The Ceremonial Beadle Chain of Office.
Regalia
Blackberry Infusion
Blackberries stored since last September were boiled to extract juices which, with the addition of alum and cream of tartar, infused cotton with their essential vibrant energy. The resulting T shirt is part of an evolving collection of ceremonial and practical Beadle wear. A test on paper produced a much flatter and cooler purple colour.
Hatching Out
Eight Buff Orpingtons hatched after incubation at my neighbour’s home last week and it was exciting and appropriate to record their arrival. Tiny beaks chipped rough circles about the egg tops, before tiny armlike wings began the extraordinarily hard work of levering chick from its redundant shell. Each hatchling took around twenty minutes to emerge, resting every few minutes to recover from the exhausting effort.
On the Threshold
Soon after dawn the rising tide crept in and lifted the Egg from its muddy berth. Overhead the sky had a wet greyness that soon began to splash light rain onto the water surface and disturbed the reflected blackthorn, bare on branch. On these changing marshy margins, the birds of both land and sea began to call and sing. From the threshold of the Egg’s eastern facing door, I grasped a fleeting two minutes and forty seven seconds of the mise-en-scène.
Another Gander at the Geese
I took another gander at the local community of Canada geese today as they flew by the Egg and came to rest in the river nearby. A particular pair (and another threesome) fly right over the Egg every morning and evening but I have yet get them on film. Their feathers provide the drawing tools I can use to depict them.
A Dark and Dirty Sun
The incredibly hot lid of the heater spun from gloved hand to the floor, where it instantly branded a fragment of carpet with a dark and dirty sun, ‘like a bad half-crown in a basin of soap and water’.*
I was reminded of John Ruskin’s writing about plague clouds gathering over our towns and cities during the immense rise in coal consumption of the Industrial Revolution. In our post industrial age, smogs from coal have vanished from British skies, but this is not true of many countries around the world.
Burning charcoal for heat in theEgg will not create a smog, but I am still releasing carbon into the atmosphere; so far from about sixty kilos of charcoal and counting…
‘I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit of plague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can see enough of it nowadays without any trouble of mine; and if you want, in a hurry, to see what the sun looks like through it, you’ve only to throw a bad half-crown into a basin of soap and water. Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man.’
The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Lecture 1, page 8. pub. 1884
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/27636_Vict_U08_Ruskin.pdf
Currents
The well eroded branch of a riverine oak beside the river at Exbury is a swirling eddying ocean of currents which echo the wider pattern of the world’s oceans imaged from data captured by NASA satellites circling the earth between 2005 and 2007.
Mouse & Gulls
Three wood mice were in the trap at 50-47-08.83N x 1-24-27.84W on the morning of March 18th. Two were released immediately and a third is the subject of a short film. It washed itself for most of the time, which I now understand is a reaction to being afraid. It was released pretty quickly.
Prickly Issues
Nick recently watched an episode of QI where the difference between thorns and prickles was explained. The Egg is surrounded by bushes protected in one of these ways or the other. Prickles grow from the skin of the plant and are found on the tangle of impenetrable blackberries. Thorns derived from shoots, arise from a bud to guard the blackthorn. Interestingly the rose bush growing in the former Bofors Gun battery is protected by prickles and not as commonly supposed by thorns.
Bumble Bees
For the last three or four days bumble bees have been frequenting the marsh and fields beside the Egg. They are in and out of the mouse holes on the riverbank where they may be seeking shelter from the newly arrived colder weather, or a new home for a nest. I have found quite a few curled up dead on the ground or really lethargic and seemingly close to death. There are 25 species of bumble bee in the UK but I cannot recognise the differences. With the aid of a microscope and magnifying glass my drawings may soon start to answer this question.
The Exbury Egg 