Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Epsom Common
First visit for a while yesterday, starting at Christ Church on the all weather track in an anticlockwise direction, then branched down to the railway, then onto the Wheelers Lane and Hook Road extensions.
Pleased to report that I spotted neither new chain saw activity nor cows, although there were a few foxes, not something I usually come across on the common. There was also a handsome dog rose, well into flower.
And an odd visual at the pond just by the keeper's cottage. This is a pond covered with duck weed, roughly circular, and the surface of which from a distance looks like a sheet of steel with some kind of matt green coating. Closer to, the sheet of steel resolves into something more mottled, but which started to throb or pulse in an odd way when one tried to focus on it from close quarters. I don't think there was anything odd going on in the pond, so there must have been something odd going on in me.
On the way out noticed the aspens last noticed on May 7th last year, but there was neither fluff nor shaking on this occasion.
Back home finished off 'Les Malheurs de Sophie' by one Comtesse de Ségur, a book to which I had been pointed by Drabble on puzzles, in a nicely produced edition from Hachette. Entertaining morality tales, first published in 1859, mostly about how Sophie manages to kill off all the various animals with which she is involved, rather more violent in that respect than English children's stories that I know, although for all I know, our stories from 1859, of which I know nothing, might be just as violent as their's.
Stories clearly very popular with lots and lots of different versions being available from Amazon France, including natty-little-frilly-pink boxes full of DVDs. Just the thing for a 10 year old female.
The Comtesse herself also has an interesting past, being the daughter of the chap who was the governor of Moscow at the time it was burnt down during the French occupation of 1812, subsequently exiled. Acquired her handle by marriage. So these typically French stories were written by a Russian. Maybe an outsider is better placed to capture the essential essence than an insider.
Finished the day off by finishing our first viewing of 'Barocco', a subtitled French hand-me-down from Bourne Hall Library for which I paid all of £1, double the asking price of 50p as I could not be bothered to wait for the attendant to finish with the customer in front of me who was into something complicated. A stylish affair, but so old that it did not resize to fill our not very large television screen. And while we got the general idea, the ins and outs of the framing political scandal more or less escaped us. I shall have to read what Wikipedia has to say about it before trying again.
Pleased to report that I spotted neither new chain saw activity nor cows, although there were a few foxes, not something I usually come across on the common. There was also a handsome dog rose, well into flower.
And an odd visual at the pond just by the keeper's cottage. This is a pond covered with duck weed, roughly circular, and the surface of which from a distance looks like a sheet of steel with some kind of matt green coating. Closer to, the sheet of steel resolves into something more mottled, but which started to throb or pulse in an odd way when one tried to focus on it from close quarters. I don't think there was anything odd going on in the pond, so there must have been something odd going on in me.
On the way out noticed the aspens last noticed on May 7th last year, but there was neither fluff nor shaking on this occasion.
Back home finished off 'Les Malheurs de Sophie' by one Comtesse de Ségur, a book to which I had been pointed by Drabble on puzzles, in a nicely produced edition from Hachette. Entertaining morality tales, first published in 1859, mostly about how Sophie manages to kill off all the various animals with which she is involved, rather more violent in that respect than English children's stories that I know, although for all I know, our stories from 1859, of which I know nothing, might be just as violent as their's.
Stories clearly very popular with lots and lots of different versions being available from Amazon France, including natty-little-frilly-pink boxes full of DVDs. Just the thing for a 10 year old female.
The Comtesse herself also has an interesting past, being the daughter of the chap who was the governor of Moscow at the time it was burnt down during the French occupation of 1812, subsequently exiled. Acquired her handle by marriage. So these typically French stories were written by a Russian. Maybe an outsider is better placed to capture the essential essence than an insider.
Finished the day off by finishing our first viewing of 'Barocco', a subtitled French hand-me-down from Bourne Hall Library for which I paid all of £1, double the asking price of 50p as I could not be bothered to wait for the attendant to finish with the customer in front of me who was into something complicated. A stylish affair, but so old that it did not resize to fill our not very large television screen. And while we got the general idea, the ins and outs of the framing political scandal more or less escaped us. I shall have to read what Wikipedia has to say about it before trying again.
# posted by Jim @ 1:23 AM 
