a graduating scooter?

If a scooter had a major, what would it be?  It's getting closer and closer to Commencement time, and students can be seen carrying packets with sashes in them.  This scooter, however, seems dressed in cardinal and gold rather as a statue of Buddha might have a garland thrown casually but reverently round its neck, or a sacred cow might be wreathed with marigolds.

 

owl pellet

and, right on cue, after I wrote yesterday that the black walnut is also the Owl Pelleting tree, what do I find underneath it today but a freshly hoiked pellet?  This is a particularly fine one: lots of little bones.  Too small for squirrel, I think, although there is a lot of grey fur - but I' thinking it's probably mouse fur, or just maybe a small pack rat.  Whatever it was must have slipped down a treat, been digested by stomach juices, and then ... owls are the most admirably tidy birds.   

 

squirrels

We have one tree that arborists can seemingly never agree about: the majority view is that it's a black walnut, but occasionally we'll talk to one who says No, Rubbish, It's a Northern Pecan.  It would be helpful (and doubtless tasty), if they bore fruit, but they never seem to get that far.  Maybe the squirrels pillaging the blossom explains why not ... I was sitting outside trying to read, this afternoon, but they were very distracting (there are indeed two separate squirrels here, and they kept breaking off from their gorging to chase one another.

It's also the tree on which one of the owls often sits, so one finds pellets, stray bits of bird (though, now I think about it, not squirrel, so far) underneath it.  Once, there was half a rabbit, which happily disappeared.

And yes, the sky was this blue, and the mountains that lovely.

 

No Kings 3

My poster this time was a little better in the conception than the execution - but huge fun to work on it, even if I wished that I'd started drafting it weeks ago, not late last night and early this morning.  And every demo, I wish I'd been practicing my always-emaciated lettering.  It did, as ever, feel good to go out there and stand up for democracy, against war, against corruption, against state violence, against - well, everything that's happening with the scary-clown show in D.C.

Good to run into our friends Dorothy and Leo (Dorothy's poster is wonderful!)

One of my favorites ... (with a properly fitting crown ...)

Harking back to the (Portland) frogs of the last No Kings - sadly, no amphibian inflatables today, but the temperature was 85 degrees;

Miscellaneous signs:

and, some flyposting: in keeping with the spirit of the day.

 

poppies

Visual evidence of how greenery is taking over parts of our yard - plus all the poppy seeds that I threw around with energetic enthusiasm.  They are so bright and startling that in person, it looks as though there are more of them than perhaps there are.  Anyway, spring.

 

Blue and gold - Dodgers opening day

Moth has always been a keen baseball fan, so she's delighted to be back watching the Boys in Blue.  They have some particularly fetching new blue (not really Dodgers blue - more like Royal Blue) and gold caps.

I dashed outside to try and catch the military jet flypast, but F 35-Cs move rather fast, so all I had to record was some very blue sky.  As happens every year, the anxious commentators of Nextdoor and Ring were quickly online, asking Why The Military Jets? and saying We Think That Was a Missile - a new level of anxiety.  In the current climate, who can blame them ... although it always amazes me that even if these people weren't like me, with Dodgers opening night firmly marked in my calendar, you'd think they'd guess what those jets were up to.

And here, to complete the palette, are some yellow flowers by our front door.

 

feet

There are some days when I deliberately push back against Professional Academic Norms in what I'm wearing: days, usually, when I feel I'm wobbling on the edge of the job swallowing me whole.

Mind you - do such Norms even exist any more?  I have male colleagues - well, one in particular - who wear shorts from one end of the year to the other, ready to take up a trowel and sieve and plunge into full archaeological excavation mode (not very convincing in South Central LA, but it's certainly a costume).  On the other hand, some other colleagues hit what would be, for me, a level of unattainable elegance, daily.  I try for respectability, at least - but it wasn't always so: once upon a time I was my department's sartorial rebel, and fondly cherish the memory - from sometime early in the 1980s - when a student asked me, incredulously, "are lecturers [remember, this was the UK, so that meant a TT faculty member] allowed to wear jeans?"   Today, it was mood-lifting when grads passed me in the corridor and went "ooooh, SHOES."  (and if you're wondering, they're made by a Spanish firm called UIN, and are ridiculously comfortable).

 

a remarkable ceiling

... in the Tyler Pavilion, the room we were using for the dinner for our open house for admitted grad students.  All the contellations are there, and what's weird is the echo if you stand underneath and talk - like the music of the spheres.

 

garden, spring

It was a very misty morning, but - when I took a quick tour round the garden before heading off to USC - that didn't prevent me seeing quite how much had grown during the heatwave that happened while we were away.  This is looking up the slope to a house above us; past the lemon and lime trees that were planted out and seem to be doing much better now that they've been liberated from their pots; some poppies, sage, mustard ... it's (deliberately) one of the more wildernessy parts.

 

beauty at both ends

Waking up to St Pancras; welcomed home by Gramsci (and Moth - busy eating).  And that was Spring Break!  Back to the grindstone in the morning ... 

 

Penzance to London

Penzance dawn, with seagulls.  Our Cornish daffodils (and there are jars and vases of them all over the little hotel) had come out a bit further.

And then a long rail journey back to London.  The advantages of being Aged include being able to purchase a UK senior railcard, and so it becomes ridiculously cheap to travel first class.  On GWR - Great Western Railways - this certainly gives one a bit more leg room, and some free ... water.  Sandwiches? Not on a Saturday.  "Please could I have some sea salt flavoured crisps?" "You have to pay extra for those.  You can have ordinary salted ones."  Sigh.

This, however, is the lovely view from our London room.  Only the Piccadilly line is closed tomorrow (so that they can introduce 92 new trains), so it'll have to be be a cab to Heathrow ...

 

Penzance, Truro, Penzance

Signs of spring - the Cornish daffodils on our mantelpiece ...

A walk down by the Lido this morning, before we found ourselves foiled by closed National Trust gardens (the effects of the big storm here earlier in the year); by train times, by ...

so we did catch a train to Truro, which has a rather fine, rather plain late Victorian neo-Gothic cathedral - built on a site that had been a church since 1259, but the foundation stone of the actual cathedral wasn't laid until 1880.

It manages to be remarkably unremarkable, unflamboyant, its stained glass windows complicated, but not especially - well, anything, unless one counts the rather unChristian violence involved in chopping off Charles I's head,

and then the fact that in this bas relief of Christ's crucifixion, the figure of Pontius Pilate  was modeled on ... Bertie, the then Prince of Wales.  That's an odd casting.

Outside, in the cathedral square, what looked like a woman holding a bouquet and a tennis racket until you see that actually it's more theatrical - it's a mask and a mirror.

Here's the cathedral from the river;

and now, back in Penzance, the view from the edge of the sea as we walked to our very good, very fishy dinner at the Tolcarne Inn in Newquay (and back again).

 

St Ives, Penzance, Mousehole

One last view and walk-around in St Ives - sorry to leave the town, but less sorry to leave the World's Smallest Room that also contains a double bed.  This is undoubtedly not true - I've stayed in a smaller one, on the Dieng Plateau in Java - but this was certainly ... cramped.  But here are a pair of lighthouses: the one at the end of the town pier, and the other (albeit transported to Scotland) the inspiration for Virginia Woolf's hard-to-get to destination (and yes, there's considerable consternation about the proposal to build a block of flats that would block the view from Talland House, where VW stayed as a child).

Walking up to the Coastguard Station and old chapel, here's certainly a street that we'd be unlikely to inhabit, at least on the evidence of this trip.

Then back to Penzance - by taxi this time, since we had heavy bags - with a proThatcher, pro Winston Churchill, and seemingly pro Trump taxi driver: "at least he gets things done."  A certain amount of disabusing took place.

More literary reference: the Admiral Benbow, made famous by Treasure Island, is just up the road from where we're staying (in a wonderful, wonderful bed&breakfast, Chapel House).  I had an idea of it from when I was 6: it didn't look quite like this...

A bus along the coast to Mousehole - very pretty -

and yes, I know it's pronounced Mowzel, but the locals clearly relish the potential of how it looks.

But more bus problems!  Not just getting there, and back - missing buses, despite what looked like a promising timetable - but for the residents of Mousehole itself, where the bus (since mid February) no longer goes down to the harbor, which makes it hard for the elderly, the infirm (all the people who don't drive) and so on.

And back to our room - complete with a seagull outside.  One can actually see the sea very easily - just not from this angle ...

 

a day in Penzance

It was weirdly difficult to find the bus stop to get to Penzance (in itself perhaps an odd move, since we're about to stay there for our last two Cornish nights) - apparently they've all recently been moved.  Opposite the funeral directors, we were told: this was accurate, but no idea whether the embracing couple on the wall opposite relate to that company's business, or the length of time it takes for a bus to arrive.

Penzance is very different, despite being only 8 miles away (the world's longest eight miles, if your bus is going down tiny country lanes).  Part inexplicably funky, part very run down, part elegant - we were headed to the Penlee Museum to look at Newlyn School art (wonderful, but not enough of their collection was on display, to my find, alas ...).  But - that being said, so good to see paintings I've known well for decades in reproduction in real life.  And also a sense of the town as a fishing, maritime, tin-mining center - and some art nouveau copper bowls with seaweed on them.  This counts as research ...

Very English door.

Then a wander around town - most notable was the Egyptian House, commissioned by a mineralologist in 1835, and inspired by the Egyptian Hall in London.

The town (where the shop fronts aren't boarded up) has vast numbers of junk - I mean, antique - stores and charity shops.  The trouble about such shops these days, for me, is that they look full of things that are horribly similar to those that I donated when clearing out 20 Hillside ...

And then the disaffected mood of the town was summed up horribly well by the youth waving a Union Jack on the steps outside the shuttered Lloyds Bank.  I'm more aware than ever, on this trip, of the discrepancy between the comfortably off in this country and, well, the rest.

 

St Ives

The view from our room, this morning ... not bad!

Followed by a seagull who doubtless poses for tourist pictures like this one, and wants to be paid in mackerel;

followed by another - doubtless - local pictorial cliché.

Then to Tate St Ives, which had a wonderful huge video exhibit of Lithuanian environmental filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė, where I could have sat for a very long time indeed as underwater creatures and past civilizations and mythological references and biological forms passed slowly, slowly in front of me.

As ever, the view, from Tate St Ives is stunning - all those long waves -

and then to Barbara Hepworth's studio,

and sculpture garden - very much showing signs of spring -

and then for a less spring like (but there are daffodils, and bluebells, and primroses, and wild garlic behind me) late afternoon walk.  Very, very relaxing.