The Digital Burial of D J Duckworth

I decided it was time to take the reference to my dad's memorial service off the home page of my blog.  Instead, I've put the text of the ceremony, plus a few pictures, into a blog post dated 14th March 2015, the date of the memorial.

As I was doing it I got to thinking that this was yet another stage in moving on from his death and that by consigning the text to the back pages of my blog I was conducting a kind of burial.  There is such a vast amount of stuff on the world wide web now that most of it is effectively buried, because the population of readers is so small compared to the volume of reading material.

I think this point is often lost in the debate about how we live in a surveillance society.  There may be a CCTV camera on practically every street corner in the UK, but if there is no one monitoring them except maybe a bored and over-worked security guard nodding off in a control room, then what does it matter?  I suppose the answer to that is it depends on the sophistication of the search engines that pick over all the stored images, sounds and words.  My guess is most of them are like brainless nincompoops moving at the speed of light with an attention span of less than a millisecond throwing up almost random hits.

A Walk Through the Ancient Olives

Last Sunday Sue booked us on a guided walk among the olive trees near Ostuni, starting near the sixteenth century Masseria D'Agnano (opposite).  Discretely beautiful and in a fabulous location on the edge of the Murghe, it's being renovated.  The perfect hideaway for a Russian billionaire perhaps, or for me if I had the money.

Our guide was a young local man who is a member of  a group devoted to the preservation of the ancient olive groves of the coastal plain, some of which he confirmed are thousands of years old.  Looking out over the trees below, he came up with the interesting insight that these were the oilfields of the Roman Empire, oil which was prized not primarily for cooking, but for keeping Rome lit at night.

Later he took us to this cave, which his group had cleared and where everyone took this shot.  I tried to resist but sometimes you just have to add to your collection of pictures framed by cavemouths and the view was great, looking out across the olive groves to the seaside town of Torre Canne with its distinctive lighthouse.

On returning to where our cars were parked our guide then led us through some trees and to a small cave which contained a massive grinding stone.  He explained that a donkey would pull another big stone, mounted on a wooden beam, which pivoted from a depression in the centre of the base stone to crush the olives to a paste, the first stage in the production of olive oil.  This primitive olive mill was documented as having been abandoned in the seventeenth century and could have been created hundreds of years before that.  There is no signpost to this deeply atmospheric spot, but now we know where it is we will be back.