An inelegant time traveller

Thank you for all the wonderfulness shown to our beautiful little old lady in yesterday's blip. She'd howl for joy if she could but read. I tried to explain it to her but I think she prefers biscuits to blip.

I suspect that somewhere  betwixt January and February each year I'll have blipped the first of the lambs to catch my eye, I hope I've noticed them and paused for longer than that. Having been incapacitated as the year turned I can't say when the first actually appeared, but these healthy little lambs are the first I've really seen.

If you haven't already I'd urge you to read Earthdreamer's wonderful thoughts on poetry, they set me off on a tangent that's bounced around my head all day.

I'm a fan of the magic of words, they have the power to move us, to connect us, to break us and to heal us. Eatherdreamer's treatise on the power of rythme transported me back to a little lost boy safe on his grandfather's lap, the rhythmic cadence of his voice more of a sensory embrace than anything I'd truly tell you I understood. It would take me decades to recognise the works of Tennyson, Blake, Longfellow and more dusted on the shelves of the farm. Holding the battered books, books my grandfather learnt to read with only in his later years, quite possibly with a small boy on his lap, is a form of magic it's hard not to believe in, a connection from now to then.

But I can also remember, like surely every teenager before me, the way the music of my youth spoke to me. The poets of my formative years were Morrisey , Lennon and O'Shea Jackson - their words to this day can make me bristle with teenage angst and rebellion, I remember how often I was told to turn "that noise" down, I smile at how seldom I did. 

Tonight cooking supper the ipod threw out a line so generationally specifc that it's become, I think (well, until the next song works it's magic) my favourite opening line. 

"back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark..." 

The singer is my age (ahem) and it's such a beautifully specific reference in what is a harshly sharp song. The reference to Wahlberg's own journey to adulthood, from boy band dancer, to Hollywood heavyweight, reflected in the song's antagonist and framing that of a listening generation. I'd guess its pure gibberish to anyone a few years either side of my age, nonsense, like the words of a spell.