We were living in Texas when James Burke’s The Day The Universe Changed was first broadcast. The Cold War was still a thing and truth was one of the biggest casualties. Some would say that the Cold War was a modern form of the Dark Ages. That’s useful to consider since the Dark Ages in western, Christian cultures were not quite so dark elsewhere else on the planet.
Fake Memoir
Posts and Gaps
I had an epiphany of sorts in the first year of my career. In fact, I had quite a few revelations as I learned what wasn’t taught in three levels of education. In my first office job, I was being taught practical things by Dalziel, a phonetically correct abbreviation for a very tolerant teacher. I asked how to calculate the length of a geophysical profile and his answer was to ‘count the posts not the gaps’. A few days later, I asked him to explain what ‘mistie’ meant. I pronounced it misty. He laughed and said ‘put a metaphorical hyphen in it’. I was learning about seismic recording techniques from a man who did the Daily Telegraph crossword in twenty or thirty minutes every day while enjoying a pint (or two) of plain and a toasted cheese sandwich (or two) in a Dublin pub. In the realms of onshore geophysics, the listening devices are arrays of geophones, centred on ‘stations’. A billable length, like a fence, is the distance between two stations or posts. Sometimes, for reasons due the geometry of echoes from sloping subsurfaces, two readings might mistie due group azimuth or line bearing.
Wake Robin
Each night, for the last week, the heady fragrance of trillium has wafted up to the bedroom. Up some five metres comes the perfume from the eight flowerheads. I’m not a chemist but I do wonder about the concentration levels of the compounds that transmit olfactory pleasure over such a distance. I think these things walking in the park when socially distant hair shampoo and personal perfumes waft over me. The fear of covid should have changed us all.
Magnolia Redux
I’m pleased that the Magnolia chapbook has been well received. I’m saddened that I have found another hundred whose blooms have alerted me to their presence. One gorgeous stellata is barely fifty metres from our driveway, hiding in plain sight from my camera. Our national pandemic travel restrictions have been relaxed and today we ventured beyond 5 kms. Almost giddy with excitement, we walked the gardens of Fernhill, some six kilometres from our driveway. It was lovely to be in the company of tall pines, thuya and wellingtonia, spreading birch, beech and oak. We were also among specimen acid loving trees. Huge rhododendrons, camelias and several magnificent magnolias.
Quarry Wall
An early morning walk and a pathside discussion with another walker. And I’m at work, scouting sites for the April chapbook. And seeing interesting tones along the way while experimenting with black and white photography.
Jack Frost, President and Plate
At last, Dublin latitudes are benefitting from sunlight. We see that in a bed of Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ planted for over a decade under a canopy of trees in the front. Some passers-by have told me they are siberian bugloss ‘Jack Frost’. I’ve also had conversations with passing architects and keen gardeners who don’t know its name. They paused to admire the silver-frosted, heart-shaped leaves detailed by veins and edges of jade green. We have come to think that the perennial appearance of sprays of small, bright blue flowers are the confirmation that spring has arrived. Confusingly, after a decade of reproduction and expansion, some of the frost is disappearing. Warming?Dehybridising? Unevolving? Regressing?
This image is from my Garden chapbook available at FabHappy and elsewhere.