It’s my birthday tomorrow, meaning today’s post marks the end of a ninth complete year of this blog. Am I feeling morbid? Not particularly, I just thought this grave (in Bunhill Fields, London) was kinda cute actually. The hair is getting greyer but I am still an old Goth at heart.
It is getting difficult to sustain the (my, your) interest over the endless, repeated days of lockdown. Particularly when they are cold, grey and wet, like today. I sorted out and dusted the CD shelves: this is as exciting as it got. The extra decorations have always been there.
More Christmas decoration, this time our annual harvesting of one of the house’s copious collection of sheep skulls for the usual Gothic effect. I spent all day at home working, but now I’m done. Christmas, whatever that means or represents — here we are.
Back home — at least for a day. It’s Halloween but I don’t really go for The Festival of Cheap Plastic Tat. I did have a couple of online classes to run however, so I let my totem make an appearance. Perhaps the Mac is also a totem — or a familiar? It’s certainly hard to weave any magic without it, these days.
Even less happened today than for the last two days, although this short period of purdah will end tomorrow. Isolation at home forced me to find subjects from the stuff around the house, like this — I mean, everyone has horned sheep skulls on their bedroom window sill, right?
There was excitement to the day, but this came courtesy of Brighton & Hove Albion FC coming from 2-0 down with two minutes to go and still go through at Millwall in the FA Cup quarter-final; but the only photographic record of it is a selfie of me looking worryingly manic, so I will spare you that. Not much else to show however; we are clearing out the bedroom (not easy in a house with very limited spare space) in preparation for decorating it, and the unusually empty shelves are the best I can do. The film books still remained to be packed as of this morning, but they’ve gone now. The sheep skulls have not…
Feels like a while since I have spent any proper time at home, with its indoor herb garden, its dust bunnies, its strange collection of bits of dead animal.
Our window sill, and indeed our house generally, contain more pieces of deceased sheep than most people would consider normal. Souvenirs from a few Lakeland walks….
Always nice to have some kind of memento of a good day out. In five and a half years of tramping the fells of the Lake District on a regular basis, I have come across six intact sheep’s skulls including this one from yesterday: but none of the others had horns as spectacular as this one. I think I’ll hang this one from the front door to deter canvassers.
