Misty mornings

Searching for the right word. What do we call the stores that sell books and magazines in airports and train stations, points de presse in French? Stationers? I Google it and come up with Newsagent (bravo!) and the following snippet: (…) Travel Retail is responsible for the operation of stores at railway stations, airports and hospitals. Yikes! I never thought of hospitals as transit areas before, but there you go… literally. I seem to spend a lot of time searching for the right word these days.

I once spotted a title in the window of a point de presse: “Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part”. (Official translation I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, personal colloquialism I wish there was somebody waiting for me somewhere). What a masterstroke I said to myself, the emotional pull of the title, especially in a train station or at an airport, was tremendous. I didn’t read the book straight away - I tend to resist such punches to the gut. It is a collection of short stories. In one of them, a couple meet on Boulevard St Germain and he spoils everything by glancing surreptitiously at his mobile phone to see if he has any messages as they leave the restaurant. The image hit the mark, and reminded me of a drink in a country pub, once. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime.

Meanwhile I still have the urge to start an anonymous blog to post the notes I jot down occasionally after a session of psychoanalysis. Coming to terms with repetition. The idea here is not of rubbing out and starting again (palimpsest) but of producing variations on a theme.

I stumbled on a photographer who likes Gascony morning mist, too.

An innocent form of murder

Analysand’s diary 21/01/05

I apologised for wanting to pretend she wasn’t there. She said you can do anything you like with me. And I said isn’t it a sad state of affairs if that is the case that all I want to do is pretend you’re not there. An innocent form of murder she said.

Upliftment

While I was looking for information about Dylan Thomas'

“Do not go gentle into that good night
[…]Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I found And death shall have no dominion. As uplifiting as Dianne Reeves, in its own way.

Egg tooth

I was thinking the other day I don’t post often enough or spontaneously enough. The blog is not lively enough. That reminded me of a Sylvia Plath poem that starts “These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.” The poem is called Stillborn.

The lines I remembered were:

“They are not pigs, they are not even fish,

Though they have a piggy and a fishy air – ”

Egg-tooth. Some creatures develop an egg tooth to crack the egg they are in and hatch themselves. Once they have cracked the egg, the tooth falls out and doesn’t grow back.

My father's garden is across the road from his house. It is world-famous; a beauty spot, part of the national heritage, or should be. My father’s garden is a magical place. Here are some pictures of it, one with the man himself.

Another one is of a corner with a solar-powered fountain. I had to wait a long time to get the picture of it working, clouds kept coming over and blocking the sun.

Small world

Browsing at random, I came across this wonderful story about the Glasgow coat of arms, which includes:

the tree that never grew,
the bird that never flew,
the fish that never swam,
the bell that never rang.

The fish that never swam

“The coat of arms always shows the fish with a ring held in its mouth. This is because a King of Strathclyde had given his wife a ring as a present. But the Queen gave it to a knight who promptly lost it. Some versions of the story say that the King took the ring while the knight was asleep and threw it in the river. The King then demanded to see the ring - threatening death to the Queen if she could not produce it. The knight confessed to St Mungo who sent a monk to catch a fish in the river Clyde. When this was brought back St Mungo cut open the fish and found the ring. When the Bishop of Glasgow was designing his own seal around 1271, he used the illustration of a salmon with a ring in its mouth and this has come down to us in today's coat of arms.”

It's a small world. I wrote about a variation of this story on March 11th.