Showing posts with label AA Milne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AA Milne. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

2011 Streak Day 186/365: Dr Dolittle

2011 Streak Day 186/365: Cycle - 19.33 miles, Time - 1hr 25min, Weather - morning was sunny and warm
My route took me past the alpaca farm and so I stopped to look. 
They are amusing furry bundles, who, today, felt the need for shade and a number of them were sitting-down under the trees, resting. I liked these two, sitting together to make a pushmepullyou. It confirms my opinion that Dr Dolittle is really non-fiction.
Although it was not part of today's route Hemel boasts a small business park with a brilliant name: Doolittle Meadows. If I ran a business I would love to have that address (but that probably tells you more about my lack of business acumen than the appropriateness of the name).  Although I am rather surprised that some bright spark in marketing has not already tried to rebrand it, I am glad they have retained the traditional name for the area.
It goes back a few centuries to when the Abbott of St Albans sent some monks to the corn mill as a break from the ecclesiastical rigours of their life. Apparently the concept of break was stretched to mean rest and a reputation was established. It is nice to know the name was literal. (Nowadays, of course, I am sure that it is deeply, deeply ironical).

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

2011 Streak Day 151/365: Thinking of childhood

2011 Streak Day 151/365: Run - 3.31 miles, Time 31min 05sec, Weather - warmer and sunnier as the day progressed (I ran first thing in the morning)
Yesterday I posted a rather good poem by Philip Gross. Today I took a photo of a delphinium and all I could think of was a verse by AA Milne: There once was a dormouse who lived on a bed / Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).
I know one of the ideas of the 2011 project is for me to see something and make some associations but reaching back into my childhood, and recovering one of the pebbles that rattles about, is stretching it a bit far. I might just as well have taken a photo of a wheelbarrow and said:  "Jonathan Joe had a mouth like an O and a wheelbarrow full of surprises".
As you will probably guess I was bought up on AA Milne - my mother liked reading the verse as well as Winnie the Pooh and used to sing me to sleep with 'Christopher Robin is saying his prayers'
What this has left me with is fragments. I cannot remember anything as long as a verse but the odd line or two will occasionally bubble to the surface.
So much of your childhood is always with you. You do not carry it around in the forefront of your conscious mind but every so often something will jog a little memory and you can picture things as they were