Our opening date is Oct 10th.
It has to be because….
Tom in the The Republic of Mimpi and Lost in Sea of Sand |
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The little row of shops that includes Atticus moves up market with a bakery and a local craft shop and creperie opening soon.
Our opening date is Oct 10th. It has to be because….
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There is a nut tree in the garden at Arnside. It was loaded with delicious hazelnut nuts, or filberts* Until this afternoon.
* Called after Saint Filbert. The most boring saint to be canonised and therefore patron saint of boredom. Arguably St Gertrude of Nivelles is more boring but she is redeemed by being the patron saint of the fear of mice. Her sister Begga was pretty boring too. Perhaps readers have their own nomnation for most boring saint. There seem to be plenty of possible candidates. Squirrels have their own patron saint, Alfonso Santos. I once made a sheep for the Leominster Sheep Festival and from a distance it looked pretty lifelike, so I was interested when I saw this sheep doing its best to look like a stuffed toy. Once again life imitates art. Last weekend I bought a copy of this book, complete with ball and chain, in a car boot sale. At first I thought it was just one of those novelty anthologies but it turned out to be selections from an 1806 work by James Beresford. I had never heard of Beresford before and the book turned out to be one of those delightful curiosities of literature, a little like Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions. And here, thanks to the wonderful Internet Archive, is the full thing for you to read. The grumpiness seems surprisingly modern at times. It was nice to see birds forming an orderly queue at the food bank for desitute birds that hangs outside the kitchen window. Long-tailed tits deserve some award for britishness, those rowdy Indonesian munias would show no such restraint. As I write workmen are drilling into the walls of the Arnside house to install a new damp proof course. They shout to each other in a strange polysyllabic language and play Stockhausen's Greatest Hits on their amplified ipods. The strain of house moving has been getting to Viv lately as you can see from the picture below. Feeling that she needed a break and that it would be good to get out of the house I organised a trip to The Silverdale Spite Wall (see picture below) I had not heard of spite walls, spite houses and spite fences before moving here so thought a close look at our nearest example would be a good idea. And indeed it was. The great thing about this particular wall is that it is brutally unsubtle. Think of all the clever alternatives you could come up with to taunt and annoy your neighbours. So many it is hard to choose a single one. So just go for a massive stone wall. In the end it is such a satisfying choice. Just look at it. The embodyment of nasty meanspiritedness. Brilliant! Before stopping at the Spite Wall we had been on a walk around Sunderland Point organised by the Barrow based group Art Gene who are producing a series of decorated maps covering the whole bay area as a part of a project called Seldom Seen. We got to meet a husband and wife still working the river. The woman is the only female haaf net fisherman (fisherwoman?) in the UK.
You can see her below with the net that she carries across her shoulders and after wading out stands for hours on end in the channels where the fish run. It must be extraordinarily difficult and skillful to capture and kill the salmon with such a heavy and unweildy net as well demanding a good deal of strength and stamina. At first she met resistance from the male fishermen who jealously guarded their craft and in revenge she painted her frame pink decorated with rabbits to annoy them. With the implicit threat to go even further it was enough to silence the most traditional of fishermen! The link states that haaf fishing takes place only on the Solway but it also happens on the Lune and some other places in the UK. |
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