******

A kindle of kittens...a watch of nightingales...a sulk of foxes! I love the surprising collectives...they are almost surreal.

**
(ふしぎの国のアリス, Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu) is an anime adaptation of the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which ran on the TV Tokyo network and other local stations across Japan from October 10, 1983 to March 26, 1984. The series was a Japanese-German co-production between Nippon Animation, TV Tokyo affiliate station TV Osaka, and Apollo Films. The series consists of 52 episodes, however, only 26 made it to the US.
In the English language, this series is generally overshadowed by the success of Disney's 1951 feature film version of the story; however, the anime series was quite popular in various European countries, in Israel, in the Philippines, in Latin America, in Iran, and in the Arabic-speaking world. The series was also dubbed into Hindi by the national film development board of India and telecast on Doordarshan in the early 1990s.
The language with the most editions of the Alice in Wonderland novels in translation is Japanese, with 1,271 editions.
This was inspired by the photographs on the set of Frankenstein which show the Monster and his creator having a *** and a cuppa and one could imagine somebody calling "Ok guys....back into the scene!" And Boris stops being Karloff and lumbers back into being the Monster whilst still chewing a Custard Cream. "Ok...action...,lights!"
So I also thought that the Jabberwocky and Alice get breaks from being themselves in a fictional way until someone somewhere picks up the wonderful book and begins to read the famous poem. The Jabberwocky, his mouth stuffed full of Chocolate Bourbons as he lumbers after Alice and hopes that this time he will come out on tops...not realising he is doomed to fail time after time.

And in Tagore's own translation, from the 1912 English edition of Gitanjali.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father let my country awake

The title comes from Mr. Charles' GET DRUNK!

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"


Charles Baudelaire

Enivrez-Vous
Il faut être toujours ivre.
Tout est là:
c'est l'unique question.
Pour ne pas sentir
l'horrible fardeau du Temps
qui brise vos épaules
et vous penche vers la terre,
il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi?
De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu, à votre guise.
Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois,
sur les marches d'un palais,
sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé,
dans la solitude morne de votre chambre,
vous vous réveillez,
l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,
demandez au vent,
à la vague,
à l'étoile,
à l'oiseau,
à l'horloge,
à tout ce qui fuit,
à tout ce qui gémit,
à tout ce qui roule,
à tout ce qui chante,
à tout ce qui parle,
demandez quelle heure il est;
et le vent,
la vague,
l'étoile,
l'oiseau,
l'horloge,
vous répondront:
"Il est l'heure de s'enivrer!
Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."

Ruby going for Gold...long may they reign...the King and Queen of Love.

THE SHIPPING FORECAST...

An aural nautical weather map of an imaginary cut-up sea where the naming enters our nation’s consciousness....becomes part of the British psyche through its radio recitation... a litany... a rosary...mantra... a prayer of  various here and theres that can only be imagined.

An oral/aural concrete poetry whose art belongs to Dada... an incantation of sounds and places only imagined...well known unique distinctive soundings and their hypnotic reassuringly ritualistic resonant repetition which is held in the greatest affection...mesmerically obscure...soothingly safe...strangely comforting...a litany of waves coming across the airwaves like a lullaby or a wartime coded message or Cocteau’s Orphée trying to decode death on the radio.

As iconic as the tube map with its elegant geometry of twisted coloured lines...it has become part of our mental landscape that our senses seek out as being quintessentially British.

It scans...it’s got rhythm...who could ask for anything more.

Something rich...and strange.

*******

Especially in its bedtime for Britain broadcast with us all drifting off to the strains of Ronald Binge’s SAILING BY(also the writer of ELIZABETHEAN SERENADE)   as we sip our coca...lock the back door...put the milk bottles out and try to persuade the cat to come in as the day is put to bed and finally laid to rest at precisely 00: 48

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1625 utc on Monday 31 May 2010 for the period 1800 utc Monday 31 May to 1800 utc Tuesday 01 June 2010.

The general synopsis at midday:

It is read out on Radio 4 at 0048,0520,1201 and 1754 (local time) . All broadcasts are on LW on 1515m (198 kHz)   and some transmissions are on VHF. It gives a summary of gale warnings in force, a general synopsis and area forecasts for specified sea areas around the UK. The radio bulletin also includes the coastal weather reports (0048 and 0536 only) .

The music played before the Shipping Forecast is 'Sailing By' composed by Ronald Binge.

The mystical marine areas are as follows:

VIKING    NORTH UTSIRE    SOUTH UTSIRE  
FORTIES    CROMARTY    FORTH
TYNE    DOGGER    FISHER    GERMAN  BIGHT
HUMBER    THAMES    DOVER    WIGHT
PORTLAND     PLYMOUTH    BISCAY    TRAFALGAR
FITZROY(FORMERLY FINISTERRE)  
SOLE    LUNDY    FASTNET
IRISH SEA    SHANNON    ROCKALL      MALIN    HEBRIDES
BAILEY    FAIR ISLE    FAEROES
SOUTHEAST ICELANDetry whose art belongs to Dada... an incantation of sounds and places only imagined...well known unique distinctive soundings and their hypnotic reassuringly ritualistic resonant repetition which is held in the greatest affection...mesmerically obscure...soothingly safe...strangely comforting...a litany of waves coming across the airwaves like a lullaby or a wartime coded message or Cocteau’s Orphée trying to decode death on the radio.

As iconic as the tube map with its elegant geometry of twisted coloured lines...it has become part of our mental landscape that our senses seek out as being quintessentially British.

It scans...it’s got rhythm...who could ask for anything more.

Something rich...and strange.

*******

Especially in its bedtime for Britain broadcast with us all drifting off to the strains of Ronald Binge’s SAILING BY(also the writer of ELIZABETHEAN SERENADE)   as we sip our coca...lock the back door...put the milk bottles out and try to persuade the cat to come in as the day is put to bed and finally laid to rest at precisely 00: 48

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1625 utc on Monday 31 May 2010 for the period 1800 utc Monday 31 May to 1800 utc Tuesday 01 June 2010.

The general synopsis at midday:

It is read out on Radio 4 at 0048,0520,1201 and 1754 (local time) . All broadcasts are on LW on 1515m (198 kHz)   and some transmissions are on VHF. It gives a summary of gale warnings in force, a general synopsis and area forecasts for specified sea areas around the UK. The radio bulletin also includes the coastal weather reports (0048 and 0536 only) .

The music played before the Shipping Forecast is 'Sailing By' composed by Ronald Binge.

The mystical marine areas are as follows:

VIKING    NORTH UTSIRE    SOUTH UTSIRE  
FORTIES    CROMARTY    FORTH
TYNE    DOGGER    FISHER    GERMAN  BIGHT
HUMBER    THAMES    DOVER    WIGHT
PORTLAND     PLYMOUTH    BISCAY    TRAFALGAR
FITZROY(FORMERLY FINISTERRE)  
SOLE    LUNDY    FASTNET
IRISH SEA    SHANNON    ROCKALL      MALIN    HEBRIDES
BAILEY    FAIR ISLE    FAEROES
SOUTHEAST ICELAND

My little girl's sense of where she was...as if it were written in the sky and the world was simply there to do her bidding. She used her own personal co-ordinates to bring in a thought to land.


"Where were you Tilly?" I asked innocently. "I was by the big cloud pretending to be a tiger beside the worm...look!" And with that she produced the worm she had been hiding behind her back. So she had gone to the bottom of the garden...hopefully not to eat 'em.
So I thought I also would get my bearings the three year old Tilly way! I was singing Ariel's "Where the bee ***** there **** I..." so I guess this got cross-pollinated with where and who I was. It takes a little girl to teach one how to live in the world in the rightest of ways.
My little girl's sense of where she was...as if it were written in the sky and the world was simply there to do her bidding. She used her own personal co-ordinates to bring in a thought to land.

Nyctophobia struck deep into the heart of my six year old self. I was a townie and the dark never touched me until I experienced Cork country dark which was terrifying...you simply vanished into it as if it had consumed you and you were in the belly of the beast. Uncle Mikey had a unique way of dissolving the dark for me and did a good impression of an owl as well.

It was a strange sort of comforting but it worked...after that I always thought the dark was afraid of me and didn't want to argue with a natural born ghost!