Dulwich : Not Twinned with Watchet

This blog must be being read by GOD since no sooner had I put "Floods" on my list of agreeable items, than the best floods for years occurred. I thank the Lord.

In blog Headquarters in West Somerset London is popularly believed not to exist, but 2 of us went there at the weekend and it was all full of LONDONERS.

Kind Dulwich-dwellers urged us to stay with them because floods were forecast, but we would not be deterred: we must needs drive home through the night of savage downpours, and sure enough we had a SUPERB journey back from London, as there were floods of really generous extent. The roads between Bridgwater and here were uncommonly enjoyable, being all very flooded, and we had to keep turning round to find alternative routes.

This was the first place where the water was too deep for us to get across. The weedy puddle shown here is as NOTHING compared to how it was when we reached it the night before. Giant lorries were being stopped before the might of the torrent.
Unfortunately by the time this picture was taken even Private Light Goods vehicles could be driven through it.

There were magnificent water levels everywhere and we drove through countless new-made fords and along roads that had become riverbeds. The police were completely overwhelmed by the scale of events. Motorists were all helping each other and on the roads a rare camaraderie grew up - unlike the hostile atmosphere in Watchet, where we got trapped. There the inhospitable people closed their doors on us, nursing their pints in their cosy after-hours lock-ins and laughing cruelly as we were turned back out into the everlasting rains. Should a Watchet-person ever find himself trapped in Blog HQ he might reflect on the wisdom of this night's work. 

Having been despised and rejected, we went and dozed in the car for a few hours while we waited for the waters to recede a bit. By a circuitous route we reached home at 6am after 12 marvellous hours on the road.

With some surprise I must say that our Vauxhall Heap did sterling work throughout. This car is 15 yrs old with 1300000000000 miles on the clock and has led a hard life, never being kept in a garage or cleaned or pampered with 10000-mile services or any other such luxuries and every year it is a source of utter astonishment when it gets through its MOT. Yet it did not falter during a journey with which the VW Enzyme of my early driving career would definitely not have coped. Like the enzymes it was named after, that car only worked within a narrow band of physical conditions and packed it in every time they strayed minutely from the required values. pH, atmospheric pressure, humidity, pollen count, temperature, wind direction (easterlies were DEATH to it): all had to be at precisely the right alignment or it would conk out immediately.

Vauxhall! People of Dulwich! We salute you!             Watchet; Volkswagen; - You we do not salute.

Justification for Some Animosities

Today I am going to describe
·         Shrubs
·         Circular tables, and
·         Monkeys and bears
and explain why they can not be tolerated.

Shrubs

A typical shrubbery. Hideous.


Shrubs are dull woody plants, usually found grouped together in 'Shrubberies', the bleakest garden features known to man. Shrubberies are always dank and gloomy, and muddy because no grass can grow beneath the shadow cast by the sombre canopy of evergreen leaves that make up all the decor of these horrid plants for most of the time. For a few days each year you might get a number of unattractive, scentless flowers showing among the dreary foliage. They don't even yield any useful fruit.



Gardeners! Let us stamp out Forsythia, laurel and privet. Away with bougainvilleas and rhododendrons, and let them be no more seen in the gardens of our land.



Behold, I have spake.



Circular Tables

These make my blood boil. What a silly idea they are. Rooms are rectangular, and so should tables be. Anyone with a simple knowledge of geometry can see that the surface area to circumference ratio is wasteful in the extreme. King Arthur set a very dodgy precedent when he tried to make these ridiculous pieces of furniture acceptable. They are NOT acceptable. I will not have one in the house. 

Monkeys and Bears

Lovely? Admirable?  Don't be fooled.

My dislike of monkeys and bears is exacerbated by the fact that everyone else seems to think they are lovely and admirable. They aren't, though. Monkeys eat each other's babies, which is really nasty of them. Chimpanzees are the most revolting grotesque horror-film sort of caricature-humans and I resent being told all the time that I share God knows how high a percentage of my genes with the horrible creatures. All I can say is, the few genes I've got that they haven't, must be my best ones and must exert a disproportionately large influence on my make-up.

Bears annoy me too. People like them just because they are furry. Well so are tarantulas, but no-one likes them, do they? Or rats. Furry perhaps, but lots of bears are vicious and cruel as Mother Nature decrees they must be. Polar bears are complete BRUTES and so are brown bears which don't even look sweet. Both these types of bear are hardened killers who think nothing of slaughtering seal cubs galore and would tear the infant Bambi to pieces as soon as look at him. 

N.B. Pandas do not count as bears. I like them.



Nice vegetarian panda



A herd of baby pandas



In the Dock : Ernest Dowson

Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae       by Ernest Dowson


And well you might look shame-faced, Dowson my boy...

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Anyone who can call for madder music and for stronger wine, must be a good chap in my book; and as for flinging roses riotously, well, which of us hasn't, which of us hasn't? You can see that Ernest here has his heart in the right place in some respects.

But this poem  - technically brilliant though it certainly is, and contain a number of splendid lines though it may  - infuriates me as it should all right-thinking persons, on account of the outrageous sentiments expressed therein.

Namely, that although the poet has been out all night carousing with common harlots, the hapless Cynara is expected to put up with it and forgive him because it's "just his way of being faithful".  He even seems to imply that she ought to be grateful for his peculiar form of loyalty. AND he complains about her spoiling his evening by occupying one of his passing thoughts between the bought red lips and his own. It really is A Bit Much.

If Cynara had spent the weekend romping with the soldiery, and then come home saying "Oh it's OK, I have been faithful to thee, Ernest! in my fashion" would he much care for that? I think not. I think she'd be out on her ear, and serve her jolly well right.

So it's a shame, but with this poem Dowson has overstepped the mark.

He's let Cynara down, he's let us down, and he's let himself down.

Squirrels and Why I Hate Them

Look at this repulsive little thing, pretending to be cute.

Squirrels are anathema to me and here's why.

Red squirrels are FINE, I don't mind them at all, but you never see them; I've only ever seen one and that was in Austria and it might have been due to the WINESTUFFS I had been taking. It's the grey ones I can't stand, frolicking about wetly in parks etc. and stealing all the hazelnuts and birds' eggs.  

They have destroyed more bird-nut-dispensers than you have had hot dinners, on my patch alone. I have long waged a war of wits against them and believe me they are resourceful, determined blighters who WILL NOT GIVE UP. Not content with pinching all the costly peanuts put out expressly for the sole use of long-tailed tits, they feel compelled to rip the bird-nutter orf its moorings and fling it to the ground broken to bits and unmendable.

This happened repeatedly so I tried hanging the new nutter (£3.99) on a long bit of string attached to the guttering hundreds of yards overhead. Events continued as follows: 

1. Tedious squirrel then climbed up onto the windowsill and launched its beastly self towards the £3.99-worth of new equipment.
2. Result: same as before - broken nutter and peanuts all over the place. Gutter now unserviceable. Squirrel VERY pleased with itself.
3. Mended gutter.
4. Affixed new nutter (now £4.59 owing to inflation) on new long bit of string.
5. Placed stick against wall to hold nutter a good distance away from the windowsill. 
6. Squirrels confounded by this development, heh! heh!, but every time I walked past I hit my head on the stupid nutter. Also the freaky construction looked unsightly and made people think I am a loony.

Thus the squirrels remained victorious, if a bit Pyrrhic.

But then... in a brilliant, unanswerable coup, we moved in to a house whose back wall has a RIVER running along it, right against the building. One can therefore hang out a nutter from the guttering with complete impunity.     

Take THAT, Squirrelly Fiends!      Feast in peace, Long-tailed Tits.

 

 

You have got to admit, long-tailed tits are really endearing, and they DESERVE the peanuts, which is more than can be said for the horrid squirrels.

 

How Amiable

Here are some things I do like :-

Here's a violin. Violins are excellent.

• long-tailed tits
• swifts
• floods, puddles, high tides
• fossils
• clocks
• Fibonacci sequence and pi
• umbellifers
• dere little babies
• N Molesworth
• olives
• Beethoven
• full moon rise
• hayfields

for all of which I bless the name of the Lord.
More details will be supplied later.

The View from the High Horse

There are many things that need saying around here and I am the one to say them. So here I am on my High Horse.

I will be addressing subjects including :-

• squirrels
• shrubs

• 

  Charming shot of Porlock Bay

  Pacific Standard Time
• monkeys and bears
• circular tables
• the plucked string 

• "slapstick humour"

• "Jingle Bells"
• Tesco's bacon scam
• inappropriate use of the present tense
• Ernest Dowson's poem Cynara

all of which INCENSE me.

Sometimes I will mention stuff that I do like, in order not to appear a total curmudgeon, and to alleviate the constant ranting.