http://beta.dropshots.com/oshopirates/media/76095264
( My home vid photo gallery )
Oui, ici en haut c’est un video pour tous le monde 🙂
Sing along to Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes…..
View from the Roof of The World
——————————-
I don’t get up as high as I could here on my mountain walks, though I’m heading for our local mountain lake tomorrow, a good three, knee-exercising, hours away. The forest passes lead from the tiny village and within just an hour, or 400 metres of up up up, I’m into high, empty-of-dwellings, wilderness. There’s still snow in patches a few hundred metres above me, and tonight was a stunning night of baroque painterly indulgence.
Directly over Mont Blanc , just an hour beyond the end of our own 1,5 km high chasm-dropping, choo-choo train, mountain pass there hung this evening a pastel grey curtain of rain cloud, which wafted, skimmed across the top of the ice-cream-meringue Mont, whipping up discreet squalls so that her ‘Mrs Whippy’ crest disappeared into fine gossamer greys, progressing in feathered billowy sails, of deniered rain. The evening sun not to be outdone, joined in. Our end-of-the-valley mountain, a towering sharp ridged menace of snow-flecked grey granite, softened to the evening sun’s insistent apricot hues.
Granite mountain, slam-dunked with a layer of 18th century, Neapolitan landscape, fine layered apricot paint. This collection of peaks, which usually stand in silhouette at evening, became divided in their loyalties. A chalk palette of familiar dark grey on one triangular side, which split straight down one 3D edge into the loveliest apricots of yummy yum yumm yumm all the way down her other flanks. Orange and greys, being vibrant at their confluence, cause the eye to scintillate. Despite the fading sun, this colour show thrilled translucently alive. I’m alive, I’m alive , ‘Hava Nagila’ . ‘ I can do two tone mountains , la di dah,’ the evening-sunshow called out, ‘ I’m just brilliant aren’t I, woohooh look at me…..yee haaahhh’. Tonight was a Corellian symphony orchestra night.. The sheet of grey cloud that hung deep behind our mountain, far, far behind Chamonix to the south west and which similarly hovered over Mont Blanc, lit up, unable to resist any further the overlayed mellow-evening-powdered-apricot talcs. Just coincidentally and by complete and utter chance, the valleys below us now , in daytime, are also heaving-full of real apricots, and this local variety has deep blushes in its colouring. Do the sky and trees talk to each other at night? Why Of course they do.They even dream together.
To the West the deeper greys of the sky-sheet-rain-sails were interspersed with someone’s pastel shower cloud of floss-pinks-apricot-blush-peachy, sundaes.This connecting landscape seems now to resist the independent naming of its constituents..Every single day and every single night and every single moment of every single day, she does this. This, this, this. Tonight was the first night I had seen her do this particular ‘this’, though. And I had nearly not gone out for this particular walk. Note to self, ‘always go out for a particular walk, as they really are, and they do their best to remind you that you are too.’ Our lovely Alsatian-cross taught me that. Delight in the grass, the leaves, the land, don’t just look, but enrich this bodily known self with these sense-delighting joys. He was a lovely lovely boy with the handsomest face and beautifullest pointy wolfy ears,ears that always bowed down in friendship-recognition yes, love, of his truest friend, his very own Stephanie.
Some months ago, here in the Paradise land of Toblerone, in my favourite season of the gold and russet autumn, I had been going through some uncomfortablenesses which wouldn’t leave me happily alone . ( Unlike losing weight, you cannot go on a self loss programme to shed any unwanted moods that are as old occupants complete with familiar inside sensations) . the sort of ‘ why am I here if utter self-love is not reality,oh bugger-mundanity-and-repetition-for-a -laugh-type, constant existential moroseness. With the extra time on my hands and the utter freedom around ( we had the last occupied chalet up the mountain road and any itinerant weekenders were no longer disturbing our idyll), the days were emptying themselves into the blessed rest of autumn. But I wasn’t. And this particular succession of days was just me and our lovely, lovely alsatian husky cross , the three catesses,( tinned food, post-prandial self-licking whores, all three of them) in the all-wooden nineteenth century chalet for two.
Now as we all know from mountaneering class, altitude pressure at 1800 metres causes exercise to be more intense, water boils slower, and swearing, when chopping wood is followed by hollering to hear the echo of triumphant wood splitting yelps that fill the empty evening air. I wonder if … ” Jeeeesus Fuuuuuckkkkkk ”…. is actually a little known Swiss yodel, as it seemed to fit the still dew-damp autumn airs perfectly on more than one occassion. So, I had taken to mood clearing with renewed axe-chopping verve.’ Take that ! ‘, oh piece of wood with added mood, until the wood disappeared flying over my head, but the mood alas didn’t do the same. Emptiness and mountains seem to be great places to get a reality check on one’s own altitude.Good evening ladies and Gentlefarts, we will be flying at an altitude of roughly the same as always and your Flight Engineer Captain Grump will be doing the same thing he has done over and over, whilst enduring life and himself, in passive hesitation. Tea and coffee will be served later to interrupt the repetitive pointlessnes and refilled with shallow desperation.Thank you and enjoy your flight-life.Isn’t the planet and even flying, great, especially when one can take imponderable facts like being 30,000 feet up or being born as just another thing to do on one’s fridge check list. If someone hadn’t have invented aversive overlyfamiliar self mundanity then the world and associated experiences would have lacked that grey backdrop which makes all the other colours stand out in.
……more later….
Oshopirates 