moss and lichen

... and here, on a wall in Hillside, you can see, very clearly, the difference between moss, and some crustose lichen.  That was this morning; it's now 6,000 miles away, and I must sleep.

 

Regent's Canal

To Camden, today, to see one of my three cousins and her family (including Tiger the Cat) - and on the way there and back crossed Regent's Canal.  Of course, in a passive kind of way, I know Regent's Canal is there - indeed, I even sat beside it for an hour or so this last summer, in Granary Square.  But today was the first day that I've actively thought - why have I never walked along it?  At least, walked along this part of it - I think we walked along another bit of it about ten years ago.

Part of the answer to that, of course, is that it's only been thoroughly renovated and spruced during the last decade - turned into a kind of London equivalent of the High Line, judging by how relatively crowded parts of it were.  It's only 9 miles long - designed by John Nash, opened in 1820, and running from Limehouse, on the Thames, to Paddington: the part I saw today runs behind Kings Cross and St Pancras.  It was a bit wobbly, as a trade venture, when it started - but then the development of the railways made it a truly important, if short, thoroughfare for goods of all kinds.  (and yes, that's sunshine!  at last!).

 

January sky

One couldn't exactly call this a sunset, but it's an excellent end of the day sky ... and the time was just after 5 p.m., so maybe one could pretend that the lightness works as a harbinger of spring?  As, of course, do the snowdrops.

 

Lichen, fence, leaves

Sometimes, days are very long, and one's glad that the road has some lichen-covered fence posts with leaves poking through them, which give one some green visual sustenance ...

 

The library! It's still there!

 

There have been days - weeks - months - when I've wondered if I'd ever get back into the British Library.  It's been - how long? - just about two years.  But it's still there!  And, wonderfully, there are so relatively few people in it that books turn up really fast.

I'm writing a piece about nineteenth century paintings termed "Idylls" - some classical, some very much not - and their relationship to temporality and environmental criticism - and wanted to lay my hands on a couple of things that are pretty elusive, one of them a volume of engravings and poems reprinted from the Quiver as Idyllic Pictures.  From the frontispiece, one would think that these are going to be "idyllic" in the loosely vernacular sense of the word - unbelievably quiet, pleasant, peaceful.

But in fact, most of them are "idylls" in the classical sense of the term (or the term adopted by Tennyson, Landor and others), meaning εἰδύλλιον [eidyllion], or “little image,” with a strong narrative component - more like a vignette, than anything.  So one finds gloomy melodrama:

Dead and alone,

By the trysting-stone

social realism colliding with sentimental pathos:

Oh, sir! don't pass like the rest, I pray

and my favorite, an illustration for D. P. Starkey's "Hassan," which suggests that the chilly streets are anything other than "idyllic," in the popular understanding of the word:

Flitting past in wintry wather,

    Lo, a poor Lascar in tears!

His swart eyebrows pinched together,

    Pendants shivering in his ears.

Weeping for his lost equator,

    For the sun as there it shone,

The bright eye whence the Creator

    Glows upon the torrid zone.

In my fancy I could hear him

    'Neath our Arctic skies bewail

Heavens he once believed so near him,

    Now so distant and so pale!

Paltry wares oppressed his shoulder,

    Flimsy rags about him flew;

Nothing than his garb looked colder -

    Nothing warmer than his hue.

Was it Vishtu thrust thee hither,

    For some worship left unpaid,

That thy tawny flesh might wither

    'Neath our hyperborean shade?

Back! poor pedlar, tramp, or juggler! -

    Back to thine own orient sphere;

God ne'er meant thee for a struggler

    With our wretched winters here.

Due art thou unto the Ganges,

    To the palms and plains of Ind, -

To the hills whose sunny ranges

    Reach from Arracan to Scinde.

Home! to dream amidst thy roses -

    Home! to bask beneath they sky!

Heaven itself the path discloses

    Did not Eden eastward lie?

fragmented, England

This pretty much sums it up: part of me staying with my father; part of me coming to Cambridge to stay with friends (and having a big chunk of the day online, at a meeting); corresponding with Los Angeles, 8 hours away; wondering about Boris Johnson's future on the one hand and that of the US Supreme Court on the other; working on one essay for a volume and worrying about another (and worrying about writing a couple of talks); missing the cats but looking with admiration at my father's foxes ... and so on.  Identity, and attention, is clearly in a whole lot of pieces, with various gaps between them ...

 

marmalade making

Time for the annual ritual of marmalade making!  About twenty four pots were potted.  Yes, my father is shining a flashlight into it, to make sure that he could see for sure if the thermometer had reached the right temperature.  I am so impressed by this venture - which I've known all my life - and was glad to have a hand, this year, in stopping any disaster from happening (pan burning being the most likely of these ...).  Doubtless tomorrow he'll write up an account of what was learnt this year, and this will join a significant archive of trial and error.  I only wish I liked marmalade, but ...