Sailing to Byzantium

Continuing the poetic theme....I have always wanted to visit Istanbul or Constantinople.... remembering the playground riddles of seventy plus years ago

"Constantinople is a very big word. If you can't spell it you're a very big dunce"

Then, I had no idea where Constantinople was and, even if I had, I had no idea of travelling to it.  It was a place like Timbuktu, or Timbuctoo as I would have spelt it.   A story book city with a long name.

Now, the world has shrunk.

Now, I can travel wherever I wish.. almost.   Only Time is against me now so, like Yeats...

 ...therefore I have sailed the seas and come to  the holy city of Byzantium.

We flew but the destination was the same.

Istanbul pulsates with vigour.  Everyone seems to be on the move, like a human ant nest or beehive. The traffic is unbelievable, a constant stream of vehicles filling every street and lane and roadway, all going to...where?

                                                               No country for old men

The monuments of its the magnificent past sit unperturbed amongst the bustle.  

 The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are as serene as when they were built.  Unlike the poet, they are secure in their state and status... 

Monuments of unageing intellect

We sailed across the Bosporus from Europe to Asia and drank Turkish tea.  

We walked round the Hippodrome of Constantine the Great where charioteers had steered their horses round an incredibly tight circuit like Charlton Heston in the movies but for real.  We  marveled at the obelisk of Thutmose III, already three thousand years old when it was brought to embellish Constantine's city and its carvings as fresh as the day some long forgotten Egyptian craftsman with a copper chisel and wooden mallet created them.    A monument not to some Pharaoh but to the man who made it.

Yeats seemed to be searching for a means to achieve an after-life in art.

to be gathered into the artifice of eternity

The humble stone mason achieved it more than three millennia before him.

 

 

Ode to Autumn

 Continuing the poetic theme, a week ago, I turned the corner at the burn and saw...

not a Wordsworthian host of spring daffodils but an autumnal burst of autumn crocuses

Where they seeded from goodness knows but they must have been propagating year by year for decades just to give that splash of colour on a rainy October day.

As Larkin suggested, I'm recording "the day the flowers come....."

and "when the birds go..."

Geese flying in for winter.

A New Start

  

  I stopped writing my blog in 2020 because I thought I didn't have anything to say that might be of interest to anyone else.

Two novels and half a dozen plays later, I've returned to write for myself as an exercise, a mental workout, a whimsy, a sort of on-line reverie.

A programme on Philip Larkin, one of the greats of English poetry had me re-reading some of his work and I came across one I hadn't seen or didn't remember, "Forget what did".

"Stopping the diary

Was a stun to memory"

Whatever Larkin's reasons for stopping were, he seems to say that a diary shouldn't be a personal but the pages...

."Should they ever be filled

Let it be with the observed

Celestial recurrences

The day the flowers come

And when the birds go"

So maybe a blog of observations has some value.

                                                          Chaffinch on Blackthorn

A walk around the field edge fringed with a snowstorm of blossom on the bare blackthorn in spring now has sloes, blue-black with a dusting of bloom, on the branches.  Blackthorn, the witches tree from whence theycarved their wands, the tree of misfortune and magic but also the tree of protection that made a stout prickly hedge and from whose hard wood cudgels or shillelaghs could be fashioned.

Sloes have been found in the stomach contents of  Iron Age peat bog mummies.  They are so astringent that if you eat one you can't un-pucker your mouth for about twenty minutes.  So, did the ancient folk cook them or were they  consumed as part of a ritual?  Possibly they were eaten when they had been "bletted" by frosts. I've seen blackbirds pecking at crab apples after they were frosted when presumably they are less tart.

                                                      Crab Apples waiting for the frosts

Medlars are traditionally bletted before consumption.   I've never eaten a medlar but have discovered a tree in the Priory garden so will have a go when the weather changes.

                                                                       Medlars

The best thing to do with sloes is to make sloe gin.

We have an old recipe book that says -

Take 1lb sloes;1pt gin; 12oz sugar.   Prick the sloes with a hat-pin.  Put in a sealed jar, shaking every few days for three months.  Strain, bottle and drink at race meetings.  

Presumably National Hunt or point-to-point in the winter months.