Shoes...

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Red Dirt Girl and I share some laughs over shoes. Her blog, the one I first read, posted pictures of the shoes and boots she liked, along with the poetry she loves. She had, just before my arrival, taken possession of a pair of extremely neat red lace-ups, which I admire greatly.

It would not be an inexactitude to suggest I was a just a tiny wee bit jealous of her for having such cool footwear.........

I had always wanted a pair of shoes with toes in them, so I threw common-sense to the wind, and went ahead and bought some Vibram Five Fingers. They're silly, but comfortable, and allow me to hang upside-down like a fruit-bat, using my prehensile toes.

Okay. I lied. I can't hang upside down using my toes, but I can leave strange footprints in the mud.

Not to be outdone, the Red Dirt Girl's youngest son (12) just came home from school with  this cool footwear made out of duct-tape over socks, by his schoolfriend. Kelyn.

LINK

We stayed, on our travels, in an old ranch-house

We stayed, on our travels, in an old ranch-house, built here in 1859, when Texas was a very different place. Sam Houston became Governor in that year, and far to the north-east, John Brown led a raid on the federal armoury at Harper's Ferry, sparking what is often held to be the genesis of the civil war. Two  years later, against Houston's strong counsel, Texas became one of the five states that seceded from the Union.
Also, in this year, Juan Cortina spoke out against the mistreatment of mexicans within Texas by the incoming settlers, and led a short-lived uprising centred on Brownsville.

Just a few miles away to the north-west, the U.S. army was sending an expedition to map the way west, men, camels, and mules, faltering and dying of thirst on the way.

I say this because I sometimes joke, unfairly, that Texas' history started only last thursday; -coming from a place where I can see evidences of the sweep of history pretty much forever back into the past, iron-age, bronze age, celts, vikings, romans, it amuses me to see what in my world would be unremarkable buildings revered because they were built in 1920, and thus are 'Historic'....

I pass a building every day here, built in a.d. 1150.

A few miles away, I can find 4000 year-old stone carvings on the moor tops.

Staying in this cabin, travelling through the Texas hill-country, I was very aware that the people who settled this land were truly pioneers of the unknown. This was the frontier, the edge of the known world. Yes, California and the west coast were being settled, but for the most part, the lands to the north and west of here remained unmapped and mysterious. Life was precarious and uncertain. 

Now, in the current era, life is not so bad, and the Gruene Homestead Inn (New Braunfels, handy for San Antonio and Austin,) is a very good choice as a place to stay. More about it later, maybe. One of the pleasures here is breakfast, held in the main house, a rather grander affair, moved bodily across the street and planted here a few years back. This is the only place I've ever seen fruit salad with strawberries teamed with hard-boiled eggs and cheese.

(Very tasty, I must say. Especially after a good dose of bacon and scrambled egg).
"How", you might ask,  "do they shell all those eggs?"

They have a machine to do it, of course!

At the Gruene Homestead Inn, this sight intrigues me, the old well and water tank. Wind pumps are a common sight in the vistas of Texas, in so much of the country, the water's deep below the surface. But here, the hard edges of the steel are tempered and softened by the twining wisteria, who sees the  opportunity, in her embrace, to climb above the surrounding countryside, turning the steelwork into a frame for her blue flowers and soft green foliage.
We stayed here a year ago. Another post from this place can be found here.

Sometimes I see this as a metaphor for us, RDG and me. Each partakes of the other's qualities, and each gains in the exchange. Over the years, like the windpump and wisteria, we've grown together, and entwined.

Just start from here... In your own words, no hurry. When you're ready? Okay?

Well, yes, where do I start?

I really have forgotten how to do all this stuff with keyboards and so on. I've been away. Away from the world, away in another place, but not a place you can find on the map, I've been away in a metaphysical sense as well as a geographical translocation.
I've been travelling with the Red Dirt Girl.

Those of my readers who have a history here will know some of our back-story, but it deserves a re-telling. It extends back to just a little before page one of my blog, back at the end of December, 2006.

I'd been blogsurfing, found a writer who'd posted a poem which I liked, wandered into the previous posts, had a fun hour or so of reading, looking at pictures, fascinating diversions. So I left a comment. Only the blog didn't accept anonymous comments, nor, so far as I then understood it, comments from anybody without a Blogger i.d.

What to do? I want to leave a comment to say how neat the blog is, so, I sign up, get a blogger i.d. and leave my comment. Only now I have a blogger account and no idea what that means, nor what to do with it, so I indulge my inner idiot, and invent a blog name and write something, and suddenly we're careering toward the trees with no stabiliser wheels and no brakes. I'm sure the occupants of the interwebs, those folk who were here first, before me, the big kids.... yes, just like that, like your first day at a new school. They're going to stomp on my lunch, ridicule my speech, flush my head down the toilet. But no. they were kind and welcoming, and its now well  over six years, and that blogger whose blog I liked, well, she responded, and we started a dialogue, and about seven months later, she stepped off a plane, thousands of miles from home and gave me a big hug.

I can't imagine really how much courage it took to do that, especially when her dad was warning her what a crazy person she was, going to meet some unknown foreign guy, far away from all that was safe, he was probably a weirdo and a serial killer.

But she did. She made that leap of faith, and, as luck would have it, I may be weird, but I'm no cereal killer. Except for corn-flakes. We'd learned a lot about each other, of course, by then, but even so, it was nerve wracking. After about three days I told her that I planned to marry her. I didn't exactly ask, I just told her. We were sitting in York Minster, in a beam of coloured light from ancient stained-glass windows. She didn't scream. Nor did she run away.

A little later, I persuaded her to sit on the pedestal of a roman column, for a photograph, she was not too sure, thought the romans might arrest her, for despoiling an ancient monument. That's what happens when you grow up in a world where a building from the 1960s is regarded as 'Historic'.

 I think she looks happy?

Here we are, six years later, and we're still both happy.  And I'm packing up my life, ready to move to the U.S. to marry her. 

There's a ring, made specially for her finger, by a craftsman working in a tiny village where there are remains of Roman villas, some 20 miles north of where that picture was taken. And there's a heap of paperwork, grinding slow as a glacier, through the machinery of government, but one day soon, I'll get the piece of paper summoning me to the embassy in London for a 'Fiance Visa' interview.

Once my passport is stamped, I'll be winging my way west to a new life, with the person I should have met twenty years ago.

As I say, I've been travelling. With my best friend, my missing piece, the one who says the word I'm thinking. We're not clones, we're very different, but we fit. We fit like matched gears, like jigsaw pieces, like beats of a heart.

At the moment, we're apart. We speak every day, the phone companies  should love us, but instead just overcharge us with glee. Thank heavens for skype.

Sometimes the internet does good. I wasn't looking for this, I'd no idea this would be the result of one little comment, but I'm very happy it did.

Happy Birthday, Red Dirt Girl!

(More travelling, and pictures to come)

This blog will shortly resume.

I've been travelling for a zillion hours.
I want to go to bed, but if I do, then I'll wake up at about two in the morning, still on Texas time.
I need to go out and buy food and milk.

Update when my brain catches up.

But I can tell y'all, that when I touched down at London Heathrow, I wanted to walk straight over to the gate that was boarding a flight back to Texas.

The Pope and the Falklands.

Pope Francis, it is reported, shares his Argentinian President's belief that the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory, should belong to Argentina.

Last week, there  was a referendum on the islands to find out what was the will of the people in terms of future sovereignty. This was closely monitored by a team of international observers.
Here are the results.

Results of the referendum on the Political Status of the Falkland Islands

On Monday 11^th March 2013, Keith Padgett, Chief Referendum Officer gave notice that the result of the referendum on the Political Status of the Falkland Islands are as follows:
The number of ballot papers issued was 1,522
The number of votes cast at the referendum was 1,518
The total number of rejected ballot papers was 1
The total number of votes validly cast at the referendum was 1,517
The percentage of turnout at the referendum was 92%
The number of “Yes” votes cast was 1,513 (99.8%)
The number of “No” votes cast was 3 (0.2%)
1 vote was unaccounted for
The international observation mission’s preliminary findings were released after the official announcement of the vote result.  Full statement is available to download in English and in Spanish here.
“It is our finding that the Falkland Islands referendum process was free and fair, reflecting the democratic will of the voters of the Falkland Islands,” said Brad Smith, the Head of the International Observation Mission. “The international observation mission has concluded that the voting process was executed in accordance with international standards and local laws. The process was technically sound, with a systematic adherence to established voting procedures.”




Clear enough, wouldn't you say. Some of those voters are in the ninth generation of families to have lived there. 

Argentina's president dismisses it as 'irrelevant'.

She claims the islanders are 'squatters' on land which naturally must be Argentinian territory, because... well, just because.

Here's a timeline, via Wikipedia , showing who, and for how long, has historically held the islands.

February 1764 – April 1767	France
January 1765 – July 1770	Great Britain
April 1767 – February 1811	Spain
September 1771 – May 1776	Great Britain
February 1811 – August 1829	None
August 1829 – December 1831	United Provinces
December 1831 – January 1832	United States
January–December 1832	None
December 1832 – January 1833	Argentine Confederation
January–August 1833	United Kingdom
August 1833 – January 1834	None
January 1834 – April 1982	United Kingdom
April–June 1982	Argentina
June 1982 – present	United Kingdom

So  it seems several others could proffer a claim too. Including the U.S.

The people there speak English, and their houses, their roads, their world owes nothing to Argentina.

If we are to talk of the tyranny of colonialism, which President Kircher brings up, well maybe we might ask her to explain why the population of the country she represents speaks spanish as its main language?

And we might ask her  how the native Fuegian and Patagonian tribes fared under the colonisation of her forbears? How they were hunted and slaughtered by the colonial Argentinians of european  origin. 

It seems to me that the people of the islands should be heard, and supported by the world. And that any nation who talks of 'Democracy' as an ideal, should stand by them. 

(Next Week:  Canada invades St Pierre and Miquelon, after finding a tiny French colonial outpost only a few miles off the southern edge of Newfoundland. )

There's a New Pope.

Yes, I know... It's an old pope, one or other of them. 

The point made remains relevant.

I Can't Dance.

There's a time in a kid's life when dance is natural. Whatever happened to mine passed suddenly, and I thus have all the dancing ability of a block of stone. Two left feet. Disconcertingly unco-ordinated.

My best friend, when I was a kid, was sent by his parents to dance classes. I ridiculed him, unfairly, because by then, young teenage years, it seemed to me that dancing was a neat way to get a grappling hold on the mysterious, and largely unapproachable opposite sex. In truth, I was a bit jealous.

Whether wibbling about to contemporary pop, or those ballroom dancers I saw on T.V.,  or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the whole thing was a mystery, into which other people were initiated, but somehow, I was held in ignorance.

Luckily for me, my lack of prowess in this particular field is not usually a problem. The Red-Dirt Girl is not big on dancing either.
What pisses me off no end is when someone at a party, who has had a bit too much to drink, insists I dance with them, and won't take no for an answer.



There's a mystery, when I dream, sometimes I can dance. I think on the whole, I'd prefer to be able to dance and choose not to, rather than the current state of unable and choose not to.



When she asked me to dance I said, "I have two left feet."
And the she took my hand and whispered a song so sweet
And she said, "Hold me as close as you can 'til my body's on fire."
It's just a vertical expression of horizontal desire.
So we moved like water being poured over polished steel
And I really can't translate the way she made me feel
And the music played on and the mercury just went higher
It's just a vertical expression of horizontal desire.
We did the samba, the mambo
The tango, the two-step while we romanced
And when the music got fast
We just held to each other and slow danced.
I took nothing for granted but I wished I could stay all night
And as we walked into her place she reached out to dim the light
She said, "Dance with me darling 'til the moon and the stars retire."
It's just a vertical expression of horizontal desire.
It's just a vertical expression of horizontal desire...

Lyrics:  David Bellamy

The expression "Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire" has been attributed to Robert Frost, Oscar Wilde, ...... And George Bernard Shaw.
There seems to be no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim for either Frost or Wilde, and the only printed evidence for Shaw was in an article written twelve years after his death, but it was actually thus:
Google Books The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
By Elizabeth M. Knowles
New York, NY: Oxford University Press
1999
Pg. 709 (George Bernard Shaw):
[Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
in New Statesman 23 March 1962

Some Images from My Working Week.

There's no real need for  an accompanying text, I was just going through my pics, taken as part of my working life, I use the phone-cam as a handy memory aid as I work, saves me innumerable notebook pages. Sometimes, I think the places I work are a computer-gamer's dream world. I expect space-suited explorers of the abandoned facility to leap out at any moment, brandishing the Super Plasma Cannon that they picked up on level 8.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Vintage fuel beneath this, I'm sure.
My 1962 Landrover drools for a hit of the old stuff as we pass by.

 

 Mmmm... still got some in, none of that bio-ethanol nonsense in there, it's all old-school carcinogens, and tetraethyl lead additives.