Wool-gathering

Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs; can't knit a book review without gathering wool.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

On weather, fear and reading

The Weatherpixie in the sidebar there, at this moment anyway, is telling me that at Adelaide Airport, 20 minutes south of here, there is currently a totally clear blue sky and the sun is shining brightly with his whole face. Yet chez moi all is dark and gloomy both inside and out. Thunder rumbles roll past in waves. Whistling and pattering, not unlike the whistling and pattering in the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, is coming from outside, and I do so hope it's just the irritating wind and the small rain. It's the sort of day that makes you think you should go straight back to bed and stay there, but if I did that I'd have to finish reading my current bedside book, the new Val McDermid, and that's much much scarier than any scary weather.

My other fear is that the next book in that pile, the new Kathy Reichs (bedtime reading is strictly non-work-related), is going to continue the downward slide that began two or three books in from her debut when her publishers (or so I surmise; maybe her agent too) first told her to dumb down the science, bland out the prose and ramp up the lerve story, which is getting INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS. It's probably too much to think she might have defied them, at this level of success, and write however she damn pleases, the way she did when she first started. But we live in hope.

Me and Leonard Bast, we're like *that*

For those of you who may not remember Leonard Bast, he is the failed aspirational with whose shabby umbrella the heedless Helena Bonham Carter Helen Schlegel makes away from the Beethoven concert in Howards End (both the film and the book and yes, no apostrophe there, can't think why), who later fathers Helen's baby in a peculiarly bloodless and as it were offstage encounter*, and who comes to a highly symbolic end when a Wilcox** attacks him with the flat of a decorative ceremonial sword, whereupon he has a heart attack and grabs a bookcase to stop himself falling, and the bookcase falls on him and showers him with books.

Which is to say, he is hit in the head by an out-of-control swarm of the books he so loves, and his heart fails him. And I know exactly how he felt.

Nonetheless, I have been out into the garden for long enough to report, on this second day of Spring,


the following eruption of yellow, white, and yellow-and-white things:

Banksia roses
Climbing white roses
Daisies
Freesias
Honey-eaters' chests
Jasmine
Lime blossom
Lemon blossom
Lemons
Nasturtiums





* Later ridiculed by Katherine Mansfield, who concluded that the baby had been fathered by the umbrella.

** The pragmatic, business-minded 'telegrams and anger' and 'panic and emptiness' family, later recalled in the name of Vic Wilcox in David Lodge's 1986 (?) novel Nice Work, which, like some of Margaret Drabble's from that period, recalls and formally echoes the narrative mode, characters and concerns of the 19th century 'condition of England' novel, in which the urbane, cosmopolitan, well-off South of England is contrasted with the struggling industrial North.

Even now, just occasionally, I hear my mother's voice

"If you write a thousand words today, you'll feel a thousand words less desperate and put-upon tomorrow."

'A fine and fancy ramble to the zoo ...'

He thought a little and then said:

　　`I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally ...'

-- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh


Back in my days as an academic, my office doorway would be darkened now and then by a student at the end of his or her tether, stressed beyond endurance by -- most usually -- some combination of study pressures and personal life, complicated occasionally but more frequently as the 1990s wore on by a third source of strain, job pressure. Sometimes it would be even worse, some nightmare scenario involving an eating disorder or triggered memories of childhood sexual abuse or even mortal illness, and in those cases I'd send the students straight to counselling, but for common or garden mental exhaustion or depression or strain I'd send them, as per Samuel Butler's Mr Pontifex, to the Zoo.

I don't know how many of them went. Only one actually reported back to say she'd done what I suggested and it'd worked a treat, but, as so often in teaching, one was enough.

And I was thinking last week that I needed a break myself and that furthermore I'd not been to the zoo since I bought a digital camera, and then the orang-utan (see previous post) made her inventive bid for freedom yesterday




and rain was forecast for tomorrow, so I took the afternoon off to walk round Adelaide's beautiful zoo on a brief but glorious autumn afternoon.






Some of my fellow-creatures were just hanging around in the sun.






Some were relaxed;






others, not so much.






The hippo was sulking,






and the ring-tailed lemurs were showing off.






I don't know whether it was because I was planning a blog post as I strolled about taking pictures, but for some reason the zoo kept reminding me of the blogosphere.






Every time I go there, the Adelaide Zoo has improved yet again in this respect: there are now beautiful little settings, calming and welcoming, at almost every turn in every path.





On the walk back to the car I noticed a drama unfolding in the distance, as this picnicking couple on the riverbank remained oblivious to the fact that they were being staked out and stalked:





Even when the sneak thief was practically on top of them, they still remained unaware:





Sprung at last. I could almost hear the screams from the road.