sollers

These days, I will often find myself puzzling over, what was that person's name? connected with some Thing in the past. I was actually struggling to recall the name of the very weird woman who was the landlady of the bedsit I inhabited near Mornington Crescent in the very early 70s, with whom there came about Major Draaaama (it eventually popped into my mind, as these things do, a couple of days later when I was thinking about something else: see also, finding that book one is looking for in the process of looking for something entirely different.)

I am not sure if this is AGE or the fallibility of human memory, and is it actually AGE and the wearing out of the little grey cells, or just having That Much More stored in them, so that they resemble one of those storerooms in museums where no-one has catalogued anything for centuries and curators have gone in and nicked stuff to sell on eBay -

- I think this metaphor is going a bit too far, somehow.

And yet one can recall quite readily, in fact one might even say intrusively, an obscure pop song by a not particularly renowned group.

That is, after reading that Reacher novel, The Hard Way, the other week, I found myself being earwormed by The Hard Way, a single put out by The Nashville Teens (who were from Surrey) in 1966 which got to all of 45 in the charts. It's not on iTunes even or in any of the compilation CDs, it's obscure. And yet I remembered it and who it was by.

Maybe it was being repetitively played on one of the pirate stations of my youth?

Though probably African frogs do not say that (the chorus from Aristophanes' The Frogs).

Anyway, this was of considerable interest to me having had to do with archives relating to these here amphibians (in which they were described as 'toads'):

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

and also read the ms of a work by A Friend on the history of pregnancy testing in which they played a significant role.

They replaced the rabbit test ('did the rabbit die' - the rabbit had to die, actually, in order to examine its ovaries) as this was a non-lethal test and kept producing yet more frogs.

And there was quite an issue of what to do with the little blighters once chemical testing became the norm - as I recall attempts to dispose of them as pets.

Also

The frog is genetically surprisingly similar to humans, which means that scientists can model human disease in this amphibian and replace the use of higher sentient species.

Last week's bread became really, really, dry, so I made a loaf of Shipton Mill Three Malts and Sunflower Organic Brown Flour: very nice.

Friday night supper: the ersatz Thai fried rice with red bell pepper, chorizo and salsiccon salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 strong white/rye flour, turned out very well.

Today's lunch: lemon sole fillets, which I cooked more or less as for the whole soles here - slightly shorter time and lower oven temperature, also sploshed a little wine in; served with La Ratte potatoes roasted in beef dripping, spinach according to recipe in Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery, and warm green bean and fennel salad (I included a little chopped red onion as there was one left over from last week as well as the fennel, and added additional tarragon to the dressing).

I was intending posting a link to a really depressing article in Guardian Saturday about an awful trolling site and the people who seem to have nothing to do but troll on it: but it's not currently online, you are spared.

I was thinking about such people, who seemed to be spending hours of their lives being horrible about other people and trying to dig up dirt on them, did they not have lives? could they not be doing something else?

Like, you know, bringing ghost ponds back to life: An expert team are resurrecting ice age ponds and finding rare species returning from a ‘perfect time capsule’:

The two ponds returning on farmland are the 25th and 26th ice age ponds to be restored by Sayer’s team of academics, volunteers and an enthusiastic digger driver in the Brecks, a hotspot for ancient ponds and “pingos” formed by ice-melt 10,000 years ago. Over the past two centuries, thousands of such ponds have been filled in as land was drained and “improved” for crops. So far, most of the 26 ponds have been revived on land bought by Norfolk Wildlife Trust, which has supported the restoration effort with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Brecks Fen Edge and Rivers landscape partnership scheme.
But the latest two ponds have been dug out thanks to a Norfolk farmer, who is one of an increasing number of private landowners reviving ghost and “zombie” ponds. New surveys by Sayer’s team have revealed that 22 of the ghost ponds restored since 2022 now support 136 species of wetland plant. This represents 70% of the wetland flora found in more than 400 ponds on Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Thompson Common, an internationally important nature reserve whose ponds have survived since the ice age.

The Hunt: Friction to feel. which is about the culture of searching for music before it was (theoretically) All Online:

The hunt is built upon friction. Friction is good. Friction is healthy. Friction develops adaptation. The hunt is also born of curiosity. The desire to seek and discover something you don’t know, and might never know. In the pursuit of knowledge and experience, you teach yourself about empathy, other perspectives, and mold a person who is resilient and grateful. We lost something along the way in pursuit of efficiency and this idea of saving time for productivity.

And, of course, as I am occasionally moved to point out on The Soshul Meedjas, most archives are not digitised and online (and mutter mutter a significant % of the ones that are were digitised by proprietary bodies and paywalled), and finding them can still involve Expotitions.

That thing happened this week whereby a couple of weeks ago I was looking everywhere for a book I knew I had somewhere (unless maybe I'd lent to somebody sometime and they'd never returned it, it being the biography of an NZ-born sex reformer published by Penguin NZ: and currently available according to bookfinder.com, 2nd hand, from NZ, at PRICES, not to mention, how long would that take?).

And then I was looking for Other Book entirely, in fact just vaguely casting my eye over shelf adjacent to where I was looking for that, and there was That Book, stuck between two other books and way out of any kind of order.

We are not sure that is not, in fact, entirely typical of its subject....

***

I was taking my customary constitutional at lunchtime today, and walking across the grass among the trees, under which there was a certain amount of debris of fallen leaves and twigs (these were not the horse chestnuts that were madly casting conkers on the ground), caught my foot and stumbled slightly, and somebody said, 'Be careful!'

I went off muttering that there is not a lot of point in issuing warnings to be careful after the event, but people do tend to do that, don't they, sigh.

***

I am not sure this is an oddness, but normally, by the time a conference at which I am supposed to be keynoting is only just over a week away, participants will have had at least a draft version of the programme, indicating time the thing is starting, slot they are speaking in, etc.

(I also had to do a certain amount of nudging to discover how long I was expected to Go On for.)