Friday 18 April 2008

never ending

The gorse is very yellow at the mo, and lots of it. Otherwise Green-fatigue could set in as everything is burgeoning away to it's heart content.
Canadian Cousin is over on a trip, so had to take the obligatory trip thru the countryside to show him what he is missing these days living in Calgary.
He is more impressed by the number of channels we can get on Sky compared to his cable. Never thought this was an area in which to score points.
New neighbours are "working from home" so BT has to put in their Broadband etc. which so far has involved 4 vans and cherry picker all at the same time in our Lane. nothing else, as that fills it.
They tightened a low hanging wire passing thru our magnolia, apparently the pole on the other side of the Lane had fallen at some time and the lines were held up by dead elms, always knew there would be a use for them. Being deepish rural idyll no-one had noticed as the bracken or the brambles or some other green form of life is always as high as an elephant's eye.
Dead elms edge all the fields, pointing tragically at the sky, like Lady Macbeth, or grainey pictures of First World War battle debris.
Country folk who know about these things, or have a good line in leg pulling, tell me the elms can grow up to 18' but the beetles that carry the virus fly at that level, so then they land and things go from bad to worse.
I am typing this under assault myself, as The Canadian has discovered the Sky Sports Channel and is beside himself with glee soaking up the loud wrestling.
The magnolia is losing it's fat pink petals in this high wind, the cypresses are undulating in a slightly menacing manner just above my eye level, beckoning into the church yard................
One unexpectedly nice thing I did this week was go to Languard Fort at Felixstowe. Obviously it was a stitching referral that took us there, but both the fort and the exhibition were rather marvellous. I can't quite explain the fort, it was big and round and hollow, like a huge car tyre.
It was built in the nineteenth century against Napoleon, and if I understand it rightly the army made sea mines there, with which they defended Harwich harbour.
I think there was a lot of munition around - and lamps, which do not go well together, so there were long winding tunnels within the walls to carefully take many lamps and place them in niches to light the munition rooms on the other side, without a spark drifting over and blowing the whole caboodle up.Mines were then floated into the sea attached to long wires to detonate them if needed.
Must have worked as both Harwich and the fort are still there.
All round the first floor of the massive walls are now empty cold rooms, glaring out to sea, and within these Textile artist Fran Crowe is exhibiting the results of 3 years walking British beaches.
She picks and sorts the plastic litter, and each room had an installation of the results. It's sounds a bit worthy, but actually it was rather glorious and ghastly at the same time - to think so much litter is strewn blows ones mind [without wires attached].
Also pics of what it does when eaten by birds and seals - not nice.
Some rooms and there must have been 15+ had a stone on the window sill with a hole in it, tied in the hole was a label recording how long she had walked a particular beach, and the weight of plastic she had picked in that one time.
One room had a selection of brightly coloured plastic cigarette lighters ranged neatly along the bottom of the wall, another - balloons, another - bottles. All so elegant and all so deadly, plastic never bio-degrades.
One floor had a huge circular pattern of cheerily coloured nets, ropes and lines, another had polystyrene sculpturally placed in another circle, with bird marks where they had chipped bits off thinking it would feed them, not kill them.
But Harwich, the Fort and We are still here, birds still fly, we may make it right yet.
However BT has just driven up again so they are not so confident.