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The Serpent's First Slinking Ground
It's scary to think that it is exactly 14 years since the Serpent's 'birthday'. It seems like centuries ago but only yesterday.
The magic is long gone but the memories remain.
It was a stinking sizzling 37c today and oh so very tempting to be a lazy snoozy serpent and abandon the annual rituals. Sometimes I wonder if the whole purpose of festivals and rituals is to provide some sort of external structure or deadline to override the lazy lousy inner beast.
Well it certainly worked and it was worth the effort.
Of course there was an added incentive to visit certain sacred sites due to last year's unexpected interruptions to the scheduled program.
In some strange way, not so much the fact of not being at Cottesloe Beach to watch the last sunset of 2014 but simply being unable to watch the last sunset at all because the faint and sickly yellow blob of the northern winter was hiding behind a hundred grey clouds, it was as if the year had never really ended.
So the annual ritual consists of a visit to a certain old lunatic asylum which has been converted into an arts centre. It used to involve a picnic with a bottle of Wynns Cabernet, water crackers and camembert, a quill and bottle of emerald ink and most important of all - a bright shiny new green notebook.
The wine and cheese picnic got left at the Lair for later in the evening since it is a waste of good wine when the day is so hot as well as just being another heavy thing to haul around.
A bright shiny new book to read has also found its way onto the list. This year it is "Wake" from Elizabeth Knox which I managed to snaffle for 3 silver sickles at the charity shop a few months ago. It got rave reviews about six months ago.
So I got as far as one paragraph of this entry when the Keeper of the Keys came to do the lock up ritual at 5pm. But it was a good omen to start in such an auspicious location. That was the main point since hunting and pecking with a horrid tablet keyboard is too much hassle when there's the nice Big Mac serpent friendly keyboard lurking at the Lair. The Big Mac had its 6th birthday last Wednesday and the warranty has long ago run out. It's still doing well and had a much longer shelf life than the ibook got in 2005 with its pissy 256kb memory that was slow as a snail by 2009.
It was amazing how it was like another world within the walls. The plane trees had lost half their leaves but it was quite cool and breezy and not nasty and muggy like it had been when I had set out on the visit. This is largely due to the sea breeze which comes in the afternoon, removes the doom and gloom and lifts everyone's spirits immensely.
It is a day for indulging in nostalgia, for squiggling and doing all the plotting and planning for the new year and review of the old that most folks save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
Last year's little black book also got switched over for the bright shiny recycled diary from 2011. January and February are one day out thanks to the pesky leap year but the rest is just fine. I had been using an old 2009 model for 2015 until I got tempted by the pretty Moleskine diaries reduced to the very tempting price of $3. I bought a couple of extras for 2020.
Tomorrow there is more sizzling weather forecast so the morning will be spent watering the weeds and devising devious means to keep them alive. There's also magic beans to be planted which will provide shade for some of the more sensitive baby trees.
2015 was a very productive year in the Serpent's Garden and 2016 is going to be even better.
The magic is long gone but the memories remain.
It was a stinking sizzling 37c today and oh so very tempting to be a lazy snoozy serpent and abandon the annual rituals. Sometimes I wonder if the whole purpose of festivals and rituals is to provide some sort of external structure or deadline to override the lazy lousy inner beast.
Well it certainly worked and it was worth the effort.
Of course there was an added incentive to visit certain sacred sites due to last year's unexpected interruptions to the scheduled program.
In some strange way, not so much the fact of not being at Cottesloe Beach to watch the last sunset of 2014 but simply being unable to watch the last sunset at all because the faint and sickly yellow blob of the northern winter was hiding behind a hundred grey clouds, it was as if the year had never really ended.
So the annual ritual consists of a visit to a certain old lunatic asylum which has been converted into an arts centre. It used to involve a picnic with a bottle of Wynns Cabernet, water crackers and camembert, a quill and bottle of emerald ink and most important of all - a bright shiny new green notebook.
The wine and cheese picnic got left at the Lair for later in the evening since it is a waste of good wine when the day is so hot as well as just being another heavy thing to haul around.
A bright shiny new book to read has also found its way onto the list. This year it is "Wake" from Elizabeth Knox which I managed to snaffle for 3 silver sickles at the charity shop a few months ago. It got rave reviews about six months ago.
So I got as far as one paragraph of this entry when the Keeper of the Keys came to do the lock up ritual at 5pm. But it was a good omen to start in such an auspicious location. That was the main point since hunting and pecking with a horrid tablet keyboard is too much hassle when there's the nice Big Mac serpent friendly keyboard lurking at the Lair. The Big Mac had its 6th birthday last Wednesday and the warranty has long ago run out. It's still doing well and had a much longer shelf life than the ibook got in 2005 with its pissy 256kb memory that was slow as a snail by 2009.
It was amazing how it was like another world within the walls. The plane trees had lost half their leaves but it was quite cool and breezy and not nasty and muggy like it had been when I had set out on the visit. This is largely due to the sea breeze which comes in the afternoon, removes the doom and gloom and lifts everyone's spirits immensely.
It is a day for indulging in nostalgia, for squiggling and doing all the plotting and planning for the new year and review of the old that most folks save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
Last year's little black book also got switched over for the bright shiny recycled diary from 2011. January and February are one day out thanks to the pesky leap year but the rest is just fine. I had been using an old 2009 model for 2015 until I got tempted by the pretty Moleskine diaries reduced to the very tempting price of $3. I bought a couple of extras for 2020.
Tomorrow there is more sizzling weather forecast so the morning will be spent watering the weeds and devising devious means to keep them alive. There's also magic beans to be planted which will provide shade for some of the more sensitive baby trees.
2015 was a very productive year in the Serpent's Garden and 2016 is going to be even better.