Books Do Furnish A Room

Zebra crossing

I know there are some readers who are practical and creative people, and I thought you might like a look at my new rug, a proud acquisition from Namibia.  These rugs are woven by native people to a very high standard, from the wool of the karakul sheep - bizarrely, I believe this is an Afghan breed - incorporating motifs from traditional life and the natural world around them.  It feels quite physical and nubbly, and I particualrly like the asymmetry, the way the zebra motif is not quite central in the rug.  I bought it without having a home for it, as it's three foot by about eight, but it found its own place on a blue-green carpet in one of the upstairs rooms (displacing another rug, which started a musical chairs not yet resolved!).

When I got back to the UK, I took this through the red channel and paid duty - much to the apparent surprise of the officer on duty.  The last picture is perversely setting the long lines of the rug at an angle, just for fun: it wouldn't work on the floor, but I think this quite effective.  I expect Cornflower to start knitting her own version shortly!  By the way, I saw lots of real zebras, too.

Swans' down

A visual post today, of three contrasting textures.  I like the oppositions: small - large; part - whole; white - black; soft - hard; curve - lines.

In memoriam Kate

About 10 days ago, a group of friends went to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire to remember a friend who had died a year before.  It was inexpressibly sad when she died, but this occasion was also warm and affectionate, with friends from different parts of her life coming together in places which had meant much to her.  We all had dinner together, and climbed a local hill called Beamsley Beacon.  These photographs are not sad, but take interest and joy in life, which I am positive is what she would have wanted us to do.

I stayed in Skipton, where I admired the fine church, including these unusual windows..

.. and this marvellously named solicitors.  It sounds like a phrase meaning a hard fought dispute to me, as in "we never got on well, but we had a real savage crangle over the right of way".

Up on the moor, we could admire the bracken croziers, the heather, the vibrant moss and lichen - tiny but determinedly alive in every crack of stone - and finally, the glorious open view.

Quotidian

A new list in the right hand column from today, Quotidian, a rough pun on quotation and daily, in which I plan to put a word or quotation of the day (or such other period as I wish!) - things which are fun but which don't deserve a full post.

Today's, the first, is from John Buchan's The Free Fishers, which I have just finished.  It's a romantic Scottish adventure which is a bit weak in the plot, certainy not the equal of the Hannay books by the same author, though fun enough in its way.  But there are lots of great Scots words, of which this is one.  Translation, anyone?

Flowers of Scotland

No, not that dreadful tune!  Mr Cornflower came to stay earlier this week, straight from Auld Reekie.  At first, I was disappointed, as flowers did not spring from the pavement where his feet had trod, and epigrams did not crystallise from the air around his brow.  But he came laden with books, one literally about flowers, and both figuratively flowers of Scotland.

First, there was a kind gift of Flora Celtica, an interesting account of "plants and people in Scotland"; slightly more informal than Flora Britannica, but rather wider ranging in its account of traditional uses of plants, and covering the whole gamut, including seaweeds.  Great fun! The cover shows the Burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia, which they call 'the white rose of Scotland', although it grows freely across all of Britain ("in dry sandy places near the sea, or calcareous areas inland" says Flora Britannica - not habitats I associate much with Scotland, I confess).  There is excellent material on traditional trees and their uses, and the types and names (cuddie, scoo, or maun, for example) of woven baskets, to pick just two fascinating areas.

And then there were Alice Howlett's poems, seen here with books by her publisher and the author from whom she draws her title.  Don't you love the Tusitala edition, with its South Seas name, its gold page edges, and its intense respectability?  A really fine book to read about Stevenson in the South Seas is Alberto Manguel's dark and  beautiful Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.

Alice's poetry has impressed me since I read Edinburgh (New Town) a year or so ago  - here are a few lines:

I survived the winter on a cache of photographs from July,
when months of rain had grown the gardens wild, making
the Dean Valley an emerald rift in the basking city,
shoals of light alive in the canopies of silver birch and lime.

The pictures are dappled with glare. Light flows
white-hot between leaves, suffuses like honey,
plays upon greenery in thousands of shades,
adorns with sequins the towering willows.

I kept that day, pinned it above my desk to remind me.
Autumn marched through and swept out, pulling
winter down on our heads as it left. Edinburgh turned her colours,
faded to sedate grey, but blazed still at late afternoon.

This, and the other poems in the book, are most accomplished, and I recommend them to you - and remember her name, you'll be hearing it again, I've no doubt.

Prices

A couple of things brought prices to my attention recently.  The first was a London Library book, published in 1840 (more anon), but I don't know when this extract from the rules was pasted in:

Needless to say, you won't get away with an annual subscription of £3.15 (a translation I offer for those of my readers who didn't recognise the currency), nor can you go dancing for the afternoon at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse for "half a crown" or 12.5 pence, as this advertisement at the tube station suggests!

Finally, Price's was the name of my school, famous for men's hockey and its unusual crest, a lion rampant but facing back over its shoulder, not forward.  Mr Cornflower will remember it well.