New Year Rhymes

Dissassembled Reader,

I’ll do some bookbinding posts soon. For now, more poetry.

Lines Written in a Very Strange Wood

I climbed an oak to ask the birds
What order I should write these words,
I’d had some planned, but none were good,
Which found me walking in the wood,
And climbing up by branch and limb
I met a furball wise and grim
‘What kind of rhyming scheme is best?’
(I thought I’d ask the country pest)
The cat looked up and raised a paw –
I ducked and dodged an angry claw –
‘What for’, said I, ‘was that hard swing’,
‘No matter’, said the feline king:
It seemed I’d accidentally
Met a lion in the tree.

New Year 2015/16

The horizon blushed gold in one bright seraphim,
In quiet notes the sun and haze blew out and fled together,
The day was done; there’s an end to the year.
Another page written for loss or gain,
Storms and battles raged; these things we weather,
Moments – faded and clear –
High time, I think, to start again!

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A Welsh Doodle

Celebratory Reader,

I was off out sketching today, and at the front of an old sketchbook I found a group of quick doodles I did a few years ago in Aberystwyth – put together, they were supposed to create a panoramic view of the seafront.

The originals covered four pages in different sizes, and not all of them ending exactly where the next began:

Thankfully, after playing around with Fireworks, I manages* to get them into a vague kind of order that resembled a complete panorama. I just wish I’d drawn a few boats for the sea…

If you click the image, it might just be easier to sea.

Merry Christmas, dearest reader.

*What I did not manage to do, was proof read this post

The Devil of Bell Hill

Remarkable Reader,

I put together a tall tale about Danbury’s finest ghost story last Christmas, and this year (although I should and hope to put together a proper good old tale for this year’s fireside) I hope to drag on my incompetent prose with a short rhyme upon it.

Basically I went for a foggy-sunset walk and some verses popped up, so here they are.

High in Danbury wood there stands
A kingdom of bone fingered hands
     Stretched in winter’s haze
Fog-lit moonlight holds the wind –
Opal vapours curl and grin,
     A raindrop patter plays.

It’s here they say in olden times
That when the church was ringing chimes
     The devil stole the bell
He ran it down that hill toward
The copse where winter keeps accord
     (What secrets seasons tell).

For where the frost comes down to sleep
In their depths the snowdrifts keep
     A hidden secret too
For when the bell fell down that climb
It bounced and called out one last chime
     Then tumbled out of view.

The devil, starting with surprise
Found the bell was twice his size
     His strength no more sustained
And so he fled that ancient hill
(The one that stands so stalwart still)
     But yet the bell remained.

So now if walking Danbury wood
In winter’s beauty – which you should –
     You here a distant bell
You stand where once the devil’s feet
Tripped and fell at his defeat
     And that’s devil’s knell.

And when the folk in ages old
Would tell the story I’ve just told
     Young men would up and go
And climb their way through wood and vale
To search the truth from out the tale;
     They found but empty snow.

 

Binding a Butler*

Merry Reader,

I’ve been doing a good deal of bookbinding recently, and finally seem to now have more books to work on than time to work on them.

Owing to one of my bookshelves being against an outside wall, for the last week I’ve been trying to keep under control some mold among my books, which spread from a couple of battered old volumes that seem to have been kept somewhere damp in the past – the culprits for bringing mold into my collection in the first place. With that now solved, I decided to repair a disbound book that had been sandwiched among some of those unfortunate volumes – I pray, kind reader, that you enjoy the result.

The book itself is the miscellaneous works of Samuel Butler, a poet and writer famous for his Hudibras – a satire set within the conflicts of the Civil War. This little volume I was working on also contained L’Estrange’s “Key to Hudibras” – and was the reason why I’d originally bought it, being a huge fan of L’Estrange’s works.

My attempted header and footer bands

I had some of my favourite leather left over for this book – a beautiful olive green. I did attempt to gild it using the traditional method of gold leaf and glaire, which I failed at completely, and resorted back to the easier way of gilding with foil.

The internal bottom corner of the title page was missing, so had to be repaired and I went over the new paper with a pen to draw the missing printing

*If you haven’t noticed yet, not an actual butler