Pleased to meat you.................

A gratuitous nod to the Rolling Stones ahead of their Glastonbury concert tonight but that's not what I'm writing about. Part of this morning was taken up with a trip to our butcher's. Not any old butcher but Chris Rounsevell at Caradon Town on the edge of Bodmin Moor.

I enjoy going to Chris's for our meat. Why? Because:
*  His meat is all locally produced and slaughtered and prepared at the back of his shop. I have asked Chris where he gets his meat from and he's just pointed at a field across the way or a farm up the lane. We've never had a duff lot since we've been going to him.
*  He, and his staff, are very friendly and always have time for a chat about whatever seems right to chat about on the day. Today it was clay pigeon shooting and growing potatoes.
*  The journey there (it's about 5 miles from us) is through some beautiful countryside and there's always something to see as the seasons change.
 At the moment the hedgerows are stunning with a spectacular display of foxgloves and cow parsley. And it's all so green, green, green.
*  Caradon Town, itself, is an interesting place if you know its history: in the middle of nowhere if you don't. Nowadays it's no more than a few houses, a farm and the butcher's shop.  It's hard to believe that, in the mid-1800s, it was at the centre of the mineral boom on Caradon Hill and the neighbourhood had a population of several thousand.  Nowdays, there can't be many more than 50 or thereabouts people there.
*  It's the only butcher's shop I know that comes with an associated mausoleum. Chris's father has been building a family mausoleum ever since we've been down here and it's finally finished. Four of its occupants, or rather their ashes, have already been installed inside. Given the robust health of Chris's dad, I think it's going to be a while before he joins them. It has to be said that Chris is not as keen on the mausoleum as his dad! He thinks his dad wants to keep on eye on him from beyond the grave.
*  It's shopping with an old fashioned spin - going to an expert supplier and getting an expert service. With the added bonus of some very keen prices. Why do it any other way?

Compare and contrast with what would happen if we bought our meat at a supermarket. Walk up a sterile aisle, pick up a pre-pack, stick it in a trolley and wander off to the check-out. Boring! Boring!

The lanes and hedgerows are magnificent at this time of year. I opted for a lesser frequented lane today and travelled under this sort of canopy for quite a while. The sides, being of Cornish granite, are unforgiving!

The Rounsevell family mausoleum across the road from the butcher's at Caradon Town.

The memorial on the outside wall of the mausoleum. Note that there is plenty of room for the names of those who are to follow.

It's a good year for foxgloves in the hedgerows. We've got quite a selection down the sides of our own lane but no sign of the white ones I planted a couple of years ago.

Service with a smile - continued....

A trip to a local supermarket today (which shall remain anonymous as I am so ashamed that I crossed its portal. I know I shouldn't support them but it was the only place convenient for what I wanted today - honest.) and, after checking-out my necessary but treacherous items, I saw that there was an in-store Costa franchise (Another one! They are popping up like an infection all over the place). I couldn't help but notice that the 'proud to serve Costa' proclamation was not on display. Why, thought I? I just had to find out.

Of a young lad in a uniform I enquired: "good morrow, bright-eyed barista chappie, pray tell me why you do not tell the world that you are proud to serve Costa". Inwardly I was hoping his response would be along the lines of "coz we ain't, mate. Why don't you get orff outta yer". His reply, after he'd had time to consider my question, was more civil than I probably deserved: "I dunno. I'll arsk me boss" and off he went to arsk his boss. And arsk his boss he did. I saw him do it and I saw the strange looks they cast in my direction. After arsking his boss, he came back and told me: "she dunno either. Best get on our website and arsk Head Orffice". Well, as I can't be arsed to arsk Head Office, I'll never know why the Groves Green branch of Tesco's (doh!) appears not to be 'proud to serve Costa'. And I'm probably the only person in the world who cared.  

Service with a smile?

A Sunday afternoon trip to Leeds Castle followed by a visit to their Costa-franchised coffee shop. "Proud to serve Costa" was their claim. To be accurate, the signs should have read "supremely indifferent to serve Costa" or "can't be arsed to be civil serving Costa". Rather perversely, I quite enjoy seeing people not buying into corporate hogwash. Long may they retain their distain for empty slogans.

Whilst on the subject of coffee chains, is it just me who is irritated by the Starbucks slogan “We proudly serve Starbucks coffee”? The use of that adverb annoys me. Not just because it’s grammatically rather clumsy, but because it also attaches the pride to the service and not the Starbucks coffee – which I don’t think is the intention. Why can't they employ literate copywriters? You know what? I think I'll boycott their coffee shops in protest. Ooops, as a non-coffee drinker, I do that already.

Welcome to Molly

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Not a deliberate juxtaposition of the subjects of two posts but we've gone from the grave to the cradle in less than 24 hours. Today we saw the arrival of the latest addition to the family: Molly May Palmer. Grandchild #6; grand-daughter #3. All is well with the world.

Requiescat in pace

Not all writing is on paper and not all written documents are found in libraries. History is alive in graveyards and that's why I've always loved wandering around them. Give me a pile of crumbling tombstones and I'm a happy bunny! The way people bury their dead says almost as much about themselves as it does about those who have died. Going around a 'good' graveyard will give you insights into not just the names of people buried there but also, if you are lucky, one or more of the following: their familial relationships, their religious beliefs, their social standings, their technological knowledge, their cultural symbols and their artistic ideals.

It may seem rather morbid to enjoy a book about graveyards but that’s what I've just done with Peter Stanford's 'How to read a graveyard'. Not a heavy read by any means but more of a meditative travelogue as his sort-of-pilgrimage takes him to ten sites: the Scavi in the Vatican, purportedly the grave of St Peter; the catacombs of St Callixtus in Rome; St Margaret’s, Burnham Norton, where he hopes to be buried himself; Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh; Père-Lachaise in Paris (where Oscar Wilde’s and Jim Morrison’s celebrity tombs attract devotees); the misnamed “English” or “Protestant” cemetery in Rome (for Shelley, Keats and the pyramid of Gaius Cestius); Paddington Old Cemetery; the Deane Road Jewish Cemetery in Liverpool; the Commonwealth war graves at Etaples; Notre Dame de Lorette; Ayette and Thiepval; and finally the Chiltern Woodland Burial Park, a modern eco-friendly “forest of remembrance”. He makes no claim to it being a comprehensive survey but it did strike me as rather perverse not to visit Highgate cemetery, yet succumb to the tourist trap that is Père-Lachaise.

His central premise is that our contemporary rituals tend to sanitise death and distance us from our own inevitable fate. Reading graveyards helps us to find out how previous generations dealt with the Grim Reaper and, in some way, help us to face up to him/her ourselves. I'm not too sure about that last bit but there are pleasing nuggets on nearly every page. We learn that Dr Spock’s greeting on Star Trek derives from Jewish blessing; that British wolves died out after graveyards became walled, presumably because they were thus deprived of food; that Woking cemetery once boasted its own branch line, the London Necropolis Railway. A book worth reading for the funereal trivia alone.

Musical sirs

Leonard Cohen, Joe Bonamassa - all this thinking of pop stars reminded me of a niggle, albeit a very small one, I've had for a while. What in the world possessed those who decide these things to start knighting pop stars? Who is responsible for this nonsense? Admittedly, I used to think that the Beatles were incredibly cool, but, really... Sir Paul? And... Sir Mick Jagger?  And ....Sir Cliff Richard? And....... Sir Tom Jones?

Can you see King Arthur trying to defend Merrie Olde England with a Round Table comprised of Sir Paul, Sir Mick, Sir Cliff, Sir Tom and..... Sir Elton?

And they still haven't ennobled those true aristocrats of the pop world - the Barron Knights. Instead we get some barren knights.....

(PS: the above was written in ignorance that more honours were going to be announced today. Tony Robinson has been knighted: at least Sir Baldrick sounds authentically Arthurian).

For musciologists everywhere..................

I think I have made an important discovery. For some time now I have been fascinated by a particular variant of spam messages (Yes, I know, what I want is a nice hobby and to get out more). You know the ones? They contain what appears to be a random collection of words and phrases as the wrapping paper around an advert for Viagra or some other universal panacea. The advert is in the form of an image and, as such, doesn't seem to be detected by my spam filters.

 But what of the random words? Who creates these? From whence do they originate? Here is a sample from a message which landed in my in-box this morning.

Ideas percolate Bedouins/Again we switch parts/Thrill gone, seeing my bedroom tricks mysterious/Wins prejudice, naivety and witty innuendo.

 

The answer to the questions raised came as I wandered (lonely as a cloud) around my veg plot just now. They are all lyrics from Leonard Cohen songs. Granted, in some cases they are lyrics from songs the sainted Leonard hasn't written yet, but the phrases are surely destined for "Ten Sad Songs" or whatever his next CD might be called. Then a second thought struck me. Maybe, just maybe, Sunny Len got his lyrics from a close reading of spam messages rather than the other way around. Could this create an opening for me. I have the lyrics - all I need now is a tune. Where did I put my old mouth organ?

There's a slow train coming...............

I am in the process of (slowly, oh, how slowly) writing a book about the servicemen who died in WW1 and who are listed on our local War Memorial. Attempting to track down a relative of one who had worked on our nearest railway line in the early 1900s, I did the obvious and Googled under a number of railway relevant terms. Hooray! I found what I was looking for - eventually and after some smugly satisfying lateral thinking. Having been successful, I rewarded myself with a rummage in the 'Related Items' collection and came upon an excellent interpretation of a Flanders and Swann song I'd long forgotten, "Slow Train". Michael Flanders and Donald Swann wrote and performed the song back in the 1960s and although the events it records (the closure of almost 50% of the small railway stations in Britain following the Beeching Report on the future of the railway network) are now long gone, the song remains as a triumphal celebration of nostalgia. To illustrate the cultural loss resulting from the Beeching Axe, they simply strung together a list of the names of just a few of the 3,000 small stations and halts that were closed during this period. The result is, I think, musical poetry at its best. And it's accompanied by some lovely old photographs of steam trains and sooty platforms.

The Beeching cuts hit all parts of the country. Both rural and urban lines were decimated and by the end of the decade a quarter of the original trackway mileage and a half of all stations had been cleaved from the system. Here in the West Country, as in the rest of the UK, many of the most romantic small stations and desultory branch lines vanished almost overnight. They remain only as ghostly markings on OS maps: look for faint dotted lines annotated with 'track of old railway'.
 

One of the more weird things I came across in my searches was the post-Beeching fate of the station at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire. It was stolen! Following the closures, British Rail issued contracts for the demolition of the buildings, the clearance of the sites, and the sale of the recovered material. When the appointed contractor turned up at Cleckheaton Station he found the entire station - every stone, wooden fence, metal frame, and tin signpost - had already been dismantled and removed. Eventually the person who had dismantled the station was arrested and taken to trial (the only case in British legal history concerning the theft of a railway station). He was eventually acquitted as the court accepted his defence that he had been following the orders of what he thought was the legally appointed contractor. The company that masterminded the plan was never identified, and the station was never recovered.

And finally: whilst we are talking about slow trains, how about this live version of 'Slow Train' by Joe Bonamassa? Listen and compare and contrast with the more sedate music of Flanders and Swann. I enjoy them both, but they are very, very different.

 

In praise of Corky Siegel

I'll admit that I'd never heard of Corky Siegel until this track came up in a recent Best Radio Show You've Ever Heard compilation (Volume 208). It's called 'Half Asleep at the Wheel' and features some of the best rock blues piano playing I've ever heard. I located two clips on YouTube. The first, with the best sound, comes from a live concert in Minneapolis in February 1977.

And the second is of the man himself playing at a show he did in Montreal in 1999. Both are worth listening to. All those notes without looking at the music! Enjoy!



Hooray for the 10 hour day

 As I write this it is 9.0785 according to the decimal clock I have just installed on my computer. I have always been fond of decimal time (perhaps it explains my rather idiosyncratic timekeeping and the fact that I always seem to be operating in a different dimension to most people?) and I have never understood why there has never been a more active campaign to get it adopted. The idea of dividing each day up into ten decimal hours each of which is made up of 100 decimal minutes subdivided into 100 decimal seconds is one of the finest ideas to come out of the French Revolution. Why we were so keen to adopt - long after the revolutionary ardour had faded - the ideas for decimal measurements, paper banknotes and all the rest, but leave the idea of decimal time in the dustbin of history is beyond me. Decimal time is easier to understand, much simpler to calculate and much less confusing (there are no silly AM's and PM's on the decimal clock). It has the advantage that time seems to go at a more leisurely rate and its adoption would almost immediately lead to a slowing in the frenetic pace of modern life. As each decimal minute equates to about 1.5 old style minutes, tea breaks become longer, as does Chopin's Minute Waltz. Back in the far distant days of licensing hours, I always used to say that the biggest advantage of decimal time was that it never got passed 10 o'clock and therefore it was never closing time. I must add that this logic was never accepted by any publican I mentioned it to - usually over my shoulder as I was being ejected.

As a service to my readers, I must let you know that you can download a decimal clock onto your computer display and share the beauties of this most logical system of timekeeping. Visit http://minkukel.com/software/sillyclocks/
for a free download. And that's not all! The software (SillyClocks 2.2) displays eleven different clocks which, as they rightly claim, 'will help you losing some time while trying to figure out what time it is'. The clocks are:

• Normal Clock
• Binary Clock
• Decimal Clock
• Roman Clock
• Degrees Clock
• DMS (Degrees, minutes, seconds) Clock
• Sine Clock
• Percentage Clock
• Swatch Internet Clock
• Hexadecimal Clock
• Morse Clock

Apart from the Decimal version, I find the Roman Clock strangely addictive and the Morse Clock is fun. I really must get out more!

Baroness Knight and her gay friends

 

Who says the members of the House of Lords are not in touch?  Let's go to one of them for my 'quote of the week'. Speaking to Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday, Conservative peer Baroness Knight said that despite her opposition to gay marriage, she recognised that homosexuals had many good qualities. “We’ve all got friends who are homosexuals. They’re often extremely clever; very, very good at artistic things; very good at things like antiques…”

I rest my case for the abolition of the House of Lords.

Upon receiving a spooky e-mail

I received a rather unusual e-mail today. It appeared to come from a friend who had died about six months ago (RIP: Brian). When the surprise subsided, and after I'd reflected a little, it struck me that the e-mail had come as a result of someone replying to a comment I'd made to him about one of the posts on his blog. The blog in question is still accessible on Wordpress and I presume that no-one in my friend's family knows how to close the account. Or, perhaps, they want it to remain as a virtual memorial to him. This got me thinking............about immortality. Internet immortality.

We’ve had the concept of space junk with us for just over half a century now… with items floating about in space that have served their purpose long ago, or like the Voyager Spacecraft, have gone beyond their original design parameters. The internet has many sites like Brian's where their owners have passed away, yet the site goes on, like Voyager, into the inky future. Internet detritus can only increase dramatically in the years to come and it is inspiring in one sense; that your work will still have an existence, long after you’ve stopped writing..… or existing. Is this our 21st Century version of immortality, where our virtual presence could go on into infinity, or as long as the server and hosts continue to function? I am reminded of one of my favourite writers from my teenage years, Ray Bradbury, and his story from the Martian Chronicles, There Will Come Soft Rains. Its central character is a futuristic house that continues to function long after its occupants have gone. Bereft of its raison d'etre, I find that immortality rather sad.

(Note to self: leave farewell post on file and instruct executors of will to upload it and leave blog live. I want to boldly go.........)

In praise of Thomas Hardy's poetry

Since I first dipped into The Mayor of Casterbridge in my entry year in grammar school, I've always enjoyed the novels of Thomas Hardy, though they are sadly out of fashion now. I read his entire canon and then graduated to his poetry. I'll admit that I don't like them all and, in my opinion, Hardy was a much better novelist than he was a poet. Ironically, he abandoned fiction after receiving an increasingly negative reception from the critics of the time  and turned entirely to writing verse. 

I like his shorter works and here's one that dropped into my inbox today. It seems to resonate with the sunny weather we are having at the moment. It's called 'The High School Lawn'.

Gray prinked with rose,
White tipped with blue,
Shoes with gay hose,
Sleeves of chrome hue;
Fluffed frills of white,
Dark bordered light;
Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.

They whirl around:
Many laughters run
With a cascade's sound;
Then a mere one.

A bell: they flee:
Silence then:
So it will be
Some day again
With them, ...with me.