'while tragedy collected... visible to all'. (haunted by sickness)

RIP jon hassell.

is the winter of 1937-38 and  freya stark is lost in the middle ages. 

(horsemouth has been dipping freya stark's the coast of incense  aided by the page headings. 

'what has chiefly remained with me from that winter, apart from the beauty of the valley - pictures that lie deep in my mind, is the intimacy with a world so strange and remote: it amounts almost to an annihilation of time, for the then scarcely visited smaller valleys of the Hadhramaut seemed to be separates by centuries rather than space from the life of Europe: I thought constantly of some illuminated manuscripts, roughly painted with drapes sandalled figures and crowded backgrounds of towns, coming suddenly awake and living and moving beyond its frame: and the history of the middle and even the dark ages  will never again be mere history to me, since I have lived in it and known what it has been...'

the book she will write about this will be called a winter in arabia, (,which horsemouth will attempt to find online and read, hoping that it will be like carlo levi's christ stopped at eboli. 

but soon, as she puts it, the background to our lives will come alive and war will begin.'while tragedy collected... visible to all'.

the other impression she received are now far more familiar to us.

'the other impression that remained was far less agreeable, for it was the feeling of being haunted by sickness, a pervasive, intangible presence in everything one ate, or touched, or did. my companions, who did not share my pleasure in the medieval aspect of life, felt this even more than I did: the succumbed one after the other, and so did I, and we were hardly ever all well together... the winter passed like a balzac novel, its events unrolling slowly in an atmosphere of dramatic squalor far more intense than their apparent smallness seemed to warrant.'

horsemouth likes this section and will type in more when he gets the chance. 

yesterday. a walk on the common and then later a walk with his mother down by the abbey, by  the village hall (playground freshly tarmacked), and along up the river.  (and the they had to walk back).

today a rainy and grey morning (but everything is very green and is growing apace). we are still at midsummer (though it is difficult to believe) and firmly in the bright half of the year. 

the freya stark was horsemouth's last reading of the evening (while he listened to his mixcloud mix of five months ago). earlier he had been reading harry de  quetteville's piece in the torygraph.

harrry (de quetteville is an old Brittany name) has noticed that there are rather a lot of pesky europeans still in the UK and that they are applying for residency. there are rather more of them than the government thought, not the 4 million of home office estimate but more like 6 million. good (says horsemouth) who as you know likes foreigners. the article is uneasy in tone between celebration and torygraph panic.