For over a year now I have been trying to establish an independent land base and adapt and furnish it. It is only recently beginning to come together and tradesmen are installing furniture,  curtains, blinds, hot water and all the sorts of things land people take for granted but are alien to life on a watery wave ...

Two hard boiled eggs?  Already boiled?  And shelled?  For less than 60p?

I watch the cheap shelf in supermarkets constantly but I buy my food on value rather than price.  I do like to know the price of everything but I always compare price with value.  You gotta not only know the price of everything you gotta know the value too.  I prefer to pay more for a better egg so I may choose Waitrose's Clarence Court at 42p per egg.  But!  If I see two shelled, hard-boiled eggs for 55p I do my sums ...  The average price of an egg in a shop is  30p but this pair? Cooked and ready to eat.  

The internet does not even scratch my life
but the slate of my life cynically records
the width and the span of my life's fabric.
​I macerate in life's water by immersion. 

I have no interest in apps
or in being an internet pawn.

​While others goggle
over a picture of rising steam
or marvel at the photogenic qualities
of a pixelated steaming cup 
I prefer to  smell my coffee 
in real time

If I want something I'll not be not side-tracked
by a deceitful web trying to push tat
I patently neither need nor want.  ​

I am also inured of the web's churning  algorithms: 
and declare myself ... Origin of my Species
Off-Grid Floating Cave-Man
​Gaia my god.  The natural world my mentor
  my man-cave my means of escape 
​to a reality far away from 'new' normal  ​

​​​© MMXXIV

[email protected]
​
ex salice ortus sum

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Beneath those rugged elms,
that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf
in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell
for ever laid,
The rude forefathers
of the hamlet sleep.

Nor you, Ye proud,
impute to these some fault,
If memory o'er their tombs
no trophies raise,
Where thro' the long-drawn aisle
and fretted vault
the pealing anthem
swells the note of praise.

 Once upon a time I was Warden of the Mace in an Essex parish. To one side in the hallowed ground fornenst the porch, as I walked into church, was a neglected grave.

I decided to remember the long-gone parishioner and, over a period,  planted bulbs: crocus, galanthus, daffs, narcissi, tulips, hyacinths.  Over time it became known as the Grave of the Unknown Parishioner and acted as a natural calendar.  An early example also of my guerilla gardening escapades which eventually would be promoted on English canal towpaths and anywhere nature needed a hand.

When various bulbs bloomed on the Grave of the Unknown Parishioner, each in its own season, marking the passage of time ... it brought to mind Ecclisiastics III 1-8.  In 2008, Easter Day fell on 23rd March, the earliest date on which Easter can fall.  I took the snap above to celebrate.  I was still a sea-sailor back then . 

Sixteen years later Easter 2024 fell just a week later than in 2008 and global warming ordains that tulips are blooming a month earlier in Peterborough.  The daffs have been out since before Valentine's Day.  I do not know what the Grave of the Unknown Parishioner is telling the faithful but I hope it is telling them that Spring is sprung and all will be well ...  if only the country can get rid of this useless government ...

Goodbye old operating system.  You've been a great friend but the ... Internet of Things ... is upon us and I am about to hitch a ride into the Satellite Age.  Goodbye Toshiba...   You've been a great friend too ... twenty plus years through tyck 'n tyn, Windows 95. 7, 10  ... but when I could no longer see the characters on my keyboard and fitted a new one you got upset and calved.  I was lucky to be able to have the data saved because I had not been as careful as I had been trained to be and let stuff slip onto the long finger.

Now W10 on a 7th generation Dell Latitude 7390 running Core15vPro ...
I have entered the age of enlightenment. Woe that the government is not there

... read the serial number on my Morris Minor ... check warp drive ...

CONNECTING WITH NATURE
6.30am and I look to the bay window of my flat sensing movement from the corner of my eye.   Two  blackbirds (Turdy and Merula) have flown up to the gutter over the window and then dropped together to the ledge below.   A flurry of wings, Turdy mounts Merula and in mille seconds there has been a nuptial conjugation.  The mating is over in less time than it took Red Rum to jump Beechers.  Turdy swoops across the lawn with a clatter and a whirr while Merula smoothens her composure.  There will be a nest somewhere very near and soon a clutch of eggs will keep Merula on the nest for 28days and later bairns, indicated possibly by bluegreen eggshells.  From then on Turdy and Merula will be constantly flying back and forward bringing the groceries.  Later I hope to see young ones on the lawn ...

On the water it has been a busy transition from Winter to Spring for the boats.  I've had major electrical work done on both.  Now I can isolate and couple Wavy Rider's leisure batteries into Pentargon's system to share the considerable solar potential of the butty with the boat. 
Spring has also been exceptionally wet windy and warm. 

Warm enough for boat visits to have needed no Hampshire heat.

The pictures below show Pentargon at Blisworth Wharf before the warmth arrived.  The whiteness in the fields and on the towpath is hoar frost. OAT was -2 overnight.  I slept well in my warm cabin with my goose down duvet and my heater on best behaviour.

The photos above appear to be identical at first glance but are different. Look at the reflections of trees and boats in the still water for clues ...