We're all going on a winter holiday

No blogging from me today (other than this, obviously). I'm taking a group of students to the Land of Lost Content, a sure contender for Shropshire's oddest museum. It's basically an old warehouse filled with the contents of the charity shops nobody ever goes to. Old detergent boxes, 1950s underpants, a telephone exchange, Wham records and a very disturbing collection of golliwog memorabilia. You can see the disturbing photos I took last year here.

The name of course is from A. E Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad', which also features the line about Shropshire's 'blue remembered hills'. The irony is of course that the narrator is looking to Shropshire from Herefordshire, and the subtext of the poem is homoerotic… which would no doubt horrify the tweedy Tories who like the line but have never read the poem. It amuses me though.

Talking of homoerotic, the only book I've acquired so far this week is Rhys Davies' 1947 The Dark Daughters, a rather melodramatic Lear retelling which features the first Welsh cocaine abuse in literary history. Davies was proper Valleys boy (though not a miner) whose works carry a considerable homosexual charge, albeit one rarely mentioned by his contemporary reviewers. Apparently this books is 'sustainedly unpleasant' and carries hints of 'perversion'. Excellent.

I'm hoping the bus breaks down - otherwise I get back to the Hegemon and go straight into another meeting, damn it. Have a good day.

The Gnomadic lifestyle

Hello everyone. I'm skulking indoors from the relentless searing heat (it's about 26C here), but I didn't skulk at the weekend. 


Instead, the Map Twats dressed up as Gnomes (woolly hat, pipe, waistcoat, belt etc) to travel to a beautiful corner of Shropshire (overlooking High Vinnals, near Ludlow) to celebrate Christine's birthday, and the formal unveiling of the caravan she and James won by writing this song. 

Princess

The Silverline Nova (c. 1980) is a work of unearthly beauty - decorated like a 1970s downstairs lavatory. It is also, under the layers of decoration, a bit of a wreck, despite the best efforts of its proud owners. 

Our hostess

So 30+ people gathered with varying degrees of posh camping equipment. My tent was last used by German friends, so everything was beautifully folded and nothing was missing. I'm less organised, so managed to bring a camera with approximately 10 minutes of battery life. The result is that there are no pictures of the stunning ridge with views for 50 miles in every direction - Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and lots of Wales - or of the amazing sunset and orange moonrise. There are pictures of happy liberals, a deaf sheepdog (which amused itself by chasing the sheep away from their water trough), the caravan, and the buzzards which circled us hopefully and hungrily. I was woken around 5 a.m. by the sound of massive wings flapping around the remains of the barbecue. 

The blue remembered hills of Shropshire

In summertime on Bredon
  The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
  In steeples far and near,
  A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
  My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
  And hear the larks so high
  About us in the sky.

A.E. Housman, 'Bredon Hill'

Into my heart an air that kills
  From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
  What spires, what farms are those?
 
That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
  And cannot come again.
Housman, XL

The deaf sheepdog. Appropriately, Christine teaches sign. 

You can see more excellent photographs by Carolyn, here. Amongst other things, someone launched a Chinese lantern which flew glittering into outer space, or at least near, and a polymath called Matthew who makes fine plum jam and set up a moth box (a powerful light and box to harmlessly attract moths for study: some amazing fluttery things are out there).