I've just come in from my dose of fresh air on the balcony. It was bracing: -3C (-11C with the wind chill). I think I lasted about 25 minutes. Yesterday, I didn't make it out at all. The day got away from me. How that's possible when I'm unemployed and self-isolating, I'm not sure, but it did.
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| Waiting for spring |
Today, as with the last time I was out there, my Samsung Tab S2 tablet, which I use for just about everything, crashed after a few minutes. I don't think it likes the cold. It might have crashed for completely different reasons - it does that sometimes - but I wasn't taking any chances. I came back in and grabbed an actual book. It's not easy turning pages with mittens on, but I persevered.
The book, the first that came to hand, was Handwriting, by the Sri Lankan-Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. It's a 1998 poetry collection. I like the idea of poetry, I read a lot of it at school, but I confess it mostly defeats me when I try reading it for recreation. Ondaatje, I always made an exception for. I loved the novels and the early poetry. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a novella-length 1970 prose poem, was a great favourite, often reread when I was in my 20s. I still have my well-thumbed copy.
This one is less accessible. The settings and allusions appear to be Sri Lankan. The decades-long civil war is in the background. (His novel about an investigation of war crimes there, Anil's Ghost, came out two years later.) Some of the images in these poems are spine-tingling, but what they adds up to, I'm not really sure. Maybe they don't need to "add up," though. Maybe I should just enjoy the language and the images.
Here are the final few lines in the opening poem, bafflingly titled "A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade":
for the fictional doctor in his novels.
the generator shut down by insurgents
swaying in the darkness above us.
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Today's memory bank shot.
The second year Karen and I wintered away, in 2010, we rented a place in Seville, Spain. It was a bad year. The weather was crap everywhere in Europe that winter. It snowed in Barcelona! I was working full-time, but wasn't 100 percent healthy, possibly suffering from post-concussion syndrome, although that was a very tentative retrospective diagnosis. Karen came down with a flu at one point that was scary enough we took her to hospital.
We had a great place, though, a recently renovated four-storey townhouse with its own elevator, just around the corner from the city's quite good art museum. One day on one of of our walks, we came upon the preparations for a parade. This was one of the bands, marshalling in an alleyway. I suspect they thought I was a press photographer since they appear to be politely posing. I have no idea who they are, probably members of a neighbourhood confraternity. I love the two teenagers at opposite edges of the frame, pretending to be bored.
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I do have recommendation today, not of a book, TV or piece of music, but a podcast.
When we were in England, visiting Caitlin and Bob and Louis, I wanted to find out a little more about the history of where they live in Northumberland. In my rooting around on the Internet, I found a podcast called Neil Oliver's Love Letter to the British Isles. Oliver, a Scot, is a book author and well-known TV presenter in England. He's also a trained archaeologist. The podcast is based on his 2018 book, The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places. Each episode is a chatty introduction to one of those 100 places.
It just happened that he'd recently done a couple in Northumberland, which is why the podcast came up in my searches. One was on Lindisfarne, the "holy" island just off the Northumberland coast, the site of a medieval monastery and scene of one of the earliest Viking raids on the British Isles in 793. We had visited the area, though not the island, back in September. The other was on King Alfred the Great and Northumberland.
Both topics dovetailed with a recent interest in the early medieval and particularly the Viking wars, inspired by the slightly cheesy Netflix series, The Last Kingdom. (Which despite it's cheesiness I would also recommend.) In any case, I listened to the Neil Oliver podcasts while out on my runs - they're just about the right length at 35 minutes - and got hooked.
For starters, the guy has an absolutely gorgeous radio voice, with a broad but perfectly understandable Scots accent. And he's so obviously genuinely enthralled by, and well informed about his subject matter. The podcasts aren't particularly dense with information, but you come away from each - or I did - having learned something. I've been listening to more recent episodes while jogging around the apartment.
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