And... the Pickle joins the delta of hair

 

The Pickle goes camping

Ev aquired a tent (I think you and I spent more than a few occasions in the 121 garden in tents over the years).  Ev's is a pretty amazing thing - gone are the days of bitter fighting about how the poles go together and what sequence of assembly leads to a well pitched tent - his is somehow spring-loaded and pops itself up - needing only four pegs and two guides to sort it all out.  

Ange kindly dropped them off at the stables, behind which is a flat field where it seems quite a few people had a similar idea - really nice to see.  Aiden had in fact been to the same place the night before with his mates - a big middle finger to photos of that :-).  I had a stern talking to Ev about fire risk (a lesson I learned vicariously through Geordie, and the inappropriately named Alistair Smart).  I was pleased to see that they'd gone to the trouble of organising themselves properly in the photo below.  This did not stop the police from arriving at some point in the evening and taking their names... not sure what that means ... certainly he doesn't seem bothered by it.

It's a cool spot for kids to go camping - perhaps for fires one needs to go to a beach?

A photo off one of Ev's mates phones - in case one wonders what time it is.  Ev in his new tent.

The day before, checking out his new interior.  Pretty cool.

Delta of hair - hospital beards and mops

Ange and Ev are going with unchanged; I put six days of hospital into a beard (which is now alarmingly grey, but still, damn cool ;-) and as WhatsApped to you, Aiden lost the mop ready to return to school...

The intimacy of un-globalizing

 I think it would be wrong to refer to our current state as lock-down.  That's not at all what it is.  Much more a case of a reversal of personal globalization that seemed previously to characterize white collar life in Hong Kong.  With the quarantines now required (21 days in Hong Kong - six days in the hospital was a challenge - 21 days would leave me needing a shrink.  I was reminded of how different things were a generation or two ago.  When my dad went to the UK for his PhD, he traveled there on the RMS Windsor Castle, a fast mail ship that ran between SA and the UK.  That trip was nearly 2 weeks, which bizarrely is a week and a day shorter than it would take from door to door with a 21 day quarantine.  There are a couple of pics of the ship at the bottom of this post - couldn't help myself.

So in that space, for me, a precious and almost unfamiliar intimacy - having been Willy Loman on the road for a decade and a half before.  And I love the granular moments.

Ev in a zoom class out on the patio

Dinner the vast majority of nights - such a lovely thing

Ev and Ange having a little table cuddle

Teenage life up close, a quick pose while cleaning up, or absorbed in a phone.

Holly asleep under my desk, one of her three fave spots.

Ange making a cake.

Andy, our very cool neighbour, giving his new people mover a scrub

Pickle back from a walk up the hill, mandatory exercise

And look how happy it makes him.

As promised, here are a couple of pics of the RMS Windsor Castle, the PhD boat.  Firstly in it's hey day in the early '60s, and below that in 2005, about to be scrapped at Alang in India.  Quite an innings.

The winter that isn't

 Global warming, or living in the bull's eye on the dartboard with everyone else (in the Northern hemisphere) freezing?  Its hard to know - when you're living on a postage stamp and can't step off.  So what approach makes most of this varicoloured cell?  I've been wildly on the straight and narrow to deal with work volume and stress.  Its the best approach for me.  You could summarize it as lots of exercise, trying for lots of sleep, and those occasional beautiful conversations, the ones that are hard to plan for.  I opened The Daily Maverick today (in between hawked up chunks of spin that I'm trying to write... a communication strategy - itself rather more than a euphemism) and saw "Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it's always event." ~ Ursula Le Guin.  So true.  Is reading fiction speech?  Whose conversation is it that one hears in the mind's ear. I'm ready for a killer book, having sucked up a few false starts of late.

We had a visitor, the son of a lovely colleague of Ange's; she had to be somewhere and he needed a place to do his online school.  Euan. Which is the same derivative as Evan.  He was so sweet; shy-seeming, initially, but with fast and smart eyes, reading the room and the people.  Ange asked him whether he wanted to work in Aiden's room, or at the dining room table ... or outside on the Patio.  He decided in a flash.  I left him the binocs in case there was an interesting boat or two.  Holly joined him in the sun, and did a tour through his legs, brushing that cat-ghostly-affection.

This morning I was out on Blue - been running mostly of late - it was wonderful.  I caught the dawn over Po Toi O riding crushing hill loops, but it was pretty, with the smoke of fires warming the parts that the sun hadn't reached.  Lot's wife still.