David Bennett

When will Spring come?
When will the nights pull back and the days start to get longer?
When will we see the sun?
When will the grey, grey days go away?
When will the wind stop?
When will we be able to walk out without layers of clothing, without thinking of the struggle to get to the post office, to the shops, to the bus?

We’ve had almost no snow. You can see it on the hills – and you can always see the hills from almost anywhere in Edinburgh, even from the city centre.

But there has been no snow. Just a flurry or two scattered through the winter months. But nothing that has settled.

Snow is an ambivalent creature. It’s all white and welcoming, but then it turns to slush. As pure as the driven slush, as the actress Tallulah Bankhead said of herself.

Of course, in some places (I am thinking of the time I spent in Finland) the air is so dry that the snow settles and remains crisp and white for months.

And apparently the snow was knee deep in Edinburgh for months, just four years ago.

But not this year. So it has been a bit of a slog to reach these lighter evenings and some sunny days. But now the crocuses and the snowdrops are out and the sun is shining.

It is so easy to see how epic poetry and drama arose in human consciousness – the struggle through the dark and the bursting into the light – it’s all there with the seasons. It’s almost all there with each day in the changeable Edinburgh weather…

Crocuses

But now it is here.
Early signs of Spring are here.
It’s a gorgeous day and the sun is here.
Longer days are here.
Crocuses are here:

A Reminder Of Snow

So what is snow like? The scene fades from the memory so quickly I can hardly recall what it looks like or feels like. I have to dig into it to remember it.

The crunch of boots and the sudden ‘give’ as the crystalline structure loses its fight against my weight and I drop, just a fraction, into the snow.

The tiny highlights as the sun (the sun??) glints off the snow.

The sheer brightness as I look up and out and over the blanket of snow. (Who first described thick snow as a ‘blanket’, I wonder?)

The snow in this photo here isn’t Edinburgh snow.

It is a scene from high on the Yorkshire moors a few winters ago. It’s one of the ecard photos from the Landscape category at Quillcards.

A Woman In Bundi

The marks of life are evident in this woman in Bundi in Rajasthan in India, and her poverty is evident in the small stall of vegetables set out by the roadside.

Were she to turn around, would her face enthral and entrance? There is a beauty in old age, isn’t there.

Never. He will not.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies, for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

This is said by the character Domitius Enobarbus in Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

Enobarbus is speaking about Cleopatra and explaining why it is that although Anthony should leave Cleopatra, he never will.

The reason he says, is that unlike the case with many relationships, familiarity makes Cleopatra all the more desirable. And even when she is promiscuous, even the priests are so entranced that they bless her.

Weathered And Weatherbeaten

These are the doors to a building in Bundi. You will find the photo in the Windows and Doors range of images in our ecards here at Quillcards. Click the link to take a look.

Like a lot of photographers, perhaps like a lot of us, I am drawn to structures that have settled in over time.

Wood sawn to size, iron beaten into shape, clay daubed on a lattice of wooden sticks tied together with knotted rope. And then yellow paint with spatters of it on the door.

When things like this grow old we can see the marks, but they don’t destroy the authenticity of the materials. They don’t show the materials up as being fake. They show the beauty, don’t they. Or as they say… beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

We took this photo a few years ago when we lived in the south of England.

And you will find it in the English Cottages section of Quillcards and you can use it in one of your ecards.

There’s a free trial that allows you to use any of the images in Quillcards, so you can definitely use the photo, just click here to get started.

Gold Hill

The photo shows a view of the steep cobbled street named Gold Hill in the town of Shaftesbury. If you look past the cottages you can see how the hill tumbles down to the plain below.

It’s quite a surprise to enter Shaftesbury from one direction and then suddenly find yourself at the top of Gold Hill looking down over the Blackmore Vale in the distance.

Gold Hill is famous as the setting for a television advertisement for Hovis bread that was shown in the UK in the 1970s. Made by the film director Ridley Scott, you can see it here in this YouTube clip.

You might catch a reference to ‘doorsteps’ in the narrator’s voiceover to the advertisement, which is a way of describing particularly thick slices of bread.

Shaftesbury In Context

The town of Shaftesbury is in the county of Dorset, which is in the south west of England.

You can see its location on this map:

Dorset has a rich history. You can get a flavour of that rural history from Thomas Hardy’s novels. And although his later novels took in other surrounding counties, Dorset was always at the heart of his work, fictionalised and based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

And it is on the Dorset coast, on the beach at Lyme Regis, that young Joseph Anning found a part of a fossil of an ichthyosaur in 1811 and where his sister Mary found the remainder of the skeleton in 1812.

The fossil was several feet long and the find was seen to some Victorians as a threat to the creationist vision of history and was highly controversial.

Because of the number of fossils found along the coast of Dorset, it is fondly known as the Jurassic coast and the home of the modern science of palaeontology.