Clouded Skies: Rescaling North Head

 Sydney Harbour’s North Head is always worth contemplating from any distance, the sandstone cliff faces are chameleons in the changing late afternoon light, and mostly upstage both Middle Head and the sky, but this  late autumn afternoon cloudscape, with its impossible volume of cold grey cumulus under a vast acreage of pink-mauve tinted stratus, seems to the kind of brinkmanship of scale that  outdoes everything else in sight, that Goethe’s adage that the sky offers the one perfect view, seems perfectly apt. 

Cold Times and Everyday Ambiguity

 There must be limits to insult even for inanimate objects, and I find no reason one should  boast about being rude to Ice,  yes, it it cold, and lacking in conversation, but for summer drinks, cold compresses and something to rattle in a glass, ice is hard to surpass. Vain boasting of this kind can’t last. 

Crow Bones and Green Grass - A Whitmanesque Curiosity

Crows have been dropping clean-picked bones into my garden. Spying this possibly macabre undoing of the buried, naturally brings to mind Walt Whatman’s Leaves of Grass.  While it’s unlikely the earth has extruded what seems to be a duck femur,  the ground is supersaturated and seven eighths  mud after so many weeks of rain, anything, bone or water is unlikely to be swallowed up. Did the crow drop it from the jacaranda tree directly above, or let it fall while winging past? Is this speculation pure idleness or a bona fide interest in avian habits?  

A Glass of Clear Light Please

 A cocktail of wood grain and shadow, what better beverage for a little after midday - as the fall of light here reveals, than a patterned glass of clear light, in its wavering partnership with the cutting board’s plain surface. 

Blue Hills - Bart Brassica’s Alternative Italian Travel Scheme

 Bart has been thinking of ways to break into Agri-tourism, and has fancied Lambertville as a kind of Faux  Firenze - though how the Delaware and the Arno might be confused relies entirely on Bart not having ever been further than Swedesboro New Jersey, just once  and at the time he was packed, he says by a mistake of scale, into a box of Fancy Medium Peaches - and he woke up in what he claims was an Alliterative Universe, that was exactly like Tusuncanny,  which has given him a deep insight in the The Tusuncanny Lambscape - and this (yes, this is long-winded) was the inspiration for his Blue Hills mural, which will surely bring in all those that fancy a trip to Italian but don’t own a passport.  

A Bird in The Foot is Worth Two on the Barn

Bart Brassica, always one to take advantage of any proverbial good fortune has been trying to attract song birds to Brass Acres for some time, and has found the Big Foot has been adopted as a nest, or perhaps a rest in place for this Blue-Eyed Tin Warblette. Bart is aware that, as a rule, Tin Warblettes,  rarely sing but might twang if they get motivated, but one thing Bart is sure of, is that is a Bird in the Foot must have a market value of twice any other bird. This is the footprint for Bart’s economic step forward. 
 

Apple of My Eye Level

 

 Bart Brassica’s farming ethos has long been Crops One Can Look Up To, and here he has applied himself to good effect with what he calls  his Apple of My Eye Level -  an Appellation for which he has applied for a Pattern Ending, Mavis Eggwhistle has said, tartly, that Bart has designs on himself, which he takes as a compliment.   Now Bart is waiting for the Apple Pie Orders to roll in.