In Life what hope is always unto men?
Stories of Arthur that shall come again
Cleansing the Earth in her eternal stain,
Elias, Charlemagne, Christ. What matter then?
What matter who, or how, or even when?
If we but look beyond the primal pain
And trust the Future to write all things plain
Graven on brass with the predestined pen.

This is the doom. Upon the blind blue sky
A little cloud, no larger then a hand.
Whether I live and love, or love and die,
I care not; either way I understand.
To me – to live is Christ; to die is gain
For, I also, I shall come again.

 Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)

Or...
 

We have been here before

I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the top of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work'll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.

“I have been here before!” I asserted,
In a nook on the neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it.
How long has this got to go on?

 Morris Bishop (1893-1973)

“Before extinguishing the light I read, as is my wont, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (I am at MUS to OZON, Vol. 16). I find perusal of these educational tomes a perfect method of wiping from my over-active brain the cares of the day and also an ideal soporific. I had skipped 'Obstetrics' and was reading, with a certain interest, that Oconomowoc is a city in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, U.S.A., and that its name is an Indian word which is said to mean 'home of the beaver.' Suddenly a light footstep on the staircase diverted my attention. My first thought was that Mother had arisen. I threw back the bedclothes and, as my feet touched the linoleum, Miss Constantine entered the room. She was, to my acute embarrassment, in her sleeping attire. Her hair was unbound (I was surprised at its length) and, although she did not speak, her arms were outstretched in my direction. She stood, for a moment, in the shadow of the doorway, as though imploring me to go to her and then, slowly, moved toward me. I darted to one side and, as she reached the spot where I had been standing, I noticed an extraordinary thing. Her eyes were closed.”

 “... one italicized line leapt to my mind. The somnambulist, if suddenly awakened, instantly drops dead. I dared hardly breath.”

From  "The Journal of Edwin Carp” - by Richard Hayden, embellished by Ronald Searle.

 The other day, as I lurched around a Burgundian meadow, clutching a magnifying glass and shadowing the erratic flight of a Hummingbird Hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum), the surging hiss of lime trees and strained lowing of Charolais cattle suddenly transported me to the world that I abandoned in my teens...

 The aggressive sizzle of a coal-fired fryer and hoarse shouts of a drunken dispute erupt into the cold night air of an industrial English town. The pubs have emptied out and the warm glow of a fish-and-chip shop has lured me to its sprawling queue. The beer-fuelled boisterousness of the evening has worn thin and an increasingly familiar lassitude takes hold that makes even the vituperations of the couple next to me seem distant.

 Eventually, I come to lean against the high tiled counter and a pale, sweating girl squints at me as she struggles to interpret my slurred request, Cod and chips and what's your name?

 
The Chippy

Eve shovels chips into plastic trays
adds sausage, beans, gravy,
then wraps the workman's dinner
in thick paper. Her eyes weep
grease. Her arms are blistered
from the hot spit of fat; then she's wanted
out back:

two large barrels
of onions to peel, floors
to be brushed and mopped, cod
to be fried, bins to be emptied, industrial vats
to be scrubbed, as well as the hot plates
and grill pans with their dark leprous
landscapes.

The sink is deep and nine pots in
Eve's spine is a hell bent
question mark:

Why isn't there a memorial day
for all those lives wasted
in crap jobs?

Then there's a queue out front
and Eve's back
to shovelling chips.

Janette Stowell (from 'The Midnight Horror Tree')

 
 

High on a bookcase I have a mounted Common Kingfisher (seen here provoking a Mountain Barbet – Meglaima monticola)

 Compare and contrast with the following example of the taxidermist's craft/art by Peter Morass of Austria;

 It is reminiscent of this remarkable photograph by Lazlo Novak;
(Sent to me by my friend, J)

 The following illustration is by Roland Green (1896-1972), it has more than a hint of sentimentality, but not too much for my dubious taste.

 The bird's iridescent plumage is a challenge for a guide-book illustrator; a 'pure' artist can use techniques to throw the eye but an illustrator who wants the viewer to recognise field marks is limited in what he can do.

 Above is a faded illustration that may have been a little dull to start off with. It's by George Rankin, and shows the bird at the entrance to its nesting tunnel. This tunnel is roughly a metre long, making the nest extremely difficult to find and giving rise to a well-known myth, which, as A F Gotch demonstrates in the following paragraph, is hinted at in the bird's Linnaean name, Alcedo atthis (atthis, incidently, being Latin for Athenian);

 “There are famous legends about the kingfishers; the ancient Greeks thought they conceived at sea and built floating nests, and so at this time the Gods favoured them and kept the sea calm. The Greek word for kingfisher, alkuon, is derived from hals (Gr) of the sea, and kuo (Gr) I conceive, hence 'halcyon days', calm days, kingfisher days.”

 Kookaburras are large, terrestrial kingfishers. There are four species; Blue-winged, Rufous-bellied, Spangled and Laughing.

Laughing Kookaburra,
'The Evolution Store', Manhattan

 Given the distinctive characteristics of the Laughing Kookaburra, such as the snake-eating and the maniacal call, it has a very unimaginative binomial name; Dacelo novaeguineae.

 The specific name, novaeguineae, refers to the fact that besides Australia it occurs also in New Guinea.

 The Kookaburra's generic name, Dacelo, has no scientific basis at all and is simply an anagram of Acledo, which is the generic name for the Common Kingfisher – a little known fact that one could raise during a lull in dinner party conversation (should one want to prolong the lull).