A gang of four or five goldfinches have become daily visitors to the garden here. I don’t think I had seen one until a couple of years ago. The secret of attracting them is a bird-feeder full of niger (aka nyjer) seeds.
I wish I could say I took the photo. I have tried, but the little blighters won’t stay still.
Yesterday I received the very sad news that John Baldwin died on 14th April. John was one of my teachers, along with Doc O’Connor and Olive Tooley, when I first studied phonetics on an evening course at UCL in 1973.
John was an excellent phonetician with expert knowledge of a wide range of languages, including German, Russian and Turkish. He was also very active in the field of forensic phonetics and co-authored a book on the subject which was published in 1990.
John’s great passion was music. He was an accomplished musicologist and performer and for many years a leading member of the Balkan Music ensemble Dunav.
As a teacher and a colleague John was unfailingly kind and considerate and I have many pleasant memories of working with him and talking to him almost on a daily basis for many years.
The picture was taken in early April 2011. No sign of any blossom this year yet. Happy Easter anyway.
 by Sebastiano del Piombo |
There has been a lot of news pontifical lately. Your faithful blogger likes to keep up-to-date, so cast your minds back, if you will, to 19th November 1523. This, as I am sure you remember, was the day that Cardinal Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici became Pope Clement VII.
Now I reckon Clement had a lot going for him as a pope. For a start it was he who commissioned Michelangelo’s painting of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately Clement died just a few days later, so he never got to see it.
Secondly, he grew a beard in violation of Catholic canon law which specified that priests should be clean shaven. He grew the beard in 1527 as a sign of mourning for the sack of Rome during which he was imprisoned for six months by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. He must have thought it looked cool because he kept it for the rest of his life.
Finally, the story goes that he was urged to ban the drinking of coffee by some Catholics who thought it was the devil’s beverage. After drinking coffee for the first time the Pope said that the drink was ‘so delicious that it would be a sin to let only misbelievers drink it. Let’s defeat Satan by blessing his beverage’.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
It was in fact this afternoon that I caught this falcon on an outing to the coast near St. Just in Penwith. Hopkins was right about the mastery of the bird. It can remain completely motionless for minutes on end, just with the slightest trembling of its wings.
Signs of spring are around. Witness the swathes of gorse all over the countryside. I just wish the weather would realise it too.
