The latest daub

I painted a view of Quéribus a few years back for someone's birthday present, and was a little sorry to part with it.  The chap who comes along to our art class to flog materials sold me an acrylic pad a while back, so as a first exercise, I thought I'd revisit Queribus.  It's a different experience to painting on canvas, and I wasn't sure I'd finish it.  But by the time I'd got the paper covered in paint it felt pretty natural.  (Come to think of it, my last attempt at Quéribus was on the smooth side of a piece of hardboard.)  I'm trying to loosen up and get a bit less photographic, and this time went for a less literal rendering of the sky, and I towed the Massif du Canigou a few miles to seaward for the sake of the composition.

Not sure what to tackle next.  I have plenty of canvases, so no excuse for not getting on with it, once I've replenished the titanium white supply.  Need some more varnish too.  I have a gift voucher from the local artists' suppliers, so will perhaps hop on the 281 into town tomorrow.  I'll see if they can sell me a tub of inspiration as well while I'm there.

Books, beds and beakery

I'm getting a bit fed up with Kate Mosse's Labyrinth.  I pulled it down to the Kindle a while back and am now about tho-thirds of the way through it.  It may have a bit to do with the transcription for the electronic reader, but her spelling of the name of one of her heroines keeps shifting from Alaïs to Alais and back again, and there are some unforgiveable continuity errors that ought never to have got past an editor.  Still, it's a good yarn, and I think I'm learning a lot about the Albigensian heresy (though in view of the errors, I'll need to read that up separately).  I do have to read it, however: some of it was filmed in Lagrasse last summer, so it'll be a must-see if it makes it as far as the silver screen.  Whatever else, it's a bit of a relief from my other recent reading - Jude the Obscure.  I think I'm Hardied out, having also read Tess and The Mayor in recent months.  But I'm rattling on through Labyrinth so that I can get back to some nice wholseome Nordic carnage - I have some more Nesbø and Mankell on the electronic bookshelf.

Curious week: mild days, days of torrential rain, frosty days.  I got quite a lot of gardening done one day, trimming back some of the penstemons and spiraeas, lopping the tops off the rudbeckias, a few of which are still alive, pruning the roses, and sowing tomatoes.  We got a packet of seed of the little olive-shaped tomatoes that are so good for bruschettas and hot goat's cheese starters.  The packet contained all of 8 seeds, and I've sown four, three of which have germinated so far. 

We've been doing a bit of chucking out and reorganising in the kitchen, and we've also been keeping the Freecycle movement busy.  We've finally bought a big bed with two mattresses to suit our differing requirements, and the old slatted job headed out the other day in the back of one of they Ford vans (well, it was a Mondeo shooting brake actually, but hon. mention for whoever identifies the reference).  A hardly used cathode ray tube telly went off down the hill on Monday as well, and we've passed a whole lot of surplus china and glass to the charity shop and to a residential home.  I suppose one shouldn't be surprised at the vast amount of cardboard that comes with bed bases and mattresses: enough to say that I was glad to get it loaded into the car and disposed of.

Small things, small minds

I guess it's a sad reflection on my retired, sedate life that I get satisfaction from small achievements.  A tray of cuttings, well-rooted and on the way to summer colour.  A couple of baskets of clean laundry aired and dried in a pleasant breeze.  Another pot-boiling canvas varnished and on its way to be framed. 

And a shelf full of home-made Seville orange and lemon marmalade.  Should keep us going till next year's supply of oranges comes in.  Two friends report separately that the oranges are just being left to rot on the trees in Southern Spain.  Which moved me to enquire what else the bitter orange is used for, and where it comes from.  Turns out that it was the Moors who cultivated it in the Seville region, and that it was introduced to Southern France during the crusades.  Apart from marmalade, it is used in perfumes and flavourings, notably of Triple-sec, Grand Marnier and Cointreau.  It was introduced to Malta before the sweet orange, and is the basis of a national soft drink.  The oil from the (copious) pips is traditionally used in the treatment of excess cholesterol, and extracts from the zest and other parts of the tree have more recently been found, in animals, to reduce anxiety and have a sedative effect.

All of which I learn from Wikipedia.  Or Wikipédia, to be precise, since the English language edition of the same is on strike today in protest against draft Intellectual Property legislation now before the US Congress.  This is an area that I dabbled in back in the 1990s during my first stint in Brussels.  Back then, the rightsholding community was trying to make transporters of copyright infringing material liable for the breach.  Back then, we succeeded, I think, in fixing the focus on the infringing act, and I argued the analogy that if I made an illegal video cassette copy of a film and gave it to you, and you took it home on the tram, the Brussels tram company would be caught as a copyright infringer under the terms of the legislation proposed.  I'm starting to hear comparable (though better argued) analogies from Wikipedia.  The problem is that breach of IP rights in the internet is like the hydra: you cut off one head, and two grow to replace it.  Once again, the rightsholders are looking for easy targets.  Wikipedia argues that it spends vast amounts of time and money removing infringing material already, and that the draft laws are excessively onerous on aggregators of online material.  My allegiance hasn't changed.  The ability to obtain instant answers to questions that come to mind on a whim is one of a limited number of glorious triumphs of the modern age.  Wikipedia is only one example of this powerful new information society, and it is a far from perfect one, but the world would be a poorer place without it.

The day lengthens, the cold strengthens

After an extraordinary mild spell that saw me outdoors a few times gardening and potting up at the table on the terrace, we’ve had a couple of sharp overnight frosts that have not lifted from shaded ground.  Still, on the good days, some dozens of penstemon cuttings have found their way into pots, and I’m hoping that they’ll survive outside in cold frames.  They are incredibly rewarding plants, striking easily from cuttings and flowering profusely over a long season.  I was far less successful at growing them from seed, though, and am not sure that I’ve actually seen a flower from any of the seedlings.  All but one of the autumn’s surviving New Guinea busy lizzie cuttings are now also potted up and adorning the kitchen window ledge, despite attracting whitefly.  On a mild day I took them outside for a dose of insecticide.  Much as I’d love to be an organic gardener, life’s too short: I’m sparing with pesticides, but do not shrink entirely from using them – and slug pellets in particular.

We underwent ordeal by IKEA on Monday.  The experience is more bearable on a weekday during working hours, but the place was still quite busy.  We’ve also been haunting the shops and the internet in search of new linen for our IKEA bed, and have done quite nicely, we think, in the sales at a local department store.  M&S was a less wonderful experience.  We did a run to its neighbour, the tip, on Friday with a lot of rubbish turned out from the spare bedroom and the attic, and had to queue for ages in the traffic jam that permanently afflicts the increasingly retail-oriented industrial estate.  Getting in and out of the tip is bad enough, but the M&S car park is just awful.  It is going to be hell out there when the new supermarket opens.  Oh well, we survived with nothing worse than briefly raised blood pressure.  The internet was almost as frustrating: one lot of linen arrived bearing scant resemblance to the description on-line, and is on its way back.  I hope the duvet, due tomorrow, is better.

Nice convivial evening yesterday: a surprise dinner gathering at a nearby hostelry for an old friend, who was celebrating his 50^th birthday.  He and I met some time around his 22^nd, when he was lodging with a then neighbour of mine.  His girlfriend visited from Surrey at weekends.  Married 25 years, they now have five daughters and farm a handful of beautiful acres in East Sussex.  I had been expecting to see another couple from those early days, but learned last night that the husband has just come out of hospital after an unexplained collapse just before Christmas.  Of the nine of us neighbours who used to knock around together in those days, the married survivors are still married to each other, and have produced a total of 13 kids.  One of the chaps died a couple of years ago, and it has recently been touch and go for another.  And I’m by far the oldest of the nine.  I hate these intimations of mortality.

Surprise, surprise

I spent a while yesterday morning scattering new telephones round the house.  Our old system was a trifle Fred Karno's - and still is in part.  I've moved the not altogether ornamental fax machine up into my study, where it's connected through wiring that runs under the carpet on the landing to a rather dodgy socket in the back bedroom.  But everything else - the internet router and the base station and answering machine - is now wired to the master socket near the front door, connected wirelessly to the three or four computers and the other five extension phones. 
All this makes me ponder that it'll soon be 40 years since I entered the world of telecommunications.  Back then, you could get a telephone that stood on a table, or one that hung on the wall, and you had to rent it from the Post Office, and pay a lot extra if you wanted to unplug it and move it to another room.  Since some years earlier, you'd been allowed to choose a colour other than black, but that was about as far as it went so far as customer - excuse me: 'subscriber' - choice was concerned.  Many 'subs' were still forced to share service with a neighbour whom they might or might not know, and who could listen in to their conversations.  Mind you, in other countries, such quaintly-termed 'party lines' were shared by as many as ten subscribers.  On phoning home to Scotland, I'd often get the alternating long and short tones that told me that the equipment was engaged, sometimes with the benefit of an announcement in impeccable RP telling me 'lines from London are engaged; please try later'.  Calling my aunt and uncle in the suburbs meant dialling a two-digit routing code, then the first of the five digits of their number.  Then you had to listen as the selectors clattered around for a few seconds before dialling the last four digits: otherwise the call failed.  The rare early press-button telephones set the call up through an electronic clicker that mimicked the pulses emitted by an ordinary dial.  I remember how impressed I was when my first trunk call from home with a multifrequency tone keypad got a ring tone instantly at the other end of the country.  Indeed, for a long time, callers, used for so long to waiting several seconds for the call to snap, crackle and pop through to the other end, would hang up, convinced that they had misdialled.  And that signalling technology, though a vast improvement, is now on the point of being a thing of the past. 

Radio telephones were as near as dammit unknown - these days, every other person you meet in town has one clamped to one ear or has a thumb moving at the speed of light across a keypad, sending text messages, doubtless of world-shattering moment.  A computer with the power of the laptop that I take around with me to meetings would in those days have needed a hangar to house it, and would have heated a small block of flats.  My manpower planning colleagues who used computers had to book an hour on a teletype terminal in a noisy room down the corridor.

Such thoughts serve only to emphasise your obedient servant's dinosaur status.  But make no mistake: I love what communications technology can do for us today.  Search engines and Google Earth let me indulge an enquiring whim instantly, but I'm less happy with the expectation that an email must be answereed at once, and for that reason am not quite ready for a smartphone.  I had a principle in work days: if a piece of paper landing on my desk didn't really need an immediate response, I put it in the heap.  Once a week I'd transfer a good 90% of the heap to the waste paper basket, since that 90% would have been overtaken by events or otherwise rendered superfluous.  The same is almost certainly true of the content of my various email 'in-boxes'.  But on balance, I'm very happy that it's January 2012 and not my penurious January 1972.  And as for the new phone system, all it needs is for someone to make the first call to it.