footprints

[helenic]

Yesterday was crisp and white and beautiful. Walking back home at noon there was still frost on the ground. I took my book vouchers into the Cambridge University Press shop and Heffers and bought three beautiful hardback editions: the massive, glossy, colour-printed Odysseus Unbound by Robert Bittlestone, a gorgeous three-part boxed edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, complete with ribbon. I was also looking for Once More, With Footnotes by Pratchett and an edition of Culpeper's Complete Herbal, but neither was forthcoming; the former is only available in America so I shall investigate Amazon, and the latter is probably best found second hand.

Walking back across Jesus Green and the common everything was extraordinarily still. No sound but the frost-edged leaves crunching under my boots, the wind barely stirring the trees. Tang of woodsmoke on the air. The quiet was something essential, inherent in the perfect white blankness of the sky, the breath misting in front of me. It felt as if nothing could have broken it. Walking by the river I indulged my normal nosy fascination with the canal boats, noticing as much about them as I can, the traces of people who live in them, the pot plants and bikes perched on the roofs, the books and herbs crowding on windowsills. It's always a lifestyle I find myself envying in an abstract way - in fact one of them is for sale at the moment, and I let myself dream for a few minutes about buying it and painting it up, and having a life on the river with guitars and books and crocheted blankets and no internet. I was wearing the purple gloves dennyd gave me, and I had bags with beautiful new books in, and (at least until I got home and had to confront my procrastination) I was happy.

Comments

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

Re the boats thing: a friend of mine in London has exactly the same fascination and daydreams. She goes on a couple of boating holidays a year. Trouble is, we've been to Venice now, so the boats and the beauty are all inextricably tangled in one another.

I too was in cam yesterday afternoon - saw it in the beautiful afternoon sunshine, then the mist came down, which was also strangely gorgeous. cambridge in the mist is a city of infinite possibility and mysetry, providing you can avoid being flattened by a cyclist. watching people disappearing into the mist on Parker's Piece was very inspiring, as it was when I got back to y own city and found the Lantern Tower glimmering like a ghost through the misty twilight. If you've never seen that, you've missed a thing.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I've never actually been on a canal boat. I just like the ones on Midsummer Common, populated by serious-looking, dreadlocked individuals, and the glimpses through the windows all messy and overgrown, and the posters for Strawberry Fair...

Cambridge in the mist is utterly, utterly gorgeous. I was sitting on our balcony last night having a smoke and the fog was really lot, just the silhouettes of rooftops visible through it and the amber glow of streetlights. Lovely.

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

In some ways, I wish Oxford got mists like that, because it's even more full of secret nooks and crannies than Cambridge is.

You get some good misty vistas here - in particular, the market square and down Fore Hill, which is a curving, sloping street lit with carriage-lamp shaped arc sodium whatsits, can look very romantic in the mist, providing the nightclub isn't taking in or spewing out punters. And the cathedral rocks, of course...

[velvetfox.livejournal.com]

I have a paperback copy of Culpeper's Complete Herbal for about a £1 from one of those cheap bookshops. Try galloway and Porter?

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ta for the recommendation :) Ideally I'd like a nice illustrated hard-back edition, but if I can get a paperback for that cheap that'll easily serve until I find something nice in David's or similar :)

[velvetfox.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/026-0307311-4678858

89p

[libellum.livejournal.com]

oooh... although the postage and packing puts it at almost £4. I shall investigate the second hand places in Cam first, I think. But thankyou :)

[skorpionuk.livejournal.com]

I have a paperback version too, one with a dark green cover. Is that edition called Wordsworth or similar? I've forgotten...

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I ended up buying the Wordsworth paperback edition - £2.69 from Borders :D Mainly because the colour illustrated one, though beautiful and helpful as I know not much about plants, was very very edited. There wasn't much of Culpeper left in it, and a lot of it had been re-written with knowledge from modern homeopathy and herbalism. I'm not using herbs in medicine, I'm using them in magic, so it's the symbol sets I'm interested in rather than their biological efficacy. I'll just have to look them up online if I want to pick them rather than buy them :)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Satellite internet, and you can count me in :-)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

You can get satellite internet now? Well, who'da thunk it?

[perplexed-seal.livejournal.com]

At £4 per minute :)

[nuatha.livejournal.com]

Or 3G (assuming decent reception area) £70/month for a 1000MB

[matt13.livejournal.com]

Amazon.co.uk (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1886778574/203-5987517-1436701) have Once More With Footnotes.

:-)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know :) I was hoping to find it in a shop so I could use my book vouchers, though. But nowhere seems to be able to order it...

[nuatha.livejournal.com]

I'm told Waterstones will order from Amazon for in store colection and payment, whichshould then allow pament via book tokens. Worth checking?

[libellum.livejournal.com]

thankyou for this! I went in and have ordered it. Fabulous, I wouldn't have known otherwise :)

[nuatha.livejournal.com]

Among the hoards of useless information I accumulate is the occasional useful titbit.
Pleased to have been of service.

[oakwonder.livejournal.com]

That sounds perfectly beautiful. One day perhaps we'll pass each other in our canal boats, look up from our books, sniff the frosty air...

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I doubt I'll ever have a canal boat - too small, too claustrophobic, not enough water or internet, too cold. But it's a nice fantasy, and I'll continue to be nosily fascinated by people who do :D

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Living in a boat = bloody cold. Every inch of insulation you add makes the inside smaller...that's one of the reasons they pile so much stuff on top of the boat. (Other than "there's nowhere else to keep it".) Having said that I'd live in one too, if I had the knowledge and the skills and the money.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can imagine. Although I prefer being cold to being hot I'd rather not be either. I was also put off by a story a friend told me about waking up in a canal boat with a gin hangover and having forgotten to refill the water tank due to the aforementioned gin. Aaaaaaagh dehydration, it sounds horrible. On the other hand they look all homely and fascinating from the outside, so I shall continue to nose :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The two reasons I do not currently live on a canal-boat are books and computers. Although both are possible, neither seems well-suited.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Why not books? I acknowledge that I have far too much Stuff to live on a boat, but that's Stuff in general, not books in particular. I'd get rid of clothes first, then books. I'd rather live as a nudist bibliophile than ... well ... than many other things, actually :)

I bought the Kama Sutra for £1.50 today. I was shocked and appalled to realise I didn't already own a copy.

[perplexed-seal.livejournal.com]

Boats, of any kind, are inevitably damp most of the time.

The kind of discipline you need to keep dry area and wet area separate is well nigh impossible to maintain.

The end result is damp books, which is no fun.

OTOH I treat books as more of a channel than an end in themselves, so I'm less concerned about how they'll end up, they merely carry information and/ or data and once that content has been consumed then they've served their purpose.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Books would get damp living a few inches above a canal. Ask elise how weird I am about the condition of my books :)

The Kama Sutra isn't a very good book, imho. The discussion of the seduction process near the beginning is vaguely interesting, but as a sex manual it's highly over-rated.

[surje.livejournal.com]

last week, cycling to work was fantastic as there was low angled sunlight on frosted grass and trees, and the evenings were also fantastic as it was almost daylight (but inverse colours!) as the moon was so clear and bright!

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Mmm, the moon last week was *incredible*. I don't get to do as much cycling as I'd like, mainly because I need to buy lights for my bike... I tried to take photos of midsummer common in the morning last week, but they came out all blurry. The focus on my camera is rather temperamental.

[ixwin.livejournal.com]

I've probably said it before, but you do do a very good line in mood-evoking entries.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Thankyou! :)

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's a very evocative image. Similar feelings were among the reasons I opposed the plans to restrict mooring near where I live.

(S)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

They're one of my favourite things about the common. It makes me happy that people choose to live on the river. It just seems right, somehow.

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

I mentioned to Elise that my local bookshop in Ely is currently waiting for a copy of Once More with Footnotes, which should be in Thurs or Fri. I presume they take Book Tokens. It would presumably mean coming up here to get it, if you want to use them though.

If you don't buy it,I may well do...

If you want to check with them, they're Topping and Company, on 01353 645005, and they're an absolutely smashing bookshop (though I have to be a bit careful,. because there are two independent bookshops in Ely, and my dranma connections are to the other one)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Well, I've ordered it from Waterstones, where it's $25. It might take 6-8 weeks though, in which case I'll order it from amazon - the postage is cheaper than the train fare to Ely, and I can always buy more books :) thanks for the info, though :) And you should definitely buy it! I borrowed it from bekithewitch but only got five or six stories in before I had to return it, which is why I'm getting my own copy :)

[nicolasix.livejournal.com]

i went on a canal boating holiday last winter, and i must say i am definitely not suited to the life. it was freezing cold unless i was perched right beside the stove and after three days or so i got so claustrophibic i was almost sick from it. it's a lovely romantic idea though, but i think one best viewed from a distance, at least in my case!

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I've never actually been in one. I agree the cold and claustrophobia would probably become issues. I've done a fair amount of sailing and the claustrophobia is easily solved by sitting on the roof, but only in certain weathers, and while I like wind and rain I like being able to warm up again afterwards. The amount of work it would entail is also off-putting. but - living on the river! how cool! It's nice to have it as a background future plan for a year or something if I could afford it, although I'm well aware it might never happen and would probably suck if it did.

[skorpionuk.livejournal.com]

I went on a boating holiday at Easter, and it was lovely. Well, ok, I knackered my ankle on day 1, so that limited how much clambering about I could do. There were 6 of us on the boat, though, so at least it didn't slow us down.

[ifimust.livejournal.com]

Thank you - was good to read.

And... I am glad about the common. :)

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Canal boats are brilliant. There's just enough skill involved in steering to prevent boredom, and at the same time they go just slow enough to force me to relax. I've been going on a boating holiday more or less annually since I was at College, and since we were poor students at the time, the first time was in February, so I'm no stranger to keeping warm on a boat - it's perfectly do-able with space heaters and lots of layers. I've since given the bug to aegidian, his half-brother and my best friend, and djm4 already had it, so now we all set off annually with a varying entourage in a 70-footer (sleeps up to 12). Now we have kids and bigger budgets, we usually go in the last week of the summer holidays. aegidian and I plan to buy one when we retire and live on it all summer, but we'll probably keep a house on land too, for the winter and to have a base for doing other things.

You'd be very welcome to join us for a day or so one year to see if you like it. We're probably doing the Saar navigation in Germany next year, but we'll probably be in the UK the year after that.

[inslowmotion.livejournal.com]

Is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell good? I've been meaning to read it for ages!

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

In Cambridge living on a boat actually makes a lot of sense. I've never done it, but a friend of mine lived on a houseboat during much of his phd. If you're ever thinking seriously about it, I'll put you in touch with him. Financially I believe it works out cheaper than renting a room or flat, even with mooring charges. The problems are enormous - damp, no space, no bathroom, awkward boat maintenance - but it would be wonderful to do it for a year or so.