Rotating, waiting - forever
Apr. 2nd, 2021 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashlymeI got my first vaccination (Astra-Zeneca) Wednesday morning. The jab was done almost without me noticing; I've had worse off bramble or dog-rose thorns. Coming back in the taxi I saw my first muntjac of the year, on the Parkway verge: the tiniest antlers, anxious-looking (you would be, next to that traffic). Hopefully I'll see him grazing from my window before too long. Later in the day I found half a robin's egg and brought back home. I just found out its colour is sometimes called lost egg blue. Forty-eight hours on I've had no side-effects. Touch wood there'll be none coming. I pulled something in my back the other day and that's made for a couple of long tedious nights. It's migrating towards my waist.
Currently reading Nancy Arrowsmith's A Field Guide to the Little People which thankfully isn't twee as the title suggests. Its wights and goblins aren't averse to dropping the odd four-letter word. Some of Arrowsmith's choices don't quite fit. my idea of "fey": - basilisks, satyrs and selkies? Hmm. There seem to be an unusual amount of fey women whose breasts are long enough to throw over their shoulders. I guess that's warm in winter? Assuming it wasn't women who came up with those tales. It's illustrated by Hans Edelmann who did the art direction for Yellow Submarine. I wish Mervyn Peake had been alive and working in the seventies; just imagine what he would have created for this! This passage on English fairies made me shout But what about Arden?*
They are known throughout England, although they are less numerous in the Midlands.
Pfft. Anyway, it's a good book. A paperback of Peake's Shapes and Sounds came through the letterbox yesterday and that's next. The cover illustration's extraordinary, drawn in the Blitz - a mother made of rubble holding a baby to her: "half-masonry, half-pain."
*Yes, I know Midsummer Night's Dream is set in an Athenian wood. But I'm with Angela Carter that it's just a stand-in for Arden.
Currently reading Nancy Arrowsmith's A Field Guide to the Little People which thankfully isn't twee as the title suggests. Its wights and goblins aren't averse to dropping the odd four-letter word. Some of Arrowsmith's choices don't quite fit. my idea of "fey": - basilisks, satyrs and selkies? Hmm. There seem to be an unusual amount of fey women whose breasts are long enough to throw over their shoulders. I guess that's warm in winter? Assuming it wasn't women who came up with those tales. It's illustrated by Hans Edelmann who did the art direction for Yellow Submarine. I wish Mervyn Peake had been alive and working in the seventies; just imagine what he would have created for this! This passage on English fairies made me shout But what about Arden?*
They are known throughout England, although they are less numerous in the Midlands.
Pfft. Anyway, it's a good book. A paperback of Peake's Shapes and Sounds came through the letterbox yesterday and that's next. The cover illustration's extraordinary, drawn in the Blitz - a mother made of rubble holding a baby to her: "half-masonry, half-pain."
*Yes, I know Midsummer Night's Dream is set in an Athenian wood. But I'm with Angela Carter that it's just a stand-in for Arden.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 10:03 pm (UTC)Tiny, plentiful, and hard to find where they fall! A vampire-distractor's best friend. Also they taste nice.
We've also got wild garlic growing aplenty round here, so if there's a bloodsucker apocalypse come on over! Mattie the Vampire Slayer. They do it with botany.
Brilliant.
There's also "robin's pincushion", the gall that only grows on dog-roses. It looks like crimson and green moss. I don't think there's any lore on it but there should be: it looks pretty damned fey to me.
Wow. Yes. I just looked up some pictures. It looks sentient.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 10:21 pm (UTC)God, yes! That doesn't look like the product of wasps.