Jack Frost

Jack Frost is traditionally said to leave the frosty, fern-like patterns on windows on cold winter mornings (window frost or fern frost) and nipping the extremities in cold weather. He is sometimes described or depicted with paint brush and bucket colouring the autumnal foliage red, yellow, brown, and orange.

Jack's appearance can vary from tale to tale, although he is commonly depicted as having icy dark blue hair, striking blue eyes, and pale bluish skin. He has a tall stature, albeit quite slim. His clothing is a pale shirt, small branches of leaves collecting around the ring of the collar and other areas, and trousers bound with darker material starting from the knee down to the rather tattered and frayed bottom. He carries around a magical staff with a G-shaped arch, resembling a shepherd's crook. It is Jack's gateway to help him unleash his powers of conjuring snow, ice, and frost as well as allowing him to fly.

As the manifestation of winter, Jack Frost is capable of manipulating ice and snow. He is the spirit of mischief and chaos personified. Jack is both the Spirit of Fun and Winter, but is a surprisingly powerful and a cunning trickster. His task is to make children have fun, while bringing joy and fun times with Winter and snow days, thereby making them happy and bolstering their faith. As the Spirit of Fun, Jack can bewitch others with feelings of fun, joy, and laughter with his snowballs or even his snowflakes. Jack Frost has a special kinship among the world of leaves. He can command the leaves of any tree or plant (other than Mandrake) and use them as spies to keep watch. They can change colour, fly and even return to their tree if he tells them. They speak to Jack as though he were one of them and revere the spirit as a king.

Text from:

https://gods-and-demons.fandom.com/wiki/Jack_Frost

Christmas Through A Wineglass

“December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeer. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.”

“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.”

“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

Quotes from: A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas (1952).

I Have the Best Words

I had promised not to give the logicidal idiot Trump the oxygen of publicity. Yet now he has been roundly rejected by 80 million people and is retreating from the stage like a tapeworm back to the warmth of its home rectum, I dont mind sharing some of the funniest memes I have encountered throughout his reign.

Beeple on Trump

The fantastically talented Mike Winklemann (aka Beeple) has an impressive body of work, with no small part of it devoted to the cognitively- dissonant fart cloud known as Trump, which is thankfulky dissipating now, even without need for a facemask. Sadly though, fart clouds are known to linger and contribute to global warming for 100 years. Lets hope not. Love the way Biden gets some pre- emptive grief too. 

Another Man's Fireworks

Stolen water is sweet, 

and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.

So states the book of Proverbs ch9 vs17. I had no idea however, that the ineffable truth of this proverb also applies to fireworks. Hearing a neighbour letting off a few wizzpoppers, I flew outside with my handy DSLR camera, and managed to get a few shots of the free display. 

Trent Riverside Walk

Bit of a pleasant surprise this walk. I took my car to Gainsborough for an MOT, and being advised of a couple of hour wait, I decided to meander down to the riverside where there is an industrial landscape path and a few sleepy information boards. Thankfully no urban maniacs around. It was a lovely day with the sun dancing on the river, and illuminating the ochres of industrial brickwork and obsolete rusted machinery. The burdock and umbellifers had all but set seed and were nodding sagely to the passing river, acknowledging its majesty.

The River Trent also has some notable historical mentions including King Canute who stood in the River Trent in an attempt to hold back the tide. It was believed it was to demonstrate that power is vain compared to the supreme power of God. It was also here in Gainsborough that some of the Pilgrim Separatists fled from the town on a barge up the River Trent in search of religious freedom in May 1608. They met others at an isolated place along the coast near Immingham where they boarded a Dutch ship to Amsterdam. Some would later return and board the Mayflower in Plymouth in 1620.

From the Visit Lincoln website. 

 

Rhoscolyn Head

Setting out on foot from Hafod, you are right on the coastal path. Heading south, you are immediately thrust into a wonderland of breathtaking cliffs, idyllic coves, barren headland, distant forlorn mansions, and huge arches of rock gouged out by the sea. 

Initially, I made a few daily forays along the headland. I was suffering from plantar fasciitis which I did not allow to disrupt my enjoyment of the headland. Eventually I was able to take the full walk down to Traeth Borth Wen and back again. Further along the coastal path is St. Gwenfaen's Well an ancient holy well described by Dafydd Meirion as "One of the best preserved Holy Wells on the Island", and it's associated church. The highest point on the walk is on the cliffs at the Coastguard's lookout. All together, there is just about every kind of feature along the walk, of course at all times under the watchful and restless eye of The Cruel Sea. 

Bryn Celli Ddu Revisted... Again

I think you might be gathering by now that I cannot go to North Wales and not visit Bryn Celli Ddu. Whilst this may seem like an obsessional trait, I can reassure you I have moved on from my original fixation of the Druid's Circle at Penmaenmawr, which I must have attended a dozen times. Given the enormous number of neolithic sites in North Wales, I am ultimately optimistic for my mortal (and etheric) soul in the long run. On this occasion, Bryn Celli Ddu was particularly beautiful and the photography worked out better than ever probably due to lighting (ok, or familiarity). 

Hafod

We went for a family holiday to a 6 bedroom big old house which overlooked the sea, called Hafod, at Trearddur Bay in Anglesey. Hafod was once the summer home of the author Nicholas Monsarrat and his family. Monsarrat wrote many novels including the wartime classic The Cruel Sea (1951). Monsarrat said of his time at Hafod:

“We always enjoyed the time we spent over at Ravenspoint, there was an endless variety of things to do and to learn. Ravenspoint, standing high up on the southerly arm of the bay, commanded a magnificent view of the whole coast-line nearly to South Stack lighthouse. On rough days the waves, surging in with the full force of the gale behind them, swept past in successive mile-long crests, piling up until they broke in a white flurry and fell thunderously onto the beach”

I love big old draughty holiday homes. I occupied the top floor and took two rooms; one for an office, and the other for sleeping. The bedroom had a dormer window, out of which the sea was reassuringly within touching distance, and for the duration of the holiday I was gifted with waxing, full, and waning moonlight cascading through the window. The full moon imparted a swollen and at times angry aspect to the sea, which was a pleasure to enjoy in all of her moods. Watching an old black & white movie (I recommend The Cruel Sea 1953, dir. Charles Frend) to the crackling fire, warmed by red wine, was a poetic delight. Below is some photography I took from the bottom of the garden at Hafod. If you skip over the stone wall, you are on the coastal footpath and right on the cliffs looking out to sea.

Nicholas Monsarrat