ManRom2021

Wabi Sabi Challenge

April 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I gave myself a simple photo challenge. I was to sit for one hour facing out to the garden and take photographs. I could use my Canon DSLR and the 70-200 lens with the 2X extender. And at the end of an hour, I had to post my favourite six. For the technical folk who might read this, I decided it had to be handheld too; no tripods. And I’d be indoors, behind a newly double glazed ‘French’ window. All photos to be taken from a seat in our living room.

We have very purposefully built up our front garden over many years. There’s about 100 square metres at the front and we converted it all into a rockery about 15 years ago. We got a lot of criticism from passers-by for returning granite boulders to a garden where they recalled a lot of granite had been blasted, broken and cleared to make way for our house. Our garden rises up quite steeply from about a metre beyond the window, running up ten metres to a road. This has a southerly aspect that has reduced direct sunlight because we are in the shadow of Roche’s Hill and surrounded by many ornamental but mature trees. So we selected plants as a botanical screen against views from the road, which is level with our first floor. And we selected plants that could survive with the benefit of indirect light reflected from the windows and white walls.

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From Memory

April 16, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Our eldest grandson once dropped a lightning strike in our kitchen. It broke as it hit the table top. Shattered in fact. I’d brought the lightning strike home in a bottle some twenty years before. A plastic bottle, stuffed with toilet paper to protect the delicate lightning strike. An age-old message in a new-age bottle. An untold story found on the shores of a lake dying in an incoming tide of sand. Our ten year-old grandson was very uneasy after the accident, looking in horror at the shards of lightning that lay on the table. It was a lightning strike that had been recorded in sand, its heat creating a vitreous memory with a dendritic shape that mapped the path of the electrical discharge. A very elegant and tactile artefact, a fossilised lightning strike known as a fulgurite. I found this one at the base of very small dune somewhere north of Lake Chad. I’d seen what appeared to be broken twigs lying on the surface. I was curious since I’d not seen any plants for hours and KB stopped the Land Cruiser for a closer look. I’d never seen fulgurites before but I knew of them so maybe this was a lightning strike and worth keeping. Whether recent or older than the ancient trade routes that criss-crossed this desert, who could say. And so I picked it up and it made its way into a just-emptied water bottle after being wrapped in some of the emergency toilet paper we kept in the 4×4. And thence, eventually, it came to Ireland. And for the sake of our grandson, I’m pleased to say that I brought home more than one. And he was relieved to know that too.

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Pigs

April 15, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The London Review of Books are selectively dropping their firewall each pandemic day. They say ‘Diverted Traffic is a new LRB newsletter, featuring a different piece from the archive each day – chosen for its compulsive, immersive and escapist qualities, and also for a complete absence of references to plague, pandemics or quarantine.’

It was there that I recently read about pigs. No matter your view on swine, I think there’s very a very relatable quote from John Miles in 1834 retold by James Buchan in ‘My Hogs ‘ in 2001: “‘A couple of flitches’ – i.e. sides – ‘of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them on the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet.’“

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Giants, Elders and Bosons

April 14, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

How many people know about The Elders? Not science fiction, they are a non-governmental organisation of global thought leaders. Oddly enough, I’ve met a couple of them. We spoke in social pleasantries rather than of their vision which ‘is of a world where people live in peace, conscious of their common humanity and their shared responsibilities for each other, for the planet and for future generations’. Our meeting was the day Lia was being conferred with an honorary doctorate by Dublin University. As her plus one, I was able to enjoy a meal among the honourees, their plus ones and the university principals. And in my own alma mater, something neither my adult imagination let alone my student version was ever capable of imagining.

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File Death and Nesting

April 13, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

I tried to read some files from a back-up drive yesterday. Dated 1992 and 1991, they were created with MS Word V1 and 2 using Windows 3 (true but a numerical series joke in memory of Lotus 123). The files are available to me because I kept moving them through time from device to device and continent to continent until I switched from Windows to a TimeMachine in an Airport on a windowsill.

I got some text from one of the files and realised that it only gave up its text because it was different – remember Word Perfect? We kept WP up for as long as we could but together with spreadsheet software Quattro Pro, it went the way of DOS. Meanwhile, Lia had bought a Brother hybrid word-processor for her teaching and first novel, a compromise because personal computers cost a month’s gross salary back then. It was hugely important to her. A massive affirmation of the importance of her work.

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Kefir Ezra

April 12, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

We’ve been enjoying our own kefir pretty much every day since a friend gave some grains to Lia. Counter Kefir thrives in the kitchen. We use it exclusively in our morning granola. Hers greened with spirulina, them both riddled with cran-, blue- and goji berries as a health-maintaining minimum of supplements we add. There was a time that we’d buy kefir or other probiotics to use for breakfast but having our own is much more satisfying.

So, I wondered, how old is our kefir? How long has it been going? So I asked the donor.

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