St Jude Dog

Conversation overheard in a Glastonbury charity shop yesterday between a woman working behind the desk and a lingering female customer:

(As predictably British as ever, the conversation is about the wake of storm St Jude, three days after its unassuming wave of disaster tickled our coastlines)

Lingering Customer: "I had a dog called Jude... you know, named after the song 'Hey Jude'
Woman behind counter: "Oh, lovely."
LC: "She died last year, actually on St Jude's day. The feast day.
WBC: Oh, right.
LC: "Yes, it was terrible actually. She'd been ill for a while and I thought it was her time to go. I nursed her on my own, knew she was giving up. I was on my own and I had to make that decision.
WBC: Oh, oh dear.
LC: "I took her into the vets, the vet agreed to put her down. But it wasn't until this year, with the storm, and it being named after St Jude...that I realised my Jude had been put down on St Jude's day last year.
WBC: Oh right.
LC: "And it makes me think. Perhaps, if someone else, if my husband had been with me. At home, when I thought it was Jude's time to go - maybe he'd have said, no, it's not her time. She'll pull through."
WBC is silent, looks on awkwardly
LC: But it's funny how the storm last week was called St Jude. Makes me think it's somehow making me remind myself about my dog Jude - seeing how the stormed happened on the same day that Jude died last year...


Made me chuckle a bit and think how funny it is when people try to sort of free-style associate stories with current affairs and weather patterns...

Scurge of the press

Being a Bristol resident I was obviously aware of the Jo Yates story as it unraveled a few winters ago, and reading the vilified articles in the press about Chris Jeffries, landlord and for a time, suspected murderer of his tenant Jo.

The images showed a wild-haired man, looking somewhat wild and disheveled. Small-minded people reading the tabloids would have no doubt made assumptions about Jeffries. But the derogatory and hurtful words and misleading images of Jeffries used in the press at the time have no doubt caused his friends and family much suffering and stress before the full press liable story was exposed.

Until recently, I wasn't aware that Chris Jeffries is a member of the same gym as me - has been probably for longer than the three years I've been going - yet it didn't strike me that this was the man from that press frenzy, even though we've been in the gym at the same time probably a hundred times.

It was the gym manager who first alerted me to him - only because we got on to the subject of documentaries and he mentioned that a certain major broadcaster was soon to be filming in the gym as part of a documentary about Chris Jeffries and his ordeal with the press and the police - clearing his name and appealing for compensation for his treatment while being under suspicion for the Jo Yates case.

That image of the wild haired-man did stuck in my mind, and sure enough I saw a man in the gym (a few days after my conversation with the manager) with similar facial features - but now with very short, dark hair around the temples. A very slight and quiet man, who moves much more gracefully through the apparatus than any of the other men members.

Ah ha, I thought, that's Chris Jeffries. I wonder if the stress he's been through, (wether inadvertently or directly through that derogatory image and words used in the press) caused him to change his image?

Either way, I was intrigued to see him - to think about everything he must have been through over the last few years - all that unnecessary pain and anguish caused by a few vindictive, shallow-minded and callous editors. I'm happy to hear that he's at least received damages from eight newspapers who reported on the case. I hope he's finding peace now - I'll look forward to seeing the programme.

This article summarizes Jeffries' ordeal very well:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/22eac290-eee2-11e0-959a-00144feab49a.html#axzz2j9Dg9rc9

      

If you go down to the woods today...

Exactly what fairy tales are made of. I could imagine the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland reclining on one of these. There were many others but this one was the most impressive as it was (as yet) untouched/un-munched. 

Such stark whiteness
pencil sharpener furled
embezzled in delicate lamb-soft moss

A twisted woodland fit for a Tim Burton movie

A quiet and special moment caught as the sun came through and made the earth warm after a torrential two-hour downpour. Could double for dawn mist - deceptively mysterious. 

Otherworldly light on an autumnal afternoon

A line of whipped clouds on the horizon at Porlock Weir

An endless wave of pebbles

Ships all at land

The pomp and ceremony of a Regatta circa 1908, Porlock Weir - a tradition that I hope has stood the test of time

Thank you Huxley

Antic Hay

I'm enjoying a bit of a reading renaissance. 

Maybe it's the turning of the seasons that breaths an instinct within me to snuggle down, in a comfy corner and disappear into someone else's life. It's about a book a week - or more accurately one a weekend at the moment.

I learnt to be a very speedy reader back in the days when devouring three/four books a week was standard procedure for keeping-up in BA English(with Media) classes. Then there was a time when 'the career' took over and books would be dipped into/skimmed/read but not consumed or unintentionally deserted for months at a time, so passages would be re-read over and over accidentally with only the vaguest feeling of deja vu. 

The follow up to 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls', which title evades me, is case in point - all I remember is that it concentrated heavily on the arrogant and fastidious early career of Quentin Tarantino, but was no way as engaging or memorable as 'Easy Riders' overview of the explosive arthouse scene in Hollywood during the 60s and 70s - before cinema got homogenized.

I really recommend devoting yourself to a book over a weekend. You're in absolutely no danger of forgetting characters, rereading chapters or loosing your page/makeshift bookmark. 

What I enjoyed more about consistently chugging through 'Antic Hay' by Aldous Huxley in less than 70 hours was the joy of finding new words and hunting down their definitions (somewhat lazily on my android). Maybe my vocab has diminished, or maybe it's just Huxley's superior possession of the English language but either way - there are some BIG FAT BUTTERY words in 'Antic Hay' and that's inspiring to me.

Here's some delicious, delectable Huxley-plucked words that I ear-marked because they're definitely worth trying to slip into conversation:

*Gormandizer = Someone who eats gluttonously; gorging

*Rabelaisian = Display of bawdy/earthy/course humor (Ref. to Francois Rabelais, a major French Renaissance writer of satire and bawdy jokes)

*Callipygous = Having beautifully proportioned buttocks

*Hobbledehoy = A clumsy or awkward youth

My favourite is hobbledehoy - mainly because of the way it makes your mouth feel quite awkward while saying it.