Sunday 7 December 2014

Goblin Gobelins

Christmas is coming, and there's shopping to do.  Today we will visit, ah, Gobelin Market, to pick up some rich tapestries manufactured by the Not-So-Fair Folk...




Some kind of propeller theme going on there.  The first one reminds me of the dense showers of sycamore keys that have been descending on us recently from a couple of nearby trees. Most years we also get inundated by those little flying-saucer birch seeds -- they constantly turn up in the bath like spiders, and in a bumper year you find drifts of them between the rafters of the roof space, like dry handfuls of breakfast cereal -- but I've seen far fewer of those this year.

The Gobelins, of course, were a grand family of French manufacturers of spectacularly ugly upscale carpets and tapestries.  Goblins, on the other hand, though small and quite often spectacularly ugly themselves, know how to weave a thing of beauty out of the neglected natural debris of wayside and woodland.
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town)
Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti

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