Blame it on Thomas Carew

The day had determined that the routine affairs of living be dealt with in the foremost. So, most of the morning I was 'tooing and froing' with such items as the Iron (will somebody answer me why shirts need ironing when they only crease up again), the mad monster washing machine with its own set of rules needed to be fed, the vacum cleaner that attempts to suck the carpet into the next world was 'rampant' as it led me from room to room. There were Bills to pay, (my electricity Bill went up by THAT much ... looks like very thick jackets indoors until spring), pathways to be swept of the last autumn leaves (oh, the leaf inhumanity of it all). There was passing traffic to be 'shouted at' with keen conumdrums of 'verbose syllables in loose arrangements'. There too was the shopping and everyone asking me, "How are you?", as if they care? I invariably reply with a straight face, "Absolutely dreadful", and usually get the monotone reply, "Oh, that's good", so much for listening. I'd even had time to rumble through Harold Bloom's wonderful tome, 'The Best Poems of the English Language', but as soon as I struck Thomas Carew (1594-1640) and his Lines:

'Ask me no more wither dost hast
The Nightingale, when May is past:
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps her warm note.'

I felt a surge of poetic revolt - asking, 'Is this old English guy serious or had he enjoyed too much claret?' Besides, it's June now NOT May, silly old duffer.

But what of this having the least to do with today's commentary. Not an iota, except it made me contemplate the real word, though clearly 'shaken with a new found appreciation of modern poetry'.

So, I closed Bloom's generous book at Byron's 'Don Juan' on page 405: 'Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant! / Dabbling its sleak young hands in Erin's gore' - phew, and that was only 2 lines roughly 2/3rds in of its 136 Line bludgeoning - and headed out in the suburban yonders in seek of photograhic distraction and deliberate misadventure (all within legal bounds of course). This had me meandering (the day was foggy, exceeding more than 18% grey, cool but nary a breath of wind) near a place called the Altona Coastal Park, a rather nondescript, hesitant, (seen better days) plain at the emptying of Kororoit Creek into Port Phillip Bay. Think of Kororoit Creek as say, the Danube or the Thames after being 'flushed' with a billion liters of valium, though in painful increments over decades and decades of abuse. The 'Park' itself is located just over 10 kms from Melbourne to the south-west. After the European invasion/settlement of Victoria, from about the 1880s until the end of 1945 a large Racecourse (Williamstown Racecourse) operated on what once was a swampy and flat aspect of land adjoining the Creek. There was once a 'grand' Grandstand here but it burnt down in 1945, in dubious circumstances after the Army vacated the Racecourse, which they had used as camp in WW2. Over the years the area was testament to abject neglect and disinterest with only the memory of the 'hoofs clatter' in the minds of some Old Timers who fished nearby at Seaholme until they became the ones that got away to the afterlife or wherever such 'Old Casters' go. Toward the end of the last Century, a slow, spasmodic rehabiltation of the land on which the Racecourse once sat began to bring it back to its more 'swampy' origins. Now there is cycling/walking track (part of the larger Bayside Trail which in turn runs a whopping 58 kms around some of Melbourne's western, northern and eastern bayside foreshore). You can still see the ruins of the old 'grand' Grandstand but the ruins ain't ancient Rome, more akin to a place for 'vandals to target practice ruination' with a lot of concrete piled in testament. Nearabouts, part of the Trail crosses a Railway Line that journeys from Melbourne through Altona and onto Werribee. It was on a foot crossing over the single-track Line that I found myself (well after dark) having earlier tramped through the Coastal Park and its bits, snapping away at 'artefacts' and trying to forget that Percy Bysshe Shelley followed Byron in Bloom's book that I knew was 'meancingly' awaiting me upon my return from my plodding.

Hearing a Train come (surely it was late) - I had an idea of a long shutter exposure as the Train sped past to see what 'image' I would obtain. The result is today's photograph. Mind you the first attempt was a dismal failure - the battery went flat after 2 seconds of a 15 second exposure in clearly a 'Homer Simpson' moment for the Plod! Happily, I did have a 'spare' battery and after waiting 20 minutes in the cool evening's air for another Train to pass, I tried again for a 15 second burst.

PS

I did read more of Bloom's book after I arrived back at the Plod-house (it's a superb read if you like poetic criticism that is instructive and well as opinionated) and am now up to page 658 and Robert Browning's, 'Fra Lippo Lippi' - a strong coffee at the ready, and a very full bottle of Baileys Irish Cream in case of an 'emergency', very, very close to hand!