God's Own Wind
Let's get some light in this stream :)
A recent Radio Norfolk weather forecast was distinctly... unusual :) Coming after a news report of Kim Jong Un's squawkings, it departed from normal to begin "East wind, rain" :) Someone in the studio has a mischievous sense of humour - but all who have heard the horrendous Becky Betts know such subtleties are wasted at Millennium Plain :)
Wind was in the air. I had been thinking about Walter Baldwin, whose story was told in the "Parson's Tale" picture. That had reminded me of Donald's fine photograph of the haunting graffiti at Ashwell church, written at the end of the Black Death. There are various translations - the inscriptions are barely literate - but this seems the most commonly accepted:
"There was a plague 1000, three times 100, five times 10,
Miserable, wild, distracted, the dregs of the people alone survive to bear witness and in the end
a mighty wind, Maurus, thunders in this year in the world, 1361"
Half the people of England died in 1349-50. There was a final flare-up in 1361 which carried off a fifth more, and a devastating hurricane on St Maur's day of that year - coincidentally the saint who gives my family its name. It was a trauma that changed the way people lived and thought: The exact results varied in different parts of Europe, but everywhere there was a changed conception of the individual and his relationship to God, nature, society and himself - a new sense of the preciousness and dignity of the human person. The Black Death - the focus of a terrible century of economic chaos, climate change and conflict - was the hidden foundation of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution. Of our world.
And that made me think of Sherlock Holmes :) The brilliant historian Barbara Tuckman argues that we are in our own 14th century: Another vast catastrophe whose results will transform everything and which began in 1914. Conan Doyles' "His Last Bow" - chronologically the final Holmes story - is set in the August of that terminal summer and ends with the dialogue which gives this picture its title. Here it is, word for word, inimitably performed by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce :)
Doyle's real meaning - the subtext to this - was only peripherally patriotic. He believed human consciousness would be raised to a higher level by the coming world crisis, which he knew would be far longer than the Great War itself. And such things hold true in the personal too: It blows damned cold, but it's God's own wind :)
Oh - and I'm not making any point beyond that you never know the consequences of things :) I might be even scarcer than usual, but I'll be back before too long - and I've got a lot of replying to do :)
Near Burnham Overy Staithe, Norfolk. Nikon FM2n, Asuma f2.8 28mm, Foma 400, orange filter.
God's Own Wind
Let's get some light in this stream :)
A recent Radio Norfolk weather forecast was distinctly... unusual :) Coming after a news report of Kim Jong Un's squawkings, it departed from normal to begin "East wind, rain" :) Someone in the studio has a mischievous sense of humour - but all who have heard the horrendous Becky Betts know such subtleties are wasted at Millennium Plain :)
Wind was in the air. I had been thinking about Walter Baldwin, whose story was told in the "Parson's Tale" picture. That had reminded me of Donald's fine photograph of the haunting graffiti at Ashwell church, written at the end of the Black Death. There are various translations - the inscriptions are barely literate - but this seems the most commonly accepted:
"There was a plague 1000, three times 100, five times 10,
Miserable, wild, distracted, the dregs of the people alone survive to bear witness and in the end
a mighty wind, Maurus, thunders in this year in the world, 1361"
Half the people of England died in 1349-50. There was a final flare-up in 1361 which carried off a fifth more, and a devastating hurricane on St Maur's day of that year - coincidentally the saint who gives my family its name. It was a trauma that changed the way people lived and thought: The exact results varied in different parts of Europe, but everywhere there was a changed conception of the individual and his relationship to God, nature, society and himself - a new sense of the preciousness and dignity of the human person. The Black Death - the focus of a terrible century of economic chaos, climate change and conflict - was the hidden foundation of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution. Of our world.
And that made me think of Sherlock Holmes :) The brilliant historian Barbara Tuckman argues that we are in our own 14th century: Another vast catastrophe whose results will transform everything and which began in 1914. Conan Doyles' "His Last Bow" - chronologically the final Holmes story - is set in the August of that terminal summer and ends with the dialogue which gives this picture its title. Here it is, word for word, inimitably performed by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce :)
Doyle's real meaning - the subtext to this - was only peripherally patriotic. He believed human consciousness would be raised to a higher level by the coming world crisis, which he knew would be far longer than the Great War itself. And such things hold true in the personal too: It blows damned cold, but it's God's own wind :)
Oh - and I'm not making any point beyond that you never know the consequences of things :) I might be even scarcer than usual, but I'll be back before too long - and I've got a lot of replying to do :)
Near Burnham Overy Staithe, Norfolk. Nikon FM2n, Asuma f2.8 28mm, Foma 400, orange filter.