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The Abundant Lake: An Illustrated Post

Thursday 14th July, mild silvery overcast warm sun, a still morning. The keynote is a video of Gabriel playing young composer Alex Drosos's The Abundant Lake, a very cool piece, cool water, abundant numbers if that means anything to you (Gabriel's dad very pleased by the mathematical connection), the performance was for Alex's final.



Monday we walked out in the evening, from Woodingdean along the Juggs Road track to Castle Hill, down through sheets of vivid rosebay willowherb and between walls of bramble to the flowers and butterflies in the combe, out the other end past the old lost damson orchard, up again over the hill & down the Bostle path and the lane into Rottingdean, under battalions of swifts to Kipling's garden and a sojourn at the Black Horse, which was rather gloomy and very quiet, and back along the undercliff walk. A very still evening, an old-gold three-quarter moon in a mist, the sea hardly making a sound, gracile black-headed gulls, (a pleasing change from the brutish herring gulls who have made Roundhill Crescent their clifftop colony), sleeping on the water, turned up at both ends The Tour is on the tv, the last two-legged tadpoles, four-legged tadpoles and mini-frogs have been released, the year is about to break in half, no long trip this time just a short holiday, Geneva and Chamonix where I hope to keep my promise to self and walk into my jigsaw picture of Les Aiguilles Rouges, but still, symbolically and from old habit this is the changeover, the end of my summer term.

A mailing from Orion? Whoa, that's weird, what can it be? To be approached with caution, but it's okay, only the SFX team deciding to elect Ax Preston as one of their Summer Reading feature's sf heroes. I'm touched, SFX people, and to satisfy Ax's multitude of eager fans here's the great dictator's portrait by Bryan Talbot.


Hoping to polish off my review of Paul Bleton's intriguing study of French espionage fiction (see what I did there?) La Cristallisation de L'Ombre today. And pay my library fines, post my letters cancel the milk and all that. It's time to hit the road.