The Après Match

We dined last night in Sunderland with a group of my cousins who come north once a year to see the lads play at home. We were a party of ten: three brothers, two wives, three grandchildren, durham_rambler and me. We talked about plans, and absent siblings, and our various work / life balances, and at half time I changed ends and talked books, music and films.

We didn't talk much about the match. Sunderland had had a player sent off four minutes into the game, and had not distinguished themselves thereafter. "To think," said my cousin R., "that I got up at five o' clock and drove 300 miles for that!"

"I," said the lady at the next table, "flew in from Switzerland for that!"

Five things: desk-clearing and tab-closing

1. The mornings are getting lighter, at last. We notice it most the days we go out early to the pool. Last Monday the sky was dappled pink; on Thursday it was veiled in grey, but cleared to sunshine while we swam. The river is high, and flowing fast, but still within its banks. What will tomorrrow bring? We shall see.


2. But there is still winter ice to be had, if you know where to look. Such as this Flickr set of the Ice Caves of Apostle Islands.


3. This weekend's Saturday poem in the Guardian is And by Alison Brackenbury:

   Sex is like Criccieth. You thought it would be
   a tumble of houses into a pure sea
   and so it must have been, in eighteen-ten.



4. Clearing my desk, and indeed my entire study, is a long-term project: sorting, shelving, filing and occasionally discarding. Occasionally I discern progress. This week, I have closed the top drawer (the one that was pulled out so that things could be stacked on it as if it were an extension of the desktop); admittedly, the stack of paper on the desktop is higher and more precarious than it was, but still, I have closed the drawer. And found the 2013 puffin calendar that I bought in Anstruther - I wondered where that had gone...


5. In the process, Gregor Lamb's Orkney Wordbook came to the top of a pile. Opening it at random I found:

   skrivver a skrivver and klanker a pancake coated with rhubarb jam (Sanday) [ON skrifli, fragment; see KLANKER]...
   klanker, klankertony, klunkertony, a big jellyfish (medusa), a scone and rhubarb jam (the jelly fish looks like rhubarb jam!), [Eng sea nettle; ON klungr bramble, ON þrn a prickle; the jelly fish, nettle and bramble sting or prick]

   
   On the same page, there's a rhyme to recite if you meet a long-legged hill spider or kirsty-kringlick.