psmv5: Survival

The pumpkin man of reference 1 still stands, despite the wind and the rain. Although, to be fair, the top of his head has fallen off. Rather more than a week now.

And left-over pumpkins were going for next to nothing in Waitrose yesterday, some of quite a decent size. If I had had my trolley with me, I might have taken advantage.

Similar considerations apply to the handsome bronze propellor that I almost fell for at a collectibles stall on the market place. £50 in money and maybe between 5 and 10 kilos in weight. Perhaps just as well that I did not think of using my scarf as a carrying strap until it was too late.

Also a day for a good number of sightings of shop trolleys, in town and some quite near home. Maybe there will be some action later.

Striking leaf scars on the supposed tree of heaven outside the telephone exchange.

As it happens, I have been getting on with reference 3, noticed at reference 2. I read there that horse chestnuts are not so named because horses like to eat conkers or anything like that, rather because their leaf scars look very much like a horse shoe, complete with nails, presumably the feeding pipes in life. Looking at these scars, one can see how this might be, but unfortunately, this morning, none of the chestnuts that I pass on my way into town had branches near enough to be able to inspect the scars. Maybe I will get lucky over the next few days.

I might also say, that not only are Leighton's woodcuts much better, much more interesting than I was expecting, she writes pretty well too. Despite the touch of what a one-time correspondent, who knew about such things, might have called the 'muck and manure' tendency in English poetry after the carnage of the First World War. Woodcuts also much better than most of the rather cut-price efforts in the Thornton Wilder book.

And following the film set in Tokyo, a spot of Japanese tree gazing of the principal tree. If one is in the mood, tree and weather are right, a fine activity. Not that this snap captures much of it.

In the margins of all this, I came across reference 5 and wondered whether I had got it right about all the trees in Japan. Gemini assures me that I had: two thirds of Japan is mountain and not much good for anything except trees - which grow because there is plenty of rain and the climate is temperate. Everything else, the rice, the industry and the people is packed into the other third. All in all, a handy essay on the subject which I have no reason to question. One can see why he might well be popular with school children and older students on assignments.

One question - 'Back in 2012, I wrote that 'Japan is two thirds forest, a reasonable proportion of that two thirds being virgin forest; a lot more forest, as a proportion, than almost all other countries' Did I get this right' - and one supplementary.

And round at Screwfix another nod to Japan, in the form of yet another snap of my favourite whitebeam.

Back home, I remembered about reading a short novel by a young Belgian writer who had spent some time working in Japan. One of three short books. Search using that information failed to turn anything up, but contrary to what I had thought, the books had not been culled, with the author in question being Amélie Nothomb of references 6 and the novel in question was 'Stupeur et tremblements'. I shall probably read it again at some point. And in the meantime, we can always ask Prime.

Inspection of the archive reveals that it is 15 years since I last read it. Turned up again five years after that, but not, as far as I can tell, reopened at that time.

Inspection of Wikipedia reveals that she knocks out a novel a year, regular as clockwork and usually, but not always, uses Éditions Albin Michel. What is going on there?

I associate to Simenon, another successful writer from Belgium who could turn good stuff out, more or less to order.

And while we are on things French (or at least French flavoured), I was shocked yesterday to learn from Mauriac, noticed at reference 7, that it was customary to use live pigeons as decoys for pigeon shooting, seemingly a big deal in the Landes, where the novel - ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux’ - was set. And that it was customary to blind the pigeons before the off, so that they decoyed rather than scared the intended victims off. Real sportsmen did this themselves, rather than getting their gamekeeper to do it for them. Gemini was able to tell me all about it and about how it all fitted into the novel in question. Stuff which I probably would not have thought of under my own steam. Clever chap a lot of the time.

Shocked again to be told by 'Epsom Connections' or some such, pushed through our letter box at regular intervals, that it is 40 years since the Armero tragedy in Columbia, the damage and the huge loss of life - more than 20,000 people - being caused by mud flows and such triggered by a volcano erupting - and described at reference 9. Shocking partly in itself, but also because I remembered nothing of it, although I would have thought that I would have known all about it at the time. While I do remember all about the Aberfan tragedy in Wales, twenty years before and involving something over 100 deaths, mainly children and for which see reference 9.

On a lighter note, I went onto read that Eastbourne Corporation was once the doyen of the municipal bus companies, having been started in 1903. The omnibus version of the Father of the House of Commons. It finally succumbed to being starved of funds in 2008 and wound up in the hands of Stagecoach. Read all about it at references 10.

From which I learn that the corporation used to number its buses sequentially, a number quite separate from whatever was on the number plate. Their No.39, for which I am waiting in another connection, was a Leyland which started its life with the Wellingborough Motor Omnibus Company in 1912, came to Eastbourne as a chassis in 1917, was then rebodied a couple of times, before being retired in 1928. Just over ten years with Eastbourne.

A throw back to my recent excursion into the timber content of the bodies of buses. Finding which is left as an exercise for the reader.

PS: coincidentally, BH and I are both reading books presently which involve the extraction of resin from certain pine trees in France, she in Provence and I in the Landes. BH prompted a visit to the Larousse, which happened to be to hand, which established that the resin in question was turpentine of reference 11, a product which made the pine trees important, at least for a while, as a cash crop. One problem was competition from the US. One use was as an oil, or an ingredient for same, for lighting, replacing whale oil, before the arrival of electric lights. Another was as a thinner for paints - and I learn, I think for the first time, that the whole idea was to have a volatile solvent to carry your pigment, which would evaporate once applied at a suitable rate, not too fast and not too slow. The drying of many paints. I remember using the stuff as a child to clean varnish brushes, possibly also in connection with French polish. Then there is the rosin used on the bows used on stringed instruments. And terebinth, snapped above, which I had vaguely heard of without having any idea what it was. All mixed up with the mastic tree which got a mention at reference 13.

I think the turps I remember was being pushed out by turps substitute, aka white spirit, a mineral rather than a vegetable oil, with this last being what I have at the back of the garage now. I shall have to have a poke around and see if we still have a bottle of the real thing.

From the Internet Archive, a useful reference from the Wikipedia article. Perfectly legible in the original under zoom and included here for my future reference (to which end it may be found at Miscellanous-16/tp1).

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/alive-and-well.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/second-impressions.html.

Reference 3: Four hedges: A gardener's Chronicle - Clare Leighton - 1935.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/acorn-statistical-endeavours.html.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/clothes-line-saga-series-2-episode-2.html.

Reference 6a: https://www.amelie-nothomb.com/.

Reference 6b: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9lie_Nothomb.

Reference 6c: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/04/vocabulary-lessons.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/french-affairs.html.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armero_tragedy.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster.

Reference 10a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastbourne_Buses.