Burial ground

An update on our Moslem burial ground over the last couple of months, I've been a bit lazy about taking photos.  

It's getting on, but there's still a lot to do, I suspect the landscaping will start in the spring. The local community police officers seem to be keeping a high profile at the moment, I hope the vandals stay away. Psychologists say that something in good shape is less likely to suffer, lets hope so!

Fused Glass

 The end of term again, stained & fused glass are both totally addictive. The downside is the precision needed in cutting so the bits fit, but I'm improving.

Dichroic glass is the most amazing stuff, micro-layers of metal or oxides, developed by NASA. The results are variable, totally unpredictable, but always beautifully coloured and shimmery. The colour you see looking at it is totally different from the colour looking through it. The Romans sort of had it, not the electro-vapour coated one we have, but the two different colour stuff.

This one's an experimental window-hanging, multiple layers of glass, the top layer tacked on rather than fused in. The sparkly fish are dichroic glass.

More from the Gower

Wales in December doesn't really bring to mind a T-shirt stroll along the coast, picnicking in the sun, but unpredictable as ever, that's just what we had.

Just enough of a shower to make spectacular clouds and rainbows, in this one what appears at first sight to be a reflectiion is offset from the bottom of the "real" one, unlike a proper reflection, any explanation anyone?

I think this is a kestrel from it's black tipped tail, but I'm happy to be corrected.

M identified these as stonechats, he's usually right!

Late/early Christmas!

Having a virtual flick through photo albums I found these Christmas cake pictures from September, long since eaten!

Not quite as daftly premature as it seems, Rosey was off to Antarctica again.

Christmas!

The walking club had out traditional Christmas weekend at a Youth (!) Hostel in the Gower, the weather was better than you could reasonably expect in Wales in December, and the food one of the best meals I've had. the mushroom in cream sauce in filo pastry starter

and pear tart were beyond words. Anyone with a few days in this area should check out chriskeenan the caterer, he does courses and things. No problem to transport all the stuff to a tiny YHA kitchen, it would be a good mega-birthday or wedding celebration.

Unconnected Pleasures!

Sometime ago I mentioned teasels as a brilliant garden plant, for its flowers, and persistent stalks. here's another reason: Goldfinches, so shy that any movement makes the scarper, but through a window you can see them enjoying the last seeds. Not brilliant photos as the windows needed cleaning.

The South bank is always worth a visit, at this time of year there's a splendid Christmas market, although the prices ean it's for looking more than actually buying.

Books, nearly there!

            I've now got to 55 mind-improving books, 5 to go to my 60 target, but I'll continue to tell you about good (or particularly bad) ones.

               Al-Khalili:Pathfinders looks at the history of science and maths origination in Arabic cultures, Persia Syria &c. It’s quite solid going, but with lots of fascinating bits of information. Many words like algorithm, algebra, gibberish and of course our numbers and the concept of zero are all their ideas. Seleucus, a Babylonian around 190 BCE came up with the strange idea that the sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the solar system.

 Knapp:Potted Histories is a lavishly illustrated large-format book looking at the main plant groups through classical illustrations. A brilliant idea, but the text is a bit meatless, and often doesn’t relate to the illustrations. The end-notes after each chapter would be much better if incorporated in the body of the text, but the snippets of history and about the people are good value.

 White:Natural History of Selbourne  consists of Gilbert White’s letters, mainly about birds from the 1770s & 80s. The language is quaint, particularly in respect of mating habits, very delicately alluded to, and he uses old spellings like oeconomy. It’s hard to imagine such precise observations of, for example the feeding-on-the-wing habits of swallows without access to binoculars or a camera, or observations on migration (sometimes wrong) with no electronic tags, no wonder there were so many mysteries. Even Linnaean classification was in its infancy, so anyone could, and did, come up with whatever Latin descriptive name seemed apt. This is still causing confusion. I love all the quotations from Milton, don’t see that much nowadays, and from erudite textbooks in Latin too, as a normal thing for the educated. Fortunately translations provided, it taxed my rather old O-level!