You know how, when you see those documentaries in Shark Week at Discovery, they’re always tagging and putting radio beacons on sharks? Well, now you can follow those tagged sharks all over the ocean. Isn’t the future wonderful.
Also: how to bathe a hedgehog:
I just wanted a Youtube video of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out to listen to at work, the cats were a bonus:
Ever since Youtube eased the length restrictions on uploaded videos a while ago people have been using it to share full length albums or concerts, but it’s usually done lazily, just a straight audio rip of an album with some cover art. This guy however (and somehow I do think it’s a bloke, as they tend to be more anorakish about these things) has gone out of his way to make the video almost as appealing as the music. He’s included the titles of the songs, the back cover text of the original album, not to mention some great shots of the record player doing its thing and his cats responding to the music.
The thing about grief is, that for me at last, it’s nothing like the grandstanding you see in movies or on tv. It’s not a great outpouring of emotion, no crying jags, no dramatic shakings of fists at uncaring heavens, just that dull, gnawing pain in the pit of your stomach, occasionally forgotten or unnoticed, but always there. It’s just there, whatever you do, churning.
It’s almost a year now since she died and it seems like forever. You slide deceptively easily back into your daily routines after that initial period of shock, just existing day to day, getting on with life. Yet that feeling remains at the edge of your consciousness that she’s just stepped out of the room, you could pick up the phone and call her, she’s still lying there in hospital if you’d care to visit. So many times during a day that you hear something or see something or read something you’d want to share and so many times you stop short, wait, you can’t do that anymore.
The worst comes at night. The worst always comes at night. All the suppressed anxieties of the day are expressed in dreams, part of the half familiar, half distored landscape of your subconsciousness. There she is, waiting and sometimes you know it’s a dream and she’s dead and sometimes you don’t, but the worst are those that you know but it had all been a mistake. That glimmer of hope you know is wrong and which evaporates when you wake up, setting you up nicely for yet another day.
Sometimes you have to look at a familiar landscape through foreign eyes to appreciate it:
But there’s no bridge from anyplace I’ve lived to the Dutch polder. This is nothing like anything I have ever known. If my love of California came through the front door and my love of Scotland through the side, this sudden, inarticulate love of the Netherlands is the unexpected guest who appears one day in the living room, ringing no bell and answering no invitation. And yet, here it is, and it draws me out of the house and away from the cities every bright day. I go out for half-hour rides and come back three hours later, windblown and bright-eyed.
And the Noord-Hollands polder through which I’ve been riding is the real deal, the unfiltered, unadulterated Dutch landscape, served neat. It’s undiluted by tulips and uncut by the tourist trail. It stretches out northward from the urbanized shore of the IJ to the Afsluitdijk, making up the land between the North Sea and the IJsselmeer. The fields are punctuated by towns and villages: Purmerend, Volendam, Alkmaar, Heerhugowaard, Den Helder, Edam, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Schagen, Heiloo. Straight, elevated canals and swift roads cross them, taking the people and the freight to and fro. But the land between is filled only with a kind of vastness: long, straight lines of pasture under the endless, endless sky.
Abi Sutherland declares her love for the flat, Dutch landscape. I’ve always found Noord-Holland, that stretched out farmland north of Amsterdam, to be dull and depressing, the worst part of the Netherlands but Abi shows it can be beautiful too.
So did Jacques Brel decades ago, talking about Vlaanderen, but it could be Holland as well:
The Dvorák Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, with Truls Mork as soloist.