Hard Line (Or Not)

If you describe someone’s policy or attitude as hard-line, you mean that it is strict or extreme, and that they refuse to change it. –Collins English Dictionary.

‘lines’ photos taken by Nigel on 30 March 2020.
Tapanui, West Otago, New Zealand.

On that day we were getting some fresh air and exercise, wandering around on Tapanui’s rugby field and golf course and Nigel got interested in taking photos of various lines. I’d already been taking photos of goalposts myself, but not specifically of lines in the grass (the wiggly ones are sheep tracks).

I wasn’t sure how I’d structure this post – it ended up pretty much taking its own course!

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Lines

Some lean more to the centre, or the left, or the right.

Those with ambition and discipline get their goals all lined up

and everything aligned with their goal

but …  ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.’

I had no idea until now, that this saying is derived from a line in a poem by Robert Burns called To A Mouse. He included “To a Mouse” in his first collection of poems — “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect” in 1786.

here’s the verse in which it appears:

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Last verse of the same poem:

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me;
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects dreaer!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

At the poem page (already linked to above) there was also an analysis and I thought I’d share the final paragraph here:

“The Industrial Revolution took over the agrarian life and affected peasants everywhere, where there was not much chance of rising up the social ladder and they felt the pinch of inequality. Since Burns’s family worked on a farm and suffered from oppression and poverty, he could understand well the mouse’s predicament.”

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Text by Liz, photos by Nigel; Exploring Colour (2020)