This week’s amusement is especially for the dog lovers amongst you …
Something for the Weekend
October Plenty
October Plenty 2013 is on Sunday 20th October starting at 12 noon on Bankside, Southwark outside Shakespeare’s Globe. (Yes, that’s in London!)
October Plenty is an Autumn harvest celebration held annually in Southwark. Beginning on the Bankside, by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, October Plenty mixes ancient seasonal customs and theatre with contemporary festivity, joining with historic Borough Market, Southwark and Borough Market’s Apple Day.
October Plenty is a collective celebration of the seasons, weather and food, in a public place, with access to everyone. The event is free, and happens whatever the weather.
There is loads more information about this event at www.thelionspart.co.uk/octoberplenty/. It looks as if it should be great fun; must see if I can get there.
Goats on the Roof
Saturday 19th October from 12 noon
Live goats graze the wildflower meadow on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on London’s South Bank.
To mark the end of the season, and to help the wildflowers grow stronger next year, goats from Vauxhall City Farm will be nibbling away at the roof garden. Why? Because in the wild, animals would naturally keep wildflower meadows in good shape.
There will apparently be lots of other free activities during the afternoon, including seeds and plants from the roof garden being given away free, woodworking and refreshments.
So why not enjoy this opportunity to see a natural process played out in the urban jungle.
More details at www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/goat-grazing-fun-day-79295
Such a shame I can’t go. Goats eating a meadow on a London roof really should be something to have done/seen.
Quotes
Another of our spasmodic collections of inetersting or amusing quotes encountered. In no particular order …
Walk nude, and people won’t need to undress you with their eyes.
Thomas Fuller
Men honour what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.
Chuang Tzu
Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.
Buddha
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
Robert Sarnoff
One thing I have learnt is that transport, rather like banking, is at its best when it is boring. That is when it tends to work.
Alistair Darling
Without deviation progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.
Jules Henri Poincare, 1854-1912
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
GC Lichtenberg
Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.
Found at www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum.html
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and “coincided point for point with it.” But even this map, the size of the empire it described, could not capture the totality of experiences within the empire. Sure, it could tell you exactly where the castle is, or which roads intersected with which others and where, but it couldn’t, for example, tell you what that intersection smelled like.
Rose Eveleth, Seeing Maps of Sounds and Smells
The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.
Lao Tzu
Light thickens, and the crows make wing to the rooky wood.
Macbeth
Weekly Photograph
OK, for this week’s photograph we have something slightly different. A tiny little beast which although scary looking is harmless to us, but scary indeed if you’re a caterpillar as it is a predator and parasite.
This is an Ichneumon Fly. They parasitise caterpillars and other creepy-crawlies by laying their eggs in them for their larvae to eat from the inside.
These are the four best shots of a tiny ichneumon which wandered into the house. I suspect it if being a member of the Braconidae, possibly Apanteles glomeratus; almost certainly one of the Ichneumonidae. Its head and body about the size of a British black ant (so around 4-5mm) with the antennae and ovipositor each roughly the same length as the body. Its legs were definitely reddish. It liked walking about (it was quick too) and then suddenly flew off into oblivion.
Ichneumon Fly?
Greenford; July 2009
Chocolate Week and National Baking Week
Yes! The week of 14-20 October brings a double win as it is both Chocolate Week and National Baking Week. And what better excuse could any of my fiends have to bake me a yummy chocolate torte!
Chocolate Week promotes fine flavour chocolate, celebrating the work of top chocolatiers and chocolate companies. But of course there’s nothing to stop you all participating at home!
National Baking Week supports the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the top five paediatric research hospitals in the world. So the idea is that by baking and selling your results money is raised for the GOSH charity.
As always there is more information over on the Chocolate Week website at www.chocolateweek.co.uk and on the National Baking Week website, www.nationalbakingweek.co.uk.
Something for the Weekend
King Harold Day
Saturday 12 October is King Harold Day. Unfortunately as 12 October is also my mother’s 98th birthday I won’t be able to partake of the celebrations — which is a real shame as I grew up just across the valley from the centre of activity in Waltham Abbey.
Essentially this is a weekend of activities, both fun and serious, to celebrate Harold Godwinson — yes he’s the one who lost at home to William the Conqueror — who is (allegedly; it has never been proved or disproven) buried at Waltham Abbey, which he had refounded a few years earlier.
The events on offer range from an early music recital in the Abbey Church (above) to displays of falconry and Morris Men.
As always there more information on the King Harold Day website at www.kingharoldday.co.uk.
Weekly Photograph
This week’s photograph is one from our rail holiday in German’s Harz Mountains, February 2008. Here 7241 pauses in failing light towards the end of a steam charter from Quedlinberg to Wernigerode.
Admiration
Eisfelde, Germany; February 2008
Word: Offing
Offing
Yes, offing is a responsible, adult word! And not just in the phrase “in the offing” which is now perhaps its most common usage. It is actually a nautical term …
1. The part of the visible sea distant from the shore or beyond the anchoring ground.
2. A position at a distance off the shore.
Hence, by analogy to a ship some way off shore but visible, that phrase “in the offing” meaning something that is close-ish to hand and yet some way distant.
The OED gives the first recorded use in 1627.