Hugh's 2019 reading and notes, part 2

Welcome to the new thread!

This week's picture may mean more to @haydninvienna than other Dragoneers. We used to know an old dear who lived in the Kloof Rest Home, just along the road from the church I pointed out, Richard. Indeed, when she got very ancient a considerable part of her book collection moved into mine -- at her insistence, let it be added! Anyway, from her front verandah in the rest home she had a truly amazing view, of which this is part:



Richard will be able to make sense of the road in the "foreground", which is the steep bit going up to our suburb; the bend is where I asked you to look left. You can also see the approach to the viewsite that's now been closed. Home is a bit off to the left, and just behind the slight grassy rise.

Technical bit: This is a telephoto view. I used a 300 mm mirror-lens and a 2x extender. I then had to tweak the contrast digitally.

The Ascent of Money. I've been avoiding this on the library shelf, expecting it to be deadly boring. But then I saw that it's by Niall Ferguson, whose book on Empire is most interesting and full of good things. So I tried this one, and it is too. Maybe as a history of human greed and folly, but nevertheless, readable and interesting.

>2 hfglen: Nice picture to start your new thread with. While the rest of us were not there I think we can appreciate the view.

What Peter said.

Thirded.

>4 pgmcc: >5 Busifer: >6 -pilgrim-: Thank you all!

La Belle Sauvage. I distinctly recall a BBC dramatisation of this broadcast about when it came out. As I recall, that production missed very little, essentially nothing, of value to the story. However I also recall that further dramatisations of the following volumes were promised. According to LT the next volume is out (has anybody in the pub read it?), but no sign of any dramatisation.

Here we are treated to a short period in Lyra's babyhood, ending, as befits the first part of a trilogy, on a massive cliffhanger. As suggested by the LT reviews, this is considerably darker than His Dark Materials, and the anti-religious message is every bit as heavy-handed as one might reasonably expect.

Wild Karoo. An account of an expedition starting from Cape Town and going more-or-less clockwise through the driest parts of South Africa. The inclusion of details of the places where he stayed may make parts of this book date relatively quickly, but other parts, on the history and ecology of selected parts of the Karoo (mostly National Parks and private reserves) are probably timeless. Well written, full of interest and beautifully illustrated.

I have just received an e-mailed circular with the rather questionable English "please see below call...". But the next line really takes the cake:
"Please reach out if you have any queries."
Am I the only Dragoneer inspired to puke rather than respond?

>10 hfglen: Delete! Delete! Delete!

Sorry, I got stuck in a loop there.

I agree with Peter. Unless this is something you already know about and are in desperate need of, get rid of it.

>11 pgmcc: >12 haydninvienna: Thank you both! In fact it was terminally irrelevant, so I've deleted it already (without puking).

"Are you looking at me? If so, why?"



Mr Inky Mistoffelees enjoying a moment's sunshine.

>14 hfglen: Ah, a background where you can actually see a black cat in the photo! I have the hardest time getting a good photo of my dark little shadow cat, who isn't actually black, but a tortoiseshell. She blends into almost everything. Nice photo.

>14 hfglen: As I may have said, Inky is the blackest black cat I’ve seen for a good long while. He wasn’t particularly interested in talking to me so I didn’t make any close inspection, but he didn’t seem to have any white hair at all. Most black cats have ar least a few.

>16 haydninvienna: He does, in fact. A fine white stripe on his chest and some random white hairs on top of his head. (Shame, poor kitty; the strain of living with his pet hoomins is making him grey before his time ;-)
It's taken four years (after he demanded that we adopt him!) for him to decide that lap-sitting is actually possible, and he still often only talks to me at any length when the fridge door is open.

>14 hfglen: Mr Inky looks happy in the sun :)

Did I ever show you this picture of the mountains around Outeniqua* Pass behind George, Western Cape?



*Outeniqua: from a Khoekhoen word meaning "man laden with honey", which seems somehow appropriate.

I've decided to give up on Kraken, not quite halfway through. The characters and story do nothing for me, and I have a problem following China Miéville's convoluted imagination. Anyway, the book needs to go back to the library.

>19 hfglen: Oh, nice! Honey, indeed.

Mr Inky up in >14 hfglen: reminds me of our beloved black cat Fia who we had to put to sleep what must be 17 years ago. She was part Angora, so her fur was very thick and very black, but whatever else she was led to it being quite short.
Still miss her, after all these years...

>21 Busifer: I can well imagine that you still miss Fia. You have my sympathy.

Karoo was written 65 years ago, and forms an interesting counterpart to the recent Wild Karoo I noted recently. Mr Green's book concentrates on the people and their stories, where Mr Reardon's focuses on efforts to rehabilitate nature after the damage caused by not-always-innocent farmers and hunters. I bought the older book on a "bookshop-crawl" that @haydninvienna and I undertook and (I hope) enjoyed recently.

>23 hfglen: Enjoyed? indeed yes, Hugh. Just arrived back in Doha at sparrow-chirp this morning, so the Adventure is officially over. Pictures to follow.

I've finally given up on Hitler's Pope, which became infinitely slow-moving, tedious and repetitive about 40% through. A quick skim suggested that matters improve slightly towards the end, but did I need the frustration of getting there? He'd already made the point many times over that his subject was a deeply flawed human being, with all the backward-looking rigidity I, at least, associate with the not-very-bright trying to cope with a job in which they are out of their depth.

*sigh* there are so many good books out there, waiting to be read.

>20 hfglen: I’ve had mixed reactions to most of the Miéville works I’ve read. I think I mostly enjoy his convoluted imagination, but I get frustrated with his convoluted sentence structures. To be fair, they may not exactly be convoluted, but something about the way he phrases things doesn’t get parsed easily by my brain. Unlike with most other books, I frequently have to re-read sentences to understand what he was trying to say.

I haven’t read Kraken yet. I’m planning to read Embassytown later this year.

It looked to have double-posted, so I deleted, and then it deleted both?!
Oh, well.

>20 hfglen:, >26 YouKneeK: I have read and enjoyed both Embassytown and The City & The City but convoluted certainly seems like a good word to use, here.
I had planned to read one or more of Perdido Street Station, Un Lun Dun, and Kraken, at one time or another, but maybe not Kraken, then.

Edited, because when writing it up the second time I seem to have picked up a dash of dyslexia...

>28 Busifer: I found Un Lun Dun much easier to follow than Kraken. YMMV, of course.

>28 Busifer: I liked The City & The City fairly well, although I wanted more background and details about the city itself. I thought it was the most accessible of the four books I’ve read by him.

I also read the three books in the Bas-Lag series, including Perdido Street Station. I liked Perdido quite a lot, but it took me some time to get into it. I was also frustrated because, although he went into much detail about the city that the story is set in and its inhabitants, other things were surprisingly (and annoyingly) poorly fleshed out by comparison, such as the magic and the world beyond the city. One does learn a bit more about the world beyond the city in the other two books, but the magic remains hand-wavy.

I haven’t read Un Lun Dun.

Un Lun Dun is very much aimed at a younger audience than his normal fare. It has similarities to Gaiman's Neverwhere.

>20 hfglen: thru >31 AHS-Wolfy: I have only read three Miéville books so far. Kraken was the third and I rather enjoyed it. More so than Perdido Street Station, which I did not dislike, but I had similar issues with it like >30 YouKneeK: describes. Beyond the hand-wavy magical aspects, I also thought there were too many things going on that were not adequately wrapped up by the end - but it did have a megaton of cool concepts, (slake moths, the Weaver, the Construct Council, etc).

Embassytown is my favorite Miéville to date. I found it to be more coherent than the other two titles. When it comes to genre, I'm also more of a science-fiction reader - as opposed to fantasy - and Embassytown is purportedly his least 'weird' and most SFnal novel. Also, the overall concept is really quite remarkable.

Tavern of the Seas (bought at the Kloof SPCA with @haydninvienna) is a description of Cape Town and its immediate surroundings. As it was written just over 70 years ago it is acquiring the patina of a historical document. Nevertheless, Mr Green's writing is still eminently readable. This one will probably mean more to those who have lived in, or at least visited, Cape Town than those who haven't.

The forensic science of C.S.I. Interesting. The series is intermittently screened on South African TV, generally in the middle of the night and/or on subscription channels. For the most part it appears that the TV series displays a reasonably accurate image of what CSIs do. The book explains the detail that couldn't possibly be fitted into a TV program, in sufficient detail and simply enough that most readers will have no problem. Only one chapter requires an effort to hang on to one's supper: that dealing with the investigation of dead bodies.

>34 hfglen: I remember watching the show when it originally aired; the original Vegas version, that is. I liked it, but one of the few things that I find genuinely disturbing is when you turn a dead body and the maggots fall out. As a small curious kid living at the edge of a forest I had this happen a couple of times as I poked dead animals (mostly birds) (with a stick). I pretty soon learnt to stay away. Seeing that on a screen is the only time I'll close my eyes.

>34 hfglen: My brother's (a retired policeman) complaint about that show, and all other TV crime solving shows, is the timeline for answers from the labs. He said they were lucky if they got results back in a month. Guess it would be a dull show if they stuck to all the facts. :)

>36 MrsLee:

I can see the opening sequence for episode four:

"Hey, boss, we just received the lab report on the blood stains at the crime scene in episode one."

"Which one was that? I get all the episodes mixed up."

>36 MrsLee:, >37 pgmcc: LOL! As long as the methods used are realistic I'm OK with the compressed time frame.

Edited for grammar...

I love the discussions in this pub! Long may they last.

Went out into the garden and saw that a climber we bought last year is flowering.



It's a Butterfly Pea (Clitoria ternatea), indigenous in a wide area of tropical Africa and Asia. If you look closely and work it out, it's a pea-flower that grows naturally with a 180° twist in the stalk, and so opens upside down. In Southeast Asia the flowers are used as food colouring, and in China it has medicinal uses due to, ahem, the appearance of the flowers (which also give rise to the scientific name). It's also widely grown for ornament, and in Australia apparently it has been used for revegetating land damaged by coal mines.

The Scientist as Rebel. A collection of book reviews and essays by Freeman Dyson. Well written, thoughtful and thought-provoking. He has added paragraphs at the end of some items updating the story from the time of first writing to 2006, when this volume was assembled for publication.

French Spirits. Memoir of an American couple who bought a semi-derelict presbytery in an obscure village in northern Burgundy. We learn a bit of the couple's backstory as well -- the author in particular seems to have had a most unpleasant upbringing. Nevertheless, a delightful story, with space for a sequel.

>40 hfglen:

There's some amazing diversity on this planet,

>40 hfglen: I can speak for the food colouring. I was on a Thai Airways flight a couple of years ago and a tiny jar of something called “butterfly pea jelly” turned up on the breakfast tray. Apparently it was essentially apple jelly coloured with the extract of those flowers. I’ve never been able to find it again, even in Bangkok Airport or on Thai Airways.

>44 haydninvienna: Hmmmz. If the plant had more than 3 or 4 flowers I'd be suggesting that you come to Durban to make the obvious experiment. I presume one extracts the pigment into alcohol (cane spirit or vodka?).

>45 hfglen: With jam or jelly you might be able to just steep the flowers in the boiling jam. Apparently in SE Asia rice is sometimes coloured by adding a bud or two to the rice while cooking. The dye is an indicator and turns pink in acid solution though. I recall the jelly being distinctly blue although under aircraft cabin lighting I couldn’t be sure.

I tried googling the jelly after encountering it and found it very difficult to get any useful information. I’ve never found any kind of commercial source, as I said above, although there must be one.

>46 haydninvienna: All very interesting, thank you. I'm planning to cook rice tonight, but the mind boggles at the idea of blue (or even pink) rice. Might add some turmeric, cinnamon and raisins though (a good Cape tradition, that).

21 lessons for the 21st century. Depressing, overall, though much of what he says needs to be said, often, to those in power (no names, no pack drill; it's just that the planet's survival depends on the message being heard, understood and acted on correctly). I think I'd rate reading this one as a necessary chore, although he writes well and factually.

Dumb question: How do you ride a bicycle in more than one direction at a time (as forbidden by this sign)?



Seen at Giba Gorge MTB park in Durban this afternoon.

I was at a craft beer festival this afternoon (hic!). A picture or 2 to follow.

>49 hfglen: LOL, it is kind of a funny way of phrasing it. I assume it’s like the “One Way” signs I see on roads here in the U.S. sometimes, meaning travel is only permitted in one direction and if you go the wrong way you're likely to cause a head-on collision. So for example if it’s an east/west road, you might be permitted to travel east only and never west.

>40 hfglen: Lovely flower. When the petals fall of has it been de-flowered?

>49 hfglen: It appears to have been good craft beer.

>50 YouKneeK: We usually use the international one-way graphic, a white arrow on a red rectangular background. The other end of the one-way stretch has (should have) an international no-entry sign: a white horizontal bar on a red circle.

>51 pgmcc: Happen so.

>52 pgmcc: It was. I didn't sample this stall's product, which is what it says:



but did try several others, including a pomegranate brew from Clockwork Brewery in Pietermaritzburg. Here's the brewmaster (mistress / brewster) with an enthusiastic customer.

1603. The year Queen Elizabeth I of England died and James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain, thereby ushering in the Stuart dynasty. Theme by theme, the author works through the salient features of one of British history's great turning points. Interesting, if a tad dry in places.

Rudyard Kipling and his world. Only 114 pages, at least half of which are pictures. Hardly surprising that it only lasted one interrupted sitting. But the authorship of Kingsley Amis guarantees a good and interesting read. Curious that he considers Bateman's (Kipling's home for his last 34 years) to be cold, dark, damp and miserable. But then he saw it in winter, and I went there on a sunny summer's day, and didn't see any of those adjectives applying.

>54 hfglen: Thanks to Paul Crilley, I actually understood that the first brew probably comes ftom Durban!

>57 -pilgrim-: Google tells me that their brewery is near the Moses Mabhida Stadium, about half an hour's drive from home. And I see from the author page on LT that Paul Crilley lives in Hillcrest, about 10 km from where I do.

>58 hfglen: Wow. Have you read his Poison City? It's a book that is very mixed in quality, but one strong impression that I got from reading it is his love for Durban.

>59 -pilgrim-: No, but I see several copies on the Durban Libraries' e-catalogue. I'm now planning to request it, as none of these copies are in the Hillcrest, Kloof or Waterfall branches. And I, too, enjoy Durban, for all its faults.

>60 hfglen: Warning: it is a rather original urban fantasy, but the author does have an axe to grind over Christian religion, which takes over a bit in the middle. However the setting is an integral part of the plot, so I look forward to hearing what you think of it.

>61 -pilgrim-: Thanks for the warning. Is the axe-grinding even more obvious than in His Dark Materials? The book would be dire if that is so. I expect it will be some time before I comment further, as it takes Durban libraries several weeks to deliver books requested from other branches, and they only do so about half the time.

>62 hfglen: It is a debut novel, and it shows. I actually received the sequel, Clockwork City (set in London) as a review copy, liked the opening chapters but realised that I was missing some background, so went back for the first book. The sequel is better, and enabled me to grit my teeth through the middle section of Poison City. At least Philip Pullman's cosmology made sense! ... Or I think it probably did... I confess that I got so bored with "feisty", bratty Lyra and the heavy-handed lecturing that I never made it further than Northern Lights.

Crilley's tone is rather more petulant, but just when it gets almost too irritating, he throws in a cracker of a final battle. Perhaps the style is best described as a Philip Marlowe-style noir crossed with Zelazny (although far less polished than either).

>63 -pilgrim-: Many thanks. Lyra does grow up (to an extent) in the last book, but the heavy-handed lecturing does not abate.

Cars Cars Cars Cars. A quick read, as most of the area of each page is occupied by pictures, and there are relatively few pages. So it counts as a coffee-table potted history of the automobile to 1967, the year in which it was published. He traces the history back to Hero of Alexandria (2nd Century BC), and notes several failed attempts of the 17th and 18th centuries to use steam power in a road vehicle. But success came in the 1880s, and he illustrates nearly everything from then on. The author is/was evidently a racing/rally driver and motoring journalist, and so lards his account with his own experiences of driving some of the more eccentric vehicles. His final chapter is speculation on the future, which at this distance in time makes interesting reading. It was evidently written just before the six-day war, as he doesn't see a turbine engine's inordinate thirst as fatal, and he holds out hope for a Wankel engine. His descriptions of crude GPS, self-driving cars and electric buggies are quaint. A fun read for a rainy afternoon, overall.

Special for @MrsLee this week. Here's a mediaeval (c. 14th century) clapper bridge at Postbridge on Dartmoor.



This is quite close to Widecombe-in-the-Moor (shades of the Old Grey Mare, Uncle Tom Cobley and all), and not all that far from MrsLee's ancestors' home at Hele.

The old dear looking cold on the bridge is the Aged Mother; I have numerous pictures of her looking cold when those around her were coping adequately. Indeed, one of her many nonsensical instructions went "Put on a jersey; your mother's cold".

>66 hfglen: Thank you, Hugh. What a lovely bridge indeed! Easy to see monks, serfs, and merchants, possibly even a knight and squire, climbing those steps and scurrying across.

I like your mother's advice and believe I have given the same to my own children once or twice. ;)

>66 hfglen: & >67 MrsLee: One of my sisters, the one that is also my Godmother, brought back a plaque for me from holidays when I was about twelve. Written on it was the phrase:

"A jumper is something a little boy must wear whenever his mother feels cold."

It is obviously a universal principle.

Of tricksters, tyrants and turncoats. South African history includes many bizarre and memorable stories that have long since been filtered out of any school syllabus (they might make the subject interesting; God forbid that should ever be allowed to happen!). Max du Preez is one of our best journalists, and probably about the best qualified person in the country today to tell them with the verve they need. This is his second selection of such tales, and very readable it is too. In deference to the sign at the door of the Pub I must point out that the political repercussions of at least one of the stories are still reverberating in South Africa.

The Long Weekend. It must have been wonderful to visit an English country house between the wars, when most of them were in full flower. If, that is, one could survive the sometimes stifling formality. Less fun to own one, as the upkeep must have been a perennial and horrendously expensive problem. We are told in one place that a small country house for a moderately prosperous owner would have four or five living rooms and a minimum of ten bedrooms (and no more than two bathrooms, that only if you were very lucky). Is this a house or a boutique hotel, one asks oneself? This book is a history of the "country retreat" between1919 and 1939, and the people who owned and lived in them. It is beautifully written and illustrated, with the occasional laugh-out-loud turn of phrase. Thoroughly recommended, especially as many of the houses can be visited nowadays with a National Trust or English Heritage card.

The Olive Season. Evidently the second in a series of four, but perfectly satisfactory as a standalone. She lives on a farm in Provence with her lover (later husband), and chronicles their work in bringing the farm back to life, mainly producing olive oil. One of many threads is the battle with bureaucracy to get their oil registered for AOC status. This plays like a soapie, as French bureaucracy always seems to have another sheaf of forms and pettifogging regulations up its sleeve (sounds like home!). But not all the threads can be handled that flippantly; there are heart-warming moments and tear-jerking ones. I shall look for others in the series.

Some time ago I promised a picture or 2 of the material the Railway History Society's museum acquired recently, and in particular the teacup that is the local equivalent of the one that @Busifer showed us. Here it is, at last:

>72 hfglen: Very nice. Just as you described them.

I was amused to see how well our railway sleeping compartments of yore agree with T.S. Eliot's description of Skimbleshanks's domain in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.



We don't have a complete mock-up of a sleeping compartment, and so "every kind of light, you can make it dark or bright / and a handle that you turn to make a breeze" are missing, but here's "a funny little basin you're supposed to wash your face in".

Non-stop!: London to Scotland Steam. The first time I visited Edinburgh was a few days before my 16th birthday, by Flying Scotsman. Sadly, only a few months earlier British Rail replaced the A4s with Deltics on this route, so I never got to see any of the locomotives on this route (except for Mallard in the National Rail Museum at York, much later). This book is well written and profusely illustrated, in black-and-white, as colour film was as rare as hens' teeth in the period covered. I enjoyed it, but can see where it's a specialist book with TMI for most Dragoneers. Possibly also TMI: I bought the book for @Railwaysoc on a sale at this month's S.A. National Society meeting, and read it between cataloguing and placing in the library.

Hickory Dickory Dock, aka Hickory Dickory Death. How come I haven't seen this Agatha Christie in the library before? Grabbed with glee and read with pleasure (predictably). The student digs sound like the ones I knew back in the day, admittedly some 15 years after the period when this one was set. However our students' nefarious activities were more concerned with politicking than smuggling. As usual with Mrs Christie, a good story with an unexpected twist in the tail.

And an "intercalary" (re)read of The third QI book of General Ignorance. Tid-bits of all sorts of trivia; this would be a great book for @MrsLee's bathroom!

>78 MrsLee: I love that my GD friends know me well enough to give book bullets for my bathroom reading. lol!

>78 MrsLee: ;-)

A Thief in the Night. Pope John Paul I's body was hardly cold when conspiracy theories started flying around. John Cornwell was given the job of investigating how and why the Pope in fact died. The result is this book, which reads like a good whodunnit. It is, effectively, a story of lies, evasions and stonewalling despite orders from the highest authority for complete co-operation. Although there is no evidence for any actual wrongdoing, the Vatican bureaucracy does not come out of this well. One wonders if anything has changed -- can change --since then.

>80 hfglen: Two films that have hypotheses about Pope JP I's death are, "The God Father III" (the worst of the films) and "Kill the Pope" with Robbie Coltrane. The latter is a comedy about a hippie priest with the same name as a cardinal who was elected to the papacy by a conclave that was fixed by the mafia. As you can imagine, the hippie priest is elevated to the papacy by mistake and the mafia and its cardinal try to get rid of him. An amusing romp if nothing else.

Nice cups, and nice basin!

>82 Busifer: Thank you. Here's an example of the coffee pot they used to bring round to compartments in the morning (unlike on Skimbleshanks's train, we could get early-morning coffee as well as tea).



One says coffee, but Heaven knows what they made it of; I can only tell you that our chairman makes the stuff for those present at Inchanga on working Saturdays. It's "black and bitter as a witch's soul", with a flavour that only remotely resembles coffee beans. Nor is it all that close to French chicory.

>59 -pilgrim-: The library produced a copy of Poison City today, and I have started reading it. I am impressed by his description of the city, so far.

>83 hfglen: Great description of the "coffee", there. I guess a reliable metal pot is in order, to keep the coffee from escaping ;-)

>83 hfglen: >85 Busifer: I have no recent experience of railway coffee, but if it's anything like the usual airline coffee there's no need to prevent it escaping--it's usually too weak to get out of its own way. Black and bitter as a witch's heart sounds kind of appealing, like a very dark stout.

>86 haydninvienna: Railway coffee in Sweden is usually potable, with the exception of the over-night trains. For those trips I have started to bring my own coffee, in a thermos. I don't want to walk through two to three carriages, first thing in the morning, to reach the bistro only to realise that the coffee there likely has been on the hob while I slept... and if ingested will end up burning a hole in my stomach.

Airline coffee in Sweden come in several varieties. Most commonly it's Nescafé, but one carrier has more like real coffee. They boast that they have made several tests to find a brew that works well on high altitudes, and I'm leaning towards almost trusting them on that.

Poison City. Blood-soaked tale set in Durban, which is amazingly accurately depicted. But the story? Not so great. Many dragoneers will (with good reason) hate that it is told in the present tense. There are violence and often gruesome killings on almost every page, which to me puts this definitely into the horror genre. One could argue that the apparent inconsistency in the fragments of magic systems arise from the many ethnic groups (in the story, not all or even mostly human) that call Durban home. A book bullet from @-pilgrim-; I'm not sorry I read it, but am unlikely to do so again.

>88 hfglen: I did warn you that I considered the plot seriously flawed! It was his evident love for Mother Durban that made me mention the book to you; it is interesting to know you think he portrayed her well.

The London of Clockwork City is much less fondly portrayed; I think he describes it as "the city that nobody loves". He claims that London is like Johannesburg in this - is this Durban/Johannesburg antipathy as ubiquitous as it is portrayed?

>89 -pilgrim-: As a total side note Swedes tend to love London. So clearly it's not wholly unlovable (even though I personally don't share that feeling).
(People in Sweden tend to favour London, Paris, Barcelona, and New York.)

>89 -pilgrim-: You did indeed. I'm probably the wrong person to ask about Johannesburg, as I grew up there. But I have been heard to say in public that I see very few if any reasons for going back there.

ETA: I've always thought of Johannesburg as a place where one does one's work, gets paid as much and as fast as possible, then leaves as quickly as possible in order to enjoy life. And that is why the first day of school holidays is always marked by heavy traffic flow (typically 3000+ cars an hour on each main road) leaving the place, horrendous accidents and massive queues at the Lebombo border post (main road to Maputo). 'Nuff said.

>91 hfglen: Ach, pleeeaze Daddy ... Right?

>92 haydninvienna: He taught me Latin in what we then called standard 6 (now 8th grade).

Ag pleeez Deddy, woncha take us down to Durban.
It's only 8 hours inna Chevrolet
There's spans of sea and sand and sun
And fush in ve aquêrium.

Popcorn, chewing gum, ice cream and bubblegum ....

>93 hfglen: I think you posted a YouTube link to it a while back, but I first encountered it in Oz many, many years ago (probably about the time it was released, even). I see it came out of a show called "Wait a Minim", and that name rings a bell too.

ETA I see the verse on Durban describes that city as a "lekker place for a holiday". I've just been in Dutch-speaking parts and seen signs outside pubs advertising "lekker tapas", which struck me as cute.

And the JNB-DUR rivalry is very reminiscent of the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney back in Oz.

>90 Busifer: Having worked in London, I tend toward the loathe, rather than love, category.

>94 haydninvienna: I did indeed. The rather charming story of "Wait a Minim" is that the Johannesburg YMCA had a tiny theatre called the Intimate, which could handle an audience of maybe 50. Towards the end of 1961 something went wrong with a planned production, and the management had the inspired idea of calling in whatever folksinging talent (such as Jeremy Taylor) they could find in coffee bars, and getting them to cobble together a sort of cabaret to fill the fortnight or so the theatre was going to be dark. Ag Pleez Deddy was written for the show, and based on what Jeremy Taylor heard in the street while marching us kids from the school to the municipal sports fields at Wemmer Pan -- the school only had one sports field, which was reserved for the first teams. Anyway, "Wait a Minim" proved so popular that it was a good two years before the management could get their theatre back, which they did by sending the show to larger premises.

Maybe @Ennas or @zjakkelien can comment, but I have always understood that lekker in proper-Dutch is restricted to foodstuffs i.e. flavours, but in Afrikaans and the mongrel language of working-class Johannesburg at the time (had to be a bit careful there: since 1975 the mongrel language of the area has been mostly Portuguese) lekker was and is used for anything and everything desirable.

Come to think of it, I would suggest that the mutual contempt in which JNB and CPT hold each other (and, @-pilgrim-, I had to smile at Mr Crilley's throwaway comment about Cape Town in Poison City; he sounded just like a Johannesburger!) seems from this distance to be more like the MEL - SYD rivalry. DUR and its province tend to be on a different planet to the rest of the world, and one about a century behind the world you know.

I evidently meant to show some pictures from the S.A. National Society's visit to The Elephant House back in March, but for some reason failed to do so. Here's one I think people might enjoy.



The Elephant House was built in about 1848, and is the oldest surviving home in Durban. The street it's on used to be an elephant path through the bush, and the owner showed us where the elephants (in 1848) took exception to one of the pillars holding up the roof, and trashed it.

>97 hfglen: That elephant has obviously seen something it needs to forget and that's the only way it can.

Atomic: the first war of physics. Good, if rather dry, history of the development of the atomic bomb, with some background starting before 1939, and relating what the nuclear physicists were doing to the progress of World War 2. Includes an epilogue summarising the story from 1950 almost to the time of publication. Not sorry I read it, but unlikely to repeat the experience.

>98 AHS-Wolfy: Ha! Can you blame it?

>99 hfglen: Sounds like a good one to skip. Thanks, as usual, for the wonderful photos. I especially love that wash basin.

>100 clamairy: It seems quite happy, though.

Following on from the elephant, a corner of the kitchen one could maybe see through the window behind it.

Curry Lovers. Somewhat sparse and short, but the recipes are good. Tried the koftas in cinnamon masala on friday: family approved.

>101 hfglen: That's lovely, Hugh!

>101 hfglen: what’s the ceiling made of? It looks like tongue and groove board, which was common in houses in Oz of the same period.

One of my brothers in law, who was a big bloke (6’ 4” tall and with the build and bulk of a lifetime of good living) had a house of roughly that vintage in Townsville. My late wife and I visited him at Christmas 1980. He had been working in the roof space and had fallen through the ceiling, fortunately without doing himself any serious damage, and with great pride showed us the hole in the board ceiling. It was only 3 boards wide.

>104 haydninvienna: It is indeed tongue and groove board, probably imported Oregon Pine (which now costs a fortune). In the Western Cape, where they used yellowwood in the 17th to very early 19th centuries, the boards are much wider and aren't grooved. A hole three boards wide in a good Cape Dutch ceiling (upper floor, usually) could have been easily over a metre across!

Mouse or Rat. A BB from @pgmcc, and a most interesting read, though I suspect I understood a great deal less than the author would have liked. I was particularly taken with his account of Aulus Gellius's colour terms, as I used often to have to battle with colour terms in (botanical) Latin, until the requirement for descriptions of new taxa to be in that language was done away with in 2011. I can't help wondering how Prof. Eco would have coped with having to translate the 5000 different shades of puke that mycologists use to describe their fungi! (The other "joy" of doing translations for my mycological friends was when most of the description consisted of a list of point mutations in a DNA sequence -- and the output was supposed to be vaguely classical.) For other Dragoneers, this is a deeply thought-provoking collection of essays on translation, and anything but an easy read.

>105 hfglen: The boards in Oz in the best years might haven Huon pine, also now a pretty price, and would have been much narrower, maybe 6 inches.
>106 hfglen: Fascinating how a book by a student of meaning should be hard to understand! Another book on translation that also has its moments is Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter, although the main language concerned is 16-th century French. Odd coincidence: the title is a pun on Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Ravel, which was one of the pieces that the CBSO performed last Friday.

>107 haydninvienna: As discussed earlier elsewhere, I loved Eco's book, but (like @Busifer) dislike his principles of translation. So Le Ton Beau de Marot sounds very interesting.

>106 hfglen:
I am glad you found it interesting and thought provoking.

>108 -pilgrim-: I suggest you skip the chapter about his wife dying. That was almost unbearably painful even though I read it before my own wife’s diagnosis. But all of Hofstadter’s books are worth reading. There’s a joke about how you define “recursive”: “Ask someone standing a bit closer to Doug Hofstadter”. If you don’t get it now, read Gödel, Escher, Bach.

And yes, Richard Hofstadter the historian was his father.

>110 haydninvienna: Warning very much appreciated.

I only managed to read a little of Gödel, Escher, Bach before my copy disappeared into the gleeful hands of a pure mathematician friend...It was leaving me feeling inadequate regarding my level of knowledge of musical theory.

>111 -pilgrim-: Gödel, Escher, Bach makes me feel inadequate in just about every way possible, but I love it all the same (I have 2 copies).

>112 haydninvienna: In that case, it sounds like a good one to not-look for.

Churchill & Smuts: The Friendship. There is an English version that LT doesn't acknowledge, and that is the one I read; apparently it was published this year in London as well as here two years ago. A very interesting read about how justabout the last two people on earth one would have accused of getting on with each other in fact did so, and became close friends. In view of their acreers it couldn't be anything but highly political, so I shall say no more in this pub, other than to recommend it as a good read.

Durban's Heritage Explored. (Touchstone not working, but the book page in LT is here. Four walks in the CBD, and a drive in the Indian suburb of Chatsworth. There's no publication date, but it would seem to date to some time in the 1990s. Durban has not aged gracefully since then; I wonder if it is still safe to explore any of these routes?

Thought I'd been clever and found a Simon Winchester I hadn't read. Turns out I first read his Korea back in 2013 and forgot all about it.

Baobabs of the World, on the other had, is both new and new to me. A slender volume -- there are only eight species -- slightly bulked out wits brief notes on some Madagascan lookalikes, but profusely and beautifully illustrated with photos and drawings by the gifted (on the evidence of this book) Louise Jasper. I can see why they kept the lookalikes chapter short, but it would be great to see some of them treated at slightly greater length. One could also wish to see Rupert Watson's book on The African Baobab mentioned, at least in the bibliography. Makes me want to go to Madagascar and Australia to see the ones I don't know.

This week we continue exploring the Railway crockery in the museum at Inchanga. Here is a fragment from a dinner service used on the Royal Train of 1947.

A History of East Asia. Saw this in the library and took it out in the hopes of learning something about a part of the world I know precious little if anything about. The logic is probably correct but the execution is somewhat less than stellar. This is a textbook through and through (so is a suburban public library the right place to find it? Especially as the publisher is known for inordinately expensive products.). How do I know that? Not just the reading lists at the end of each chapter; also the clunky and sometimes downright ungrammatical text, shortage of illustrations and lousy maps. That said, if you plan to be a world expert on East Asia, you would probably want to be within range of a copy, as it is a prolific source of facts. Still, I'll be glad to return it and not have to find space for a copy.

>119 hfglen: I've been known to this - get a book because I think I need to expand my knowledge. Often I get hung up on repetitive language, or an author too obviously enamored by his topic but not being that good at telling the story... but you just know there are loads of knowledge in there. If just that the form gets in the way.
Hopefully at least you learnt something?

(East Asia is a blank spot for me, too.)

>120 Busifer: Perhaps the most important thing is that I need a different book, maybe a different kind of book, to become more than minimally interested in the subject. And that if I want to know what it would feel like to be in China, Japan, Korea or Vietnam I DEFINITELY won't find that here!

Public Library and other stories. Self-consciously Literary (the initial capital is deliberate) short stories, leavened with real-world experiences of public libraries in UK. The experiences are worth reading for a few minutes, but repetitive. The stories are one and all indigestible. In one she evidently tries to write fantasy, but ends up being thoroughly unpleasantly surreal. This was almost a DNF, and was only saved by some very rapid skimming and the shortness of the book. Needless to say, she's either won or been nominated for a whole slew of Literary prizes. The most pleasing part of this one is that housing it is the library's problem, not mine.

>119 hfglen: Interesting that even this very prestigious publisher (not going to say which it is--check Amazon if you don't already know) apparently can't provide proper editing! We're all DOOMED, I say.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that decent introductory books on China, Japan and Korea are easier to find in Australia, simply because East Asia has been of interest there ever since Australians stopped believing they were "British to the bootstraps" (a belief which most of us abandoned some time in the late 1960s).

>121 hfglen: Ouch!

>123 haydninvienna: I suspect you are correct. I'd say at least in Sweden anything outside the generally "western" cultural sphere is a blank. I mean, most people here doesn't even know why anyone would want to visit Dover Castle. We're quite OK with reciting facts on the Swedish Empire (which is not labelled that way here, we're quite restrictive with the use of the word "empire" word).

Evidently I read Lost for Words back in 2012, so getting it out of the library this week counts as an unintended re-read. But not an unpleasant one. Our author has some well-earned barbs for those who substitute salesmanship for reason, and purveyors of ungrammatical English. One cannot help feeling that what was wrong when this book was written is now, on the whole, many times worse.

Inspired by @Bookmarque, I dug around in my photo archive for a picture of an African Fish Eagle. Here's one from 2015:



And here is the call. At one point this bird looks as if he's impersonating Sam the Eagle!

Bomb, Book & Compass, aka The Man who loved China. In a way, a re-read; but last time round was the other title. Anyway, this is a good biography of the late great Joseph Needham and his great project, Science and Civilization in China, originally designed to fill three large volumes; it currently fills 20 and counting. The Chinese seem to have invented almost everything worth having (except computers and the Internet) before about 1600 AD. As one may expect from the author, the book is very well written and absolutely fascinating.

Miss Jekyll: portrait of a Great Gardener. Biography of Gertrude Jekyll, possibly the greatest designer of "English Cottage" gardens, and co- designer with Sir Edwin Lutyens of some of the most significant early-20th-century homes. A beautifully written, well researched and sympathetic work, and to be recommended. Also a reminder that Miss Jekyll wasn't alone in her design philosophy; much of it was embodied in Vita Sackville-West's garden at Sissinghurst, which I had the privilege of seeing almost 40 years ago. (There are a few Jekyll gardens still in existence and open to the public.)

ETA: This book was given to me several years ago by an old dear (alas now deceased) who lived in the retirement home from whose front verandah the picture at the head of this thread was taken.

Wars of the Roses: Bloodline Third of four in the series, covering events from 1461 to 1469. (I've seen and passed on others in the series; even this one I completed only with a fair amount of skimming.) Henry VI seems to have been a disastrously weak king, propped up almost exclusively by his wife, Margaret of Anjou. And so the House of Lancaster lost the key battle of Towton; Henry was taken prisoner and Edward IV crowned king. Which also wasn't the world's greatest success, possibly due largely to his grasping wife, Elizabeth Woodville. If you like blood-soaked action with a spot of history, you'll love this.

ETA: Stray thought: much of the action in this book takes place in winter. As he tells it, real winters, harder than modern London winters, not the "play-play" version we get in Durban, where everybody claims to freeze as the temperature falls to single figures (°C). Which caused me to look up when the Little Ice Age actually was: sure enough, the Wars of the Roses took place at the time of the first blast of medieval long-term cold.

>126 hfglen: That is one magnificent bird. They have to be quite closely related. But I just lost 20 minutes of my life on YouTube watching various eagle clips and one about the 10 larges birds of prey. (Neither the Bald Eagle or the African Fish Eagle made the cut!)

>130 clamairy: I gather they are "sibling species". No wonder I was confused in Washington! What were the 10 largest? I would expect to find a Lammergeyer and various vultures in that list.

130 Would the condor be on that list?

There are probably several lists of "largest" depending on whether the criterion is wingspan, weight or what not. The Australian wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) would be on the list for wingspan but not for weight, for example.

ETA: And because we need a picture (not taken by me, unfortunately):

Nothing but a Circus. A lawyer who expects (why? -- it seldom seems to happen) and stands up for morality in high places, recounts some of his encounters with the kind of people the rest of us are better off not knowing. Would be humorous if the people weren't so dire, but a good read all the same.

Alexander the Great: son of the Gods. Biography of this amazing Macedonian told in relatively short (few over 2 pages long) essays, with lots of pictures, enough maps, and text boxes going into more detail about specific points. Includes an evaluation of his effect on the classical world and the places he conquered; that could maybe have gone into more detail. Altogether a good and interesting read.

The Big Four. Poirot rides again, in his most significant mystery yet. Originally published in 1927, this story wears its years more gracefully than most; almost the only way it shows its age is the absence of flight as an option for long-distance transport: Poirot and Hastings go by ship (remember them?) and train. The theme of trying (and, seeing this is Poirot of whom we speak, succeeding) to thwart an evil cabal set on world domination resonates strongly 90 years later, and is arguably timeless. A very good way of passing a few reading sessions.

In answer to a question in her thread by @Darth-Heather:
Here is a Cape Mountain Zebra, seen a few years ago in the (ahem) Mountain Zebra National Park.



The Park was proclaimed in 1937 (over the objections of the then minister of agriculture, who lived to regret calling these animals "donkeys in rugby jerseys" in Parliament) to protect the surviving herd. At the time of proclamation the Park had six zebras, though the herd was later augmented by a few from nearby farms; in all the world there were fewer than 50. Right now there are about 800 in the Park, and small herds have been translocated to other protected places in the Cape provinces.

>137 hfglen: whew, that was a close one! So many rare species go extinct before anyone can do anything about it.

This is a great photo, I love the depth of field.

Here's another close one for @Darth-Heather. When the Bontebok National Park was proclaimed in 1931, the world population of this antelope (Bontebok, which is the name in both English and Afrikaans) was 17 individuals, on the coast at De Hoop near Bredasdorp. This was not a brilliant success, and the population languished until the reserve was moved to a more propitious site near Swellendam. Here the animals prospered, and small herds have been moved to both private and state reserves in the Western Cape.

Beautiful animals, Hugh. What great success stories, too.

Good not to have lost these species to history. We need more, not less, diversity!

>139 hfglen: aww they are lovely! I hope they continue to thrive.

Matchbox Toys. Anybody remember playing with these things as a kid? According to this book they're now eminently collectable, and some cost a fortune. The book is laid out as a history of the company, and has many excellent illustrations. At 64 roughly A5 pages, it's a quick, fun read.

>143 hfglen: I certainly remember Matchstick cars. They were brilliant. I am not surprised they are collectors items at this stage. Of course, they have to be in mint condition and still in their original packaging. :-)

>143 hfglen:, >144 pgmcc:
Count me in! Mine are very definitely not in mint condition; more like "pre-loved" - as the awful marketing phrase goes..

I think I even recognise one of mine from the cover photo!

>143 hfglen: As a matter of fact, my great-nephew and I were playing with mine this last weekend. Love them, but not for collecting, for playing with!

>143 hfglen: my brother and I would spend hours playing with them in the dirt. So much fun!

>143 hfglen: A few of my husband's survived, including a Bat Mobile from the 1960s. I think I gave away all of my kids cars, however.

>144 pgmcc: - >148 clamairy: Who'd a thought so many of us shared this childhood experience? Thank you, all!

Crusader: by horse to Jerusalem. If you want your protagonists to hold still, you'll rapidly succumb to travel sickness in the first few chapters of this one. It must surely rate at least 11 out of 10 on @Karlstar's STTM scale, though they encounter kindness, road rage, bureaucracy, stony mountains and desert summer heat as well as mud. Tim Severin acquires an Ardennes Heavy Horse with the idea of riding it from Chateau Bouillon (as in Godfrey of, leader of the First Crusade) to Jerusalem. He quickly acquired a companion and a second, smaller horse and off they went. He soon discovered the secret of the crusading knights' success in pitched battles against the Turks: a Heavy Horse with a knight in armour riding it weighs about a ton, and a phalanx of them simply bulldozed the opposition aside. In Hungary they acquired a second riding horse. They journey was exhausting: Carty, the Heavy Horse, couldn't take the Turkish climate and got sent back to a farm in Austria; the Irish trail horse died in Turkey, and the Hungarian one made it only as far as a farm in Jordan. So the humans arrived in Jerusalem on Turkish horses, which then were sent to end their days as pets on a kibbutz. Apparently a thousand years ago the turnover of horses was no less. All in all, a fascinating read in the true Severin style.

>143 hfglen: One more Matchbox car person, here. I loved playing with them when I was a kid. My favourite is loved to bits and now rests in a box with other cars, some of which are Matchbox, too. Nothing of value to collectors, though.

>150 hfglen: I'd think the turnover of horses was even larger back during true crusading times, and that's not mentioning the humans and the trail of destruction they must have left behind them as the consumed every ounce of edibles that came in their way.

>151 Busifer: I was being polite, or trying to. It seems the Crusaders' turnover of horses was much greater, and most of the horses on this expedition survived, even if they didn't all arrive in Jerusalem. It has to be said that the one that died did so in a remote area, where competent vets were sought but not to be had, and the humans did their best.

>152 hfglen: I didn't mean to say that you thought horses survived the crusades - it was more a reflection, on my part. Sorry that I wasn't clear enough. I'm a bit tired from high pressure at work, so not being very sharp.

>153 Busifer: No worries.

Burchell's Travels. William John Burchell grew up at the family (plant) nursery in Fulham, then just outside London, and nominally lived there all his life. Except that he spent many of his adult years in St. Helena, South Africa and Brazil, exploring. On his return from Brazil he spent almost as long visiting scientific institutions in Europe. He left a journal of his years in St. Helena, and published two of a projected three volumes of his travels in South Africa. The book noted here doesn't say so, but I have always understood that he wrote -- very slowly -- the MS of the third volume, but the publisher declined it, saying it wouldn't sell. Little knowing that these days a clean, intact copy of the first two volumes would change hands for enough money to buy out the entire company. Almost 100 years after his travels in South Africa, his map was much in demand by the British army in the Anglo-Boer War, as being accurate and the best available map. He returned to London with 63 000 animal, plant and mineral specimens, including over 20 000 plants. This could not help being a major contribution to our knowledge of the area, the more so as he was the first collector to attach precise, recoverable localities and dates to his specimens. Hardly surprising, therefore, that he is commemorated in many names such as Burchell's Zebra, Burchell's coucal, the plant genus Burchellia and the rather obscure Burchell's Spring (a waterpoint in the Great Karoo). Just as with his own account of his travels, this book is remarkably readable, and illustrated with a selection of his own watercolours. Recommended (one would recommend his own account too, but even the reprints cost a king's ransom).

This morning a local busybody saw fit to berate Better Half for not planning to attend the monthly parish picnic. Apparently being deeply introverted and hating crowds and noise as we all are and do (remember that three's a crowd, and if the people are obnoxious one doesn't need that many to be crowded out) wasn't considered an excuse. Which set us thinking: where would we go to enjoy a picnic? (When is easy: midweek, outside school holidays, which may be a point for the retirement discussion to consider.) My considered vote puts Debengeni Falls, in Magoebaskloof near Tzaneen, Limpopo Province (a long day's drive away, admittedly) at the top of the list. Here's what it looked like some 30 years ago:

>156 hfglen: That is a lovely spot. And isn't it a wonderful thing not to care what busybodies, local or otherwise, have to say about your chosen activities?

>156 hfglen:
Very nice.

>156 hfglen: Yes, nice indeed. One of the things I thank GD for is the knowledge that South Africa is a much more diverse country, physically and humanly, than I had realised.

The Luberon Garden. Scottish garden designer settles in Provence, gets a commission to resuscitate a garden. Memoir of doing that and at the same time settling in himself. The writer has a delightful turn of phrase, and so the story is more than readable, even when heavily laden with plant names.

>160 hfglen: I would think a book heavily laden with plant names would not be a problem for you.

It sounds like you are enjoying the book.

>161 pgmcc: I did enjoy it, even though at times my mind glazed over at the sometimes over-detailed descriptions of planting plans.

>156 hfglen: Wonderful place for picnic!
Busybodies, not so wonderful. I hate it when people try to shame me into doing things. It feels so good being able to just say no, not giving them the honour of even the simplest explanation.

>160 hfglen: "gets a commission to resuscitate a garden"

My dream job, so long as it came with a sturdy young person to help with the digging and lifting!

>164 MrsLee: It came with several such, and a Bobcat, and various other mechanical aids, and several trucks (and their drivers) to remove the rubbish.

The Tao of Travel. An ideal bathroom book for those of us with chronically itchy feet. Very little of Mr Theroux's own words here, but a fascinating anthology of snippets (rarely more than a page or 2 long, often only a paragraph or so) from a wide variety of travellers, both real and imaginary. I enjoyed this one; if you have enough Schadenfreude in your character to enjoy reading about other people's awful journeys (and some good ones, too) you probably will too.

So, did you go to the picnic?

NO!!

Belated happies to our Canadian members on Canada Day and USAnians of July 4th. The news on TV this evening ended off with a clip of the fireworks in Washington, which were spectacular. Also spectacular, but not necessarily in a good way, was the news insert on a storeshed of fireworks in South Carolina (I think) that caught fire early, for no reason the news could explain. Hope no Dragoneers were anywhere near that one.

Back in #155 I mentioned in passing a Burchell's Coucal. Here is the bird itself:



Curiously, this individual was near Crocodile Bridge in the Kruger Park -- about as far from anywhere on Burchell's route as you can get without crossing a national border. The bird is said to be able to forecast rain, and announces a shower with a call that sounds like water being poured from a bottle. You can hear it in this Youtube clip.

>170 hfglen: Oh, what a lovely bird! That's a very unusual call. It almost sounds owl-like.

Looks like he's (she? can't tell but with birds males are often the gaudier ones) been dunked in various types of chocolate sauces ;-)

>172 Busifer: Not exactly helped by his being fluffed out against the drizzly rain.

>170 hfglen: lovely!

The Olive Route. A journey in search of the earliest known site of cultivation of the olive tree. A quick Google search suggests she started in about the right area, and certainly the 6000-year-old trees she saw in Lebanon date back to only a short time after olives were first cultivated. The people she met -- but not the bureaucrats or their political masters -- were almost all kind, friendly and informative. Nevertheless, Libya, Syria and Israel come across as good places to stay away from. Overall, an interesting read.

We're in the season of memorable sunsets. Here's Saturday's from the verandah outside my study:

Spilling the Beans. Autobiography of the surviving member of the Two Fat Ladies. She seems to have had one hell (in every possible meaning of the term) of a life. Having suffered an abusive parent in childhood, she became a barrister, lost everything to alcoholism, dried out successfully and became a successful bookseller, chef, caterer, TV presenter and countryside campaigner. The book is by turns fascinating, uplifting, harrowing and humorous; recommended.

>176 hfglen: Lovely

>177 hfglen: She and her partner were great on their shows. I remember enjoying a travel programme they did in Paris.

>176 hfglen: Lovely sunset.

Pretty sunset.

>176 hfglen: Beautiful!

Following on from #169 in Peter's thread, here's what the flowers reminded me of:



Aloe parvibracteata, in the succulent garden I had when an undergraduate; picture c. 1972.

And here's what they really are:



Crocosmia paniculata (not the usual species seen in gardens!) growing wild near Underberg, Kwazulu-Natal, February 2009 (blush!). This at least flowers in summer; the aloe flowers midwinter. This one is also more tolerant of endless rain ;-)

This week's picture is a sunset, seen in March 2014 from the veranda of Letaba Rest Camp in the Kruger Park. Part of the motivation is that I got a book on Kruger out of the library (to be reported on in due course).



IMHO the clouds remind me strongly of the paintings of J.H. Pierneef (an early-20th-century painter whose works speak strongly to me), like this one (from Wikipedia, where this image is Public Domain)

>185 hfglen:
Lively photo and painting. I see what you mean about the clouds. The style looks familiar. I must check out his work see if I have come across it before. The almost surreal starkness of the trees against a natural sky looks familiar. Perhaps it is reminding me of some of Dali’s works.

>185 hfglen: Love both the photo and the painting.

>186 pgmcc: If you go to the Bushveld (North-West, Limpopo or Mpumalanga provinces), you'll almost certainly see trees that could have modelled for a Pierneef painting within half an hour of starting to look. They're not rare. This wikipedia article states that "Pierneef's work can be seen worldwide ...", so presumably you could have seen a painting of his in Dublin, but the nearest ones to you that I'm aware of are the magnificent murals in South Africa House in London.

>188 hfglen:
I am over due a visit to our national gallery. I believe it is about four years since I was there.

Fine pictures, Hugh, both yours and the Pierneef. The aloe looks like a plant my mother used to have, which I think she unflatteringly called “cigarette plant”, don’t ask me why. The Pierneef keeps making me want to mention Albert Namatjira, but I really don’t know anything about art.

>190 haydninvienna: Thank you, Richard (and Pete and MrsLee!). I've not heard of that name for an aloe before, but could it be that the flowers are red and tubular?

ETA: There is a certain family resemblance between Albert Namatjira's paintings and those of several South African artists, but due to my ignorance I'd have to do some looking before suggesting names.

Continuing from above: Richard, would you like to look at the landscapes of (among others) Tinus de Jongh and his son Gabriel, and Jan Volschenk in South Africa and Adolph Jentsch in Namibia as possibly closer comparisons with the works of Albert Namatjira?

Kruger Self-drive. An admirable book to help plan a trip to the Kruger Park; if it goes with you it should stay in your cottage or tent while you go game- and tree-viewing. It is a heavy hardback, gorgeously illustrated, with text that is, er, somewhat terse. The publisher is a DIY company that evidently consists of the writer, the photographer and a few friends. And, regrettably, it shows, as they are badly let down by the copy-editing. One block of text in the wrong place might get by with no more than a raised eyebrow, but after enough cases to annoy me, I counted three more where route descriptions or summaries had wandered. Unfortunately, due to the apparently rather random numbering of roads in the Kruger Park, this meant that in at least one instance a landmark referred to under one route is actually at the opposite end of the Park. This can only lead to confusion in first-time visitors, apparently the target audience of the text.

>192 hfglen: I see what you mean, Hugh. I think the de Jonghs, father and son, are closest to the "feel" of a Namatjira, but what do I know? I doubt if Namatjira himself knew of any of the South African artists, but his mentor Rex Battarbee may have. One thing I noticed was that there was a lot more green in the South African paintings--it's very dry indeed around Uluru, most of the year anyway. No images because I think a lot of Namatjira's work is still under copyright in Australia, and of course his estate got shafted when the rights were originally sold after his death.

>194 haydninvienna: Now I can ask if you by any chance noticed the etching just outside the guest-bathroom door. It's a Tinus de Jongh, that my parents were given as a wedding present.

... and I have to grin at this conversation, which any true Art Connoisseur (note the initial caps) would dismiss as the blind leading the blind.

>195 hfglen: which any true Art Connoisseur (note the initial caps) would dismiss as the blind leading the blind...

Absolutely. As I pointed out, what do I know?

I do believe I recall such an etching, but of course at the time had other matters to deal with.

Old Africa Untamed. Evidently written in the late 1930s; the library has the 1974 reprint. Lawrence G.Green's books are almost never less than entertaining, even if the attitudes haven't always aged gracefully. Indeed, one may now read them as historical documents, and considerably less dull than most. This is the usual collection of short pieces capturing vividly what it felt like to be in the remote places he describes, between the wars. In this case he writes mostly but by no means exclusively about Namibia-as-now-is.

>185 hfglen: Your photo is marvelous! And that painting reminds me quite a bit of NC Wyeth's style.

(Edited for touchstone.)

Thank you, Clam.

Anathem. The discussion in this pub made me curious to read a Neal Stephenson and try to see what the disagreement was about. Hillcrest library had this one (only). What a brick! 935 pages plus preliminaries in this edition. And yes, there are ways in which it wasn't perfect and needed slimming. Did we really need the hundreds of pages of info dumps disguised as discussions? Not all of them, surely. Can't say too much about what @Karlstar would call STTM, as I like reading about travels and other places, but I'm glad I wasn't tagged along on the journeys here.

And yet. When, eventually, I reached the end, I still wanted to know what happened next. How would Fraa Erasmas and Suur Ala cope with the next 10/20/50/however many years. And that, surely, is the sign of a good book. I shall now go to Waterfall library, which apparently has one or two more by this author.

>200 hfglen: I got hit by an Anathem BB by the quotation here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/301224#6860314. To save you looking: "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor." Kind of reminded me of the Doctor saying "what do you mean we have no weapons? We're in a library!"

>201 haydninvienna:
REVERSE THE POLARITY!

>202 pgmcc: According to all-knowing Wiki, Jon Pertwee was responsible for that phrase. He asked the writers for an all-situations piece of technobabble, and that is what he got.

>203 haydninvienna: Well, it has become one of the most widely used clichés in the business. We even had The Ghostbusters using it.

(Jon Pertwee was my favourite Doctor.)

>204 pgmcc: Mine too, I think. Didn't the Ghostbusters say "reverse the neutron flow", though? (Must watch that film again. One of the all-time-great comedy films.)

>201 haydninvienna: I saw that piece of dialog, and enjoyed it as much as you. There are smile-moments at odd (all-too-infrequent) moments throughout the book.

>204 pgmcc: *high five* Jon Pertwee was IMHO the ultimate Doctor, indeed all the Doctor should be.

Queen Bees. Biographies of six Hostesses who dominated London Society between the World Wars. Interesting, well researched and written; the subjects sound as if they could each be dragons if unhappy. Glad I don't move in that kind of circle.

>205 haydninvienna: I was wrong. It was "Cross the streams!"

>206 hfglen: *high five" right back at you.

>206 hfglen:, >209 pgmcc: Dragoneers are evidently true connoisseurs; Pertwee was the ultimate Doctor *high fives both*

But wasn't "REVERSE THE POLARITY!" from Return to the Forbidden Planet ( the musical)?

>210 -pilgrim-: I think it pre-dated the musical but I am sure it was used in the musical; the musical was the home for every cliché the writers could think of. It was one of the funniest stage performances I have ever attended.

>202 pgmcc: —>211 pgmcc: According to TV Tropes, the phrase can be traced back to "the 1898 War of the Worlds sequel Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss". I know nothing of Return to the Forbidden Planet but I see it's on YouTube.

*whispers* I prefer the first three Doctors from the modern series.

In fairness though, I am an American whose family didn't own a TV until the late 70s, and who never saw a BBC show of anything until she was well into her adulthood, so the modern series of Doctor Who was my first introduction.

>213 MrsLee: Watching Doctor Who whilst hiding behind the sofa was an essential part of a British childhood. Even if the said sofa, as in my case, was my grandparents' (my parents also being late adopters who only caved and bought a TV once I was in my teens).

>212 haydninvienna: Not know Return to the Forbidden Planet? Shame on you! Unfortunately even the mighty YouTube cannot prepare you properly, you will miss the essential pre-performance briefing to the audience by the crew, and remain ignorant of the correct procedure for reversing polarity. (Yes, this was an audience participation type of musical.)

>214 -pilgrim-: I have actually seen The Forbidden Planet (the original movie), though. At the age of about 6. I remember Robbie the Robot, and something burning its way into the base, and that the people trapped inside were terrified of it. I think I was frightened too.

>213 MrsLee: If it makes you feel any better, when I wur a lad I'd have had to go to Rhodesia to see the early Doctor Who series -- the then government here in South Africa considered TV to be too English / dangerously thought-provoking / politically incorrect, and transmissions only started in 1976, after the extreme right-winger who had been the minister blocking it was forced to resign. (A certain moonwalk 50 years ago was at least partly responsible for dragging our government kicking and screaming into the 20th century.)

(If this post is too political please say and I'll delete it.)

>215 haydninvienna: So have I. Having done so should increase your appreciation of Return

The Girls took Jess to a dog show at Amanzimtoti (about 50 km away) this morning. Richard, you'll be amazed to hear that Jess came second in obedience! With a score up from last show's 81% to 98%!

Here's Jess, by the way:

>218 hfglen: Jess looks pleased with herself, and rightly so. Give her a hug from me.

>218 hfglen: Good dog!

And today's picture. On Wednesday afternoon the Highway Heritage Society went to New Germany (Pinetown) to look at one of the oldest buildings in our province: the German Lutheran Church built in 1862. Sadly, it no longer functions as a church, as the area around it has turned from agricultural / residential to industrial. The church is a declared National Monument (think listed building if you're British), and the property now belongs to Distell, who use about half of the building as a meeting room, and keep the other half as a museum.

>218 hfglen: Good job Jess!

A Late Dinner. Writing about food in each region of Spain in turn, and nary a recipe to be seen anywhere. Readable, though I doubt very much that normal mortals (i.e. most readers) would ever be able to afford a meal at the restaurants where he chats up the chefs.

Congrats to Jess!
That former church makes quite the lovely museum. We have an old church in town that's become an opera house.

Good job, Jess!

Anathem I think might be his most accessible book, though I enjoyed Cryptonomicon in the same way, back in the days (nor reread it in a decade or two). Reamde, I think, is also in this category.
I'd not read the Baroque Cycle without having read Cryptonomicon first, in my opinion. Also, for the Baroque trilogy I know many has accused him of using anachronistic language. I ignored that. And I'm really not that versed in the details of the historic background that he used to be able to criticise. I liked those books.

After a while I think his personal politics, his inability to edit himself (or accept help with editing?), and the massive brick-ishness of his works starts to wear on at least me. But he's still one of the authors that I'd mention.

>225 Busifer: Jess says woof.

I believe that the Durban library system has one or two others of his. Will have to check later, as their computer is down right now. When I do I'll bear your advice in mind.

The Sword and the Pen. Autobiography of Allister Sparks, next-to-last editor of the Rand Daily Mail, which gathered more international awards during his association with the paper than all the other South African newspapers put together. Fascinating, readable (despite being a 590-page brick) but necessarily very political. Therefore, all I shall say is that I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a participant's-eye view of a very turbulent half-century in South Africa's history.

Today was one of the glorious warm (26°C), sunny winter days we sometimes get here. so Family decided to go somewhere for a picnic brunch. "Somewhere" was intended to be Amatikulu Nature Reserve, but the GPS started by trying to direct us along non-existent roads to a defunct prawn farm. We eventually made it to our intended, sadly run-down destination. And had our "brunch" between 2:30 and 3 pm. Part of the problem being that even if you go straight there the place is about 160 km from home, and the last couple of kilometres have deteriorated into a 4x4 trail. Here's the river estuary; evidently there's a sandbank closing the mouth.

Lovely photo, and I'm sure the food, once eaten, was delicious. Sounds like a nice adventure for a day.

Amazing Rare Things Essays on some groups of natural history drawings and paintings in the Royal Collection in Windsor. Lavishly illustrated with beautiful reproductions of the artwork described. As the pictures occupy somewhat more than half of the total page area of the book, one may think that this is a quick read, but to read it quickly does the beauty of the pictures no justice.

Dante: the Poet, the political thinker, the Man. Considering that Ms Reynolds was in her 90s when this book came out, it can only be a tour de force. Most of the book is a detailed and interesting analysis of the Divine Comedy, but sufficient attention (somewhat less than half the book) is paid to Dante's life. A good if challenging read.

>229 MrsLee: Thank you. It was a good adventure, and as you know, hunger is the best spice.

Has anyone in this esteemed Pub ever read anything by K.E. Mills? I got The accidental Sorcerer out of the library, and have just started it (about 10 pages in). So far it seems to me to be a would-be emulsion between Discworld and Stephanie Plum, with no visible binding agent. Not ready to give up yet though.

Further to #228, here's where we eventually had our picnic.



That's right. In the middle of the road.

Friday evening was interesting, but almost a disaster. Last month the S.A. National Society announced both by circular and at the meeting that this month's meeting would be Special, being neither at the usual venue nor on the usual date (second Tuesday). It was Brigadier-General Duncan Capps talking of his activities in the Middle East, and it was at the Durban Light Infantry HQ, a very special listed building. Seeing the venue is very much still in use by the military, there was a massive rigmarole about rsvp and bring a copy of your invitation with you and all. Only when the secretary sent around a reminder on Friday morning did we realise that we'd clean forgotten all about it! Print out the invite quickly and off we went -- to discover that some hours earlier there had been a massive truck accident closing off the eastbound carriageway (naturally, we needed to head east) of the road we needed; the road was jammed but moving, just. Arrived with seconds to spare, to discover that our Society was not alone: the Caledonians, the MOTHs and the military historians were all much in evidence. The pipers and drummers of the local Caledonians even gave us a very loud concert after the talk. A good time was had by all, I think.

>234 hfglen: Doesn’t look like you were at much risk from the traffic.

>234 hfglen: That looks like a path in the Shire.

So, you go way out into the wilderness when you could have stayed home for the community potluck.

>236 haydninvienna: We weren't.

>237 MrsLee: That's a good point. I'd not thought of Zululand as being in any way a match for the Shire (which I'd imagined as a match for Hampshire and points west), but give or take the spiky aggressiveness of the vegetation, maybe.

>238 suitable1: Sounds like a good definition of "introverted" to me. Anyway it's only 100 km (62 miles) away.

>238 suitable1:, as Hugh says in >239 hfglen:, it is only round the corner.

The House at the Edge of the World. South African couple living in London move to the depths of County Kerry and, over a period of several years, fail to get on with the locals. The blurb promised a "hilarious" read, so I looked forward to challenging @pgmcc to find a copy of this; it's not quite self-published, but is produced by an obscure Johannesburg publisher. Unfortunately, the promise of the blurb was empty: the book was by turns boring (even though only 168 pages) and embarrassing. Pete's quite safe, and I'm glad I can return this one to the library and so am absolved from the necessity of housing it.

The accidental Sorcerer. Unlike the Kyralian stories of Trudi Canavan this one is not set in a thinly-disguised Australia, though the author has lived in the real-world version since she was two. Not the world's greatest fantasy, but not dreadful either. I gather that the remaining three parts of the series go steadily downhill, but nevertheless I may try the other one I've seen on the library shelf. If Reg the bird is there in the sequels, they can't be unrelievedly dreadful.

And another picture from That Picnic: a reed-bed in the Amatikulu River.

>234 hfglen: I see what you mean by 4x4 trail. We would never have ventured that far with our VW Passat. It's extremely low even for a vehicle meant for paved roads, and we swear every time something like a high curb at some parking entry/exit makes the underside of the car screech...

>244 Busifer: We all frequently bless the Steed's high clearance. Driven carefully, it will get most places that are said to be 4x4 only -- and out again in one piece, which is arguably more important.

The other day I was reminded of the existence of Fadedpage.com, and, seeing that our copyright situation is similar to Canada's, looked in to see what they had of interest. And have spent quite a lot of time reading e-books on my tablet as a result. I downloaded three of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series:
Swallowdale
Winter Holiday and
Pigeon Post.
I'm sure I read and indeed had all these 50 years ago and more. Enjoyed them then and did so again now; the suck fairy has left them almost completely unscathed. Is this evidence of the onset of second childhood?

Also found three by Dorothy L. Sayers:
The Wimsey Papers
In the Teeth of the Evidence
Clouds of Witness
My LT catalogue tells me I read the last from the library in the last decade or so. No matter. The middle one is a collection of short stories, some starring Lord Peter Wimsey, others Montague Egg, and others neither of these. The Wimsey papers are in reserve for a rainy day.

>246 hfglen: I loved the Swallows and Amazons books so much as a child that I have never dared reread them - even though I spent part of a holiday in the Lake District retracing places from the books.

I am glad to hear that they have agreed so well.

>247 -pilgrim-: Lucky you! Two years' residence in London was not enough to allow time to make my way to the Lake District. I gather the Amazon can be seen in a museum in Coniston, and all the places in the books can be seen in the vicinity. Pity I didn't know that in 1980.

And so sort-of in honour of the Swallows and the Amazons, an aquatic picture. It's a barbel in the Kruger National Park, seen in 2015.

With the 250th message, I'm declaring this thread full and starting Part 3 with a repeat of the barbel.