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Five things and you know the rest
Jul. 26th, 2009 02:52 amI missed Thieving Magpie Morris is the Market Place yesterday; but Bob the Bolder posted this picture, plus a link to this video which conveys the authentic flavour of a morris side in action by fading down the music and focussing on the comments - a loud cry at one point of "He's just making it up!"
In yesterday's Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy commissions new war poems. Her own Big Ask is an explicit tribute to Adrian Mitchell, but the poem which reminds me most strongly of Mitchell's voice - think of To Whom It May Concern with its incandescent, barely restrained contempt - is Sean O'Brien's Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way.
John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash, and also of Harris Tweed, has died, at the age of 88 - I'm sorry to hear he has died, of course, but pleased to learn that he had not died long ago. Captain Pugwash was a childhood favourite, and I still think of the television series before the books - which is unusual for me (also, I realise, I think of it in colour though I must have watched it in black and white). In his memory, a rousing rendition of The Trumpet Hornpipe (which you may know as The Black Pig).
I have started posting my photos from Iceland to Flickr. There will, in time, be many, many more of them, and no doubt there will be posts here as well, where there are thoughts or stories to accompany the pictures. But I'll try to resist posts where all I have to say is "Wow! Look at that! It's a [what it says on the label]. Isn't that amazing?" (Like this picture of a boiling hot, sulphurous stream at Seltún on the Reykjanes peninsula, for example: some of the mist is soft rainy cloud descending, and some of it is steam rising from the ground. Isn't that amazing? You just walk along the boardwalk, following the stream back into the hills, accompanied by the gentle burbling sound of boiling water. Wow!)
Oops, that's only four. Very well, another one from Iceland: my copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals has as a frontispiece a drawing entitled "The Arms of Iceland" showing a split salt cod. I thought this was a piece of dubious humour, but no - between some time in the fifteenth century and 1903, the codfish really was used officially as an emblem of Iceland. You can to some extent explain this away: it was the emblem used by Denmark to represent only one part of its national territory, salt cod was for a long time Iceland's one internationally traded product (see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler on the subject of the role of coffee in the electrification of Iceland - it's all about the salt cod, really) - but the fact remains. And we saw the flag still flying outside the Icelandic Saltfish Museum in Grindavik, as far as a flag can fly in steady rain. We didn't visit the museum - that'll be for another trip - instead we went to the restaurant opposite and ate salt cod.
In yesterday's Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy commissions new war poems. Her own Big Ask is an explicit tribute to Adrian Mitchell, but the poem which reminds me most strongly of Mitchell's voice - think of To Whom It May Concern with its incandescent, barely restrained contempt - is Sean O'Brien's Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way.
John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash, and also of Harris Tweed, has died, at the age of 88 - I'm sorry to hear he has died, of course, but pleased to learn that he had not died long ago. Captain Pugwash was a childhood favourite, and I still think of the television series before the books - which is unusual for me (also, I realise, I think of it in colour though I must have watched it in black and white). In his memory, a rousing rendition of The Trumpet Hornpipe (which you may know as The Black Pig).
I have started posting my photos from Iceland to Flickr. There will, in time, be many, many more of them, and no doubt there will be posts here as well, where there are thoughts or stories to accompany the pictures. But I'll try to resist posts where all I have to say is "Wow! Look at that! It's a [what it says on the label]. Isn't that amazing?" (Like this picture of a boiling hot, sulphurous stream at Seltún on the Reykjanes peninsula, for example: some of the mist is soft rainy cloud descending, and some of it is steam rising from the ground. Isn't that amazing? You just walk along the boardwalk, following the stream back into the hills, accompanied by the gentle burbling sound of boiling water. Wow!)Oops, that's only four. Very well, another one from Iceland: my copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals has as a frontispiece a drawing entitled "The Arms of Iceland" showing a split salt cod. I thought this was a piece of dubious humour, but no - between some time in the fifteenth century and 1903, the codfish really was used officially as an emblem of Iceland. You can to some extent explain this away: it was the emblem used by Denmark to represent only one part of its national territory, salt cod was for a long time Iceland's one internationally traded product (see
durham_rambler on the subject of the role of coffee in the electrification of Iceland - it's all about the salt cod, really) - but the fact remains. And we saw the flag still flying outside the Icelandic Saltfish Museum in Grindavik, as far as a flag can fly in steady rain. We didn't visit the museum - that'll be for another trip - instead we went to the restaurant opposite and ate salt cod.
