Two goats go to the cinema. As they’re watching the movie one of the goats is chewing up a reel of film. Afterwards, as they’re leaving, the other goat asks,
“So how did you enjoy the film?”
“It was okay, but I preferred the book.”
This joke comes to you from Alma.
In the last-but-one post we were talking about moss and I thought, now this is something we really have a lot of, I ought to take some pictures of mossy boulders. So yesterday afternoon, I took the dogs and goats up the hill behind our house. The goats had never been there before, most of the year it is grazed by cows, but they can see it. That’s the goat house and their part of our garden below, behind Vesla:
On the right, below, is our house and to the left the hill down which boulders have rolled for several million years. You can just see Alex, the rat-like blob in the right-hand foreground:
And behind us is the lake. The dark, barrow-shaped bump in the middle of the picture …
… is this rock. Its striations are made so prominent by …
yes, finally: moss …
That was volcanic lava, and those are some of my favourite rocks around here, but they’re sitting in a field. Above them is the forest and the prime mossy area. Here’s a typical bit, showing some of the enormous cube-shaped boulders that look like fuzzy dice:
Here is another boulder on the edge of the forest:
It’s in a notable spot (that’s Alex again on the right, below) …
right next to it is this. A prehistoric pebble beach:
Some years ago this place, right here, was at sea level. But the dark reflection of a hill, on the left, is in the lake. The lake’s at +145 metres above current sea level and here we’re about +200 metres (650 ft). So when I say ‘some years’, I’m talking about a few million years; back in the days when Norway was a tropical paradise, with snorkeling and deck chairs. It’s just a small area. The stones are mostly pebbles; much more rounded than elsewhere:
By that time, Vesla was tired and the goats wanted to go home.
That dead tree has been at that angle for years.
Stirling Moss, for anyone under fifty-ish, was a 1950s racing driver.
Yes, but I let them in. They LONG to come in the garden all summer. They have a good-sized bit for themselves, but of course they want to be in the part with fruit trees and berry bushes, even if there are only leaves left to be eaten.
Here is Misty tackling a Victoria plum tree, earlier today:
Unlike the other goats Misty adores plums. I gave her some few weeks ago:
And here you can see what goats have instead of front lower teeth:
My family thought that apart from say a bunch of buttercups or pussy willow, cut flowers were a bad idea; flowers ought to be left to grow. My wife not only has no qualms about cutting anything down, she likes to leave it in the vase until completely dead in order to watch the decay. I’m with her on this; I love vases of flowers, big or small, alive or dead. She recently inherited her mother’s collection of glass and here she’s put some moss in one of the little vases. I encourage all kinds of moss to grow. After the wet summer we’ve had it’s flourishing in the garden; it’s all over the huge boulders at the bottom of the hill too. Well, it’s always been there; I think moss ought to be the Norwegian national plant.
Here’s some moss on the rubble wall behind Vesla, taken today. The rocks came from the forest, but the moss seems to be doing well here:
I have to remove it from in between the cobbles; the moss gets overgrown with grass, and pretty soon the cobbles have disappeared altogether.
Svayambh is the name of a work by Anish Kapoor. It means auto-generated, self-made, in Sanskrit. It’s part of his show that’s on at the moment at The Royal Academy, in Piccadilly. I think both this piece and the show as a whole look magnificent and a lot of fun; I’d love to go. Svayambh is an enormous, many-tonned blob of red wax that runs on rails through five of the Academy’s huge galleries, squeezing and oozing its way through the aligned doorways, extruding itself into the shape of a train (a holocaust transport, some have said), or a loaf of bread (another proposal) all because of the shape of the arches. Incidentally I’m sure all such comparisons are welcomed by Kapoor, so if it reminds you of something — hemorrhoids, for instance — don’t worry.
To avoid long, unnecessary downloading I’ll simply link to the only youtube videos I can find of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umVSGErfg8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du8dNvfY1bo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72t6bzNGyU
And here’s one of another piece, called Shooting Into The Corner:
Meanwhile Vesla finds a bush of her own:
This old birch tree lost its top a couple of years ago. Lately, every time I pass it, I’ve had a desire to paint it to look like a witch. I’d like to prop very long boards vertically against the bottom half of the trunk to resemble a pleated skirt.
There was a touch of frost this morning. The cows don’t seem to mind. It just shows that you (one) don’t need very long fur to keep warm.
This was the view in the other direction, towards the horse farm across the lake:
You can’t see much. Here’s a blow up:
A Bad Guide 