The morning after they were supposed to, the plasterers cameth. We are waiting on the schedule of the painters. I am looking forward to having a ceiling light in our bathroom again, to go with the ceiling around it.
In compensation for the first of two dentist's appointments this week, I had a delightful conversation with an 85-year-old Boston Jewish woman who ran a joke past me which I had last heard in variant form ages ago from my grandfather and took some pictures of the afternoon sunset, which with the weather these days is about the only reason you can tell the axial tilt still works.
( Past the Bear and the Bull and the Charioteer. )
Naturally after listening to the radio adaptation, I re-read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973) for the first time in longer than I had thought. If I had not known as an adult reader that she was friends with Jacquetta Hawkes and J. B. Priestley—
'Let me show you something else,' he said, and he drew Will further through the trees, away from the clearing, until there was an end to the sequence of trunks and mounds of snow. And before him Will saw not the morning's narrow track that he had been expecting, winding its way through an endless forest of ancient crowding trees—but the familiar twentieth-century line of Huntercombe Lane, and beyond it, a little way up the road, a glimpse of his own house. The Manor railings were before them, somewhat shortened by the deep snow; Merriman stepped stiff-legged over, Will crept through his usual gap, and they were standing on the snow-banked road.
Merriman put back his hood again, and lifted his white-maned head as if to sniff the air of this newer century. 'You see, Will,' he said, 'we of the Circle are planted only loosely within Time. The doors are a way through it, in any direction we may choose. For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future . . . But men cannot understand this. Nor will you for a while yet. We can travel through the years in other ways too—one of them was used this morning to bring you back through five centuries or so. That is where you were—in the time of the Royal Forests, that stretched over all the southern part of this land from Southampton Water up to the valley of the Thames here.'
He pointed across the road to the flat horizon, and Will remembered how he had seen the Thames twice that morning: once among its familiar fields, once buried instead among trees.
—that passage might have made me wonder. Encountered as a child, the all-ways road of time just tracked by me.
In compensation for the first of two dentist's appointments this week, I had a delightful conversation with an 85-year-old Boston Jewish woman who ran a joke past me which I had last heard in variant form ages ago from my grandfather and took some pictures of the afternoon sunset, which with the weather these days is about the only reason you can tell the axial tilt still works.
( Past the Bear and the Bull and the Charioteer. )
Naturally after listening to the radio adaptation, I re-read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973) for the first time in longer than I had thought. If I had not known as an adult reader that she was friends with Jacquetta Hawkes and J. B. Priestley—
'Let me show you something else,' he said, and he drew Will further through the trees, away from the clearing, until there was an end to the sequence of trunks and mounds of snow. And before him Will saw not the morning's narrow track that he had been expecting, winding its way through an endless forest of ancient crowding trees—but the familiar twentieth-century line of Huntercombe Lane, and beyond it, a little way up the road, a glimpse of his own house. The Manor railings were before them, somewhat shortened by the deep snow; Merriman stepped stiff-legged over, Will crept through his usual gap, and they were standing on the snow-banked road.
Merriman put back his hood again, and lifted his white-maned head as if to sniff the air of this newer century. 'You see, Will,' he said, 'we of the Circle are planted only loosely within Time. The doors are a way through it, in any direction we may choose. For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future . . . But men cannot understand this. Nor will you for a while yet. We can travel through the years in other ways too—one of them was used this morning to bring you back through five centuries or so. That is where you were—in the time of the Royal Forests, that stretched over all the southern part of this land from Southampton Water up to the valley of the Thames here.'
He pointed across the road to the flat horizon, and Will remembered how he had seen the Thames twice that morning: once among its familiar fields, once buried instead among trees.
—that passage might have made me wonder. Encountered as a child, the all-ways road of time just tracked by me.
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