News from Nowhere

In April 2015, photographer Quintin Lake set off from the steps of St Paul's Cathedral to walk round the coast of the British mainland. Over the next five years, he walked for 454 days; then it took him the best part of five years to sort the photographs - and now, of course, there is a book.

I have spent far too long exploring the many the photographs on Quintin Lake's website, and look forward to spending more.

There's a taster in a BBC 'Set Out' feature. What moment from the wlk did the BBC choose to spotlight, leading off the article with it? ( Guess! )

There's nothing like the Council withdrawing support for an event to tempt me to attend: but we didn't go to Pride last Sunday, instead we went to Amble for the Puffin Festival.



A sunny (if blowy) day at the seaside, with a small, puffin-themed fetival, what could be nicer? There may have been fewer stalls in the square than in previous years, but on the other hand we made better use of our time, catching both a poetry reading and an art exhibition. I also enjoyed chatting to the landscape photographer who has one of the little tourist shops (about light, and graduated lenses, and suchlike).

The poetry came from Katrina Porteous, reading in the micro-pub on the square: I liked Coastal erosion, which begins:

First to go is the footpath, smoking fireweed, the hawthorn
Reddening along the Grassy Banks, then the railway line
The end terraces, blackened memorials -

but moves on to consider erosion in a less literal sense. The art exhibition, a single room in the local art centre at the far end of Queen Street, was 36 Views of Coquet Island, which began as a lockdown collaboration - in fact, here it is! - allowing the widest ranging interpretation of its theme: music, photography, embroidery, a recollection of 36 Years of Roseate Tern Management...

Walking the length of Queen Street twice (there and back) also gave us a chance to admire the colourful puffins in the shop windows, contributed by the local primary schools. This, though commendable, is usually a bit repetitive, each child in the entire class producing, to the best of their ability, a copy of the same model. This year, though, each window had a selection of variations on the theme, and some of them were very creatively coloured:



The message was bad news, though. We had achieved our wider exploration of the festival by skipping lunch, and now we were ready for a sandwich and a sit-down. But, festival or no festival, it was Sunday afternoon and the shops were closed. Eventually we found ourselves back at the harbour, where Lilly's Landing provided us with perfectly good coffee and a total absence of any food that wasn't cake. Which was diappointing, but I was still well pleased with my day out.

Our clients, the crime-writers' collective Murder Squad, have just celebrated their 25th anniversary - and they celebrated by holding a short story competition.

Th winner, The Octopus's Dilemma by Karen Lynn Haberman, is set in Monterey Aquarium. Part of the prize is publication on the Murder Squad website, so if you are intrigued, you can read it there.

I have good memories of our visit to the Monterey Aquarium: but I did not think I had any photographs of octopus. This is almost the case -

( - almost... )

What can I say? It's vacuous, it's overblown, it is absolutely not my kind of music, but once a year I enjoy it. In moderation: no doubt I'm missing out on stuff I would enjoy, but I don't watch the semi-finals; I don't stay up for the interval performances and the voting; and I'm ambivalent about the way this year's contest even managed to take over Doctor Who. But then, I'm ambivalent about so much in Doctor Who these days, and this isn't a post about that.

Eurovision,then. It's a mark of how (not) seriously I take it, that when the show started I was a bit surprised to find we were in Switzerland - didn't Sweden win? That must have been the year before, but then came the performance of last year's winning song, and I was certain I'd never heard it before in my life. Had we missed last year, for some reason? How fortunate that I keep a diary in hich I wrote that "The favourite won, which I always find disappointing." Sufficiently so to have blanked it completely, apparently.

No promises that I'll still remember this year's winner in a year's time, but it was at least a surprise. Austria was represented by an operatic counter tenor, wearing what looked like his dressing gown as he sailed a paper boat through a monochrome storm, before finally reaching a lighthouse. "Well, that was brave!" I thought. I didn't particularly like it, but I applauded.

Sweden was represented by three Finns singing about the joys of sauna - in Swedish, which is - it says here - the first Swedish-language entry since 1998. The stage set didn't completely do without flashing lights, but its centrepiece was the construction of a wooden sauna. Top marks, too, for the reference to tango with Arja Saijonmaa (which I only picked up from reading the lyrics, and am so glad I did).

I also the UK's hymn to the morning after more than I expected to: the big choral "What the hell just happened?" seemed to be on a different scale to the jaunty "Someone lost a shoe, / I'm still in last night's makeup,/ I'm waking up like, what's this new tattoo?" Overall, though, it wasn't embarrassing and it made me smile. If I am reading the results correctly, it did respectably with the professional juries, but the televoters do not love us. I wonder why?

By the time we reached Albania, who were on last, I was pretty much exhausted: but the costumes and set were so very red they were unmissable. Once I noticed that, and that they seemed to be combining traditional song (in Albanian, I think) and electronica, I ended the evening thinking kindly of them. Honourable mention.

One more thing. Luxembourg's La Poupée Monte Le Son echoes Poupée de cire, poupée de son, with which France Gall won Eurovision for them in 1965. I could go down a rabbit hole comparing the two songs, just how tongue in cheek are Gainsbourg's lyrics (and Gall's delivery), how plausible is Laura Thorn's rejection of doll-like passivity while dressed in an explosion of candy-pink corsetry (I wondered why her tinfoil seemed to belong to a different outfit, but of course all was revealed when she emerged from her corsets to display a tinfoil swimming costume). But let's not. Even the joy of a shout-out to 1965 was slightly upstaged by, of all things, Doctor Who, which managed a shout-out to 1963 - but as I said, this isn't a post about that.

( Context )

Book-lovers could have quite a competition, collecting and identifying colophons, and asking each other what publishers were represented by an Antarctic bird, a windmill, an urn of flowers, a fountain, a sea-bird and an open book bearing a Latin phrase.

The Atlantic bird is the easy one: there's only one publisher it can be. I recognised the windmill as Heinemann, too. I could picture, but not place, both the urn of flowers and the fountain, but I had to leaf through a number of books before I tracked them down to Jonathan Cape and Collins. Who, though, is represented by the sea-bird? It could, of course, be any one of the Penguin / Allen Lane imprints, and the more I think of it, the more I incline to this conclusion, because surely even by 1950, Puffin books were, as Francis Spufford puts it " the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative". That just leaves the open book. Again, I can picture it, but not place it, and I'll need to use the steps to reach my copies. But this history mentions nothing of the kind, and without using the word 'colophon' describes the adoption of the dolphin and anchor -

- which brings me back to Geoffrey Trease, whose challenge continues:

This kind of trade-mark is almost as old as printing itself. Aldus Manutius of Venice used a dolphin entwined with an anchor. It was he...

but modestly does not say that he had recently published a novel in which two intrepid young people seek out a lost manuscript for Aldus to publish.

After the count on Friday, since we were halfway to J's house, we took the roundabout route home, and called in for a cup of tea. And I'm glad we did, even though we then had a bit of a rush to make the Live to Your Living Room gig we had booked: luckily the start time was not the advertised 7.30 but 8 o' clock, and we used the extra half hour to inveigle our too-smart-by-half tv into showing us the live YuoTube stream.

Breathless, but worth it: a hybrid concert, with Nancy Kerr, James Fagan and Tim van Eyken, not a line-up I'd met before. It seems they used to play together twenty or so years ago, when they all lived on narrowboats, then other things happened - but now Tim van Eyken has moved to Sheffield, and they have relaunched the trio. This had a feeling of celebration about it, and I think was also an anniversary concert for the organiser (Live at Sam's), so it chimed well with our own celebratory mood: and lots of tunes, lots of songs, some old friends (Spirit of Free Enterprise is absolutely not celebratory, but always welcome!), some new to me - a setting of Locks and Bolts to the tune of Lads of Alnwick, dissolving into the familiar tune...

Nonetheless, durham_rambler wanted a small celebration to thank his team of supporters (leaflet distibutors and one brave canvasser). This was of necessity held at short notice (wait for the election result, but as soon as possible thereafter) and this is a Bnk Holiday weekend: so the party ended up being a very small one indeed. I don't know what it says about this household that we had enough fizzy wine already in the cellar even before one of those well-wishers turned up with a bottle before going away for the weekend; but we had to go shopping to top up the supply of wine glasses! We also did some intensive dusting and vacuuming and moving of boxes in the sitting room, which is now looking almost presentable. We had a grand total of two guests, which is in my opinion an excellent number for a party, because you get to talk to everyone in some depth. Conversation was, quite properly, about the election, and what it will mean for Durham, and techniques for pushing leaflet through letterboxes, and gossip about local figures - and then veered off in an unexpected direction when the guest I knew less well removed her jacket and revealed a Sandman t-shirt...

Today we went to the VE Day anniversary celebrations in the Market Place: regard this as durham_rambler resuming his civic duties rather than any desire to commemmorate VE Day. Actually, I'd be happy to celebrate VE Day, and suggested that we should make a 'War is Over' placard to do just that: but as I had feared, the historical re-enactors present did not seem to have heard that news; and the band - well, it was too loud for me to listen in comfort. There were fewer stalls than I had expected, too, but we went round the market, and chatted to people (including the Parish Clerk, so durham_rambler gets his brownie point for showing up) and I bought a book from the bookstall.

On our way back to the car park, we called in at the People's Bookshop, where there was a small selection of hardbacks by Neil Gaiman, and a note saying 'if you want to read Gaiman without him profiting from it, buy secondhand' - I wasn't sure how to take this, but I selected a collection that I don't already have. So I discovered that the assistant who had written that note was a big fan...

Three celebrations and two conversations about Neil Gaiman: how's that for a themed post?

Today is May Day, but somehow not a holiday.

It is also polling day for the local elections. Too late for canvassing, says durham_rambler, so now we just wait and see what happens. Which is to say, tonight we go to the residents' association meeting, whose scheduled dates are not changed by details like elections; and tomorrow we go to the count.

Meanwhile, the flush of the toilet in the upstairs bathroom is playing up. durham_rambler has contacted the plumber who spoke to it severely in January, and we are hoping he will repeat the trick. Admiring our shiny new windows, we are both reminded that we would like a shiny new bathroom: this might be a good time to work on that, but it isn't absolutely straightforward (because of the shape of the bathroom, not to mention the shape of our requirements) so let's get the flush fixed for the time being.

I'm hoping that once the election is behind us, win or lose, we might take a little time off to enjoy the spring. I have asparagus, and there will be risotto for dinner, that's a start.

... send me birthday cards with puffins on them. The only one that arrived on the day itseld came from durham_rambler, who printed off one of his own photos of puffins on Inner Farne: this may be cheating, but I'll take it.

Other puffins have continued to arrive through the week since then The senders are very apologetic about this, but I'm enjoying my extended birthday, with its puffin-a-day service. The most recent arrival is this cartoon from weegoddess, a particularly neat sysnthesis of how we anthropomorphise puffins with their actual observable traits.

Best of all, though, K. sent me Angela Harding's print of puffins at Fair Isle North Lighthouse. I subscribe to Angela Harding's mailing list, and have been coveting this print ever since she linked to it there - now I have my own (admittedly mniature) copy, and can close the tab on my desktop!

Today we elebrate Shakespeare's birthday: last Thursday was mine. We went out to lunch, meeting our friends A. and D. at the Rose & Crown in Romaldkirk. This was a treat: a long-overdue get together with people we don't see often enough. But it didn't feel like a birthday treat, exactly: agreeing to meet on my birthday felt like getting one treat for the price of two. After I did a certain amount of grumbling about this, durham_rambler agreed to go out again the following day, to visit Ushaw: it isn't far, we have season tickets and he had already pointed out that their current exhibition sounded interesting: it is called The Discovery of Birds, and features relevant books from their library.



The welcoming display boards showed images from a nineteenth century History of British Birds: the birds were in fact identified, but in such small print that I didn't spot it until durham_rambler pointed it out, and was rather smug about identifying this very gaudy starling (it reminded me of a weaver I met once in Shetland, who took a similar inspiration from these not-obviously-colourful birds). After a short stroll in the gardens (the rhododendrons are just getting started: we should go back in a couple of weeks), we went inside.

( Inside... )

We called in at the second-hand bookshop, but didn't buy anything; we lunched on soup and sandwiches at the café; and I went home well-satisfied with my day out. I'm not hard to please.

The scaffolders arrived yesterday, and removed the scaffolding from the front of the house.

This was the second attempt. They came on Tuesday, but when they took up the planks of the top level walkway, they found that some of the roofing slates underneath had been broken during the building work. So the builders came back and replaced the slates, and then the scaffolders came back again and - finally! - removed the scaffolding.

I'm really quite surprised how smart the house looks, with its new windows and panelling.