The Dancing Cabman

Alone on the lawn
The cabman dances;
In the dew of the dawn
He kicks and prances.
His bowler is set
On his bullet-head.
For his boots are wet
And his aunt is dead.
There on the lawn
As the light advances,
On the tide of the dawn,
The cabman dances.

Swift and strong
As a garden roller,
He dances along
In his little bowler,
Skimming the lawn
With royal grace,
The dew of the dawn
On his great red face.
To fairy flutes,
As the light advances,
In square, black boots
The cabman dances.

Nominative determinism again

 From the Smithsonian online magazine:

“I’m surprised [the paper] was published as is,” Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in Wales, tells Dyani Lewis of Nature, which first reported the dispute.

  It's his real name. His father was an archaeologist.

A new dimension of light

I had a slight visual disturbance (again) which is a normal ageing thing but I wanted it checked, and got an appointment at Specsavers. They gave me those drops that make your pupils huge. 

Like most myopic people, when I look at any lights without my specs, they're not sharp but fuzzy little snowflakes. When I came out of Specsavers it was dusk and the Christmas lights were all shining. I happened to take off my specs.

The lights were now huge, shimmering, mingling hazes. Christmas lights, headlights, lights in windows, street lights, were pulsing portals into another dimension of light. I walked round town and the Museum Gardens (where the paths were lined with lights, and were now tunnels of gold), bumping into people and probably with my mouth hanging open.

No one else could see this massive silent firework display.

I nearly missed my train to Leeds because there was a tall Christmas tree on the station concourse which was now a conical avalanche. The wonder lasted for another hour and faded away in Leeds ...

World Jellyfish Day

and as I listened to Today this morning, they had on a specialist from the University of Plymouth to talk about jellyfish: Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop.

Best nominative determinism ever, especially if you think of one stranded on a beach.

We stood on the hills, Lady

The Shepherd’s Carol (1945)

Clive Sansom

We stood on the hills, Lady,
Our day’s work done,
Watching the frosted meadows
That winter had won.

The evening was calm, Lady,
The air so still.
Silence more lovely than music
Folded the hill.

There was a star, Lady,
Shone in the night,
Larger than Venus it was
And bright, so bright.

Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady,
It seemed to us then
Telling of God being born
In the world of men.

And so we have come, Lady,
Our day’s work done.
Our love, our hopes, ourselves
We give to your son.

Letty's Globe

When Letty had scarce pass’d her third glad year,
 And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colour’d sphere
 Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
 She patted all the world; old empires peep’d
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
 Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d,
 And laugh’d and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turn’d her sweet unlearnèd eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry—
‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
 And while she hid all England with a kiss
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.

Charles Tennyson Turner

The Magic Fishbone - by Charles Dickens

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