Randomly-found linkage

I went surfing, playing the "friend of a friend" game, from the projectdownload community (which reminds me, I haven't pimped that for a few posts: go over here, read, and click, please).

I found a lady who has a website full of her own music that she's having problems promoting. So, here's her music site. I like....

A seasonal gadget I probably don't need

USB Christmas cake? I'm too late to order one anyway, but the 1Gb strawberries (er, strawberries? in December?) make it rather tempting.

Writer's Block: Winters in my Childhood

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I wonder why this thing labelled "writer's block" has appeared on my LJ home, and what it does? Good idea, anyway.

Winter when I grew up. It takes a while for the memories to come back, and warm up: wrong phrase there, in this context. It was cold. Not bitterly, feet-of-snow level cold, but cold. We didn't have central heating, and the fanheaters in our bedrooms were expensive to run, so getting out of bed was a shock and involved dressing rapidly (getting partly dressed under the blankets could be done). Or if feeling extravagant and lazy, slide a toe out to the heater switch....

There wasn't usually much snow, but frost on the pavements, yes, or enough slush and ice to make walking either difficult or interesting depending on your viewpoint. Deliberately sliding down gentle slopes made them even more slippery, which was fun, but got you into trouble if caught at it by people who had the other viewpoint on these things. If it was a music day at school, I was carrying a cello nearly as big as I was, and if the wind caught me on the route to the bus-stop, I could slide quite a way even on the flat using that as a sail.

We lit the fire in the dining room in the autumn, and from then on it stayed lit till the spring: you banked it up at night by lifting a piece at the front up with a special lever, and did the same during the day when everyone was out at school or work. First one home in the evening lowered that, raked it out, and put fresh coal on. And that was the central room of the house, where we had the radio on and did our homework, because it was warm.

If the weather was particularly bad, the buses couldn't get up (or down) some of the hills, so buses from the centre of Luton couldn't get up to us on the outskirts, and also couldn't cope with one of the hills on the way out to Hitchin - the Offley hill, on the old road. I remember one morning the driver starting off from the Offley bus stop, pausing at the top of the hill, and calling back to the conductress: "did they say how we're meant to get down this? Forwards, or sideways?" We got down forwards, but very slowly. Not being able to get to school would be a problem, but not being able to get home would be worse. Ten miles, Letchworth to Luton, is a long walk. If it had ever come to it, I expect they'd have put us up with the boarders for the night, but it never did.

The only time I remember really deep snow may be exaggerated by memory anyway. I was very small, so small that "the baby" was left at home while my dad took me out on a sledge after dark. "The baby" - Helen must have been about eight months old, and I'd have been three. We went all round the local streets, and over to Putteridge Bury where there was a slope steep enough to ride down without needing to be pushed. A wonderful, magical, night. There was never snow as good as that again, probably because in later years, I was seeing it with more critical eyes. We built snowmen, we had snowball fights, we lost mittens and froze our fingers, but while it was fun, it wasn't the same magic as that first time.

RK Pomes

Winter Solstice festival in Lancaster, and I'm joining in a few of the competitions. One of them was to write a poem on the subject of winter in Lancaster. My muse, reliable as always, started off by producing a haiku. For Lancaster, in 1455. Great. :(

A Lancaster Inn.

Snow without: within,
the fire, mulled wine, and friendship
warm toes, heart, and soul

Well, the syllable count's right. I'm not convinced it gives the scene snapshot I'd have liked, and the "nature" reference is in the wrong place.

1455, haiku are not what we want. But the miniaturisation concept was still with me, and what appeared next was a pseudo-Celtic triad.

The Three Great Risings of Lancaster Feast:

The bread, before baking
The crowd, to greet their Duchess
Drunkard, from the tavern floor
But the Sun at its rising will be greater than the three

Three items, intended to work from greatest to least (1 and 2 are almost equal, here). "Drunkard" is a player who lives up to his name. I quite like this, but we're not in a Celtic area, and that isn't really poetry. So I went and looked up what poetry was around in 1455, and found someone who'd died in 1400 or thereabouts. Chaucer... When in Aprille.... It's not Aprille, it's December. It's not spring, it's winter. Zodiac references need changing, as does the name fo the wind. And they're not going on pilgrimage, it's a pub-crawl. (Taverns, in all three attempts? Yep. That's where most of the game's RPing takes place.) So we got the Lancaster Tales.

When that December with his cold so sore
November's fogs hath frozen to the core
And bathed every vein in such licour
Of which virtue engendered is the flower
When Boreus with his icy breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The bare branches; and the old sun
From the Archer to the Goat hath run
And smalle beasts make nut trees bare
That sleepen all the winter in their lair
Like sleepy bears in their caverns
Then longe folke to go to taverns
And drinkers for to seek strange brands
To try their luck in sundry lands
And specially, from every shires' end
Of Engleand, to Lancaster they wend
The corn, and bread and meat for to seek
That them hath holpen, when that they were weak.

For once, I'm playing with rhyme as well as rhythm. The syllable count is the same as the original. The rhyming pattern is the same (though in some cases using different rhymes). I doubt if I'll win with this, no other reader is likely to know the original enough to compare (half of them probably haven't heard of Chaucer!) but I'm rather pleased with it.