This morning I lent support to someone on instagram (who was sharing yet another atrocity involving the slaughter and maiming of children) by leaving what I though was a quite innocuous comment but with sufficient words to help boost circulation.
I wrote ::
“Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe”
It was the first line of poetry that I ever memorised, thanks to my beloved Form One (not Formula One!) teacher Mrs Williams who refined our English, read us poetry, taught us history so vibrantly that I could see Stephen and Matilda fighting their way across England as she spoke, tricked us into drawing complicated diagrams about haggises on April 1 and challenged our observational skills in drama class by offering each of us in turn the use of her walking stick to text which of us had observed with which hand she used the stick and how she walked (very few of us got it right).
This is a screenshot of the post I was endeavouring to support.
Within thirty seconds I received the following message.
Having learned that quoting Lewis Carroll is frowned upon by Mark Zuckerberg et al, I thought perhaps I should cite Shakespeare instead, not wanting to join the people who were posting about various marques of car or simply writing “this is a sequence of more than five words”.
I thought carefully about which of the Bard’s words to choose (there are so may brilliant phrases in his oeuvre) and posted on another account, again one describing the atrocities being committed in the genocide that has been going on since 1948.
This evening I idly opened instagram for a little recreational doom-scrolling, as one does when having been throughly soaked by the blessed rain while out on the paddock checking on the cows (many of whom are heavily with calf and about to give birth and will undoubtedly choose to do so in a storm if the option is there)
Frankly I don’t think the words I shared are at all misleading, rather they are excellent life advice. I had been planning to post a series of images in which I had been buried, not by bombs or bulldozers or the rubble of collapsed buildings, but by my furry friends…and intersperse those gentle images with other more serious ones, but instagram has now locked me out of my account.
Perhaps you’d like to see the floofies here though? They are keeping me beautifully warm.
Lately Tilly (that’s the whiter one) has been trying to talk over me as I video various things for my school. She may have to play outside when the cameras roll in future, given the rumblings she added to the piece about adding a skirt to a t-shirt that I was editing today. I don’t think she approves of me talking to myself while facing away from her.
Here’s a taste of what I have been playing with. The sample is necessarily small so as to fit into the viewfinder (or whatever the modern term is).
The ‘course’ is primarily a collection of ideas and ‘what if’s, a mind wandering about creating comfort and shape. I’m rather enjoying the experiments. After cobbling together the maquette, I bundled it with a few leaves…
If instagram locks me out permanently you’ll find me here. With the floofs and ducks.
Oh dear…oh dear…’tis never a good idea
to try to tell my friend, Ms Flint, “quiet please - that’s not allowed “
Truth will out, no matter how hard they try to muffle it
W.T.F.