a passing idea, hailed and arrested

I actually managed to come up with a useful idea at one of the meetings today. (Yes, we spent four hours in meetings. No, I cannot say I enjoy spending four hours in meetings.) Still can't quite believe it. We'll have to see how it pans out in practice.

The weather continues annoyingly cold -- no, not as cold as America, but I'd started to get used to a mild spring, and now here we are back in the cooler temperatures. Irritating.

Ten days till new Doctor Who. Prepare for the weekly bursts of enthusiasm. (At least, I hope they'll be bursts of enthusiasm.)

---

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
Here upon Earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving East
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
upon those underlands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travellers in the Westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
of evening widen and steal on

And deepen in Palmyra's street
The wheel-rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

-- Archibald MacLeish

terse as virulent hermaphrodites

I suppose working hard all day and then knitting rather than napping when I get home is likely to call in its due and present its demands, etc, sooner or later.

In other words, I'm tired.

I am enjoying the knitting, though.

---

Contours

Round - oblong - like jam -
Terse as virulent hermaphrodites;
Calling across the sodden twisted ends of Time.
Edifices of importunity
Sway like Parmesan before the half-tones
Of Episcopalian Michaelmas;
Bodies are so impossible to see in retrospect -
And yet I know the well of truth
Is gutted like a pratchful Unicorn.
Sog, sog, sog - why is my mind ambitious?
That's what it is.

-- Noel Coward