Tunnel Vision

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I can't think about the world today.

I know that is the kind of thing that a privileged person living in an open democracy can say. My bleeding liberal heart feels oddly guilty about it. It is a strange form of magical thinking: as if I, in my distant Scottish room, have some sort of moral duty to contemplate the events in Cairo. It is as if my irrational mind believes that I could make things better in Tahrir Square by the mere act of paying attention. It is absurd, but then the more I write this blog, the more I realise I am a creature of absurdity.

I can't do the world, because my sleep patterns are still erratic and I have bashed out 1032 words and that's all the hard thinking I am capable of today. My cerebellum has gone to hell and that's all she wrote.

Outside, there is the suspicion of snow. There is the smell of cold and metal in the air. A hurried wind from the North-West is pushing stray leaves about; they make little scudding, clicking noises as they hit the ground. The ancient chug of my boiler reassures me that I may stay warm as the weather grows cold again. The light is very pale, washing the colour out of everything.

I return to thoughts of the domestic. I must take my library books back and make some soup for my mother. If I were very good, I might tidy the fridge (that cauliflower really does need eating up). It's not revolution and high politics, but it is life, Jim, pretty much as we know it.

 

Pictures of the day are of the morning walk. I set out into the freezing cold with only one glove, stupidly. (No idea where the other one is.) I stumped crossly into the wind, my fingers starting to go numb, thinking I should only stay out for five minutes. The day was dank and dour and there was no pleasure in it. But then the dogs starting having their customary lovely time, and I found some buds and a bit of lichen I liked, and a good song came on the iPod and I sang along, only slightly out of tune, and suddenly there was a point. The wind became bracing instead of angry; I found fascination in seeing how the low light had changed the colours of everything since yesterday. I smelt the coming snow and marvelled at the clarity of the air.

Pale views:

Lichen on tree:

Wall and leaves:

Lovely green:

More washed-out trees:

I love this tree root. It looks like an antediluvian dinosaur's claw:

I am slightly obsessed with this pile of logs. They have been recently cut, and I stare at them each day with as much pleasure as if they were an art installation:

The delicacy of the young tree trunks:

Stone:

My dear old hedge, which got a brutal cutting at the end of last season, as I had let it grow entirely out of hand. Now I think it looks almost like a sculpture:

Harbingers of spring:

The lesson I keep repeating to myself in my head is: even on the dullest, rawest day, there is something beautiful to look at, if only I open my eyes.

And on beauty -

Contemplating the best way to jump over the cattle grid:

I am thinking about it:

And off we go:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair:

I have no time for poetry, I just want a BISCUIT:

Today's hill, in a low sort of mauve. If you look very closely, you can see the tiny black specks in the trees which are a clattering of jackdaws, taking their ease:

One final thought:

I have been thinking lately that my tendency to bang on a bit and dash off on tangents means that these blog posts are often too long. People have busy lives and can't be wading through acres of online prose each day. I resolved to be more pithy. But today, I have given you a brief blog, and my irrational feeling is that somehow I have short-changed you.

This is odd, since many of the blogs I love the most are composed of nothing more than two or three lines and a photograph. It also interests me that I have an idea that there is a right or a wrong. (I know I have spoken of this before, but it is an enduring idea as I wrestle with an entirely new medium.)

I love doing this blog, and I do it for pure pleasure. I have also found that it is a good discipline for writing. Yet somewhere, in the back of my mind, is always the idea that there is some mysterious gold standard to which I should aspire. (At this point, my sister would laugh her head off and say, yes yes, that damn perfectionism which we have both inherited. It does not matter how many psychology books one reads or shrinks one sees, one can never quite shrug off that perfection genie.)

And now I must go and check on the soup.

PS. Of course the great irony is that by the time I finished musing on the brevity of this post, it was not brief at all, but the usual rambly tangle of thoughts. Perhaps that is the point of the whole shooting match: not diamond-sharp coherence, but entirely human ramble.

Or, not.

Bonus Post

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A quite extraordinarily articulate young man:

 

His mothers must be very proud.

Sitting and watching

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is a strange aspect to living in a calm, peaceful part of the country while the world goes crazy. I am surrounded by hills and trees and grass. Each day, I take the dogs out and gaze at the moss and the lichen and the new buds starting on the bare branches, with their promise of spring. I think vaguely of the new planting I would like to do, and try to remember that I must order some compost. I make coffee and think about the book. Then I write some of the book. (911 words today, to be precise.) Outside, everything is still and unchanging. I am conscious of the thread of history than runs through the trees. Some of the yews in the old walled garden would have been planted when Charles II was a boy.

Then, through the miracle of the internets, bringing the world to my distant door, I can see all the news. I check the papers and the blogs and have a look at Twitter. There is a cyclone heading for Queensland, as if they had not had enough natural disaster. Young men are setting themselves on fire in Algeria. A day of rage is being planned in Damascus. The ruler of Yemen has bowed to street protest and declared he will step down in 2013. In Jordan, an oddly under-reported street protest has been going on for three weeks, leading to the king dismissing the prime minister and his entire cabinet.

Meanwhile, the older niece and I laugh a lot as we watch our dogs take the first swim of the season in the burn.

I'm not making any particular sort of point with this. It's just an oddity of life. Turmoil out there; water dogs here. Although, along with my intense appreciation of electricity, and opposable thumbs, and central heating, and my ability to type, it does remind me not to take one single thing for granted.

Now for the pictures. It was a bit of a gloomy brown old day today. The lighting director was having a day off. So I had to stare hard for the beauty. I appear to have found it mostly in tree trunks.

The most majestic of the Wellingtonias, which is, as you can probably tell, a grande dame of the Edwardian era:

A knobbly old lime:

Not sure what this one is, but I love its great elephant foot, with the dogwood and beech hedge in the background:

A pair of elegant beeches:

A mixed stand:

I sometimes think that wood is the most miraculous material the natural world ever produced. Here are two very different close-ups of its wonders:

Even though it was a drack old day, there was still some singing colour in the views:

Closer up, the colours were more magical still. There was the pale gloriousness of delicate branches with lichen:

And the defiant amber of the little beech:

Down by the burn, the dogwood was gaudy and unrepentant:

Off went the dogs:

Many things to sniff:

Pigeon taking guard behind a tree:

Duchess nobly gazing from the rise:

Having a small rest:

Older niece's dog in the burn. That expression on her face is her 'please please please throw me a stick' look:

I am very, very serious, so do not think about messing with me:

I would also be serious, except for the fact that I have a stray piece of straw hanging out of my mouth:

And today's hill, alone and palely loitering:

Disaster

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Oh I was going to do a most excellent rant today. I have been storing it up in my mind, and today was the day. It was going to be about sexism and feminism and hypocrisy and misogyny. I was going to let loose, and gallop across the polemical prairie on my very own untamed bronco.

Then everything went wrong. I could not sleep last night, one of those episodes of crazed insomnia that hits me sometimes when my monkey mind is monkeying about all over the shop. I woke rather late, and felt slightly crazed. I'll make some good vegetable soup, I thought, to anchor me before I gather myself and settle down to work.

This was a good plan. There is nothing like the making of a wholesome soup to calm the fretful mind. I chopped and peeled and pared and stirred, and felt some sanity trickle back. Then I called my sister, for an extra sanity break. It turned out she had exactly the same monkeyish mind yesterday, so we compared notes, shouted with laughter at our own idiocies, reassured each other that we were not alone in the farther shores of irrational thought, did a bit of sisterly teasing, and threw the love at each other, until we felt calm again.

So that was fine. Then the dogs started barking at the door. The oil man has still not arrived, so I have holed myself up in the study with one tiny blow heater, in an attempt to keep warm. The dogs seemed to want the door open. 'Bloody hell, what is it?' I said, slightly impatient. I opened the door, to the smell of black smoke. Panic stations. I rushed to the kitchen, to find that the glorious, wholesome, made with love soup had not enough water in it and had boiled dry and burnt to cinders. This is the kind of thing that flaky women in films do, not real life femmes serieuses like me. There was a hideous smell, and all my dearly chopped parsnips and celery and carrots and onions were charred to hell and back.

It was a tiny thing. It's really not the end of the world. But what with the freezing cold and the lack of sleep it felt overwhelming. I wanted to cry like a girl. Instead, I made stupid amounts of coffee, put some Mozart on very loud, and wrote 1032 words of my book, because I needed to chalk up some achievement on this day.

Now I am cold (I have to keep turning the heater off, because I can almost see the electric bill ticking up in my mind), still quite cross, manic from too much caffeine, and  regretting the waste of good food. Which is why there is no rant today.

I do have one final, slightly positive thought. And that is that the amazingly clever dogs did save my kitchen from conflagration. If they had not smelt the burning with their brilliant doggy noses, and started barking and whining, who knows what disaster might have happened? I may be in a perfect heap of flakiness today, but at least I have genius fire dogs.

And, if I am on a silver lining kick, I must not ignore the fact that the sun was shining, which means that there are lots and lots of photographs of the miraculous winter light.

Here it is, glittering through the trees, casting everything in a diffused glow of loveliness:

Dappling over the massed trunks:

Illuminating a mossy stump:

Tumbling over the grassy slope:

I think it makes the ladyships look as if they are in a film with a really great lighting director:

The good news is that somebody found a properly big stick:

Look of intense concentration is because she is trying to work out  how to get it over the cattle grid. Before I could come and help, she just leapt over the thing, stick and all. Then she lay down in the grass to have a damn good chew at it:

More light and trees and moss and logs:

And of course the tiny buds and leaves were dazzling in the sun:

I know I give you an awful lot of these, but I love the way they come out. Something happens to the colours when one gets in close, and I think the blurred backgrounds always look rather wonderful. Also, the whole bud thing reminds me that spring will, one day, come.

Mandatory beauty shots:

And two hills today - one panorama, and one up close:

PS. Just as I finished writing this, THE OIL MAN ARRIVED. It is tea-time, and I had quite given up on him. He was a charming smiling gentleman, although he did look a bit surprised when I greeted him as if he were the Prussians pitching up just in time to save Wellington at Waterloo. (I know that everyone says the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but I still say that if it were not for Blucher the entire course of European history might be very different.) Anyway, I am afraid to say that I gushed. Still, he seemed to take it in his stride. And now I shall be warm again. I might even make some more vegetable soup.