machineries of joy

no school like the old school. and for once someone who can actually cycle...

notebooks

it shouldn't need to be said that i'm particular when it comes to my writing materials. these days i use an ink pen I got from tesco's about five years ago. they don't make them anymore and i'm down to my last four or five with nothing to replace them. they're liquid ink - before that I had a box of ballpoints i got back in new York that lasted the best part of fifteen years. i'd hoped that my recent batch of muji 0.38's might have been the new pen but they have a scratchiness that just doesn't work for me.

and then there's the notebooks. for home use i've got a stash of a5 books i got in menzies - should've got more as they no longer do them. sturdy, leather bound, they're great. i do have a moleskin but I've never got on with them - the moleskin only serves as a training record. of late i've been using a very nice wee ordning and reda number. flexible, pocket sized with a horizontal band to keep everything in place. but, as with many things Swedish, there are times when I just don't want to be paying out that much money.

casting about i happened upon the leuchtturm1917. all the signs so far are good. beautifully featured with page numbers, stickers, index pages and tear outs and while it lacks the leather cover of the ordning it has a nice heft in the hand. I doubt it'll hold a pen as well as the ordning but that's the only quibble. certainly much better than an equivalent moleskin for me.

fixes vos pensees
aussitot qu'elles vous viennent a l'esprit
ou que ce soit

indeed.

now I just have to get a decent pen....

memory lane

so i'm in the loft having a tidy (and discovering things are missing that really shouldn't be) when i come across a stack of 'old' tapes (remember them?) one of which included the above. from the days when all music in the future will be made by machines!

which lead me to reposting this

ah, the old days.....

greg dunn

thanks to roxana for making me aware re greg dunn. these images are crazy lovely and well worth a browse.plus, seeing as i'm no stranger to using slides as source material it's great to see how someone else does does it. and he dresses like a captain. greg dunn. good guy.

back to training

there are ways to train and there are ways not to train. mostly you know what these are but sometimes you need to challenge them just to see what happens. so it was back in december, what with all the miserable weather and whatnot, that i decided i'd put off starting on the turbo trainer. and put it off and put it off some more. until, barring a couple of short mtb rides, it was february and at last a decent spell of dry weather.

looking every bit the part of fat santa my head was in just the right space to do a few hundred miles of cruising before back to some hefty intervals. except on only my second time out, at that unaccustomed time for me - the weekend - i get hooked up with some guy who, it seems, wants to do a few hills. i should've continued on my training route. i should've listened to my niggley inner feeling that this guy's form maybe wasn't what he was saying as he didn't seem to know the set of hills i was proposing we go up. don't get me wrong, it was a grand day, but more of a strain than i'd planned. following day a quick wee thirty and i got back feeling a bit weaker than i thought. then the pain arrived.

when i told t i'd made a physio appointment she said later she knew it must be bad if i'd made up my mind on my own. and it was. like getting kicked up the backside coupled with having a really bad bum focused toothache. oh aye, and my leg giving way. on a scale of one to ten. said the physio. i shrugged. i don't know. i'm a cyclist. i can take sore. bursitis of my hip joint she said. chronic weakness she said. ultrasound and manipulation follow. much stretching. and then some stomach aching core stability exercises.

all of which are seeming to work and none of which disguises the blunt truth that sees the scales telling me that my winter training 'regime'. you have put on ten lbs the scales blink at me. you are a fat bastard. so, seeing as it was blowing a hoolie and generally pishing down with rain today i finally got back on the trainer. true i've managed some miles on the flat during all of this and my times aren't so bad but nothing quite as isolating as a good aerobic trainer session. i appear in the living room coated in sweat. how was it says trace. that was brilliant, i say, i can't believe i left it alone so long.

sometimes you need to do the stupid thing in order to prove the stupid thing. the thing about the bike is you need to use the bike in order to really use the bike. next year? next year there will be no repeat....

finally

spring seems finally to have sprung. me and t go for a bit of a wander (t out on bike shock!). among other things we find an abandoned church we didn't know was there, go to a pond no-one visits, have a wander down the river (t, in tracking mode, takes lots of pictures of foot/pawprints). it being that arest fo things these days, actual days off, we don't have time for much in the way of photography but in keeping with our approach this year of looking at stuff on our doorstep we do come across the above churchyard. apparently it has some distinctive stonework but either we couldn't see it or it wasn't that distintive but what we did find was a vast carpet of snowdrops, a bit of river i hadn't seen, old trees and 17th century gravestones no-one seems to have touched in some time.

it was one of those wee places, along with others we saw this weekend, that are rather common in scotland but, because they're not historic scotland/natural trust, they don't have a path up to them or an interpretation board people tend to pass by. which is a good thing as it leaves them just as they are. foolishly i didn't have the recorder for a sound file or i;d have stuck it up there also. another time...

progressive insanities

okay then, what do i think

all poetry should be read. even once you get the knack of reading poetry, like looking at a picture, it may be that, yes, you can do all these things they ask you in a classroom but it's not the same as taking your book (i being old, still believe in these things), opening the pages and speaking it out loud, preferably to someone else. for one thing, it may be that you discover that the poem, esp if it's not one of those rhyming ones, is actually full of rhythm and cadences that you never noticed when you were skimming it in your head. it may also be that the other person hearing it will make another set of connections you never even thought about ( there's more of this with atwood elsewhere here - drink was involved. i don;t recommend it as a study aid!). plus, these are words, they're there to be spoken. that's what we are as creatures. speaking out someone's words starts making you feel something, speaking them to someone else, getting them spoken back at you even moreso. when you speak out a poem it becomes something of you.

who's doing the speaking? i'm not a teacher and these next couple of points are a lot to do with why. you could say, and you wouldn't be wrong is that the speaker is some bloke, fettling about in a forest or wilderness* and not enjoying it much. you could say that in the inevitable essay you'd have to write but chances are someone's not going to like it. most likely they're not going to like it, not because you're wrong, though you will be, but because you've said something in a manner or made some conclusion that the person marking it, or, more pertinently the organisation that requires them to do so, finds at odds with their perspective. so you say, hey ho, you want me to tell you what you want to hear rather than what i actually think? is that the game we're playing here? and it pretty much is. tho, i have to say, it's a good game and, even if it doesn't seem so now, the benefits come later. if you're lucky. mostly i think of it like i was doing a science write up. science essays are super prescriptive and there's a form you have to adhere to. that said all your arguments then have to be more or less based on your evidence. humanities may claim this but there's also that element of who's reading it.

so the evidence. who's the speaker and what's he about? certainly he's a he, we know that much but who's the narrator. could be it's atwood but the notion of the 'poetic narrator' is always a wee bit more complicated than that. but it could be atwood channeling her girlish days when she was out in the backwoods with the family. but it's not a child speaking, even a precocious child from years ago, the language is too dense for that. and i don;t think she's speaking about her dad because her poems about him are just too affectionate and i'm not sensing a lot of love for this character. but then there's that other thing. when you're reading, not out loud, whose voice do you hear? me, i hear atwood, because i've met her and i know what she sounds like so i imagine the poem in her voice. in which case the question who's the speaker depends as much on the reader, who they are, where they come from, what they've done. does a poem really 'mean' the same thing for someone the day they read as forty years later. i hope not!

okay then, an omniscient narrator somewhere in a forest/wilderness not enjoying it. but why not? anyone gone out into the woods and built their own shelter for the night? here in scotland there isn't anything that will eat you but i'm guessing for this guy, away up there in canadia, that isn't the case. we're scared of the outside, we're scared of the dark which is why the ideas of animals pattering across the roof*. similarly, have you ever cleared a spot of land, it can be in your garden or where ever and tried to get something to grow in it? we had a rubbish season last year and had i tried to do so in order to eat i'd have starved to death. similarly tho, every year i'm always amazed at the ferocity and abundance of the weeds that invade the space that i've spent so long digging. everything gets in! if it was me asking someone to look at this poem i think i'd take a while and ebcourage them to maintain a garden, or not, and seeing how that garden takes shape. your man in the poem, i'm guessing he doesn't have a book on permaculture in his pocket, i'm guessing he doesn't have a big truck in order to go and order stuff from the seed bank, can't call up his mates on the internet for advice. academics, broadly, don't hump sacks of dirt. this is a shame. for what it's worth, my garden is a wild garden. i do things to it, it's true, but mainly it's an ordered absence and that absence, hopefully, is me.

so what about the topic? and again you're straight back at the reader. me, i grew up in a rural area. all the chat when we were wee (boys) was about tractors, dirt and cows. we had our own animals and we ate them. there was no tv in those days but a lot of books. no poetry. but a lot of music. not so very long ago i found myself back on the islands at lambing. i was going down this wee road and i came across this old couple who were having a bit of bother with the sheep so, being an island, i stopped. no need said the old guy but i was already at it, the instinct of decades before taking right over. lambs are fragile wee things and even more so than most sheep the thing they're best at is dying. you might have some vision of how things are but then your sheep run off a cliff, get one of their many and persistent diseases, the season changes or any one of a million things you never thought of and can only pretend you're in control of. you can proclaim yourself the centre all you like but at the end of the day you just get lucky. or not. these days we'd go out in the wilderness with all our stuff and dig it up and fertilise and pest control and all that (looked at the food on your plate lately?) but narrator boy, or at least my impression of him, is her doesn't have any of that. back in the day they most likely only had faith and last i looked the bible isn't super good as an agricultural manual*. those people are as distant to me as aliens. put me in their situation and i'd be dead in days! you need s structure before you can shout let me out, you need that same structure to be absent before you can shout exactly the same.

so ideas, then. your man's standing on a sheet of green paper. for who? for him, or for the poet? it's the start of the poem, it's all just blank paper but the poet isn't going to talk about that, at least not overtly. she's a character in a white sheet of paper about to assert herself in your head. and it's not green paper - it's a forest/wilderness. for the poet it's now a metaphor. in other words it's a 'thing' it's not. i'm only writing this because me and t were well out in the nature yesterday. as privileged middle class people with lots of leisure time the notion is not to describe, not to wander lonely as a cloud but to listen, to see and pretend for a moment we can vanish into this which we have all the security of knowing we can't. people would come, people would look for us. the guy in the poem, he's not that lucky. if you've time look back maybe to the 17th century and see how people talked about the wilderness. they're just on the cusp of viewing it as something to be feared but a long way away from our perspective of it as some sort of risk averse playground. and yet we're still scared of the dark, the forest still spooks us. that's a long cultural memory. the sort of thing that programmes us and we can't unwrite it.

second stanza at first glance looks easy. here's a man, all geometric, setting up his fields like he's the later mondrian. ploughing that furrow, yes, a man ploughing that furrow. this is atwood and you cannae be missing that kind of caper. and then she says it - i am not random. this is my favourite line in the poem, the sort of thing when you're writing you happen across and you want to dance a wee jig across the room. here's your man, all geometric, all structuralist in the face of this woolly, fuzzy edged nature declaring, intoning if you like - i am not random. because we, the readers, hey we're not like that either. oh really? sitting there at our computers, working for our organisations ( you don;t think school/college is an organisation!!), learning what to think about one of canadia's touchstone canonical poets. oh yeah, we so much more not random than this guy. this is the line where you discover that this is not a poem about a guy in a forest but  something ideological, philosophical and we're firmly rutted (sic!) in at least a variant of free will vs determinism. brilliant. and then she blows it with the fattest, laziest line of the poem. speaks in aphorisms! you could argue that it's here the forest is being characterised, individualised, that she's making a binary division between the structured world of the man and the unstructured world of nature, you could use words like apollonian and dionysian and no-one would blame you but i'd still think it's a fat, lazy line. it may be you like a poem but that doesn't mean you have to like every bit of it, like a mate with irritating habits.

third stanza, more of the same. the house as a synonym for mind i kind of like but really it's all about the re-iteration. oh aye, and never forgetting the fact she's building a house in your mind! which draws a neat wee parallel bt what comes along after a house is built? the wolf. now it may be that in canadia the wolf has all manner of other resonances but for me houses plus big bad wolves will always be connected. i predict a wolf. i may be right!

stanza 4. looks a bit funny this one but, as far as i can guess she's liking those st sounds. lots of s's in here as well. it reiterates the binary opposition  but again there's the instability inherent in that position that she highlights with the inversion of ordered absence. nice wee argument maybe but they're two sides of the same coin. the forest isn't a character, it says nothing. all we're doing by aligning ourselves with the binary argument is picking an ideological position. in the structure of this house (geddit!) one is either right or wrong. at this point there isn't another way.

the fifth stanza is one of my favourite atwood stanzas. again my interpretation of this stanza is entirely down to me and my personal engagement/obsession with moby dick. fishing for the the great vision? enticing whales? i can't see past this. and so, for me, atwood is mythologizing the narrative and the narrator. he's gone from the pissed off guy in the forest to suddenly becoming ahab, pursing the great vision at any cost. what cost? atwood's environmentalism is well known. but you could go down the religious route with that what does it profit a man scenario. on the one hand you lose the environment and on the other you lose your soul. and then you're back to myth and that arthurian land is the king and the king is the land shenanigans.

and stanza 6. as if by magic now the narrator's noah (see bible above!). there's a deluge! and the log house is an ark! and, as predicted, here come the wolves! because, and this is important, the wolves are necessary. and he might have floated, really he might have. and again we're back to the environmentalism. but he doesn't float. because he's a dick. so certain of his certainties he can sink thru stone. except atwood isn't talking about the narrator now, she's taking a pop at all of us with all our certainties. she spiky that wee atwood woman.

stanza seven and she brings it all together. naming and  the naming of things? because this isn;t a poem about a man in a forest but a poem about language and how we make ourselves thru it. the wolves are there because they have to be there and because they remind us of that fact. and it's there that his beaches, his clearings are undone, all those certainties cleared away. and just in case we're still not getting it atwood highlights all the energy we put into maintaining these ideas, the tension between subject and object, the original opposition, the original binary tension. and then the whale returns and all that's left is us, like ishmael, bobbing about in the sea, floating on a coffin.

you can, if you were of a mind, find an echo of this in hg wells, not so giant a step given atwood's interest in science fiction - no way out or round or through (from mind at the end of its tether) - for an equivalent statement of pessimism. and it's  this that, for me. drives the poem. it's easy to stand on the outside of the poem, structure your criticism around the narrator in any way you choose but, in doing so, you're doing exactly the same. his green paper is your blank page, your blank screen. all these conclusions, everything you do, now and from now on are your attempts to stay the inevitable, when you too are overwhelmed. atwood doesn't suggest an alternative, there is no if only, only the futility of trying to project ourselves into something thru the vessel that is our language.

which gets you right back to the title and its progressive insanities. it seemed away back then that there was this guy, this pioneer if you like, and we could look at him and his funny ways, there were so many correlations we could make between him, the man, and the doings of men in the world. with each new piece of geometry, with each new certainty it also gets crazier, there's animals in the roof, plantlife overwhelming his crops and all this is going on and getting magnified in his head! he asserts, he names and the more he does it the more futile it becomes. and yet here we are doing exactly the same to this poem, attempting to impose some sort of order on it, square its circles, smooth out its rough edges until we can get a clear meaning out of it, until it's not this guy who's the pioneer but us and that unwritten paper is our lives.

which is why margaret atwood, for me, is such a kick ass poet. taking all the above and weaving into such a tiny, tense bundle, leaving it open to all that interpretation and yet, still pulsing with questions. now that's what poetry's all about. of course someone'll be along at some point complaining that it doesn't rhyme. that's okay. we're all pioneers here and at the end of the day, however different we do it, we're all just scratching in the dirt.

*i read this out to t because a) she wanted to know what all the typing was about and b) to see if i was blethering a lot of nonsense. she didn't see forest or wilderness at all but grassland

*i'm not in the habit of much in the way of punctuation on blogs. i'm lazy when it ocmes to the shift key

*this is not a pop at religion, more the habits of people. maintain a garden and i guarantee, within a very short space of time, you will develop some form of faith based belief in what does or does not make it grow. these things may not work. but you'll want them to. plus you'll very soon be able to see eveidence of your belief in all your growing things. the ringing of bells and chanting is a very distinct possibility!

bobbins

that's a lot of stop motion. and one for thread fans everywhere!

tattoos

Skin Deep: Horiyoshi IIIfrom Johnnie Shand Kydd on Nowness.com.

it was never that likely i was going to not post....

check this out (graphic image in middle warning). some serious tattoo action!

post 1000

at first i was going to have some sort of graphic about what 1000 miles on the bike looked like but the last couple of months inactivity have made me feel a bit forlorn on that front.

so then i thought i do something about poetry, being that's what the majority of the posts were about. i was thinking about the obama inauguration poem thing. as luck would have it i was watching the tv when the poem came on. i hadn't heard of richard blanco and, maybe it was the cold, but he looked a bit nervous (who wouldn't). and then the poem. again, maybe it's just me, but i really wasn't into it. the bit about the shooting? no thanks. but, it seems i'm way in the minority. i didn't quite get this esp given a long of the negative shenanigans around elizabeth alexander the last time. i wasn't super fussed for that poem either but in comparison with blanco i found i was more into it second time around.

plus the poems are kind of similar... i'm just saying. and then there was a whole thing about the reception of the poem, was it maybe not about the poem, i thought, but about who was speaking it? a can of worms! either way, poems for the election - a good thing. republicans take note. looking at inauguration poems i came across miller williams, who i also didn't know, and am into a collected thing of his at the moment. liking it so far. but my favourite? james dickey. so much better he didn't get to read it! the democrats, they like their arts but only if they're safe! ( i should point out i'm not getting preachy at americans here - if the uk were to have poetry the horror would be total - most likely it'd be some child in some sort of talent format, mentored by and orange person from essex or somesuch)

but what of post 1000? i came across a fabulous alternate cover for dostoevsky's the idiot here (i'm not copying the image so as you have to go and look - it's worth it) along with a whole bunch of other covers for sylvia plath's the bell jar (don't forget to scroll down for mccarthy's the road). naturally, the guardian got a hold of it, seeing a show just recently sylvia plath seems to have become the guardian's house poet. except maybe they don't talk so much about the poetry but just go on and on and on and on about the poet. and maybe not so much about the actual sylvia plath but that that other sylvia plath upon whom it seems there is no limit to the number of ideological donkeys that may be placed around her imaginary neck. indeed for some of the guardianistas it seems the 'sylvia plath' has grown and grown until it seems for some of them she is actually also anne sexton.

this last, being an anne sexton fanboy, is a bit irksome. not just well...because!!! but because the plath that emerges from sexton's writings is very different from the plath in the many strands of the official version. a bit odd, certainly troubled, but human and, reading sexton, got me back to actually reading plath (tho not the bell jar i have to admit). and it's kind of that that has me writing post 1000. sylvia plath's worth reading because she's worth reading. i don't care about richard blanco's back story because he's already giving me what he wants to say. i can't be doing with this numbing concern with the person doing the writing, it's like the safety valve for the celebrity obsessions of the middle classes. it may be they don;t want to admit they've been browsing the side bars of the daily mail but when it comes to talking about a writer's 'private life' it's the same old same old.

there's around five hundred poems dotted about this blog. i know almost nothing about most of them. maybe, in time, through their work i'll get to know them a bit better but most likely not. reading the poetry or reading about the poet? the choice is clear for me. but, horse for course and all that....

so that's post 1000 and i'm not entirely certain there'll be more beyond this. blogging i think has maybe had its day and even if it hasn't i just don;t seem to have the time in the day any more. so maybe there will be sporadic posts and maybe there won't. whatever, have a browse, read the poems. yes, have a browse. kick back. reaad the poems.

lancing the boil

days now from the lance armstrong 'revelations' it appears that, as a result of the oprah interview, his popularity may have gone down. oh dear. what a shame. but, despite the spectre of ensuing legal cases, where companies that benefited for years from all the lance exposure, capitalise on the whole shenanigans rearing its ugly head again, getting more publicity and clawing their money back. cycling dirty? you don't say!

the oprah thing was about as predictable as it was likely to be and never that likely to go down well with a non-american audience. lance's continuing references to his 'flaws, the cloying nods back to family, oprah's long pauses and just that nagging ever present hello magazine style air of 'he's a (rich) celebrity' were all something that is mostly absent from that sort of interview here (see how it's done here).

or maybe not. in it. phil 'voice of cycling' and long time lance defender liggett wonders where all the drugs have come from. maybe he missed all those years commenting on the most dope soaked races ever run. honestly, phil, did you really believe people could cycle up those mountains at that speed and not even break sweat?

but here's a thought experiment for the likes of phil. hypothetically of course. once upon a time there's a guy called thom wiesel. thom's a cycling fan, such a fan he bails out usa cycling back in the nineties when they're having a bit of difficulty. thom's such a cycling fan he's even getting into sponsoring his own team. around this time he's also starting to invest in a new biotech start up. pop quiz cycling fans - can you guess what this company is going to produce?

yes that's right it's amgen and it's epo. now once the money starts rolling in the team that weisel is involved in sponsoring has a change of name. and sponsor. that's right. it's us postal! is it too speculative to be joining those dots yet? course there's a body that sorts out all that stuff, right? that. at that time was headed up by one hein verbruggen. now there have been a variety of accusations made about hein verbruggen but so far very few that suggest a conflict of interest with thom weisel handling some of his financial affairs.

now it could be that all of this is no more than internet smoke and mirrors. phil liggett's well respected and well loved around the world and maybe he just couldn't see what was going on for being too close. and now we're in an era of clean cycling. where things have changed. really? who's watching the tour of california this year? the amgen tour of california. the same amgen that puts profit before patients?

it seems in the wacky world of cycling that there's a blind spot when it comes to sponsors and money and a collective amnesia about the effect of business on racing. why it appears that even some of the most outspoken critics of drugs in cycling may have a teeny bit of a double standard when it comes to the blush of a dollar at the amgen event

you'd be forgiven for reading many of the articles and comment by fans re armstrong that the real issue is not epo/drugs and their association with cycling but the fact that armstrong really just isn't a very nice person. for comparison try - miguel indurain (lovely guy)/lance armstrong (dick). or alternately watch all those conveniently six month banned zabriskie, vandevelde, leipheimer types lining up contrite and fighting for the future of the sport' at the AMGEN tour of california. no irony whatsoever.

and talking about that institutionalised doping. what about them rabobanks? not quite such a news story without 'nasty' lance and complicated by most of it no doubt being in dutch or flemish, the effort of translating which precludes most english speaking cyclists from outrage. could it just possibly be that there's not just a problem with the riders, the institutions but with the fans themselves?

there's a rumour kicking about today that lance's 'people' have been in touch with no fuss to see if he can ride the tour de ben nevis. most likely bollocks but cue predictable outpourings of outrage from some members of the mountain bike community. it's amazing when there's so much poverty knocking about, the economy's down the toilet, wars are sparking up everywhere, just what it takes to raise the ire of a certain type of cyclist.

me, if you asked me to cycle like those professionals do you could pour drugs into me with a hose. come to think of it most days when i'm wheezing up some hill you could pour drugs into me with a hose! would it be worth it tho? having seen the lance machine ever so briefly up close i wouldn't swap a minute to walk in those shoes. but that's a lesson you can see not being learnt (more in road than mountain biking i'd speculate) every weekend at every race. too many people, well, men, taking it waaaay too seriously.

at the end of his interview lance gets asked the moral of his story (you what!!!). he doesn't know. well, lance, i'll give you a clue. winning at any cost has a price and now's the time to be paying. as to those outraged cycling fans. really? time to take some responsibility for having the blinkers on all those years. lance never made you put those on. you did that all by yourself.

*i should point out that where possible i've included links for any internet speculations re the above. as for the big pharma and epo cases kathleen sharp's blood medicine, while not the best book in the world, is as good a place to start as any. seeing what this crew have got up to and the amount of money involved puts having your cycling spectating memories ruined by some guy on a bike properly into perspective.

glencoe climbers

doubtless anyone who's watched the news in the uk over the weekend will know about the four people killed in glencoe this weekend. one of them, chris bell, wasn't known to me directly but that was mainly because any race i was in with him  he was always lapping me! and he was well known within that small community of online mountain biking people.

i saw his parents on the tv and they seemed, to me, to be responding with a great deal of courage but none of this can disguise the fact that there's four families who've lost their loved ones tragically early and another remains struggling for life in hospital. to those families, of tom chesters, rachel majumdar and una finnegan, my condolences and best wishes and a speedy recovery for the others

it seems they weren't do anything they shouldn't and they were well equipped for the conditions and that the avalanche they were caught in was one of those occasions where so many of us can say, there but for the grace of god...

should that be the case, and even if not, should the mood come upon you luke bradley (another one of those anonymous faces i don't know from the internet world) has set up a just giving page here

*luke, if you're reading this i hear you're burning the candle at both ends. last i heard you weren't so far away - if you fancy a bike/daunder get in touch

top drawing skills

 

me being ensconced in the drawing it's always nice to see what other people are doing and i'm very much liking the carne griffiths today. i like all the botanical-ness of it but i was particularly amused (if you follow the link) to note the use of a hairdryer in the execution. i thought it was just me!

and then some irish

i'll leave it to irish people to argue different bit it often seems, from this neck of the woods, that the irish poetry scene is just a bit better than ours. or i could be wrong...

anyway, here's this as evidence. it seems to originate from some lovely people somewhere called kinsale (previously known to me only as a pub, t was maybe by it once) who will even send you a poem to your inbox should you wish it. lovely...

speaking the swedish

and now that it's the new year i'm back from spending the festives with my relatives including my now linguistically able niece.

i'd warned her mum and dad that i was coming with a range of swedish nouns but very few verbs and no grammar. they smiled indulgently in that swedish way, esp when they saw me trying to relate what i'd been listening to contrasted with the delivery of a two year old! a couple of days tho and we were well off the mark. there's nothing like a small child as a learning aid!

the plan now is get some consolidation done between now and the summer. one of the local papers was up last year looking for an interview so i'd like to be able to do at least a bit of that in swedish. plus i should, hopefully, be getting a bit of a look at some swedenlandish healthcare and it'd be nice to confound a few stereotypes about english speaking foreigners!

i think in the last post about the swedish i was complaining that i couldn't find a way into the language. now it's not so much the certain somethings i know and like about other languages that have opened the door but the actual speaking of it that is just so much fun. i can't wait to get back!