All right already, I’ve had it with winter. This morning the office is closed. It has sleeted for two days and now fifteen hour of snowfall. This whole business is becoming a very bad dream – possibly even a dream not much different from The Summoner’s Tale. Just envision us running in and out of our little ice-locked houses only to finally awaken to yards filled with spring flowers and green grasses:

“And ere one might go half a furlong’s space,

Just as the bees come swarming from a hive,

Out of the Devil’s arse-hole there did drive

Full twenty thousand friars in a rout,

And through all Hell they swarmed and ran about.

And came again, as fast as they could run,

And in his arse they crept back, every one.

He clapped his tail to and then lay right still.

This friar, when he’d looked at length his fill

Upon the torments of that sorry place,

His spirit God restored, of His high grace,

Into his body, and he did awake;…”


The Summoner’s Tale, The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400)

Cheers, Dirk

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