It’s December once again, time to bring out the straw goats. Here are some very discreet decorations we passed:
It’s snowed again, a tiny bit, and this time it hasn’t melted.
Some places avoided any accumulation, including this new private venue for viewing the lake, or maybe for fishing. There was nobody about when we passed by. I think it needs a Trespassers-will-be-prosecuted sign but this is Norway so it won’t happen.
Someone has run over the pedestrian sign.
We were taking a late walk. Not so late, really, about half-three-ish, but it gets dark so early now.
I got a reasonable shot of the waterfall as we passed. You’d think it would be easy but the surroundings are quite dark and my pictures nearly always come out blurred. I’m missing a human figure to give some idea of how big it is – bigger than you’d think from the photograph.
This is the shaky bridge I mentioned the other day. Topsy appreciates the waterfall, I think.
And I like the swirling water.
We met two dogs. This one liked Topsy.
And then this setter passed us on its way round the lake. It was alone, it looks as though it might have a gps thing around its neck. Topsy really liked it but it was preoccupied, just like the joggers.
A Bad Guide 
How weird to have such a cold weather around Christmas time.
On the bridge Topsy looked quite wet. He’s going to be sick.
Today, when I got up, it was -11 Celsius.
Topsy tolerates – enjoys is a better word – ice-cold lake water without a second thought and yet she gets cold at night lying on a bed, so I don’t understand dog HVAC.
Oops! sorry to have made a male out of a female Topsy. I know this much more of a common thing nowadays, but still…
“Dog HVAC”, as in Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning? Yes, sometimes you wonder how their thermostat works. Mine too, mind you. I’ve been feeling quite hot lately, though it seems to be a bit early in the season for such a heat to truly be there. “Ice-cold lake water” sounds like a surreal dream.
I thought you lot just dived in the ocean when it got too hot. That’s what it says in travel advertisements.
It’s snowed again, a tiny bit, and this time it hasn’t melted.
Same here; the ground around our house looks much like the ground around yours.
Incidentally, I’d be curious to get your take (and Grumbly’s, and that of anyone else with opinions about architecture) on this brief rant about the Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park Corner by Jonathan Meades in the LRB:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/jonathan-meades/at-hyde-park-corner
Er, the rant is by Meades, not the Memorial. At any rate, I love the rhetoric (“The crassness does not end with this shameless man’s distended immodesty…. The object they have forked out for is a lump of Croesus bling….”) but don’t know enough to have an informed opinion on what he’s talking about. If non-subscribers can access that link, I’d love to hear what you all think. And if you can’t read it, I’ll content myself with enjoying the lovely photos above.
He’s a funny writer, Jonathan Meades. I believe he has a TV series in Britain. He has a book out, here described by The Observer‘s architecture critic, Rowan Moore:
Incidentally, I understand that the publisher, Unbound, publishes its books based on how many votes they get, on the Unbound website, from the public. They have some pretty well-known (in Britain, at least) authors.
My only quibble with Meades is that it’s very easy to take pot shots at contemporary architecture and incredibly much harder to come up with constructive criticism, something that will lead to an improvement in what gets built, so I wish he’d try the latter occasionally.
As for the Bomber Command memorial – oh, one thing that may be lost on a non-UK audience is when Meades says :
“Quality Street” is a brand of chocolates in Britain that has a Jane Austen lady wearing a purple bonnet on the cover of the box. And he’s right, the memorial is a pastiche, a collage of old-fashioned looking styles that have no significance here. The balustrade running along the top is completely inappropriate, for example, on a monument to the dead.
The symmetrical design with an arch in the centre sets up a major axis, like a gateway, and it’s been placed along the perimeter of Green Park, facing the RAF Club across Piccadilly (a wide road), a place where my uncle once took me for tea (it’s next door to the original Hard Rock Café that Meades mentioned). The only problem is that in the middle of the street is the road going down into the Hyde Park Corner underpass, so there is no bloody axis, not even a proper visual one, it’s totally bonkers site planning and it only works from the steps of the RAF Club to please the retired-colonel types who frequent it (the club).
Meades isn’t the first to come up with the comparison to Lutyens WW1 memorial to the dead at Thiepval (even I mentioned it, in June, in a comment in the Guardian). Lutyens made the arch appear as a giant blank-faced scream that you approach by walking up a long slope, the same advance that the troops would have made across no man’s land against the machine-guns. Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, was the one who opened my eyes to Thiepval in one of his spellbinding lectures. Here’s a rather lame piece about him and memorials, I wish i could find something better. And of course Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington is the benchmark nowadays for these structures.
Sorry if this is very badly worded. I have to go and make a salad…
Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of contextual enlightenment I was hoping for.
I kind of feel like getting his book now.
Sig, your Fraicheur post, I think I too did a post that used that Bosch painting. It’s all a bit hazy, I can’t remember when it was. Bruegel, I mean. Not Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow.
No. Now I see what I was thinking of. It was you all along.
I plead guilty. That’s what happens when one is dreaming of ice day and night.
Snow fell overnight. Today is sunny and sharp.
One of the best things with snow is the sunny weather after it’s fallen.
We’ve just had cold-weather soup for lunch. It took half of our butternut squash harvest, a tin of chick peas, an onion, a large leek, some cream, a bit of ginger, a little saffron … . A warm glow envelopes me.
I would very much like to eat that right now. But I’ll have a cup of tea instead.
dearieme, that sounds delicious! I love butternut squash. Do you mean that you had harvested just one or two small ones?
Ginger, saffron, tea … all “foods” from warmer climes. They warm you up, the other ingredients fill you up.
Tesi made a soup this week with most of those same ingredients. Also carrots and a bit of garlic. It was good!
“Do you mean that you had harvested just one or two small ones?”
Spot n, m-l. Two. We got two. Really it was a very poor summer though for some reason we had a decent crop of sweetcorn.