20/01/2021

I’ve been busy with my other sites – Oasis Too and Gayles.info.

Now is an appropriate time (Trumpus diminicus) to restart.

More will follow

Back to 2017 and my comments on rain. Perhaps I was mistaken?

Wearing the same gear but in a different place. Long Lane – a gently descending farm track , stony in parts, but now oh so muddy ¹. The solution – to deliberately choose the puddles and the small stream that is eroding the stones laid at expense down the lane. It’s fine with field boots and Hugo can’t really get any dirtier. The next stage through the gate onto the fields and to the beck is another matter. Sucking glooping mud that cakes to boots. You will have seen pictures of Flanders battlefields from WWI – no, not the same, but approaching the reality. Boots carry extra weight. An extra sole of boot mud becomes the interface between the ground and the boot. Clay and mud glide on one another and progress becomes hard. The watch activity app has no setting for mud.²

Four legs is an advantage here.

Back home to the garden hose and a spray clean of my dog and my boots. The cold spray is partly forgiven by a brisk rub down with a dog towel and a rawhide chew.

A chance to relax now until the whole process is repeated this afternoon

1. But not as bad as described in ‘Song of the Mud’ ↩
2. Or for snow either – see the tweets by Rene Ritchie ↩

I love the ease of making footnotes in apps such as iAWriter 1 or Ulysses.
The ease of creation unfortunately is not mirrored by the ease of use on the web page. This is where the footnote plugin Bigfoot comes in. Clicking on the link brings up a text bubble and do not have the bother of having to click a return button to go back to your place in the article.2

The syntax for iAWriter is different from Ulysses which uses their own baked in solution. According to John Gruber in the second episode of Dialog, that does not really matter. ‘Real’ Markdown does not have any commands for footnotes – deliberately so. The authors are free to use whatever they consider to work to translate eventually into HTML (which covers pretty much all formatting options)
The only downside to this is the need to build up a mental muscle memory on how to use various commands.

MacSparky in his book on Markdown uses the square bracket and hat approach that iAWriter uses. This appears to be standard. Now to find out if the Bigfoot plugin will recognise this or whether it needs the more clumsy square bracket enclosing the word “footnote” system

It is said that if you wait long enough, then you will find yourself back where you started 1

The return to basics I mean, relates to computer programming.

When I started messing around with computers and programming, there were few programs/utilities/apps to use. There were a few word processors 2 and perhaps a spreadsheet or two but little else. Handcrafted programs in BBC BASIC were the way to fill in the gaps.

In the intervening years 3 precooked ‘ready meals’ of apps have sufficed to fulfil most of my needs and wants.

However, software engineers and indie programmers do not always anticipate or indeed are able to get right down into the weeds of my automation needs.

Here, the ability to ‘write’ ‘programs’ or workflows or shortcuts is increasingly valuable 4

I can now automate mailshots, expenses returns and indeed, this blog

As you can see, it really is a return to Basics

As the day draws closer — I wrote this 90 minutes before the 11th hour of the 11th day 100 years after the end of The War to End All Wars

In the previous entry, I have added a poem by Mary Borden

I would encourage you to buy and read her works. Not available as ebooks alas, but as paperbacks. My first purchase arrived 2 days ago The Forbidden Zone

Intensely moving. Her prose reads as if it were written in modern times, not from the beginning of the last century. Take a quiet moment and read her memoir. A small section at a time, so that you can reflect on the events that were of the moment, and on the emotions which are timeless

Two further books are awaited:

Mary Borden: A Woman of Two Wars Paperback – 1 Oct 2009

by Jane Conway (Author)

Poems of Love and War Paperback – 1 Oct 2015

by Mary Borden (Author), Paul O’Prey (Editor)

from At the Somme: The Song of the Mud

This is the song of the mud,

The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;

The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys;

The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds;

The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses;

The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.

This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu.

His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy;

His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it.

This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud,

And his skin is of mud;

And there is mud in his beard.

His head is crowned with a helmet of mud.

He wears it well.

He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him.

He has set a new style in clothing;

He has introduced the chic of mud.

This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.

The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,

The slimy inveterate nuisance,

That fills the trenches,

That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,

That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts,

That spreads itself over the guns,

That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips,

That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;

And slowly, softly, easily,

Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;

Soaks up the power of armies;

Soaks up the battle.

Just soaks it up and thus stops it.

This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,

The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men.

Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.

Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing.

Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;

Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.

Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,

Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.

Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,

And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.

Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!

Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.

There is not a trace of them.

There is no mark where they went down.

The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.

This is the song of the mud,

The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin;

The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys.

Mud, the disguise of the war zone;

Mud, the mantle of battles;

Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers:

This is the song of the mud.

Mary Borden

Our new location is North Yorkshire – more details to follow