who only by moving can balance

For reasons, I spent a fair chunk of this afternoon in and around Bonnington Square, of which I'd previously been totally unaware but which has been entirely reasonably described as "Vauxhall's secret jungle neighbourhood".

Most of it I spent in the Pleasure Garden, but I was also directed a short way up the road to the Harleyford Road Community Garden -- featuring, among other delights, a lot of mosaics. Herewith one such example:

Reading. ( Heston Blumenthal, Aliette de Bodard, Lois Oliver, Ursula Vernon )

Oh! And some academic writing by a sibling, for feedback.

Eating. Winterval fruit cake courtesy of my mother! Who also made us an extremely tasty butternut squash wellington, which I found far more convincing than the cauliflower variant I made lo these several years ago and will at least contemplate recreating. Many other good food also in that context.

Exploring. Had a lovely time poking around St Peter's Church in Coton -- excellent mediaeval architecture, smells properly of church, etc. ALAS we did not get to go up the TINY spiral staircase. Elsewise poking around in Coton and environs: found a medlar tree! And was very good and did not grab a carrier bag and help myself (largely because we wanted to get home sooner than would have been compatible with same...)

And! Glow Wild at Wakehurst Place! With GASTROPODS. It's an annual lantern trail, which has just concluded its tenth year; in contrast to previous visits we got a much stronger sense of narrative and theme this time. (Watch this space; I'm about to edit in a bunch of photos...)

( Read more... )

Growing. Faffed about with repotting various things I'm overwintering.

Observing and celebrating: happy Gregorian new year. <3

A month or several ago, while we were wandering around talking about something or other, A somewhat sheepishly said that he thought Animal Experiences were a Really Good Present Idea but he was concerned it was Cheating in some fashion to get me animal experiences for my birthdays because I'd Thought Of It First.

While I am absolutely a fan of saying "look at this ridiculous(ly expensive) fountain pen! wanna buy it for me?" and indeed "hey, want to buy us afternoon tea at Ruby Violet?" I am also very much on board with Surprise Animals, and that is why this time last week we were settling down to sleep in a tiny two-person cabin overlooking the Chilterns having thoroughly worn ourselves out with Keeper for a Day at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

[ID: one wall of a light-coloured wooden cabin, with a print on canvas of a photograph of two lions. to the lower left, pillows in white pillowcases are visible. to the right is a chest of drawers, on top of which there are a cube-shaped box of tissues and a clear glass vase containing red and yellow roses, and purple and red-and-yellow tulips.]

This had entailed getting up early enough to Be At Whipsnade for 08³⁰, which was made all the more painful by making a surprise late-night wheelchair delivery the previous evening, but nevertheless we had an excellent time of it.

( Keeper for a Day, in detail )

... and then it was time to fetch the car from the main car park and head up to the lodges for the Zoo Sleepover.

( Lookout Lodge, in bullet points, to be expanded upon at a time that is not bedtime. )

Today's Extended Celebrations began with London Zoo, avec friends and their toddler, and were followed by Afternoon Tea At Ruby Violet.

We finished at Ruby Violet at about ten past five. Rather than head straight into rush hour traffic, we decided to go for a short walk along the canal, because we'd not get home any later and we'd enjoy ourselves a lot more...

... but we never made it as far as the canal, because A spotted that the building that used to contain the House of Illustration is now Queer Britain: alas their website is not great at imparting information, so have (oh the irony) a Graun article instead.

It's tiny. It's fantastic. A got me one of those ridiculous colour-changing umbrellas from the gift shop as a(nother) present, because he'd never seen them before, and I said "ooh, I've never been able to justify getting one of those!"

Right next door to Ruby Violet (i.e. a five-minute walk from King's Cross), free with donations encouraged, and totally worth it.

On the downside: I spent something like 8 hours today at A&E following checking in with 111 this morning!

On the upside: A came with me; there was actual effective treatment (I think, though let's see how I feel when I wake up in the morning), and we got takeaway pizza on the way home.

Macabre humour: ( Read more... )

Further comment [cn someone having a Very Bad Day, no details]: ( Read more... )

This time ZSL Whipsnade. Highlights, quickly, before I forget any more of them:

• WOOLLY PIGS
  
• we still didn't see any pygmy hippos, but these information boards used the verb "trundle" to describe their locomotion on land and I was delighted
  
• Grevy's zebra have white bellies!!! (see also wikipedia)
  
• baby flamingoes are grey they don't! know how! to be pink yet!
  
• the penguin enclosure is particularly amazing (astonishing views) AND the two types of penguin are DIFFERENTLY SHIT and it is GREAT. (Rockhoppers use their beaks to pull themselves up the banks, and also flop into the water face first. The Black-footed penguins instead sort of... wabble.)
  
• excellent free-range wallabies & Chinese water deer
  
• very much enjoyed the ridiculous pelicans also

(Adam who else was especially good?)

Two baby capybara plus Several Adults at Shepreth Wildlife Park. One of the babies sneezed in its sleep. A Truly Excellent Adventure.

Reading. Actually made progress on Shaun Tan's tales from the inner city! Via the magic of my BookChair and a duvet nest on the sofa and the ongoing Problems With The Mass Spec. I started again from the beginning, and have been flipping back and forth between The Book Itself and the bonus accompanying notes, and liking them a lot. Favourites so far: butterfly, snail, crocodiles, owl, dog, tiger. Favourite in a different way: horses. I am finding the exercise of attempting to read the stories just as what they are, without seeking allegory and metaphor, an interesting challenge.

Lots of fic bits. <3

Exploring. A & I headed out, today, to the London Transport Museum, specifically to spend some time in the Hidden London exhibition, though en route we also took in the early history of the London transport network: I hadn't realised that the first passenger railway was horse-drawn! They correctly attributed to the steam engine to Trevithick! I'm deeply amused that, on a very little digging, it looks like they had the etymology for hackney carriage precisely backward (in that the LTM claim it's from the French haquenée). I was charmed by some of the your-next-station-is-... displays. A had not known about Leinster Gardens!

My other absolute favourite thing from the early-history-of-the-tube section was a letter to The Times, dated 13th January 164, captioned by LTM "Nothing changes." My only quibble is, having read rather more letters sent to The Times in modernity than is entirely good for me, that this particular specimen might feel itself a little out of place in any current edition because it's calling for nationalisation of the railways. Text reproduced below the cut because I was charmed and delighted. ( Read more... )
From Hidden London: the Exhibition itself, I learned a bunch more about the politics etc around sheltering in stations during air raids; about icons of St Barbara (patron of artillery & mines) still being stationed at the entrance to major TfL works; about distances on the tube network all being measured relative to Ongar, a station long-since abandoned. (I was also, of course, delighted by the Highgate bat tunnel.)

By this point we were a little tired and overwrought, having not really had a proper lunch, so we retreated to the café with the firm intention of going back to Do The Ground Floor Properly at some time when we're not both autistic-overwhelm, since our tickets are good for a year's entry to the premises.

Creating. I'm a bit sulky about not being able to reproduce the precise shade of unappealing purple on the petals on the thing I'm currently chiefly working on Lewisia rediviva, though I am also slowly adding bits and pieces to a partially-coloured-in-when-I-got-it Lilium auratum & am much more pleased with that.

I am getting some more of a sense of how pigments blend and layer, or don't, as the case may be, and have consequently started very cautiously applying small quantities of the Fancy Pencils to this colouring book also. I am Learning Things about the differences in how they handle.

Growing. ( Read more... )

Playing. ( Games. )

In another sense: Bizet Jeux d'Enfants, Dvorak violin concerto and Tchaikovsky Suite No. 1 for orchestra (Opus 43), all as second horn. I'm a little frustrated by how much of a gap there is between where I am now and where I was when I was doing best in terms of practice, but I was making some actually lovely noises and remembering to enjoy the performance some, which is always nice, and I am going to Make Another Attempt to keep practising out of term.

Reading. ( Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Genevieve Cogman, Alex Bertie )

Watching. Mad Max: Fury Road, avec the cousins, and I am still picking up new details I hadn't previously spotted; also a whole bunch of purplefringe's vids & some misc music videos.

Listening. At A's request, I have (with great suspicion) worked out how to make the TV play music off my laptop, so we've spent a lot of today listening to ONSIND and Leonard Cohen. (A was thoroughly stuck humming Hallelujah, for some reason.)

Cooking. Such thing. There's a batch of apples that I finally, on Sunday, got jarred up. For the cousins: sourdough and soda bread; Mohnpotitz and Kardemummebullar; houmous and baba ganoush. I did not get as far as scones, but this is probably for the best.

I made An Error with the Mohnpotitz. I knew perfectly well that the recipe for Nusspotitz in The Canonical Book (per my ancestors various) needs the amount of dough doubled or the amount of filling halved in order to be at all reasonable, and I've carefully noted that for the given Nuss filling, but I had not similarly emphasised it for the Mohn (poppyseed) filling I wrote in by hand (from my grandmother's recipe).

Reader, I halved the amount of poppyseeds. I... forgot... to halve the quantities of sugar. And honey. And the nationalism rum. The Potitz is extremely alcoholic.

(Potitze is an enriched yeast dough wrapped roly-poly around a filling Of Some Ilk. We got it from the Slovenes, probably.)

Exploring. Chihuly Nights at Kew! I will grudgingly grant that the Temperate House Persians (2018) look much better illuminated (you actually get to see the red lip wrapping in a way that just doesn't show up in daylight!); Summer Sun (2010) is stunning reflected in the lake. A thing I failed to note after last visit is that Niijima Floats (2019) keeps getting the gravel reraked around it in different patterns; on the middle visit it was in a slightly odd chequerboard pattern that I felt really didn't work, but it was back to swirls and ripples for the night viewing, which I felt was Better; it was Interesting to note how the glass responds to different qualities of light (e.g. the matte versus gloss finishes I'd so admired on Neodymium Reeds and Turquoise Marlins really didn't show up terribly well in the illumination-at-night). Also notable: the glass harmonica in the Temperate House.

Observing. There was a COAL TIT on the FIG on Saturday morning, and the birds have thoroughly rediscovered the feeders, and all is well.

Things I learned:

• Enfield Chace used to be rather larger; Southgate, which is now a tube station, is so named because it was once the South Gate of the Chace. We were given a slightly dubious etymology for the name Enfield, which I've not been able to source, but does mean that I've now found that Its name most likely came from Anglo-Saxon Ēanafeld or similar, meaning "open land belonging to a man called Ēana" or "open land for lambs".
  
• There was a fascinating pine tree that didn't have a leader (i.e. it just sort of all spread out) AND was "cannibalistic": (terminal) cones grow at the end of growing branches, then branches just... grow through them and keep going. (Picea abies 'Acrocona'??? Picea abies 'Inversa'??? I have now spent Some Time trying to work this out based on the tree map and satellite photography, and mostly I am annoyed at myself for not having taken proper notes. Tentatively going for "maybe 'Inversa', but I need to revisit it".)
  
• Lots of swamp cyprus that we were encouraged to touch, to my delight: I always feel a bit guilty about touching Official Plants, because What If Not Allow, but we were actively encouraged to do so and it made me Happy.
  
• Metasequoia glyptostroboides, notable for being a living fossil and also endangered and also being cultivated to be an exciting variety of colours (we particularly had a baby 'Gold Rush' pointed out to us).
  
• Picea omorika, theoretically the species used by Stradivarius, of particular interest because we were there As An Orchestra.
  
• I looked at the bendy hornbeam (C.b. 'Pendula'?) and thought "huh, Corylus avellana 'Contorta'"; C.b. 'Fastigiata' also excellent in terms of shape)
  
• ... Eucalyptus will just like volatilise combustible gas and just... explode, which I had not quite put together.
  
• ... there was probably more but I have now left it Some Time, so, here you go, here's a first pass on Trees.