Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Tomato, clothes and lamp posts

 
How voluptuous is the tomato! No wonder that on its arrival in Europe from South America, apart from being treated with initial suspicion,  it was given names like poma amorispomme d'amour and pomodoro. The Italian for tomato remains pomodoro

 I have mixed feelings about clothes.  Their purpose is not always clear cut and is wide ranging. Essentially they are  to provide: ceremony, warmth, sexual titillation,  pockets, and a means of hiding areas of the body not usually exposed to public scrutiny.  Sometimes,  prompted by an inner dandy, I find myself taking  pleasure in them. Dressing up is fun.  And why not? Clothes are one of the good things of life. On the other hand, day to day, I don't want to have to change  clothes to work in the garden or sit at the computer or paint the ceiling, go fishing or  climb a rock face. Tradition and practical considerations, I know, require different clothes for different occasions. But how good it would be to have an all purpose, self-washing, self-mending garment, like a skin or hide, which you could hop in and out of once or twice a day!

I watch a  pigeon arrive on  on a lamp post. The lamp post swings. It may be  in my imagination but I seem to remember that when Vivian Leigh,  steadies herself  against a lamp post after careering down some steps in Gone with the Wind, it too swings. I used to think that it must have been a studio lamp post of the frailest kind. But now I wonder whether it may not be in the nature of lamp posts to  swing and sway like saplings in a high wind.



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