A host minus a few dozen

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

… wrote William Wordsworth. I can’t say whether he then bent down, snipped off half a dozen stems and took them home so that they would look nice on the mantelpiece.

This Spring so far I have stopped and challenged two people for picking themselves a bunch daffodils from apparently public spaces. One, a young woman in Guildford; another, a guy with a southern African accent here in Aylesbury. Both initially seemed puzzled that anyone was interfering with their activities. And then came familiar justifications. I was just visiting my nan, explained she, and thought she would like these; it’s not like they belong to anybody; and look, it’s not like I’m picking all of these (she waves an expansive arm to remind me that there are in fact loads of daffodils remaining unpicked). And aha, said he, any land immediately next to the canal is public property so there’s nothing wrong with it; ‘would you (he says rather pitiably, offering the spoils to me) like to have them?” Then – here it comes again – these are only a few: look at all those!

And for the third year running, daffodils that I planted in a roadside space in the neighbourhood have been neatly sliced off, sometimes removed entirely, sometimes just left to rot where they were felled.

We have to resist this anti-social behaviour. Whoever they ‘belong’ to, roadside and pathside spring flowers have the wonderful capacity to cheer everyone who encounters them, and not – in any quantity – to grace the home of a single individual. The thing is, I’m pretty sure from their reactions that both of these people knew that what they were doing was wrong; defensiveness when put on the spot aside, I hope that all concerned, back home later, derive little pleasure from their pettily thieved prizes and think on next time they are tempted to capture a little bit of nature all for themselves.

Disconnected!

On the last day of February, my television licence expired and I decided to save myself the £142.50 annual licence fee and not renew it. Dutiful and law-abiding as ever, some hours before any viewing would become illegal, I disconnected my aerial cable and set-top cable thingey (you can no longer plonk these things on top of the telly, of course – nowadays they should really be sub-set boxes). And today I finished off the severance by packing away the TV set and vacuuming away the dust, fluff and other stuff that inhabits that space between tele-paraphernalia and skirting boards.

Concerned friends had asked me to re-consider. Since I lived on my own, wouldn’t I miss the ‘company’ of television? Three separate employees of Virgin Media from the cascade of people involved in discontinuing services asked me what reason could there be for my wishing to opt out. Would I perhaps prefer to downgrade to a ‘smaller’ and less expensive service? It wasn’t too late to change my mind. No, I said, I’m saving myself the licence fee and changing my lifestyle. Lord knows, maybe the very reason I am living on my own is because I have – sorry, had – a television. As for the licence people, they simply spelled out in automated fashion the modes in which I could and could not watch televisual material henceforth.

One concerned friend warned me gleefully that the detectors tended to ‘hound’ licence apostates. I imagined the knocks at the door around midnight – much as the poor Soviet masses must have done when KGB were on the prowl. Would they pounce the very day after licence expiry? Or would they call according to a randomly-generated (important, that, I thought) schedule ranging from expiry plus a week or two to expiry plus many months (when that notoriously false sense of security would have surely set in)? Anyhow, I am now prepared for that visit. See, I will say, how there is no TV set to be found anywhere in any room; how my set is packed away in its box in the attic here, see; how no cables are to be found; no set-top box nor aerial. Do you imagine, I shall challenge them, that I operate a TV illegally but pack everything away at each knock at the door? Oh and by the way, I take it you have some sort of warrant for this Stasi-like investigation of my home? And that you are quite prepared for a tedious and ultimately humiliating session in the European Court of Human Rights if you should put one foot even slightly out of place, or even hint that I have been watching telly at all, when I HAVE NOT!?

Nah, I’m gonna do something more constructive with my time. Such as watch my favourite telly programmes absolutely free on-demand, on-line. And continue to enjoy BBC radio, now helpfully funded for me by the 97% (or whatever it is) of households that pay for TV licences.

Predator

As I popped out into the garden to sprinkle breadcrumbs for the local woodpigeons and blackbirds, a large and well-fed cat lay just outside my back door. I stooped to stroke it. But it was cold, and it was stiff, and it was collarless. Was this the cat that had been shitting copiously in my border? The same cat that had regularly been extracting goldfish from my pond?

I left the corpse there for half an hour while I breakfasted – with snow on the ground and a chill in the air, it wouldn’t be posing a health hazard for a a good while yet. Checking with my immediate neighbour, nothing was amiss there. So I drafted a leaflet in terms that I hoped would make it clear what the animal looked like but broke the actual news in a sensitive way (“the cat has chosen my garden to pass away…”) and distributed it to a couple of dozen houses in the neighbourhood. No response within the first half hour. That’s when the paranoid fantasies began. Suppose the owner didn’t show up? Then I would have to dispose of the corpse myself. But I couldn’t just put it in the trash, or dismember it and flush it piecemeal down the toilet. I couldn’t bury it in my garden, yet if I snuck it out into the countryside and buried it in the beechwoods, some dog walker would be sure to spot me and next thing I know I would be the subject of a murder inquiry. I didn’t want to take it to the vet for cremation because that would cost a small fortune that I didn’t have. If I called the council or the RSPCA, they would just say it was on my property and there was nothing they could do; but if I hauled it quietly out into the street and then made the call, I would be detected by an observant and merciless neighbour, had up for fraud and find myself in prison – all because someone else’s cat had opted to pass away in my yard!

Eventually a neighbour called, worried that it might be her black and white kitten. I reassured her, explaining that this was a fully grown cat. But she was back at the door within a short time. I said she had better come and see for herself. And there it was. She returned with a cardboard box, an old towel, and her daughter’s boyfriend; to barely muted snuffling, the beloved kitten made its final journey off my premises. My neighbour had intoned its name as she gathered up the corpse but – to my surprise – I found I couldn’t remember it.

She said that this was the trouble with pets: that they died on you. Yes, I said – you couldn’t have the love without the pain. Case closed.

Aglais urticae

This morning, while hunting around my dressing table for today’s earrings, I heard an unusual rustling. Suddenly there appeared a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, seeking the warmth and orange glow of my table lamp.

At first I was delighted that this beautiful creature had appeared in my room. Then I was saddened at the thought that the little soul would never lead the life Nature intended for it – never feel the sun’s rays on its wings, never taste the delicious nectar of parkland flowers, never achieve the ecstasy of mating.

With an appointment at the dentist to get to, I decided to leave the lamp on, placed a small dish of sugary water next to the insect and made sure a window was open (onto the lethal exterior world of cold and slush, if it should choose that destiny) before I left. It could have a brief facsimile of butterfly life, if it wanted.

On my return, there was no sign of Aglais urticae. I think it must have chosen for the best.

Melismatic Mind Map

Melisma. I just discovered the word thanks to Wikipedia: Melisma and I like it. I like to hear it too, but in the right places. In a song, it’s great to vocalise melismatically around a significant word, or a stressed syllable (in English) within a significant word. But when it’s used on a secondary word such as ‘with’ or ‘from’ it sounds horrible, because it draws disproportionate and distracting attention to the stuffing rather than the meat of a lyric. Stevie Wonder can get away with it because he’s just such a lovely guy; Mariah Carey less easily, because whatever the lyric, all I ever hear is ‘look at me, me, ME!’

Melisma is almost onomatopoeic. There are no harsh plosives here, one gentle sibilant but none of the more severe fricatives. Only one back vowel, a terminal schwa that offers the gentlest of landings, even an initial schwa too, if you are feeling as laid back as heard melisma often seems to suggest. The word flows smoothly from one syllable to the next just as the singer’s voice extends a syllable seamlessly from one pitch to another.

And then there are the sonic and semantic connotations. Melissa – I know two of those – a sweet little kid with curly hair; and a gentle soul from Virginia. Honey, smoothly flowing, sweet on the palate. Mollis, mollify, a softness, a softening up. Elision, a blending of consecutive words so as to make speech smoother. And yet also miasma – a foul-smelling vapour hovering mysteriously over the peaty marsh, bestowing sickness on those of feeble mind or body who dare to come near. And finally the similarly stressed Greek words with the characteristic ‘-sm’ that are evoked: chiasmus, strabismus, …

So remember that, whoever and wherever you are, [sings in a Whitnerian manner] I – I – will always love you – ou – ooooou – ….

Happy Twenty-Ten!

Looking to the future now, will you not resolve  to speak the year as ‘twenty–ten’ (3 syllables) rather than ‘two thousand and ten’ (5 syllables) or even ‘two-oh-one-oh’ (4 syllables but very ugly) . In the ‘noughties’ I think we somehow couldn’t bring ourselves to switch because there was still some persistent thrill from the ‘millennium’ effect of saying ‘two thousand and …’, but now we must grow up.

I understand that David Tennant favours ‘twenty-ten’. You would think a Time Lord had some authority on matters temporal. I gather that the BBC has not yet issued a ruling on how to pronounce the year – I expect they will wish to, though, since it’s going to crop up an awful lot and the Beeb has always seemed keen on standardising pronunciation of foreign names and suchlike.

Happy Twenty-Ten, everyone!

A Christmas Carol

How do you know it’s snowed overnight? There’s a soft pink-orange glow coming through the chink in the bedroom curtains, oddly bright for 5.00 am and definitely not moonlight; the silence is more profound even than usual.

The blanket of new snow that greets me this morning is the perfect backdrop for today’s task – preparing the five carols that April and I are going to perform at this Sunday’s Christmas Remembrance service at the Chiltern Woodland Burial Park. Jem, I feel sure, will be there in spirit. He will certainly be present in my thoughts.

Footnote: the service was cancelled because of the picturesque but hazardous snow and ice! Fran is aiming to have an Easter service instead…