easter yellow

Easter drink and card

I'm not sure when yellow became the brand colour of Easter. I suppose it owes a lot to chicks and daffodils.


Or is it the colour of resurrection, as in Tom Clark's poem?


and your childish mind would be ever alive, wondering
what kind of lounge furniture do they have in heaven
a cloud, awash in a soft spray of golden
yellowish light... God-light... perhaps extending a hand
or more likely ignoring your presence
as though you hadn't really died
yet, but were just being treated to a brief
preview of the festivities, which for that
matter didn't really appear to have anything festive in them
certainly no creaturely joy or solid colour or sweet wild song
for without the material world, how
throw together a halfway decent festivity?
Is there no change of death in paradise?

When they roll away the stone, does light pour in?
Are there, like... snacks? 
The idea of death
in the mind of a child
is an idea wasted on an unformed mind
way back when, in the pre-world
before imagination died
God would be there, in that spray of golden
yellowish light
coming out of a bright mist of cloud
through which one might walk
or fall...  that wide water
without sound
but for the soft calls of the wood doves
beside a pool in Palestine
along the Perkiomen,
the deer coming down to water, ...


From "Easter Lilies"
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/thomas-wyatt-there-was-never-ffile.html


In East Somerset, Mells Daffodil Festival (commonly shortened to "Mells")  is an important event in the calendar. It always takes place on Easter Monday.


But Easter and the blooming of daffodils are both moveable feasts. This year Easter came late and the daffs exceptionally early, so their yellow was just a distant memory by the time of Mells.


But in spring yellow keeps on coming ... waves of dandelions (once again, very early compared to St George's Day (April 23), the traditional day for gathering dandelions), celandines, forsythia, buttercups and laburnum. The latter two are really May sights, but not this year....

Laburnum, Swindon 24th April 2017 08:45

Cadbury Mini Eggs Easter Egg

Chair for sale

Ring around the moon, Swindon, 10th April 2017 23:14



The physics behind these fairly common 22 degree rings around the sun and moon is lucidly explained here:


http://turningmirrors.com/22-halo




The ring indicates that there are icy cirrus or cirrostratus clouds in the upper atmosphere, which could presage a change in the weather. And certainly this proved to be the end of the summery heat that had been building for a month since mid-March -- the cause of all that early flowering. But the rest of April, though colder, has carried on being almost bone dry. April showers? What are those?

oil painting by Christer Caramon

[Image source: https://myspace.com/christer.caramon/mixes/profilemix-355677/photo/78478976]




Just before this post hastens to its close, here's a portal to the multi-talented enigma Christer Caramon, outsider artist and musician with a glorious singing voice.




https://soundcloud.com/christer-caramon


Two of my favourite tracks. "Greetings dear Mollberg" is an eighteenth-century song by Carl Michael Bellman, relating the unfortunate experience of a musician who insisted on playing "polskas" during a time of anti-Polish hysteria. [Actually, the "polska" - despite its name - seems to be an entirely Swedish dance tradition. -- It is not the same thing as a polka, by the way.]


Text of Bellman's song Tjenare Mollberg, hur är det fatt? (Fredmans Epistel No. 45)
https://www.anacreon.de/se/bellman/fredmans-epistlar/fe45.php


[No longer available on Soundcloud, unfortunately...!]



The second, "Cecilia Lind", is a song by Cornelis Vreeswijk (1937 - 1987), Dutch-born but an immigrant to Sweden at the age of 12. He went on to become one of Sweden's best-loved troubadours.



And here's a whole 20-track playlist of Swedish songs in English...


[No longer available on Soundcloud, unfortunately!]