Avast shipmates!

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

    -- John Masefield

Not the same for everyone

Didn't they do well?

Everyday prosody

Church of Poetry Blaze

Local fire chief describes incident as ‘minor conflagration of vanities’.

It’s only tinsel burning:
get out of the cold heat glitter and return
to the manifest and dangerous
traverse of stairs; to the reins of gridlock angels
on streets of highway code -
a moving mode of unaware
of all the good hands
putting all the good things there.

A brake line’s not a metaphor.
Flooring keeps you safe above the ground.
The house does not fall down.

Picture at an Exhibition

The Poet The Painter. The Factotum Works I. 2005, by Dag Thoresen. Photography by Thomas Widerberg.

They don't make them like this any more.

...and I said let grief be a falling leaf...

Science fair - we hope it is...

Here is our microcosmos presented at a science fair for schools.

















Every beautiful assistent has a magician.

It's that river again - running

I don't know what it is either. There's me just cycling over the bridge on my way back from the sea school and all up and down the little river are floating lights and strolling people. Very nice too, I thought.

The Autumnal Equinox

Bit of a prosaic fountain, it's true, but it illustrates a point in that the first picture was taken on September the fourth, while the second was taken on the nineteenth. The water's been turned off because temperatures are now falling below freezing point at night.

Nine years ago, (!) while the internet was . . . - well, it was nine years younger, anyway - poets from around the world submitted things they had written on the day of the Autumnal equinox. I think that may have been on the twenty-third of September, but I always associate twenty first with solstices and equinoxes, so I'm sticking with today.

Here's one from Norway.

A River Runs Through It

'It' being Oslo. You can just about see the Autumn happening. This taken on the way to work.



The other taken on the way home.

Day two at the seaschool

Taxi til Oslo Sjøskole - there are equinoctial gales in the air and we were not a little concerned about our baptism of fire in sailing dinghies. No worries in the lea of the island though.

Sculpture accredited and shown in context

Here she is in context, today, Sunday 18th September. 'She' is correct, by the way, as the sculpture is entitled 'Vindfruen' which would be something like Lady of the Wind. The artist is Ole Sørlie, of whom I found little enough on the net, but he's no spring chicken and can be seen here at the unveiling of one of his pictures in the music room of the high school at which he taught until 1990.
Whether these pictures and those in the link above give the impression of an open-minded, clean-aired Scandinavian model society, or rather of the town that inspired Edvard Munch's visual scream, is entirely up to you to decide.

The statue

It's just a twenty minute stroll over the botanical gardens for me to reach the Olympic-sized swimming pool known as Tøyenbadet.
I use it pretty much every day and on the way I pass this sculpture. I should reference the artist. I'll come back with the details tomorrow.

I'm on my way back from the swim when I took this, so the sun's on its way down. If anything the colours are truer, though - she's very rock coloured.
















Here she is 'taken from behind', as it were. The Munch Museum is directly behind (and down the hill), but he didn't make this.
There's a bit about an up and coming Munch exhibition in London in today's Guardian.

You may believe it or you may not, but the local building authorities (Plan- og bygningsetaten) have now bestowed their blessing upon us so that we may convert this loft. Here goes...

Sea school

In the shadow of the mighty corn silo of Oslo, I waited for the boat to the school of theoretical seamanship (Oslo Sjøskole).







Overlooking the fjord.











And here's Oslo by night, looking back.

Red Admiral

Another ubiquitous and dangerously colourful fellow is the Red Admiral. I believe they're very migrant and some of the ones we see in England can come from as far away as Africa. This one's pictured in Oslo's botanical gardens on September the fourth though, and looks far too unspoiled to have flown overseas. Maybe it's the offspring of some that flew north in the spring. Pretty thing, anyway.









As you may see from this picture of a Red Admiral underwing, they do try to be a little less obvious when the wings are folded. If this one, photographed in Essex many moons ago, were a cameleon, then it would be in the confusing situation of not quite knowing whether to look like a brick wall or a shocking pink buddleia. I think it's doing rather well under such trying circumstances.

Peacock

3rd of September - this thing must just have broken out of its chrysalis, so it's drying out its newly created wings in the sun. It very obligingly lays them flat to achieve this, and after very, very gingerly creeping up on it with my Nikon coolpix 4100 I got this improbably high quality picture. There may not be an awful lot of survival value in looking like that and hatching out in Norway this close to winter, but the underside of the wings is a lot less flamboyant and they hide and hibernate so as to get the wheel of life rolling again in spring.


Here's a picture of the peacock underwing, taken with a flash (!) about 25 years ago in Sussex. At the time I thought my equipment was rather sophisticated. Anyway, you can see how they fade into woody backgrounds when they need to.

Late summer in Oslo

Sensommer i Oslo, altså.

You could almost wonder why butterflies should exist at these latitudes, but then again, we do.

This lady is hiding after I pictured her in flagrante delicto.



So I suppose she would be embarrassed. I was.

Now that I have managed to get these two pictures to stick to the ether, I shall display a couple of more colourful creatures - also photographed this month - very soon.

really interesting

I thought I'd never see the time when you could take a horse...