(no subject)
1. Have a go at this. You have to guess the most common words in English. It's surprisingly tricky....I scored 51, so let me know if you kick my ass, or, indeed, arse. I'll give you a clue: "dendrochronology" is NOT one of them. I know!
2. The most expensive book I've ever bought arrived this morning. It's the Folio Society deluxe limited edition of Les Misérables, which would probably make
naoskopipositively faint with delight. I am a little embarrassed about my relationship with this story, because I have never actually read the book and my knowledge of it is based only on the fact that I was weirdly obsessed with the musical when I was younger. I think I've seen it about eight times. Hopefully once I've read the novel I'll be able to view the stage production with a little more critical distance than my current feeling of thisisthegreateststoryever!
3. At the weekend we finally had a bit of decent weather. Hannah and I celebrated by going on a long walk in the countryside around Fiskerton. It was hot and muggy, and the air was full of red admirals and thunderbugs; the fields stretched out around us, full alternately of uncut wheat and bored, lumbering cows. A heron flapped over the river. In the distance you could make out bright yellow fields of rape, "like a dropped tropical skirt on the proper Wolds", in the words of a recent poet whose name I've forgotten.
The path we found was overgrown with mallow and nettles and things I couldn't identify. We passed through a small copse of lime trees which, against all appearences, is in fact one of the last remnants left in Britain of the Wildwood which used to cover all of Western Europe. A farmhouse on the edge of Fiskerton Moor had a huge hand-painted sign at its gate which read DANGER LIVE SNAKES. I was so curious I found the farmer and asked him if it was serious. Indeed it was. Adders have become so numerous round there that it's become a bit of a hazard; he rolled his arm up and showed me the marks of his last bite. "Still, we don't get many rats nowagates," he mused.
4. One of the reasons I love Lincolnshire is that, even by the standards of the rest of the country, it is incredibly old. The path we were following is called the Viking Way, and it was used by the Danes to get between the network of mediaeval abbeys which ran up through this part of the fenland. Our local council is East Lindsey; the name is all that remains of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey which covered this area, and about which virtually nothing is known. At the top of our road is Newport Arch, put up by the Romans before Old English even existed, when the Angles and Saxons were still milling around in Jutland thinking about maybe building a couple of boats.
The Romans called Lincoln Lindum Colonia. The lind- is a Brythonic word meaning "pool", showing that before the legions had bothered marching so far west, there were Celts living here, picking endless woad and failing to develop any lasting architecture. For part of our walk we were following the course of the River Witham, and "witham" is an incredibly ancient name. It predates even the Celts, and goes back to the most ancient stratum of European language, spoken by whichever strange men were walking this way in the second millennium BC. It was one of those walks, where you look out over the countryside and back down the centuries.
2. The most expensive book I've ever bought arrived this morning. It's the Folio Society deluxe limited edition of Les Misérables, which would probably make
naoskopipositively faint with delight. I am a little embarrassed about my relationship with this story, because I have never actually read the book and my knowledge of it is based only on the fact that I was weirdly obsessed with the musical when I was younger. I think I've seen it about eight times. Hopefully once I've read the novel I'll be able to view the stage production with a little more critical distance than my current feeling of thisisthegreateststoryever!
3. At the weekend we finally had a bit of decent weather. Hannah and I celebrated by going on a long walk in the countryside around Fiskerton. It was hot and muggy, and the air was full of red admirals and thunderbugs; the fields stretched out around us, full alternately of uncut wheat and bored, lumbering cows. A heron flapped over the river. In the distance you could make out bright yellow fields of rape, "like a dropped tropical skirt on the proper Wolds", in the words of a recent poet whose name I've forgotten.
The path we found was overgrown with mallow and nettles and things I couldn't identify. We passed through a small copse of lime trees which, against all appearences, is in fact one of the last remnants left in Britain of the Wildwood which used to cover all of Western Europe. A farmhouse on the edge of Fiskerton Moor had a huge hand-painted sign at its gate which read DANGER LIVE SNAKES. I was so curious I found the farmer and asked him if it was serious. Indeed it was. Adders have become so numerous round there that it's become a bit of a hazard; he rolled his arm up and showed me the marks of his last bite. "Still, we don't get many rats nowagates," he mused.
4. One of the reasons I love Lincolnshire is that, even by the standards of the rest of the country, it is incredibly old. The path we were following is called the Viking Way, and it was used by the Danes to get between the network of mediaeval abbeys which ran up through this part of the fenland. Our local council is East Lindsey; the name is all that remains of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey which covered this area, and about which virtually nothing is known. At the top of our road is Newport Arch, put up by the Romans before Old English even existed, when the Angles and Saxons were still milling around in Jutland thinking about maybe building a couple of boats.
The Romans called Lincoln Lindum Colonia. The lind- is a Brythonic word meaning "pool", showing that before the legions had bothered marching so far west, there were Celts living here, picking endless woad and failing to develop any lasting architecture. For part of our walk we were following the course of the River Witham, and "witham" is an incredibly ancient name. It predates even the Celts, and goes back to the most ancient stratum of European language, spoken by whichever strange men were walking this way in the second millennium BC. It was one of those walks, where you look out over the countryside and back down the centuries.