Someone on the radio is talking about how numbers nowadays are stored on electronic devices especially telephones so that we no longer have to remember them. Are we likely to lose our capacity to remember them because we no longer have to? Probably not. It occurs to me that instead of remembering telephone numbers we now have to remember lists of access codes, pin numbers and passwords, which is almost if not equally exacting.
The humming in the garden comes this fine morning from the cistus which is covered in bees. This murmur of bees is counterpointed by the buzzing of electric saws on the building site next to the vegetable garden. To see and hear so many bees when the population is said to be declining is a hopeful sign that plant life may yet survive. Bees rather than saws. But the occasional sound of sawing conveys a similar and not unpleasant sense of busy-ness.
4 comments:
This noble if small stretch of water deserves a rather more evocative designation than pond. But then I tried to dream up some alternative and found it harder than I imagined. Is mere too big? Pool has a resonance. Tarn suggests a wilder setting.
The only references I have to hand at the moment are French. Etang covers a wide range of areas including some vast watery agglomerations near the port of Arcachon which I used in Risen On Wings (now Out Of Arizona). However the definition is discouraging: Etendue d'eau stagnante plus petite qu'un lac.
Perhaps a bit of imagination ending with the suffix "-water" would work. But my mind is concerned with madness and obsession à cause du roman. (5000 words-plus words completed.)
Well, this is embarrassing! I tried to delete a duplicate of my comment, only to have everything disappear.
I subscribe to a blog by a fellow in Vashon, Washington, an island near Seattle. His last three posts were about his hive of bees which swarmed then split recently. When I read your post, I thought you might enjoy reading Tom's posts about his bee adventures. The URL is www.tallcloverfarm.com. I think you might enjoy his videos of them, as well.
Crow Blogger has this unexplained habit of duplicting. Often it corrects itself. But how it works I will never know. In the mean time I will soon be off to read about bees. I have recently begun to realise how importan they are. Thank you for persevering with Blogger.
Robbie "Lake" seemed pretentious. It is a large pond but would be a very small lake. Madness and obsession sound promising. Yeats again as so often happens with me comes to mind as a promising source of inspiration particularly for those of advancing years:
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Shuld starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind.
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well
And when they know what old books tell,
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
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