The mercurial Frank O'Hara...

-  this is how I understand the story -  loved his friends, loved to party, loved to eat, drink and smoke, loved to debate and discuss, score points and win the argument.

John Ashbery, his good friend and mentor, was older, more fragile I surmise, more easily hurt...
Wounded by Frank's sharp tongue and mistaking his friend's clever words for a cooling of their relationship, he withdrew a little, in self-protection.

Frank's response? To 'unfriend' or 'block' him (or the 1960s equivalent)? Far from it - O'Hara wrote what is to me one of the loveliest tributes, in his poem  'To John Ashbery':

"I can't believe there's not another world
where we will sit and read
new poems to each other,
high on a mountain in the wind.."

Frank O'Hara died ridiculously early in a freak accident at the beach. John Ashbery survived all the 'school' of poets and lives still with their memories

Maths for the innumerate - or how I stopped worrying and learned to love my tidetables..

I was given tide-tables when we moved to the coast and, to be honest, at first sight they looked to me exactly like those 'Logarithm Tables' we were handed in a maths lesson at about the tender age of 12...

For those too young to remember - I suspect they have long-since been superseded by technology - 'logs' were an A5 cloth-backed volume with EVERY page filled with columns of numbers. Yes, EVERY  page, and no explanation... eye-watering stuff. Apparently one calculated things with them...
Well I learned to use them - I could work out sines, cosines and tangents with the best (is it just me or did anyone else learn 'SOHCAHTOA'?). I could add, subtract and multiply them and I passed my maths O level... But for me they spelled the end of what little interest I had in numbers. Because no-one ever, EVER explained WHY...

Back to tide-tables, then... it took a while, but I am ready to explain their relevance to one such as me..
My tide-tables are a slight paperback, with a pretty picture of sailing boats on the front and, after 30 odd pages of ads and advice to sailors, fishermen and walkers, alarmed me with 30 pages of columns of numbers...

But they are USEFUL numbers! For any given day of the year I can read how much beach there will be when Evie and I stroll down; I can tell, almost at a glance, whether we'll be able to walk along the beach to the pier or beyond - or indeed around the rocks below the cliff as far as Clarach. Or whether the tide is high and still incoming, and for a decent walk we'd do better to head through the woods to the cliff paths..
Alistair can calculate with ease where and how long is his window of daylight for windsurfing (on a breezy day) or the best bit of beach for a swim - though of course he needs other tables as well...

AND at the back of the book, after the 12 double-pages of high and low water times, I discovered 'Tidal Curves' - which I ignored, 'Imperial Conversions' - which I understand (!)
And then several pages of 'Sunrise and Sunset Tables' , complete with moon-phases...Oh Joy unbounded - I know how long I have before the sun sinks below the horizon and the sky will turn from an incredible watermelon sunset to the softer hues of dusk on a summer evening. I know how quickly I need to get home on a winter afternoon...and what time to head down to see the starlings coming in to roost in their thousands (the 'murmeration') Though I still don't understand why the sun sets over the north of the bay in the summer and over the pier in the south in the winter...

And I knew it was a full-moon last night - a disappointing one as a cloud-cover and high wind meant that we didn't catch a glimpse of her ladyship...

You may be pleased to know that sunset tonight and for the next 11 days is at 16.03 - and then starts to inch its way later again - yay! Roll on 2015 - must buy my tide-tables...