people up the hill did not enjoy the stink of the smoky steam.

end of the line and enough pix for today!

baggage from yester-year

steam smells like nothing else on earth....

the steam train

see what I mean! in the distance an ice cream vendor does a brisk trade....

staring in disbelief at English Parents with their children in raincoats and wellington boots playing in the sand on a wet spring day

the sea at Swannage south of Corfe

the road out of Corfe

more Corfe buildings

we staggered into the greyhound for a pint (or two) after the castle walk-a-bout.

kewl photo of depth

the town of Corfe.

leaving the castle...

looking away from Corfe with the steam train approaching

see what i meant in the post below ;)

A wildly leaning wall, best viewed before a few pints

looking down at the remainder of the ruins and the steam train from Swannage approaching Corfe

looking upwards

an awesome cut in the stone that I do not know the meaning of....

more ruins

spring flowers

Corfe castle presented a clear and present danger to the English parliament of the day so it was bombarded by canon and 'destroyed' . A senseless waste of a magnificent castle.

at the bottom of the hill approaching Corfe castle on the "Isle of Purbeck"

an English frog 'acquired' by master 19 from outside a house

Rushing around, trying too hard - sound familiar? Fr Ron Rolheiser writes thus:

Hurrying can hamper life's sacredness

In Exile By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi Rome

"Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." Thoreau wrote that and it's not meant as something trivial.

We hurry too much, pure and simple. As Henri Nouwen describes it: "One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams.

"It fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligation."

What's wrong with hurrying? Any doctor, police officer, spiritual director, or over-worked mother, can answer that: Hurrying causes tension, high blood pressure, accidents, and robs us of the simple capacity to be in the moment.

But spiritual writers take this further. They see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl, for example, says, "Hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time," an attempt, as it were, to make time God's time our own, our private property. What he and others suggest is that, in hurrying, we exercise a form of greed and gluttony?

Too often we have a simplistic notion of greed and gluttony. We imagine greed, for example, as hoarding money and possessions, as being selfish, hard-hearted, like Scrooge in the Dickens' Christmas tale.
continues

Do words signify things?
Was Aquinas a zen buddhist?
Is it worthwhile reading philosophy?
Why did Wittgenstein leave the room after brandishing a red hot poker whilst arguing the eternal question 'what is philosophy?" with Popper?

Notice how the questions get longer.

for those who drool on substance enjoy: fin de siecle Vienna

So a wild Wednesday draws to a close. You ask gentle reader why I use the word wild? Perhaps I know the wildness of the beast within. The sub-clinical depression I was experiencing earlier has moved into a wild rage about the inhumanity of my fellow humans.
From year to year the litany does not change. Israeli soldiers humiliating Palestinians, Sudanese 'arabs' raping children in Dafur, bashings on city and country streets in 'civilised ' countries. aaarrghhh! I am impotent in my anger, my frustration, thanks be to God I can cry out in prayer and call for justice. How long, O Lord, how long?

I seek refuge in my books - for the last three nights I have been rereading "Contemplating Aquinas" On the varieties of experience . A book guaranteed to stop the average reader in their tracks. Expressions such as: diachronic relation, conceptual linkage, mimetically representative, methodological solipsism, genuinely irreducible semantic triangle: triad reduced to a conjunction of dyads, the quiddity of God, and even more esoteric language permeates the text with liberal quotations from Latin and Greek. A deep familiarity with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas is presumed and Heidegger captures a portion of the book as well. If I have not already lost thee, oh enlightened reader, you, perhaps, should be blogging not me. Any pretensions that I am a self educated academic fall away in reading such a book, my basic theological and philosophical reading leave me ill prepared to cope with the upper echelons of academia...

Such books however point me towards the light, the hope that all will be well, this vale of tears is but for a time, and gentleness of spirit and love of one another will succeed. Hope must well up eternally in our breasts or else we become but animals.....

Tonight we had Taize prayer at our local church, one hour in near darkness with the familiar music of mainly European languages chanting praise and worship. I was able to leave my angst with my Lord, and pray for those I know and do not know, for the world in all it remains - imperfect but loveable.

I am glad for my lovely family and for the friends I have both immediate and the internet acquaintances of the past year = people need people it is true, and touching each others lives in a sense touches the godhead in each of us. Peace and goodwill G_72

pottery kiln closeup

pottery kiln surround

note the repair work on the right

once all this was buildings
the official website

w00t! King Arthurs grave

first view after entering the enclosure

the tor on the hill approaching Glastonbury

Glastonbury Abbey over the car park wall

Sherborne pub interior, who cares about the lighting after a few pints :)

Salisbury Catheral taken by moi

I am not a great pix taker so enjoy these my effort will be posted above

the tower at Southampton

church ruins from WW II, a local told us a tale of a fellow being up in the tower when the bomb hit, he flew down head first into the pavement (sidewalk); apocryphal tale - I dunno.

The traditional watchmaker meets the digital age, a clock projected onto the wall above a jeweller shop

one lane and another

This pillar had plaques commemorating every major historical event since the pilgrim 'fathers' set out. Unfortunately my co-tourists were in a hurry and would not let me take close ups of each plaque, each one a marvellous history lesson.

another piece of history

follow the signs to walk the walls

Here be examples of viking ships. Master 19, Auntie and cousin engrossed in signage!

Someone else has done the hard work of text entry about the wander around the walls!

another old stone trough

around the corner

kewl overhanging road buildings in Southampton

Detail of the old wall entry

the old wall at Southampton, main entry

I am blushing gentle readers.
I had a '/' on the end of the code for my profile, and thus it would not work.
beware oh children of html!

a 19 year old by the name of graeme can successfully present his profile
another graeme not Graham
Mr Bean puts a new twist on things!

Mr Lincoln watches over the Londoners

London March 2004