Hobbling

In the last five or six years, I have occasionally suffered from knee pain. It hinders my mobility so that each footstep is accompanied by discomfort or outright pain.Mostly the pain has been caused by kneeling down on hard floors and a couple of times it has arisen after falling down when out walking in the Derbyshire hills.

Usually the pain evaporates after a week or two and normal mobility is resumed. However, my current knee pain - almost entirely in my right knee - has been with me for more than a month now. Each day I wake up and get out of bed hoping that today will be the day when the pain has finally crept back in its kennel. But it's still with me. Pain killers help a bit but I am reaching the stage when I think I shall have to visit the doctor. Not something I do very often.

Lord knows what the problem is. There are various possibilities but I wouldn't want to bore you  by listing them. This self-pitying post has probably got you yawning already and besides when all is said and done I know that the knee trouble is connected with my advancing years. These poor knees have suffered some hammer in the last six decades. I guess it's payback time.

On Saturday, I managed to hobble on to the moor above Upper Burbage Bridge and snapped the accompanying pictures of two cows that had strayed up there from the valley below. They looked bemused. In all the many times I have been in that location I have never seen cows there - only moorland sheep.that are much better at finding nourishment in rough pastures.

Yesterday

"Moonlight"

This morning there's blue sky and sunshine but yesterday was rainy and miserable. I went to The Showroom to watch this year's oscar-winning best film - "Moonlight" directed by Barry Jenkins. The cinema was packed and irritatingly there was a fellow behind me who guzzled food and drink continuously during the first hour of the screening with associated sound effects. Damned annoying.

I wanted to be wowed by "Moonlight" but I wasn't. Admittedly, it had its special moments and some adventurous cinematography but in the end I was underwhelmed. The plot didn't grab my interest and I just couldn't warm to the extremely reticent and damaged central character - Chiron who we observe at three stages of his life. 

No. It wasn't my cup of tea. I like films that absorb me - films I can get lost in so that when "The End" is reached I am surprised to return to everyday reality. That's how it was with "Manchester by the Sea" but not "Moonlight". Disappointing.

Shirley was away in Budapest with a bunch of women friends this past weekend. When I got home from the cinema, I baked a steak pie and then got on with my latest picture of Fred Fox. I had been planning to leave the background more or less blank but in the end I decided on a green background. 

This is my fourth picture of Fred Fox. I keep learning techniques and do's and don'ts as I go along. There's a sense in which I am not fully in control of the picture I am painting. Each one has a mind of its own and what I visualise when I set off is never quite the same as what emerges in the end. Bedtime was just before 2 am as a gibbous moon was setting in the west.

Crazy

Patsy Cline died too young. She had a wonderfully evocative voice as is demonstrated in her heartfelt rendition of Willie Nelson's timeless song - "Crazy". Treat your ears:-

She was only thirty years old when she died in a plane crash fifty four years ago today but in her short life she had married twice and had two children with her second husband - Charlie Dick. The children were called Julie and Randy. Yes. That's right. Her son is named Randy Dick.

Over here in England, if you were unfortunate enough to have the surname Dick, the last Christian name you would ever choose for a boy would be Randy - though you wouldn't want to call him Red or Floppy either. Over here, "randy" is used in exactly the same way as "horny" is used in North America.

It seems that Randy Dick used to earn his money as a drummer in Nashville but unlike the rest of us he doesn't have much of an internet trail. I searched for him but just couldn't track him down. However, I discovered that there are plenty of other fellows in America called Randy Dick. In fact there's an army of them. Randy Dicks everywhere and here's just four of them courtesy of Google:-

Currently there's  even a Randy Dick in The White House! Crazy!

Bellmouth

For some reason, I like the word "bellmouth". It is a technical term in the water industry to describe a massive stone plughole in a reservoir. In times of flood, the bellmouth allows water to overflow whence it is channelled to the original river valley beyond the dam. Sometimes dams are constructed so that excess water simply flows over the dam wall but where earth and clay embankment dams are concerned, the bellmouth method has been widely used.

The biggest reservoir near Sheffield is in The Derwent Valley. It is called The Ladybower Reservoir. Its construction was finished in 1943 and required the inundation of two little villages - Ashopton and Derwent. Physical evidence that they existed still lies below the water. Near the dam wall there are two massive bellmouths into which excess water plunges thirty metres before joining spillways that lead down to the course of the old river.

I took this picture of the eastern bellmouth in August 2012. As you can see the water level is well below the edge of the great stone hole:-

But on Thursday afternoon, water was cascading into the same bellmouth:-

And this was the scene at the western bellmouth looking to one of the reservoir's two road viaducts:-

Yes, "bellmouth" is a good word but it is a scary proposition. Every time I stand by one I get the jitters, half-imagining plunging down to Hades. Just for good measure, here's another smaller bellmouth in the conduit that joins the upper reservoir at nearby Redmires but even that one gives me the willies:-

I think that "bellmouth" would be a useful term for certain human beings. People with big hollow mouths who in fact  have little of value to say. Numerous politicians and radio DJ's come to mind.

Ian

This is a photograph of our lovely son, Ian:-

I copied it from a website called "Vegan Food & Living.com". It was embedded in an article about veganism and linked to the work Ian has been doing with "Bosh" over the last seven or eight months. It's all about the promotion of tasty plant-based recipes. "Bosh" has received an incredible number of hits and there is now even focussed talk about a book deal ready for Christmas sales.

A year ago, Ian was in a difficult place regarding work and love. He had broken up with his long time girlfriend and then the music-related internet start-up company he had joined went to the wall. He had to come back and live with us in Sheffield for a few months. But now, back down in London, things seem to be on the up again. With his business partner Henry, he is working like a trojan to make "Bosh" successful and that effort is beginning to pay off. Naturally, we are very proud of him.

Go to the article in "Vegan Food & Living".

Usage

Words wax and wane. Words that were once in popular usage may descend into disuse as new words come along - their use increasing with each passing year. Then they too may become unfashionable and fade into obscurity. Furthermore, it seems indisputable to me that the use of words will often reflect fundamental aspects of human society at any particular time - just like our art, our architecture, our fashions or our music.

You can easily imagine that before the mid nineteen twenties, the word "television" was unheard of but then its use grew exponentially, reaching its zenith in 1996. It's the same with the word "laptop". Before 1980 it hardly existed at all but then its use began to storm upwards and that is still increasing.

How do I know these things? Well, I have been checking out a relatively new  facility we can all access in Google. Type into Google the word "define" and then follow this with the word you wish to research. Click "Enter" and then, if your word is in the Google store, you will see it defined followed by a light grey arrow pointing downwards for more information about the word.

At the bottom you will see a usage graph and if you click on this you will get to the Google Ngram Viewer where you can see usage results in more detail. It's fascinating but it's mostly about published words - not the more difficult to quantify oral use of language.

I thought I would check out some more words, looking at declines and inclines. between 1800 and 2012. Here we go:-

"fantasy"

 "goodness":-

 "kindness":-

 "Muslim":-

 "obedience":-

 "professional":-

 "turmoil":-

 And last but not least, "blogger":-

As I suggested before, we can read things into language use through the ages. The words we choose to employ speak of who we are. You could argue on this basis that there is more turmoil in the world today, more fantasy too but less kindness and goodness. Two words I didn't illustrate in this post were "love" and "family". It's nice to observe that the frequency of these words has remained pretty consistent through the last two hundred years. Why not check out some words that interest you? Do you think their use will be up or down?

Trying

As a gesture of international goodwill, I am trying to  make a picture for my favourite German blogger - Ms Meike Riley from Ludwigsburg, Baden Württemberg. As she is a foxy lady, she naturally wants a picture of a fox 

It's not easy. I am referring to a photo of Fred Fox who used to visit our garden until his health visibly deteriorated - before no doubt he shuffled off his mortal and travelled to Fox Heaven.

First of all, I drew an outline of Fred. Then very carefully I used masking tape to cover his shape...

Then I washed over the masking tape and did my best to produce a textured garden lawn background before drying the picture and removing the masking tape...

Now I was ready to start on Fred. Please remember that I am not trying to reproduce the photograph in paint. My final picture will be an artistic interpretation of the base image. Even so I found myself really concentrating on Fred's shape. I was thinking about his limbs and muscles as well as what was going on with his hind legs. It wasn;t easy.

I learnt a lot by attempting this picture but I am not entirely happy with it - the relative positions and shapes of the ears, the delicate detail of the eyes, the lighting of the fur from the left. I think I can do better so what I am showing you now is  just a first draft...

On Thursday or Friday, I plan to try again. Maybe next time I will dispense with the grassy background and just plant Fred on plain paper. As you can see... I am, as my mother often said, trying.