Viaduct: Gordon Brown
PHOTO COPYRIGHT GORDON BROWN.
Ballochmyle Viaduct over the river Ayr (Gordon Brown) / CC BY-SA 2.0
Trains, Zola
A second spot we might consider is text that discuss and offer railways and trains. Zola comes to mind, but which is the name of his novel with the trains… tiocfaidh se aris….
Always had a fascination with viaducts, and road building in my youth.
post note: La bete humaine (bete needs a hat on it)
As the Olympics encroaches on us, which it continues to, I am thinking of places we can go to in literature. Air pockets.
Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is my first consideration since the main character spends, to my unreliable remembering, a significant amount of time under the ground. I read it at sixteen and found the prospect of “the underground” utterly oxygenating.
Haiti’s aid: caught in a bottleneck
Channel 4 news report on aid hold up. Field hospital across the street from the airport has no medical supplies.
Waste incineration
Prime Time report on issues around new waste incinerator plan for Dublin. Vancouver debating similar plans. Power and waste management big topics for 2010. How to deal with feckin’ soft plastics? No strategy can come fast enough.
Strikers in saris
One sweltering summer afternoon in August 1976, Jayaben Desai decided she wasn’t going to take it anymore.
Whole story here
An overnighter at the Emergency Room with a misbehaving kidney and mother morphine. What an intransigent organ! Was just talking to a friend about how we form relationships with these organs when they make their presence known in inconvenient ways.
If I hadn’t been blinded with pain, I would have looked more closely for the relationships that sit in the plastic chairs. Grown up children who wait with parent/parents who are looking for answers. Instead I was acutely grateful for the invention of i/v, for antibiotics, for access to such things and the eventual pain relief. Was trying to contemplate where the mind would go if such relief never came, which for many with no access, is the case. But was in too much pain to reach any conclusion.
Good old Canadian Healthcare. I won’t have a bad word said against it. It’s been good to me. Helped me let that kidney know whose in charge!
I was talking to a man today about fragments and he exclaimed in the most colourful tones, great excitement, at my novel and declared it something like “fucking rad, exactly what this century needs, fragment, fragment up 2010.” Then he raised his arms and took off in a cloud of enthusiasm to play the bass guitar very loudly. Bless, bless.
A woman, a stranger at the same gathering, told me “I love to watch your relationship with your son. I’ve noticed it and I love to watch it. ”
Another lovely fragment.
2 in a day.
Orwell and eggs
Love how Orwell commences his diary each day with an accurate recording of the precise weather.
Each day on Twitter the corresponding day is tweeted from his diary. I love it when the weather precisely corresponds to our weather.
But the thing that makes me chuckle is his egg count. A comfort to me, his egg count is.