"The Holy Things" by Arthur Machen

It's finally gotten hot enough (in the 90s in Freedom units, or 32+ in Commie units) that my A/C can barely keep up. It's been running non-stop all day, and even though it is now well into the night time, and heavy overcast outside, and the temp outside is finally no higher than the temp the thermostat inside is set for, it still can't stop running. So I had to record with the A/C running, and use noise reduction to minimize it. There is still a slight hum in places, but there's nothing for it. I can't not run the A/C, I have 10 fish tanks and can't risk the temperature inside the house getting so high that the A/C can't get it back down, which would risk overheating the fish tanks and killing all the critters. So, this is what we get. And summer is just getting started... ugh.

I will have an A/C guy come and check on it, probably a slow refrigerant leak somewhere, but it's a weekend and it's going to be Independence Day here shortly, so it may be a few days before I can get that done. Which means we are likely stuck for a little while with this noise reduction situation and the unnatural acoustic quality it lends to recordings.

Those who have been with me long enough may recall some winter recordings where I had to do noise reduction due to unusually cold temperatures leading to non-stop furnace operation, so not the first time I've had to resort to this, but I sure don't like having to do it. Bleh.

Anyways, annotations for the story:

Holborn: a neighborhood in central London. The Church parish from which it derived is over a thousand years old, dating to 959. I'm glad I looked up the pronunciation before recording this. Why does the English speaking world not pronounce place names the way they are spelled? I know our language in general is littered with non-phonetic spellings, but it is especially awful with place names. And it's not just the UK where many place names were established prior to the Great Vowel Shift, it's a huge problem here in the US as well where no such disconnect exists. But especially in the UK: you cannot guess the pronunciation based on the spelling, all too often you will be wrong. Perhaps close, but wrong.

plane tree: the platanus, of the family Platanaceae, these are common in London. Or at least were a hundred years ago, I have no idea about today. If you do, please leave a comment below!

pastille ribbon: clearly this is (or was) some sort of tobacco product, but I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce "pastille". I don't know if this was even a historically real thing, or a made-up brand name, or what. The word 'pastille' does exist in its own right, meaning "1) a small candy or lozenge, or 2) a small pellet of aromatic paste burned as a perfume or deodorizer." I went with the pronunciation for that word, so if it's different in the context of this tobacco product, then oh well, I just don't know.

The picture used is the Holborn Viaduct, circa 1900, from the Detroit Publishing Co., Catalogue J foreign section, Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Publishing Company, 1905.

To follow along: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Ornaments_in_Jade/The_Holy_Things