Super-Feng Shui me

"I'll have a medium dream-catcher with a small dragon please, and two mystic Indian sayings."

"Do you want crystals with that?"

Beauty in Unexpected Places

Looking up at raindrops on my banana palm.  

Sunday. East Bergholt.

Old St Mary Church, East Bergholt.

A wonderful night's sleep last night.  

Talked politics at length with John this morning.

Then another picnic packed and John took Dot, N and me as far as East Bergholt where we saw the site of John Constable's home.  Now all one can see is a rather bland but expensive modern home with a plaque near the gate.  I felt a bit cheated and wondered what his home looked like.

  

Then we visited the old St Mary Church that has a conspicuous gap where the bell tower should be.  It was built just before the Reformation, a time when fixtures and fittings such as tall bell towers were considered vainglorious and superstitious.  So the tower was never built.  

Where the bell tower isn't

So, instead, the five whopping bells are housed in a Medieval 'Bell Cage'.  What a noise it must be when they are rung!  When I looked through the wooden lattice I was surprised to see them hanging upside down, although there is room underneath for them to swing.  I wondered how they are rung. Perhaps with difficulty, as Dot said there had been a bad hand crushing some years ago and the British equivalent to our OSH - the Health and Safety Executive - have intervened.  And anyway there can be no insurance now.  So there's no bell ringing.  Amazingly the bell cage was a temporary structure erected in 1531 if you please!

The bell cage.

I also found out that yew trees are traditionally planted in church yards.  They can grow for 2 - 5,000 years!  I was intrigued by the pretty red berries with a hole in one end.  They looked exactly like they were made out of polymer clay.  Dot doesn't like them much, perhaps because of their association with graveyards.  Also they do particularly well in calcium-rich soil.  And all parts except the berry are highly toxic.

Tornadoes, Hail and the Roof Caves in!

Oblivious to all but the inconvenience of heavy rain at lunchtime, I worked hard in my ceramics class yesterday.  

But elsewhere in the Bay of Plenty there was some unusually fierce weather.  The weight of 15 cm of hail broke through the roof of our local mall in five places and everyone had to be evacuated, and there were at least three little tornadoes that did a bit of damage to roofs further up the coast.

This is what our local beach usually looks like:

But yesterday, about fifty steps from that pic, the beach road looked like this:

And that beach looked like this:

And of course there are always people quick to take advantage of any situation:

And, as if that wasn't enough, there was a waterspout in the bay too.  Luckily that didn't touch land!

If you are interested, here's the information in the newspaper.

How to make Purple

Most people are taught at school that there are three primary colours; red, blue and yellow.  And that mixing any two of these, creates the secondary colours of green, orange and purple.

Grab your brush and dip in in the yellow, wash out, then the blue:  magically, green appears.  Hey, this is easy!

The yellow and the red this time, orange is easy too!

But how many of you have mixed red and blue and got a manky reddish brown colour instead of the purple you wanted?  

Like this:

Where did you go wrong, you wonder, and hide your work from the teacher, believing this was proof you had not an artistic bone in your body.

Or, having more confidence, you ask the teacher to try, and the teacher, rather embarrassed, gets the same (only usually neater):

So, why the brownish plum?  How do you get purple?  

Unfortunately the teacher was at fault for not being able to explain (or possibly even knowing why the red (or blue, or both) supplied was incapable of making a purple.

Here's the reason: 

To make a good rich royal purple, you need a red that is more crimson than scarlet - ie one that doesn't have too much yellow in it.  (Save the scarlet for making your shades of orange)

Now mix this crimson with a reddish-blue, that is, one that is not too green...  ultramarine is good, cobalt no good...

Now, you'll be able to make a number of good plums and violets and purples.

Greens and oranges are not quite so crucial.  The crimson red does make a reasonable orange, and the reddish blue makes a dullish green.

To make it easier, let's just say there are not three primary colours, but six:  two primary reds, two primary blues and two primary yellows.  

I'm convinced that children in art classes at school should be provided with two of each, and allowed to experiment with mixing them in a systematic way so they understand that you cannot make all three secondaries from only three primaries.

The fun should be in the exploring!

The quest continues...

... for a truly excellent tui photo.

I've tried before...  and I tried again today.  This time you can better see the lovely blue-black sheen to the feathers, the brown saddle, the lacy collar, patch of white under the wing, tuft of white feathers at the neck and the whiskers around the beak which this time is wide open and gushing forth with its usual ribald gurgling and chortling.  You can hear Tui's voice in the previous post if you are interested.

Dunwich Heath

Whereas the spit at Orford is growing, the cliffs at Dunwich up the coast are being eaten away at about the rate of 1 to 2 metres a year.  Perhaps the shingle ends up on the ness.  

The tops of the cliffs are covered with a sea of pretty purple heather.  The day was still very hazy but we bought bottles of elderflower fizz and had a wander around.   No pics as my camera battery had died.

Home via Tescos at Woodbridge for some soya milk for me and a UK adaptor.  Another delish BBQ for dinner.  We are very tired.  I cut the arms off a top so I have something cooler to wear tomorrow - the weather is so hot!

Image taken by Franklin_Hunting, retrieved from flickr 8.5.09.