Good Remembering

It's not last Saturday but the Saturday before. Can I really go back that far in time and remember it well?

It's very hot and we've driven all the way down to Semaphore. We've crossed the road and the beachfront carpark, walked down the track through the sand dunes and onto the beach.

There are people there, it is still hot even at the beach. We walk into the sea taking our shoes off first. Now this is the part I want to remember.

We're standing in the water. It's sunny and above us the sky is blue. Yellow electrical patterns crisscross the warm tea green sea. Clouds build in the northern quarter of the sky. They're roiling and boiling, they're cumulus, nimbus, cirrus and stratus all tumbling together, advancing as fast as a bus. Not a fast bus.

They'll soon be directly overhead.

It's nice in the water. We are up to our waists, no, not quite, looking towards the horizon.

The horizon is playing an optical trick, either that or the sea level has dropped.

We look at the puzzling line. Ships move along it, it fritters away at one end. We discuss these things.

When next we look up, the approaching clouds in the northern quarter of the sky have stopped moving. In fact they look to me like they have started moving backwards. This is puzzling too.

Yes, good remembering by me.

The Information-Rich Half Woman

Welcome to my attempt to discover connectivity in random things. The second random thing is :

The Information-Rich Half Woman.

Last weekend we went to the beach twice. Once with our daughter, on Saturday afternoon, and once without her, on Sunday afternoon. On Saturday it was cloudy and cool.

On Sunday it was sunny, but it was very chilly on the beach. I took a photograph of the esplanade for a reason that escapes me now.

I loaded the photo onto Facebook, where my daughter commented that it looked a little colder than the day before.

I was surprised. In the photo it looked sunny and there were several people on the beach in shorts. What are the clues? I asked.

The woman on the far right, she answered. An outfit for a cold day.

The woman on the far right was so far to the right that she was only half a woman. I had hardly noticed she was in the picture at all. She was middle aged, wearing one sensible shoe, half a pair of wide black pull-on trousers, half a sleeveless fleece, one sleeve of a red long-sleeved sweater and half a pair of sunglasses. She was, needless to say, walking on the esplanade, not down on the beach.

My daughter is good at processing information.

Two Days at the Coast

We went to West Beach on Saturday. The sea was the colour of prune juice. An ancient sea. A Mediterranean wine dark sea. The waves lifted and stretched before crashing. That was the moment you could see the prune juice and oxidized apple, with brownish white foam on the top.

The foam cascaded from the wavetops in bubbles that fetched up in pink scummy heaps mixed with seaweed and shivered in the wind.

That was Saturday.

On Sunday we went to Seacliff. We didn't go down on the sand. I had my camera and thought I'd take photos of flowers in the sandhills, and call them Flowers of the Coast. Some of the flowers were conventional flowers. Gazanias, portulacas, and stocks.

Then there were the unconventional flowers. The cat's head, the talking fish, the rusty solar pole and the little girl in the pink skirt. I shall elaborate tomorrow.

No, I have space here. I shall do the cat.

The Cat's Head Flower. This was......

No. I won't. It's getting bitty. It will be better if I do it tomorrow.

Pliny's Green Poem

Pliny the Elder has been cock-a-hoop since the election, having recently decided he was Green. This morning he showed me a poem he had written in honour of their great result on Saturday. This was it:

Viro Sum

Viro sum et felix
Factiones maiores frustrati
Balaena infanta hodie nata
Omen Virides admovent.
Bono anima estis!
Viridis unum in consilium plebi
Nunc in senatu
Novem

I got out my Latin dictionary and had a go at translating it:

I am Green

I am a happy Green
The major parties are stuffed
A baby whale was born today
A sign the Greens go forward
Be cheerful everyone!
There is now a Green in the House of Reps
And nine Greens in the Senate.

Oh! What a lovely poem! I like the bit about the baby whale.

After, and Before

After the Rubber Band Debate we decided to go for a walk. I remember thinking, during the walk, that if the Tour de France was over, I would be paying more attention to my surroundings.

That is not to say I was thinking about the Tour De France.

I was coasting, observing nothing properly.

How lucky I was to have had that thought. For, from the moment that I thought it, I began to observe things properly again, but in a different way.

That was last Saturday. Let us see how long the proper memory has lasted.

We left mum sitting on a seat. No, that's wrong, we left her just about to sit down on a seat. She probably sat down on it after that. But by then we were walking south along the footpath towards Seacliff.

The sea was on our right, slopping and gleaming like molten steel in a bowl. Then the sand heaps, ugly. Then the dunes and struggling grasses. Then the gnarled and twisted bushes, the decrepit fence, the footpath, and us walking on it, towards Seacliff.

We were talking about something in Latin. That is not to say we were speaking Latin. We can't do that. We were talking about a word, errato, and whether it existed....

After that we fell silent. There was a sound, probably of the sea, slopping. What else could it have been? And another sound, probably of rustling bushes, or a bouncing car. Whatever the sounds, they were enough to make me think about listening, so then I heard another car, and several birds.

On the way back, northwards, towards Hove, we seemed to be somehow tilted towards the sky. I suppose the path must go uphill very slightly. In any case, I remember looking at the clouds which looked like solid lumps of dirty yellow wadding. Far away above the horizon a slash of blue sky promised the sun, by means of a triangulation of sunbeams. But minutes before it appeared, we had to turn up Smith Street.

Chicken Wednesday

Pliny was getting her diary up to date, She hadn't written anything since last Wednesday.

Pliny's motto is No Day Without A Line. She took the motto from someone she read about in Brewers. The person lived in classical times and was a painter. So 'line' would have meant something different to him. Pliny likes this.

Pliny hasn't lived up to her motto. After ten years of being fairly strict she let her standards lapse. This coincided with the time she started blogging. However, she still likes to keep her diary looking as though there has been no day without a line.

But last night, she came up against a blank. What had she done last Wednesday? She thought for a minute and couldn't remember anything. She left two lines empty and started writing about Thursday. She knew exactly what she'd done on Thursday. Ditto Friday. And Saturday, which day it currently was.

And now she was faced with the four blank lines for Wednesday. She wrote: What shall I do? I have forgotten everything about this day. I do know it was hot though, and we may have had chicken for tea.

Then in a flood of remorse she added: And we may not.

She thought of the chicken, not properly remembered. She drew a little chicken after the word 'not'. It was a good chicken. It looked feisty. She drew a speech bubble coming out of its mouth. Don't you know? it said.