a cup of tea

you know it's that time...!

gabriela mistral

Night

Sleep, my child; because of you
The western skies their light efface;
There is no glitter save the dew,
Nor any whiteness, save my face.

My little son, because you dream,
The road lies hushed, in peace unfurled,
Nothing murmurs save the stream;
I am alone in a sleeping world.

A slow mist drowns the silent land,
A blue sigh fades in darkening skies;
Like a gentle, soothing hand
Upon the earth a quiet lies.

Not my child alone I’ve sung,
Cradling him, to easy sleep;
The earth too, as my cradle swung,
Drifted into slumber deep.


trans Alice Jane McVan

georg trakl

Wayfaring

At nightfall they carried the stranger
Into the room of the dead;
An odour of tar; the red plane tree’s soft rustling;
Dark flight of jackdaws, the guard marched
on the square.
The sun has sunk in black linen; forever
this bygone evening returns.
In the next room the sister is playing a Schubert sonata.
So softly sinks her smile into the ruined fountain,
Which rustles bluish in the twilight. Oh, how ancient
our lineage.
Someone whispers below in the garden; someone has
left this black heaven.
Aroma of apples on top of the cupboard. Grandmother
is lighting the golden candles.

Oh, how mild is autumn. Softly our footsteps ring out
in the old park
Beneath tall trees. Oh, how sober is the hyancinthine
face of twilight.
The blue spring at your feet, mysterious your mouth’s
red stillness
Made sombre by the leaves slumber, the dark gold
of decayed sunflowers.
Your lids are heavy with poppy and dream siftly
against my brow.
Gentle bells quiver in the breast. A blue cloud
Your face sunk over me in the twilight.
A song for guitar rings out from an unknown tavern,
The wild elder bushes there, a long bygone
November day,
Familiar steps on the dusking stairway, the sight of beams
turned brown,
An open window, at which a sweet hope lingered –
Unspeakable it all is, Oh God one falls to one’s knees
overwhelmed.

Oh how dark is this night. A crimson flame
Died at my mouth. In the stillness
The anxious soul’s lonely music fades to perish.
Enough, when drunk with wine the head sinks down
into the gutter.

trans Will Stone

yosano akiko

From The Channel Boat

What shall I wear to sleep alone?
An under-kimono of silk crepe
dyed the hushed red of dawn.
It touches the skin
like the heavy mist falls on flowers.
Every time I wear it I’m glad
I was born a woman.

In the candle’s glowing flame
its smallest motion
has a beauty hat makes me catch my breath
even in this bedroom without you.
It’s strange but
as I slip under the quilts
in the cold February bed
my heart returns to the days
when I was a girl and first loved you.

My husband traveller
are you sleeping now in France?
If a bird of paradise comes into your dreams
it is me.

trans Janine Beichman

and then the rest was done

two months! after a month it felt like a while so was most likely the best time to take another bit of time off. life has been occupied with much cycling (comedy cycling tan - oh yes!), only a bit of writing, more painting, surprising amounts of gardening and the ongoing sorting out of stuff. all very pleasant.

i've get the computer activity to a minimum and i have to say, for the summer at least and outside of maintaining contacts, i'd highly recommend it. i did discover, courtesy of t, that i can schedule these posts so i've rather lazily prepared this post in advance. currently i'm somewhere down in dumfries and galloway. i may be racing, i may not. i look forward to finding out!

a bit of quietness

it's liable to be a bit quiet around here for the next wee while for reasons which are mundane and annoying. i'll keep at the poetry thing - to stop that wpould be just unhealthy! but to those whose sites i habitually frequent, i do apologise for the current period of quietness. hopefully normal service will be resumed ina couple fo months....

john haines

The Last Election

Suppose there are no returns,
and the candidates, one
by one, drop off in the polls,
as the voters turn away,
each to his inner persuasion.

The frontrunners, the dark horses,
begin to look elsewhere,
and even the President admits
he has nothing new to say;
it is best to be silent now.

No more conventions, no donors,
no more hats in the ring;
no ghost-written speeches,
no promises we always knew
were never meant to be kept.

And something like the truth,
or what we knew by that name -
that for which no corporate
sponsor was ever offered -
takes hold in the public mind.

Each subdued and thoughtful
citizen closes his door, turns
off the news. He opens a book,
speaks quietly to his children,
begins to live once more.

nazim hikmet

A Sad State of Freedom

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others-
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you're free
with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom-
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being-
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.

There's neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life; there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.

translated by taner baybars

still awake!

and jacqui smith loses her seat. hurrah!

even if it's to the tories.now to wait for hazel blears. fingers crossed!

and more election....

tories get their mp back in scotland!

tories up about eighteen on labour.

bbc analzingthe results in 'molecular detail'. no, no you're not. what they're doing is talkign about numbers and more numbers. a whole night now and in none of the coverage have i heard anything about policy or the effects on policy. it's depressingly about personality, all they're lacking is some sort of simon cowell figure, or maybe that's just paxman.

and a lovely line on the bbc about the voting irregularities and peoples' inability to vote. like the 'third world' they keep telling us which sounds just that little bit patronising coming as it does from a bunch of middle class, middle aged white men.

if i was still drinking i'd be having a drinking game. identify the person's party by appearance. the chance for drunken-ness with the labour and the tories. but ukip, the bnp and the greens must come from some sort of clone factory. except the bnp haven;t been involved in a street fight since this morning. as far as i know.

time for bed...

more election

paxman. ask the same question again and again. and again. powersharing. liam fox squirms like a weasel. david milliband, who appears to be growing a moustache with each take, manages a much better performance. everyone tells the media types to wait and see what the vote says. media cannae take it!

labour and tories still neck and neck. cameron elected, brown elected. no portillo moments. except maybe lembit opik. so who cares?

but wait who's this on bbc scotland. ian gray, actually speaking on tv? surely not!

it's an election

so again, despite promising i wouldn't i'm stuck again watching the election results coming in.

coverage so far - depressing. channel four appears to think having comedians on constitutes some sort of comment. comedians and lauren laverne, who appears to be trying to carve out a channel four presence for herself in the wake of bbcr6's demise. as interesting as watching butter melt.

sky, which i'm about as wont to watch as one of rupert murdoch's stool samples is staggeringly dull. they appear to be confused with actual news. perhaps they should set kay burley on fire. i would gladly pay mr murdoch for that.

the bbc. to be honest it's like watching an episode of loose women the comment is so inane with andrew neil being a particular lowlight. so low he could possibly get himself a job on live from studio five. jeremy vine, a man with no dignity, has a 'swingometer' getting filmed on an unsteady cam so unsteady it's giving me vertigo.

the tories remain non existent so far in scotland with the snp getting a bit of a caning leading to the inevitable whining about lack of media coverage. how is this even possible. ian gray is so unrecognisable that's like getting beat by the invisible man. or at least jim murphy, a man who i believe is in roget's as a synonym for insincere.

england's still looking difficult to tell. the lib dems are doing their usual thing, coming third, and looking burst. tories still not ahead with some 140 declared. whoever wins the greek debt crisis and that whole situation, which seemed so difficult for all the parties to actually talk about prior to the vote, will be the 'gift' the winner gets in the morning. now there's a cheery thought...

the week that was

the plan - t wants to go away with her mother for the weekend. fitting that into my complicated work schedule was getting problematic so why not, i suggested, hire a cottage for a week and do that. t's only been to the tweed valley a couple of times and her mum hadn't been at all. so i hired a place that was only five minutes away from glentress. as you would!

in fact it was even better than that. the trail literally started from our front door so i refused to take the van anywhere for the entire week. t and her mum went off to all manner of places while i lolled on the couch reading and deciding which bike i'd take that day.

i'd taken four bikes. hardtail and suspension mtb, tho sadly and a bit lazily i thought, i didn't use the hardtail at all, and i took the bmc and the trek for the road. i only used the bmc once, discovered the headset wasn't right, got further irritated by the clever but not very adjustable seat and punctured on a stone (on a stone!) with my vapourishly thin race tyres. just as it started to rain. just as i discovered my spare inner had a hole in it. just as my pump broke. ah yes, that was a moment. fortunately there was a signal and it was early morning so t could come out on a rescue mission. the trek on the other hand. the trek was all manner of road bike loveliness. more upright and less aggressive than the bmc, sportive rather than race, it was like riding a pair of slippers. i liked it so much i think i'll buy another one.

anyway, despite my proximity to glentress the road conquered the mtb with the discovery of the ettrick valley. what an amazing road! no cars, no nothing, hills that go on for miles, it was sublime. my head was all full of james hogg ( i only bored t and her mum the once with an extended monologue on the undiscovered joys of confessions of a justified sinner). given that i lived not so far up the road for years i'm astonished i've never cycled around here before. i took the time to take my time, look around, i covered a lot of miles but at a human scale, not enclosed, out on my own.

not that the mountian bike was neglected, i rediscovered the joys of the gypsy glen and was up and down that and around the surrounds as much as my legs would bear. doing gypsy glen followed by glentress after the road rides tho, that was most likely a step too far! glentress i only did the once. even since last year it seems to have been furthered sanitised and despite lack of practice i still found it difficult to push the red descent to a point where i had to engage some skills, let alone brakes. while it's a brilliant resource and just a laugh to go to once in a while, it's not for me. i described latterly as a sort of mountain bike tescos. i'm astonished that the glentress carpark is constantly full while the likes of innerleithen etc still have plenty of space. that said once you're on the hill you see very few people. i think i saw about half a dozen at gt. everywhere i saw no-one. it was wonderful

all good things come to an end tho and by the end of the week i was comprehensively broken. i knew the weeks off with my knee would have an effect but not quite so much. my legs were empty and a couple of rest days were most certainly required. and off we came back to sunny, or not so sunny, home. there were no ba strikes, no volcanic disruption. if we'd been able we'd have booked another place and gone straight back down. tweed valley wins!

bike!

finally, in a month that's seen me doing nothing much except work i get a rare couple of days off together. i leave t at the felt mine and head off to see geo, who still hadn't got it together to sort the bike out he'd bought with me the other month. this and frustration with my non-working knee which, it turns out, may have been down to badly adjusted cleats but that's a whole other saga.

as it turned out we'd be cycling about in the sunniest weekend of the year. plus the tourist season really hasn't kicked off yet so we had all the tiny back roads entirely to ourselves, aside from a few cows. even the midgies aren't out yet. i return to work recharged and relaxed (as well as i'm straight into violence/police/court action)

geo loves his new bike and plans are made for another outing. i have only a couple of days left to work before annual leave and a cunningly engineered 'family' outing that'll see me getting a weeks action on the bike. nice.

the poetry bus, this is the allocation of seats....

today we have the allocation of seats. yesterday
we had the writing. and tomorrow morning we
shall have all the departures. but today.
today we have the allocation of seats. grey clouds
glower over the neighbouring gardens.
and today we have the allocation of seats.....


i could go on but i think it would be cheeky to henry reed. anyway, time to say goodbye to that lovely flower (check out more here)

first up the short and sublime folded letters

and then it was like the summer when shaista arrived

next, the revolutionary jeanne

then, rachel who wants not one, but two seats, which is her prerogative

and peter who left his bag jacket and the shopping, just because he could!

titus arrives, flowerily (and i feel i have to coin a new adjective!)

me, i'm doing other things so i'm using the poetry diesel sparingly

dominic arrived quietly, thoughtfully, sucking on honey

tfe, not early, not late, chacking to see if i've damaged the paintwork

and emerging writer, in at the back

then, just as i'm getting awake, a swirl of arrivals

niamh, a manifesto of flowers

watercats drops out of orbit

poetikat making joy out of calculation

and making a dash at the last

it's argent in romantic mood

crazy field mouse, who i must have driven right by at some point, for which i do apologise

weaver, who likes her greys

the wordly pure fiction

and at last heather with the watch looking thing


and with that, while there's still space for any stragglers, i shall hand over the keys and alloow the bus to return to its native country where niamh will be setting the next challenge. seatbelts on!



what's that you're saying? you wanted to know what these things were? oh well.

the first one is an xray of an iris by nick veasey

the watch/shell thing is a detail of an exhibit at an exhibition i was in last year

the ecg is an ecg. those with an interest in such things should easily be able to spot what's in the process of happening in v1 and v2

lastly, but definitely not leastly, is that circular thing. i'm sorely tempted not to tell anyone what it is but i fear there would be complaining so if you don't want to know look away now.





a few weeks back we were out fiddling about with our spotting scope and i decided i'd have a go at taking an image thru it. what you can see is the water's edge, some bits of reed, and now that you've got some context you'll be able to just about spot a teal. honest.