The Industrious Mole

A report by our roving reporter, Bogus Cognomen.
(This being mainly a story for children)

Just North of Banbury, and a little to the left of Bicester, in the county of Oxford, England, lies a small and isolated village, bypassed by the main roads, and stumbled upon but accidentally by our correspondent in these parts.

This village has a population of 96 moles and seven dragons. Its name, though you’ll have a hard time finding it on any map, is “Much Scrabbling ('Neath the Turf)”. At the Northern end of the main street is a small thatched pub, the “Shovellers Arms”.
When our reporter entered the pub, he found, much to his surprise, a dragon in working clothes sitting by the window, toasting a cheese sandwich with gentle and judicious puffs, and opposite the dragon, a small mole, with dirty arms. Yes. At last our correspondent had tracked down the proprietors of the famed “Spinning Mole’ Pottery”.

Almost the entire adult population of Much Scrabbling (Neath The Turf) is employed by the Spinning Mole Pottery.
So he was very lucky to find Elijah Muldwarp and Llewellyn the dragon taking their lunch break.

After a few toasted sarnies- in fact rather a lot, as Llewellyn enjoys toasting sandwiches even more than he enjoys eating them - we were privileged to learn the economics and methods of the pottery.

The main workshop isn’t in a house as we know it, but rather in a bank.

No, not a Barclays Bank, nor a Lloyds, nor even a Williams and Glyns, but an earth bank, which is a fine place for a mole to live.

Outside in the sun a lot of freshly made pots were set out in the sun to dry. Elijah seated at his wheel explained the need for only the best clay.

Well, asked our writer, what is the best clay? The very smoothest replied the little mole. The very smoothest, and from each place comes only a little, for although humans use great machines to tear great pits deep into the earth, the moles are able to use only their small hands, and tiny shovels made from ground down tea-spoons. So they can’t go very deep, also moles are great perfectionists, and only the best will do, so they range far and wide, taking but a tea-spoon here, and a tea-spoon there.

“Where do you find the best clay?” “Oh well, hard to say really, but as a rule of thumb, stoneware clay for big pots is often to be had near river banks, under meadow fields, whereas porcelain, that now, there’s a difficult one. Almost always underneath cricket pitches, tennis lawns, that sort of thing. ‘Course, you have to tunnel a fair bit, and even then you might not get any,

Best to take all your diggings up top and make a nice neat pile, then you can sort through it and see what you’ve got. If aught looks promising, you stick another candle stump in your hat and down you go again. Scrwrawp, Scrowp, Scrawp, ‘till your barrow's full, then off down the passage-ways, till you can dump it onto the “Much Scrabbling Underground Railway”.
The railway runs from the village to workings all over the country, and for almost all of its length it runs underground. Using it, all the digging moles can leave home after a leisurely breakfast, do a full days work far from home, and be back with a cheery whistle (Wheep! Wheep! Wheep!) in time for tea. Of course, working underground as they do, there is always plenty of coal for the engine, but to stop the tunnels from getting dirty, and making one cough, the engine carries a large supply of paper bags - like vacuum cleaner bags - to fill with smoke. This way they can put all their smoke in the dustbin on a Friday for the bin men to take away.

When clay reaches the pottery, it is made into pots of many shapes and sizes by Elijah Muldwarp, and, as we have previously seen, the pots are set out in the sun to dry.

When dry the pots are carefully inspected for cracks, spider foot prints or other faults and coated with a mixture of powdered rocks, (which are collected and crushed from untidy places like rockeries, and the edges of garden paths), and then just as carefully, the pots are loaded into the kiln.

“The Kiln”, I said, but like most potteries, the Spinning Mole has more than one kiln.

For ease and clarity I have shown the small cross draught kiln. This one has the door bricked shut every time. Very time wasting, but, whatever was good enough for the moles grandfather is good enough for him. Actually he’s too busy, or too lazy to set to work and make a hinged steel door packed with fireproof bricks. A much bigger sort of kiln (as seen below) is built on the side of the nearby hill, it’s like a lot of separate kilns joined together, each one a little bit higher than it’s neighbour. So flames put in at the bottom travel through not one but seven separate chambers, which means that every chamber has a different heat, which means that the moles can make a lot of different glazes work in one kiln. This one is what is known as a “Noborigama”. In Japan and China there are Noborigamas that have been in use for over 500 years

The moles favourite kiln, though, is yet another design, it’s called an “Anagama”, which may give you the idea that it’s like the last one. Well it is, a bit, in that it’s built on the side of a bill, and has a long sloping roof above it to protect it from the rain, but an anagama has but one big chamber. In China, these are known as Dragon Kilns, and they were sacred. Anyone who damaged a dragon kiln could be thrown into prison for ever and a day.

This is where the Dragons work, Llewellyn is the leader of the group, and he does all the fire for the anagama on his own. It's hard work for a dragon, because you have to keep the flames going for 22 hours or more. Some of the Chinese and Japanese anagamas had teams of dragons working day and night puffing fire for up to seven weeks at a time, but mole size pots don’t need so long. The dragons start with a gentle flame but, as they go on, they take snacks of curry paste, jalapeno peppers, cough sweets, fuel oil, all sorts of hot things, even whisky. Of course most of these things would make a human very poorly, but for dragons they’re a different matter altogether, they even like the scrapings out of the bottoms of burnt pans. After puffing fire all day it’s quite common for a dragon to be a stone or more lighter, and very tired and weak- usually they just go home to their caves, drain culverts, castle dungeons, underneaths of beds, broom cupboards, etc, and sleep for three or four days at a time.

Dragons sleep very loudly, as you may have noticed.

Some towns have bylaws forbidding dragons from sleeping under people's beds. Which isn’t really such a mean idea as it sounds, because dragons under beds are a fire-risk, especially if there’s a lot of fluff that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. It has been known for whole houses to be burnt down because of dreaming dragons igniting carpet slippers and dustballs under the bed. The flames and smoke destroy the house, but the dragon snoozes right through it all, thinking what a nice warm snoozy place he’s got.

However, kiln dragons rarely do this, because after a firing their flame is so used up, they don’t have enough spark to light a candle, which state they are in for about a week.

After the dragons have fired the kiln, they sleep for three or four days, until the alarm clocks shrill and clatter, (usually at about 5 o’clock on a Thursday, just after the sun comes up). All the dragons stretch, polish their scales, gargle with fire water, and rush down to the pottery, where they mill around in excitement, as Llewellyn carefully takes the first bricks out of the door. As it’s still quite hot, the dragons all work together to start with, and unpacking a kiln is usually an exciting job, so you can imagine the scene. Seven dragons delving into a hot dark space and handing out their finds, bowls, bottles, cups, vases, teapots, casseroles, plates, all manner of new pots, all in bright colours and 100% clean and clear - cleaner than any washing up liquid, or even a washing up machine can make them. In the fire, that clay and covering of crushed rock has turned into something completely new, pottery that rings like a bell when you tap it with your finger.

Usually they do this bit early in the morning, before the moles get up, and the dragons chat happily as they go along.

Then at 8:15, after breakfast, the moles arrive and set to work to sort everything out, check for seconds, break any pots that aren’t up to standard, and pack other pots up to take to market.

By four in the afternoon all the pots are out of the kiln and some of the smaller moles go in and set up candles on the shelves while they check for glaze spots on the shelves, cracked bricks and so on, and generally clean any dust and grit out of the kiln interior.

They then start to fill it with pots for the next firing. whilst other members of the mole community take the pots off to market.

Pots are sold to all sorts of creatures, rabbits, voles and even stoats, weasels, foxes and badgers. Otters like long oval casseroles to do fish in. Bears, mostly the teddy variety these days, buy mostly honey jars.

Paddington bear owns a specially made marmalade jar, and a specially made square sandwich plate. Pigs buy decorated troughs and a very special part of the pottery's work is in decorative porcelain horn tips for Unicorns.

Unicorns are prone to poking and digging with their horns, and it does tend to make the ends rather tatty, but with porcelain all their troubles are over. Mostly they’re very vain, so its not unusual for one Unicorn to own over 50 different decorative horn tips.

This sort of Unicorn is nearly always late for appointments, due to the time spent in deciding which tip to wear.

Dragons, of course, require all their household crockery to be flame proof. This is a problem, but largely solved by the use of clay which, with mixed in talcum powder (Lily of the Valley smell), fires to produce cordierite, a material that can be taken off a red hot cooker and dropped into cold water without cracking.

So, now you know why cricket pitches, lawns, and tennis courts often have little heaps of carefully shovelled earth dotted about them, and if you ever hear scrabbling underneath the soil, and faint steam engine whistles, you’ll know what’s going on.

And this, for the moment, is the end of my story.

Persian Love, Holger Czukay.

I first heard this over twenty years ago. Just a hauntingly beautiful sound.
Holger, better known for the experimental music group, "Can", was listening to crackly channels on a short wave radio. He heard this song on Radio Tehran, in 1979, taped it, and then set to creating the music, splicing and editing the voices...

t>

But rather than me write the story, I'd recommend you read this piece from Alan Warner in Granta.

For Steve, To give to Lily

Steve, of Bullet Holes in the Mailbox has been, he says, chasing Lily, for the last six years. On St. Valentine's day he strewed her porch with candy love-hearts.



He's blogged her a poem, from 'The Last Unicorn', by Peter Beagle. I looked around my house, I thought... I have a Unicorn, somewhere, I'm sure. And if I could give that unicorn to Steve, for him to give to Lily, that might be a good deed.
It comes with a child who has inherited Queen Nefertiti's head, but she's no trouble at all, eats very little and is very quiet, and is of course a trained member of the unicorn-wrangler's guild.

A legacy.

"But Sweetie, I couldn't salute you after what happened last night".

My great-uncle, my grandmother's brother, left me an envelope, filled with drawings, from the mid to late 1950s. They're all by an old friend of his, who I know only as 'Cull'.

All I know of Cull is that he worked with my uncle in an Air Ministry drawing office, in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, at that time. The drawings tend to be on the backs of blueprints, no doubt in their time, top secret material. Turn them over, and you find modification details for the wingroot of the Victor bomber, or the English Electric Lightning supersonic interceptor.

I wish I could find 'Cull's' relatives, I think these should really belong to them. Or at the very least they should have copies.

They're snapshots of an age, a little window into the lives of a small group of men with an important but boring job, and one of their number who lightened their days with fantasy and pranks.

To "Cull", then.

A Misadventure.

I've been absent, mentally and physically, and that's still the case. a few days of sickness and lethargy and mental fog. the mystery six-week illness that I'd been fighting, on and off, seems to have decided it wants me a bit longer. Or it's gone and has invited a friend to take over.

The result is that my brain is an alien place, everything i do needs to be thought out, but then the controls to all the rest of my workings seem to be running a different software.

I fell off a ladder on monday. on a roof. not far to fall, but onto fragile materials with a thirty foot drop if they broke.

As the ladder-foot slipped I was idly wondering in slow motion if I was above the piles of boxes full of soft toys, or above the concrete. Fairly untroubled as the brain couldn't be bothered to think it through.

The result was some bruises, and a spill of acrylic roof repair compound. A lot of cursing. Unfinished job. All would have been well up there if the forecast rain had not started a half-day early.

Tuesday was uneventful apart from the mental fog causing me to keep forgetting things and thus do a lot of trudging back and forth. Oh. And the doctor visit.... inconclusive..medications juggled, altered. blood taken. but no conclusions. I'm either not sleeping, or not waking.

Today I woke late, phoned work, said I'd be in later, my boss said go back to bed you don't sound well... So I did. And slept, not hearing any of the daytime noises, dreaming but nothing memorable except chocolates that played tinkling baroque music as you bit into them. I wondered how it worked, because it started the moment you bit... yet continued until the end... Big chocolates, four bites I'd think.

So, was it a single sound chip, edible? or a distributed mechanism, throughout the chocolate. I'll never know, because I ate it.

Then the phone, insistent.. Had to get out of bed, 7 in the evening. food might be a good idea.

So here I am. Briefly. Will go cook...come back or stumble off to bed.

I'll be back, i promise.

In the meantime, I apologise for not responding to messages and comments. I'm thinking more clearly now than I was, so maybe tomorrow the brain will re-establish communications with the rest of me.

An Adventure

I try to persuade my mother to start writing her memories, but although she says it's a good idea, she doesn't quite get around to it. Her father was the youngest son of a welsh mining family, near Swansea, in the south.
The family lived a hard life, and death was never far away in the coalmines. John's father, and all his brothers felt that he, the youngest, should have a chance to escape that life, and all agreed to put aside a meagre portion of their tiny wages towards his education. So, at the age of twelve, he signed on to the payroll of the mine. With his father and brothers, he toiled in the darkness and filth of the mine, but, each night, he had the first use of the one tub of bathwater that served six men, and then would go out to the mechanics institute, to study engineering. He became a pit engineer, a respected and privileged post, and after a few years, achieved the dream his family had for him, he left the mine, to travel to the seaport of Swansea, where he became an engineer on the docks. In this new life, he met a beautiful girl, Selina-Maria, and fell in love. But they were from different worlds, John Griffiths, a miners son, fiercely proud of his family. Selina-Maria, daughter of the manager of a large company, brought up in a big house with servants, and a stranger to want and hunger. Her father took John aside,and told him that whilst he liked and respected the young suitor, it would be inadvisable to ask for Selina's hand in marriage until he could afford to buy her a house of her own, in a suitable neighbourhood.
Devastated, John realised that he could never earn enough on the docks to meet that requirement, so, writing a letter for his beloved, he signed on as crew in a square rigger, and left his homeland on the evening tide.



The first voyage took him to Africa, the Gold Coast, where he found work as a mine engineer, but then left, along with three other adventurers, to seek gold in the jungles of the Congo, -one by one, the others sickened, John nursed them, then buried them, the african bearers killed and ate the dog. John slept with a gun in his hand, fearing he was to be next on the menu. One night the drums sounded through the jungle, and in the morning, the bearers were gone. John was never sure what time had elapsed before the day he staggered into a native village, delirious with fever, nor how long it was that the villagers nursed him, but by the time he was fit, he spoke their language. With their craftsmen he learned to work the little gold he had found, and from a part of it he made a ring, in the shape of two clasped hands, to send to Selina, before taking ship again, south to Australia.

For four years he travelled, working in mines, repairing steam cranes on docks, crewing square-riggers across the oceans, until he was paid off in Valparaiso, in Chile, where his uncle was a shipwright. He stayed there, working for his uncle, using his engineering skills, learning new ones. The uncle was childless, talked of John being his heir and successor.

Uncle wanted a commitment to staying, but John yearned for his beloved.

One day the two, uncle and nephew had a row. Harsh words spoken, not easily withdrawn.

John packed his sea-chest, and went to the docks. There on the tide, was a ship sailing for England. He signed on. The story goes that his uncle had men searching the town, frantic to find him and persuade him to return, but too late.

Apparently there is a statue to the uncle in Valparaiso... I've nevver been able to confirm the details, but it seems he was honoured as a hero, for warning the town of an impending attack by the Peruvian Navy...

The journey home was a bad one, the Cape Horn storms repeatedly drove them back, he described four months of gales, the ship beating into the wind but unable to round Cape Horn, four months in wet clothes, wet living quarters, rotten food, picking insects out of the biscuits they were fed, four months of shipmates lost swept overboard, of men falling from the rigging, men crushed by shifting cargo.
Eventually they broke free of the southern ocean, and sailed to the Falklands for repairs and provisions. John's skills learned in the shipyard earned him promotion from seaman to shipwright, and much welcome extra pay. He described bursting into tears at the scent of the land as they first approached the shore, to dock at Plymouth, on the south coast of England. When eventually, a week later, he reached Swansea, he arrived unexpected, and at first, unrecognised. The slight, nervous young man the family remembered was no more, At their door was a confident, tanned, weathered man, asking to see Selina. Her mother, puzzled and unrecognising, enquired who he might be and what business he might have, but was bowled aside by Selina, who knew just what business he might have.... The rest, as they say, is history, and I'm here to prove it. The stories are many that I have not written here, The first Motor Lorry in Uruguay, for which John was the engineer, driver trainer and assembler. The schooner found drifting with not a soul aboard, but a meat cleaver buried in the table as a clue. They need my mother to set them down."

I'll try update this, after further quizzing my Mama.

Pointless Things

I was musing about pointless things.
Like this: -the remote control for my car radio.
Why... What is the point? I sit within arm's reach of the radio, as does any front-seat passenger.
Who in their right mind would gift control to anyone in the back?
I wondered maybe stretch limo?
No.. They would sell a hundred thousand ordinary car radios for every stretch limo.

What's the point?


Leave a comment, enlighten me.

And tell me of pointless things you own.

Sigur Rós:Starálfur

Starálfur
Artist: Sigur Rós
Albums: Ágætis Byrjun (1999)
Composers: Jón þor Birgisson
Kjartan Sveinsson
Orri Páll Dýrason
Georg Holm




Blá nótt yfir himininn
Blá nótt yfir mér
Horf-inn út um gluggann
Minn með hendur
Faldar undir kinn
Hugsum daginn minn
Í dag og í gær
Blá náttfötin klæða mig í
Beint upp í rúm
Breiði mjúku sængina
Loka augunum
Ég fel hausinn minn undir sæng
Starir á mig lítill álfur
Hleypur að mér en hreyfist ekki
Úr stað – sjálfur
Starálfur
Opna augun
Stírurnar úr
Teygi mig og tel (hvort ég sé ekki)
Kominn aftur og alltalltílæ
Samt vantar eitthvað
Eins og alla vegginna

I lived and worked in Iceland for a year.
I might post something about it one day.