Three wise Munchs
Dec. 20th, 2020 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashlymeStuff from the last week:
My sleep patterns basically run to Morse code sometimes, and they probably spell out four letter words. It short-circuited my brain midweek, and I had a few ugly nights. It didn't help that I had to block someone for persistently misgendering me; I'm neither a "nice bloke" or anyone's "good boy". Well, I'll take the nice bit. Anything else, no thank you.
Two walks this week with separate friends, both centring on the Harborne Walkway, which is basically a mile and a bit of former railway line, paved over and used as a green walk. The embankments are still tree-lined: oak, silver birch, and elder which had a lot of jelly ear fungus (Auricularia auricula-judae) growing on it - it's meant to be good in soups but I'm too wary to forage fungus. Bats are meant to roost in the old tunnels. Harborne itself is a fairly posh suburb of the city; we found the oddest mural on an Edwardian house, done in grey stone or concrete: three baldheaded Munch-ish figures doing the "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" pose. They could have come straight off the cover of In The Court of the Crimson King. God knows what it was doing there. A good Oxfam bookshop on the high street. I netted a reprint of Hound of the Baskervilles with the original Paget Illustrations, a book on foxes (considering I'm besotted by them it's a surprise this is only second volume on the vulpine I have!), Richard Mabey on beech trees, and "a history of listening" that draws on ghost and weird stories for inspiration. Among other things.
And also some stamps. I was reunited with the stamp albums I owned during the eighties. I don't know if you can have a Proustian moment with these things; but I remembered so many of the colours and designs. Even the way certain engravings felt under my thumb. The old Stanley Gibbons catalogues gave me a love of colour. It didn't matter that the stamps were usually illustrated in black and white; I'd pore over the list of hues and try and match them to the illustrations. (Among them was a Twenties Australian issue described as "golden scarlet", which sounded to me then - and now, to be honest - heraldic, mythical, numinous. As much a grail or cryptid as a colour.)
My dad got the first part of his vaccination Wednesday, and apart from a brief ache in the shoulder, is fine. I saw McKellen's Tweet about his own jab the next day. So many anti-vaxx fools on that thread. But I couldn't be bothered to engage with them. I wish there was a vaccination against pig-headed stupidity,
Currently reading John Grindrod's book on the Green Belt, Outskirts. He wrote the excellent book on postwar town planning Concretopia - don't be fooled into thinking it's a dry/dull read. Far from it; it's humane and entertaining and often downright funny. Same with Outskirts. This is as much memoir as history and it has a lot of resonance for me; we're both working-class queer people who grew up in the seventies Green Belt.
My sleep patterns basically run to Morse code sometimes, and they probably spell out four letter words. It short-circuited my brain midweek, and I had a few ugly nights. It didn't help that I had to block someone for persistently misgendering me; I'm neither a "nice bloke" or anyone's "good boy". Well, I'll take the nice bit. Anything else, no thank you.
Two walks this week with separate friends, both centring on the Harborne Walkway, which is basically a mile and a bit of former railway line, paved over and used as a green walk. The embankments are still tree-lined: oak, silver birch, and elder which had a lot of jelly ear fungus (Auricularia auricula-judae) growing on it - it's meant to be good in soups but I'm too wary to forage fungus. Bats are meant to roost in the old tunnels. Harborne itself is a fairly posh suburb of the city; we found the oddest mural on an Edwardian house, done in grey stone or concrete: three baldheaded Munch-ish figures doing the "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" pose. They could have come straight off the cover of In The Court of the Crimson King. God knows what it was doing there. A good Oxfam bookshop on the high street. I netted a reprint of Hound of the Baskervilles with the original Paget Illustrations, a book on foxes (considering I'm besotted by them it's a surprise this is only second volume on the vulpine I have!), Richard Mabey on beech trees, and "a history of listening" that draws on ghost and weird stories for inspiration. Among other things.
And also some stamps. I was reunited with the stamp albums I owned during the eighties. I don't know if you can have a Proustian moment with these things; but I remembered so many of the colours and designs. Even the way certain engravings felt under my thumb. The old Stanley Gibbons catalogues gave me a love of colour. It didn't matter that the stamps were usually illustrated in black and white; I'd pore over the list of hues and try and match them to the illustrations. (Among them was a Twenties Australian issue described as "golden scarlet", which sounded to me then - and now, to be honest - heraldic, mythical, numinous. As much a grail or cryptid as a colour.)
My dad got the first part of his vaccination Wednesday, and apart from a brief ache in the shoulder, is fine. I saw McKellen's Tweet about his own jab the next day. So many anti-vaxx fools on that thread. But I couldn't be bothered to engage with them. I wish there was a vaccination against pig-headed stupidity,
Currently reading John Grindrod's book on the Green Belt, Outskirts. He wrote the excellent book on postwar town planning Concretopia - don't be fooled into thinking it's a dry/dull read. Far from it; it's humane and entertaining and often downright funny. Same with Outskirts. This is as much memoir as history and it has a lot of resonance for me; we're both working-class queer people who grew up in the seventies Green Belt.