather put down by a short note on the back of this week's TLS. A propos of a book aimed at budding writers, it explains that the explanation mark is the most widely misused punctuation mark. Guilty as charged I think! It then goes on to say how terrible it is to have wandering points of view. Should not have more than one to the page. It gives as an example: "Nunavit sighed as she saw the ragged band of her fellow Eskimos returning exhausted from another failed walrusing expedition". Now this is an invented example so one ought to be able to see the point of the complaint loud and clear. But I fail miserably. A rather dead bit of prose but I can't see what 'L.D.' is on about. So I presume I must be doing this one all the time too.
Note in passing that I am in good company. One Sir Roger Penrose, of whom more anon, is also very fond of exclamation marks.
But encouraged by the discovery that there is now a sub-discipline in university departments of literature called forgery studies. Aka cultural forensics. It seems that deception and detection are among the central preoccupations of such eighteenth century philisophers such Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Well I never did!
# posted by Jim @ 11:35 PM 
