Middlefocus

  It may have been the light from a sunny day at the beach because a glint of something caught my eye and made me pay attention. Glass. I stooped to look closer and picked up a bottle. Had it been just discarded or washed up? It looked as if it had been buried, brown caked-on sand around its neck, still stoppered. I could feel the embossment on the body and dusting it down could read the details: REGISTERED. WJ. BRIGGS. BELFAST and signed WJ.Briggs. But what did it contain? Holding it up to the light I peered inside hoping to find a roll of paper - a message in a bottle maybe. No such luck, it was quite empty. No hint of or even a trace of whatever liquid it once contained. One thing was sure, it was a glass bottle, dulled by abrasion but clearly vintage. This would-be beachcomber wanted to learn as much as possible about it. Questions surfaced. Why was the bottle here? How come? What was nearby? Who left it, an adult or a child? Does the Briggs company still exist? Where was it? S...

A railway line runs close to the rear of our home. Local and express trains including the hourly ones serving the Belfast/Dublin route hurtle past every fifteen minutes and apart from the occasional sustained warning blast of an air horn we don’t pay them much attention. Visitors to our home are taken aback: “Does that noise not bother you?” It doesn’t. It is simply part of the soundscape of where we live; something we are used to. Our paternal family has close connection with the railway. Granda Christy was a driver on a steam locomotive for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) which also operated in Northern Ireland. A story is told of him stopping his engine on the Antrim Coast as he felt that the sound coming back to him from up ahead was not quite right. His intuitive experience was correct, boulders had fallen unto the track. Catastrophe avoided. A close call. Christy TRACEY with his steam locomotive. Photo source unknown. Exterior sounds are one type of resonance and t...

  There are times when I feel that I have to clear out some of my books. It’s not that I no longer appreciate those that I have decided to re-home, it’s more about making more space to let in the new. My latest dispersal included several books not on display but stored away in cupboards. It has been years since I opened them and I decided that they needed a more conscientious custodian.  Use them or diffuse them!  is my new guiding mantra. Mind you, flicking through some that I had earmarked for donation, I found myself rereading. Interest renewed I decided to keep them. They live to light another day. I wondered how much I had invested in the books and did a quick online search to check availability and current values. Even some of my pristine hard covers were only just a few £ pounds and there were loads for sale. So having decided to send the books on their way to new owners, it would be relatively simple and cheap to buy them again if I found I was missing them. Selec...

  Preparing for our trip to the Czech Republic I purchased a copy of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless with an introduction by Professor Timothy Snyder. I've made this contract with myself that wherever I go abroad I'll delve into appropriate literature from the country, get a book, bring it with me and read it when there.  A cultural backcloth to the visit. In situ reading. Close to our hotel in Prague we spotted this memorial to the Velvet Revolution and returned to picture it with the book. Power of the Powerless is a challenging although instructive read. Notes: Check out the Vintage edition of the book here. See this related Wikipedia article here. Find the Velvet Revolution Memorial on Národní Trida in Prague

Here’s something I learned last week. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used to produce wine. Really? What about the vintner? I always thought that their practised, artful skill is what wine making was all about it. Technology and machinery in the vineyard by all means but in the alchemy of turning grape to wine surely not. There’s a first time for everything and so it was back to school for a lesson on and taste of AI-curated wine. School in this case was a wine appreciation class where a dozen of us meet each week in a local social club. Our tutor - we’ve come to look upon him as a benefactor - selects several wines he thinks we’ll like and we spend a couple of hours tasting our way through them and comparing notes and picking favourites. In a recent class many of us also sampled for the first time “orange” wine and that might be the subject of a future post. But back to that AI curation. CTZN - Luminous Drift is a wine blend from South Eastern Australia, apparently bottled in Lo...

  Sense? Pencil shavings. Trees. Fallen by the wayside. Sawdust. Pooled like blood.

The beautiful church in central France where I met the Refugee Woman and Child I wrote the following poem 50 years ago. Scalded by an experience I found that I could only express my feelings through writing it. Whatever the poem lacks in style and structure, the act of going home and penning it had a powerful effect. Powerful enough to have stayed with me for 50 years. Still vivid in my memory. I had been at a church service in a town in France and during the ceremony a woman, clearly a refugee, head covered in a blanket and carrying an infant made her way up the aisle through the congregation reaching out her hand for money. It was a direct approach to a captive audience. I remember seeing the celebrant taking her to the side and discree tly giving her some money. She hadn’t finished just yet however and continued her path through the church, having much less success with others in attendance. Then our eyes met. The look in those eyes. Defiant dignity. I felt really uncomfortable as s...