Life After Archie

Apparently there will be Noctilucent Clouds visible over Britain all this week which I suppose is quite exciting though obviously I have to stay awake long enough to see them and hope that the permanent greyness disperses as well. None of which is as wonderful as seeing the Horseshoe Vortex cloud that was in the sky as I drove home the other week.



It was indeed fleeting and because I did not have my camera (and couldn't have used it anyway officer) I am sure that bagging it in my Cloud Collector's Handbook would not be allowed.

We have been enjoying Rev on BBC2, a sitcom that has the basic premise of The Vicar of Dibley only not with a woman vicar and not in a charming country parish. And yet for all that lack of cosy teatime goodness it leaves a much warmer feeling. It seems that the struggle to do the right thing in the face of real urban issues makes for better people than the bucolic glow of Dibley. I'm not sure it's gone down too well with the standard C of E old-guard but we like it.

A Day for Maintenance

A Phoenix in the sky above the Country Park (Formerly known as The Tip). As the local representative of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I have to post such views though always with the rationalist rider that any perceived shape in the sky is just a coincidence of water vapour and wind.



Friends loaned us a DVD of The Riddle of the Sands yesterday, the title of which has always put me off in that I imagined it as some desert-based swashbuckler in the style of Rider Haggard. It turns out to be the mould from which all later early 20th century espionage novels sprung. The Thirty-Nine Steps is very similar and from ten years later. A very sparse film it is too, though I'm not sure how much of that comes from the book. I'd just about heard of Erskine Childers who wrote it but the usual Wiki scan shows him to be quite a character, his demise at the hands of the raggle-taggle administration of the early Free State after being part of the complexities involving Ireland at that time. His son eventually became the fourth Irish President and his Granddaughter Nessa is an MEP. Cracking plot though.

PS. Late and intersting information regarding the yachts from the book.

Cloud Sequence

Nimbostratus

Over the far bridge,
seconded to the guardian of flood and field,
leans my ghost,
the white blur of my own mind,
escaped and lost to me,
brought into the real world with language,
so detached from the wordlessness,
that came to me on previous nights,

A damp and oil-skinned invention,
sharp and fluent, higher than the sun, the stars,
and all astronomy.
Joined to the sky and clouds,
with understanding,
bringing rain with her unknowing,
a coincidental god of rainfall,
a one-way function of the turning world.

No dead and empty space,
marks random pointing of the skies,
It is a filled void,
a climb defined with homogeneous flow,
and dank un-hindered cataracts,
in slow-pans to the ground,
that catch the petty ends of us,
and small complaint.

Glass-Steagall-Milgram

I used to stare up into the sky quite a lot. Sometimes it was for a reason - an eclipse or high plane but sometimes it was just to look at the clouds.