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Picture Diary 69

1. My inheritance

2. Cut the Cake

3. Anniversary

4. A Choice of Worlds

5. You do not exist

I'm remembering how little I like to be cold,

The overcast has lifted and the Met Office is now giving us a run of lumpy white clouds with a rayed sun disc peeking over the their tops. Cheerier but chillier. The good thing about a heavy overcast is that it seals the heat in.

The Co-op on the corner has a notice up saying it will be observing the two minute silence at eleven.

The tip shop has a box of books by Angela Brazil, Early editions and possibly firsts and some with their original dust jackets. Were I a dealer I'd have snapped them up. I told Barb- who runs the shop- that she shouldnt let them go for a song.

I could be a dealer. I have a nose for a bargain. Trouble is that while I like buying I have no interest in selling....

Picture Diary 68

1. All Together Now

2. You'll get used to it here

3. Do I know you?

4. How about a nice fry up, dearie?

5. At the cottage

I passed through the town centre at around a quarter to ten and people were beginning to assemble for the ceremony at the War Memorial. I say "people" as if they were Joe and Jill Public but they were mostly a particular kind of person- young people in uniform- cadets, scouts- and the older people who train them. Somewhere a bagpiper was practising a lament.

Were Joe and Jill Public wearing poppies? Not that I noticed. I've been attaching white poppies to my lapel- and having them keep dropping off.

Elizabeth, who lost her father at Arnhem, was going to miss the ceremony for the first time in God knows how long. She said that this year she was just too tired.

The men and women who wore uniform in the Second World War are almost all gone- and now the generation of their children is fading out too- in which company I suddenly remember I must include myself.

I have an idea in my head, sometimes even a fairly clear picture. I put it into words that I think a machine mind will understand, keeping it simple, and then offer it as a prompt to my AI collaborator.

This first prompt is like the first cast of a fly over a trout stream. I hardly expect it to be successful.

The image the AI comes up with may approximate my idea- or it may be way off beam. Sometimes it's an improvement. Usually it's something I can work with.

And then comes the process of refinement and adjustment. It may be a matter of "evolving" the image or it may be a matter of rewriting the prompt, taking things out, putting things in. Like any creative process it can be laborious and frustrating.

Sometimes I have to abandon the process and approach the subject from a new angle.

I hate to be beaten.

Just one more try....

Oh alright, just one more and then we're done.....

But that hand has an extra finger. That won't do......

Eventually my collaborator and I arrive at a result we can live with....

Picture Diary 67

1. At the Head of the Valley

2. The Neophyte

3. Evening Ritual

4, Holiday Snap

5 Mad About the Hills

6. Class of ?

I regularly check the Met Office's weather forecast. Sometimes it's even right- as it is right now. For those of us who don't do numbers it assigns an icon to every hour- and for days now every hour has sported a lumpy little dark grey cloud. And that's how it's been. No rain to speak of, just an occasional sopping wet mist, and no sun, no sun, no sun.....

But it's not cold- or not terribly cold. No wind either because if there were I suppose the overcast would get broken up. It's an English November- no more, no less- and I find I really quite like it. Grey days and dark evenings stir up childhood memories- sights, smells, sensations, feelings- and all of them pleasant enough....

This morning I've been planting narcissi. I plan a great bank of them at the far end of the garden. Also- to protect my face and hands from stabby, pricky things- I've been cutting back the buddleia and gorse bushes that edge the lawn where the bulbs are going in.

"Let's not talk about the election." we said to one another at the Meeting House- and having agreed we wouldn't we sort of skirted round it for a quarter of an hour before tearing ourselves away.

So, I don't think we did too badly there.

We have put a bowl of stones on what I want to call the altar- only Quakers don't do altars- that sits at the centre of the Meeting Room. The bowl is a lovely piece of dark wood, expertly turned by Kevin, and the pebbles I gathered off the beach last Saturday. If we can have flowers on the ~~altar~~ table why not stones- which are as beautiful in their own way and just as grounding? I picked one out yesterday and held it through the Meeting for Worship. "Better," I said to Ailz "Than sitting there twiddling my thumbs" (a silly habit I seem to have picked up from my mother- who twiddled all the time.) I found it helped me concentrate- and had me thinking how it was an object that had existed in something like its present form for millions- perhaps billions- of years. Not that Time is anything but an illusion but even so.....

Do stones have cosnciousness? Of course they do. Everything does.

We just passed a very significant historical landmark and it would be churlish not to cast a glance in its direction. That's what I'm doing now.

But that'll be it. I'm not going to say anything more.

I was down at the Meeting House yesterday afternoon, with Ailz and Helen, waiting for some engineers who never came- and took time out to go to Camilla's- where I browsed the stacks and bought a copy of Heart of Darkness. That's what I'm reading now. One hell of a yarn- and it suits the times....

M. Verdoux (1947) is Charlie Chaplin's weirdest film- a mix of slapstick comedy, sentiment and rage against the war machine. He plays a serial killer who romances rich old women, gets them to make him their heir, then murders them. Arrested and put on trial for his life, he makes this speech before sentence is passed. He has been branded a monster- and so he is, but....

"As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison."

And then a little later, to the reporter who has been granted the privilege of a final interview he says,

"Wars, conflict - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!"

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M. Verdoux on his way to the guillotine- one more state sanctioned killing.

Damian and Louis are putting a new roof on our garage. Louis found a page of the Sun newspaper under the old one. It's dated July 1986. The garage was built badly, by the way, tacked onto the existing house with walls that aren't anchored to one another. "If I hit that wall with a sledge-" says Damian, "Just one blow; it would come down all of a piece."

The rag of newsprint carries a story about Boy George.....

Tucked in behind the Jewish section of Langney Cemetery is an area set aside for Eastbourne's civilian victims of enemy action. Not all of them are here, not by any means, but those that are- some 28 of the 134- have been arranged in two rows, with matching headstones. Each headstone has a container for flowers.

There were no flowers today

The text on most of the stones follows this simple formula:

In Memory of X, Killed by enemy action, date of death, age.....

I'm guessing those who lie here were buried by the civic authorities. Those who had families with adequate resources would have been buried out in the main part of the cemetery along with all the people who didn't die from the effects of catastrophic violence.

At the end of the front row are two stones with no names on them- just the legend "Known unto God". One doesn't have to exercise much imagination to work out the implications of this....

I went looking for the site of the bomb shelter that took the direct hit in 1943. I thought there might be a plaque or something. There wasn't.

The above photo was my best guide The ravaged buildings on the left have disappeared and been replaced, but the ones straight ahead are still there and haven't greatly altered. The 1940s photographer is standing on Spencer Rd and the road it feeds into is South Street. If he'd turned to the right he'd have been looking at the west end of St Saviour's, the grandest church in town. One of the accounts of the bombing notes that the demolished shelter was only a few paces from the St Saviour's war memorial- erected after "The War to End Wars."

My picture was taken standing rather further back- to include one of the swanky early 19th century houses which line Spencer Street. We're on the borders of the area known as "Little Chelsea"- where everything is handsome and quaint and up-market.

At first I was a little indignant that there was nothing to mark what had happened here but then I thought, firstly, that the people who now live on the site might not want to be reminded in perpetuity that thirty nine people had been blown to bits outside their front windows and, secondly, that if we put up plaques at every place where there had been violent and untimely death there'd be a plethora of the things, and in certain great cities- London, Berlin, Paris- you'd be coming across them every few feet.

Mary is interested in ghosts.

As I was at her age,

As I still am.

So I thought I'd Google "Eastbourne Hauntings"

And of course there are lots of them. Also enterprising souls conducting ghost walks- only not in winter

Here's a funny thing: churches are rarely haunted whereas pubs and theatres almost always are.

Among the many ghosts who haunt Eastbourne's Royal Hippodrome theatre is a little girl who sits and placidly watches the actors going about their business just as she did in the late 1800s before bronchitis carried her off.

I thought I'd bang this out there while people might still have leftover pumpkin lying around. It's a Japanese recipe I got off Emiko Davies. We've just tried it- and I'd have it again

Pumpkin braised in milk

Ingredients

400g pumpkin, cut into small squares, leaving the skin on.

180ml milk

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 teaspoons sugar.

2 teaspoons rice vinegar

Put ingredients in pan, all except vinegar, simmer for 10 mins, cover pan and simmer for 10 minutes more until pumpkin is soft (but not mushy)

Stir in 2 teaspoons of rice vinegar (to taste)

Serve either warm or cold.....

Remembrance Day approaches.....

And I've been looking at what happened to Eastbourne during WWII

The authorities rhought a seaside town would be safe from bombing- so children from London were evacuated here. They were wrong. Eastbourne took more bombs than any other town in the non-Metropolitan areas of Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hertfordshire. There were 96 raids and 134 fatalities.

One of the raids took out the end of the Cavendish Hotel, pictured here with the statue of the Duke of Devonshire in the foreground

Another building to suffer was our own Friends Meeting House. The ruins are the subject of an amateur watercolour painted in 1947

The worst loss of life occured on April 3, 1943. A 250lb bomb landed on the overground shelter on Spencer Rd These overground shelters had brick walls and concrete roofs and were designed to protect against bomb blast. They were useless against a direct hit. All 39 occupants were killed.

One of the victims was Kathleen Ellen Davies. She is buried, along with her husband and unborn baby, in Langney Cenetery

Eastbourne is unusual in possessing a memorial to its civilian war dead. It was installed in the Peace Garden in 2018

Like every other south coast town Eastbourne had to be protected against a possible seaborne invasion. It became an armed camp. There was was wire on the beaches. There were guns on the hills.

In this final image Eastbourners- in and out of uniform- are celebrating the end of the European war- May 8, 1945.

I carved two pumpkins- one for us and one for the Meeting House. The shoplady at Sainsbury's reminded me that pumpkin seeds are very good roasted- so I roasted some for the Friends.

"How did you do that?" asked Mark- as if he'd never had roasted pumpkin seeds before- and perhaps he hadn't even though he's 70 and widely travelled. "Just spread them out on a baking tray and put them in the oven." I said.

(I left my walking stick in Sainsbury's and Ailz picked it up for me later. It shows I don't really need it.)

In the evening I put a lit pumpkin on the doorstep to show we were friendly and handed out Halloween themed squishies and snap bracelets. There were so many trick or treaters going the rounds that I ran out. Next year we need to buy double. Trick or treating is a very civilised pursuit in this part of the world with most of the kids accompanied by parents and no loose, rude, authentically threatening teens sticking their feet in the door as we sometimes got in Oldham. There were some clever costumes on show.

I had a dream that I was on a bus parked outside a holiday camp. A hearse pulled up behind us and the driver opened the side door as if to give the deceased a last look at a place where he'd been happy- and everyone on the bus applauded.....

No sooner do we think up a really scary thing than we start chipping away at the fear with humour. By this stage of the game all the "classic" Halloween monsters are essentially figures of fun. The Frankenstein monster, the caped vampire, the Mummy, the Wolfman: is anyone really frightened of them any more? More recent movie monsters are going the same way- Jason, Freddie Kruger etc. Kids put on the costumes, the scars, the masks- and go trick or treating.

"You've got a jumper on and a padded shirt!" says Ailz.

"It's winter" I say.

"No, it isn't," she says.

And she's right. And it isn't even all that cold. But it's damp and my bones don't like it.

It feels like the year jumped straight from August to November.

We have a pumpkin. It's for putting outside to let people know we have Halloween goodies to give away. I'm thinking I'll carve it- but only at the last minute- so the flesh doesn't degrade and can be used in cooking. Vast quantities of pumpkin get sent to landfill every year and it's a pity. We should use our resources more carefully, more caringly....