(there are a few more photos of it, as well as plenty more of my garden, in my Flickr portfolio).
John Donne has long been one of my favourite poets, but I haven't previously read a great deal of his prose works. Therefore I was surprised this morning to discover that two well-known phrases come directly out of Donne's Meditation XVII.
The one that brought my attention to the passage is the line often misquoted as "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". It was borrowed by Ernest Hemmingway for the title of his 1940 novel For whom the bell tolls (which, I must confess, I haven't read) and I believe that there's also a Metallica song by the same name. A few months back I discovered a cartoon based on the same phrase, proclaiming "Ask not for whom the photocopier jams; it jams for thee", which I liked so much I stuck a copy of it above my office photocopier (mainly for the benefit of my boss, who doesn't get on very well with our photocopier).
Having discovered the source of this quotation, I was surprised to find that the paragraph containing it begins with another famous phrase: "No man is an island" (Paul Simon notwithstanding). I recall an expansion of it that I used to occasionally come across on the Unix "fortune" program (or possibly the Amiga derivative thereof) - "No man is an island, but then again no man is a potato salad either".
Flippancy aside, the point of both phrases, and the text containing them, is essentially that we are all connected to one another in some way and that our actions inevitably, if often invisibly, have an effect on those around us. Here is the whole passage bordered by the two phrases (note the actual wording of the bell one):
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne - Meditation XVII.
Now that the traditional pleasanteries are taken care of, on with the blog...
I'm not generally a big fan of New Year resolutions, for two main reasons:
This year I'm not planning any major structural or thematic changes (although I'm thinking about adding one or two new categories soon), but I'm hoping to blog on a slightly more regular basis than I have done previously. I realise that I'm not going to be successful at trying to blog daily, but I'm hoping to get at least one entry posted per week, with some extra posts when I have a bit more to say. I might also relax my self-imposed rule against posting consecutively to the same blog category, as I sometimes find I have several posts worth of material about one thing without necessarily having anything much to say about anything else.
Although I've filed this entry under miscellaneous, I can't resist a short foray into computer talk to mention that I've written a little Python script to help me keep track of how my blog entries are distributed by category. It simply counts up the number of posts in each category and prints out a total for each, plus a grand total. The script is still fairly primitive, so I don't guarantee that the results are completely accurate. In any case, this might be an appropriate point to provide a summary of the currently existing categories in my blog along with the total number of posts to date:
The most likely contender for a new category in the near future would be gardening, as I'm hoping to get to work in my garden a bit earlier this year so I have more chance of actually growing something. Another possibility is for a reading/viewing category that I could use for book and film reviews. I'm hoping to avoid getting too many categories, though, so doubtless the miscellaneous section will continue to be well populated.
Here's a couple of random, and unconnected, thoughts that floated through my mind recently...
Last night I spotted a sign at a car tyre/exhaust/stuff centre (which may have been Kwik Fit or one of its local rivals) advertising "brakes - lifetime guarantee". It struck me that this is a fairly safe offer for the company to make since, if your brakes fail while you're driving at high speed, the lifetime may be fairly short.
This morning when I was trying to will myself to get out of my nice, cosy bed I found myself in a catch-22 situation. The most immediate reason to get out of bed was to make myself a cup of coffee, but the coffee was necessary to wake up my brain sufficiently to coordinate my body to get out of bed. Since I don't have a maid to bring me coffee in the morning, I had to resort to good, old-fashioned willpower instead. Speaking of Catch-22, I must get round to reading the novel sometime. I seem to recall starting it once, many years ago, but I'm fairly sure I didn't finish it that time.
And now for something completely different...
In one of my recent blog entries (only just over a month ago) I was talking about my band's trip to Devon at the start of October. While I was in Devon I hoped to visit a friend who recently moved down there from North Wales. Unfortunately it turned out he was in London that week so it didn't happen, but he did visit back here a few weeks later. I knew that he had moved to somewhere on the periphery of Dartmoor, but I wasn't sure which end. I discovered on chatting to him that he actually now lives in Bovey Tracey, which is only about a mile away from where I was gigging in Chudleigh Knighton. It's just a shame I'm unlikely to ever get any more gigs there when he might actually be around!
I recently came across a book meme on Wulf's blog, and thought it looked interesting enough to try out for myself.
It involves the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. The idea is that you mark in bold what you have read, italicise those you started but couldn't finish, strike-through and asterisk books you have no desire to read, put a question mark in front for books you never heard of and strike through what you couldn't stand, asterisk those you've read more than once and underline those on your to-read list.
Wulf took 3 blog entries to get his list marked up, but at the rate I blog that would probably take me into next year so I decided to do it in one go. Here's my list.
Like Wulf, I didn't mark any books that I couldn't stand or had no desire to read, although some are fairly unlikely to ever make my reading list. The books I've italicised are ones I've not got round to finishing, but it doesn't necessarily mean I couldn't finish them. I italicised and asterisked the Canterbury Tales because I've read several of them many times but never quite got round to reading the whole lot. The list is probably slightly inaccurate, because there are several books that I can't remember whether I finished them or if I've read them more than once.
Well, I seem to have slipped a bit from my target of at least one blog post per week. I think it was a month ago today that I last got round to writing anything.
In the last couple of weeks, I've been quite busy out in my garden. Last year, when I first moved into my flat, I didn't do very much in the garden as I wanted a chance to see what had been planted there already. This year I fully intended to do a bit more, but didn't get round to it until after a visit to my parents where a brief stint of gardening one morning (about all that the weather would allow) obviously inspired me.
At first I concentrated on clearing away some of the dead or dying material and added a couple of new ornamental plants. My favourite of these is my new celosia plumosa, which you can see in this picture:
(there are a few more photos of it, as well as plenty
more of my
garden, in my Flickr portfolio).
Since then I've added a couple more herbs to my herb garden (basil and dill, although both have been badly attacked by slugs so I'm now trying out beer traps and other anti-slug devices) and started trying to grow a few vegetables. I've sown seeds for radish and rocket (both of which have now started to appear) as well as nasturtiums, carrots and French beans (all of which have yet to put in an appearance), and also planted a few garlic cloves and some Welsh onions.
After several days of fairly frenetic garden activity, I've just about used up all the space I have in the garden and come to the end of the major horticultural tasks for the moment. The next stage is probably harder, as it's now a matter of patience combined with vigilance to make sure the slugs don't eat everything and it all gets sufficient water.
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