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The Rather Nice Show

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Homewards, driving, the film of existence is over exposed. Gold-glare where the road should have been. It has a thickness, this light, a liquidity. We are swallowed in it, guessing the route. We guess close enough, close enough to get home unscathed. Half a moon hangs in the sky there, a lace clad performer waiting for applause. All the blue deepens. The sun dips to a spotlight, gives the moon centre stage. A bottle of champagne crouches in the fridge. A note from Houseguest Ben, out at his Leavers’ Day celebrations, is propped over the oven: I had seen him earlier, suited and booted, off to have fun. We are to have a glass of champagne, he says, a thank you, he says: if there’s any left could he have another glass, it is rather nice. A toast we drink, to all of our children and all of their guests. Whatever else is achieved, is a script to be interpreted, is our encore.

Whale Visuals

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Here are photographs of the revisited former Fin Whale, with apologies to anyone who finds this gruesome. It would be more fabulous to see it live and swimming wild. Grandchild 2, although impressed by the size of bones, mostly found it stinky. 

Whale Scent

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There was a time I was smaller than this. Barefoot, summer-frocked, home-cut hair. If were lucky, smelling like cheap ice pops. It was one of those times I followed my father along the seawall. The storm had passed, it was warm, the tide halfway. My father, who photographed everything; I don’t recall him holding a camera. Everything I remember smelt like clean salt and beach heated seaweed; perhaps because it was fresh. The whale was fresh. We were empty handed. This memory opens like a box of that fresh sea air, streams out, tidal, blue-green. We are tiny, perched over a rock. Below us the whale carcass looks, mournful, out to the ocean. It cannot go home. It is oblivious to my awe, to being an  object of awakening. The oceans are That Big. Nature is immense. Above us, sky, space. We are tiny, perched in time, perched in space. Wow. I was four, maybe five years old. Forty years ago. And here, on Wansonmouth Beach, I am walking, barefoot. My daughter cuts my hair and I fo

Pea Blossoms

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Tractors rumble, back and forth to the field where a wind turbine will be installed. The dirt they carry has an orange cast, looks iron rich, but today they dig the earth to harvest the weather. Some loathe the turbine blades whirring in the landscape: not me. A blend of sleek futuristic styling and eco friendliness, to a girl who would live in a cave but keep the wifi? A cool wind swoops, the sun plays blaze and hide, clouds take interplanetary sizes. Our seedlings cling in the ground, dazzled. The taller plants only know that they have made it this far, no one is an expert. The peas have an exuberant way of growing: throw as they grow and curl and climb, experimental, without regrets. Like a tumble of pea blossoms, our grandchildren at play; Grandchild 3 has her second birthday: the diary is checked because it seems she has been here longer: but do we remember not having any of them? How the present can alter one’s perception of the past! Grandchild 3 has a fine sense of purpo

Coffee After Work

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A working wheel on your wheelbarrow makes a difference. Three loads I had brought with the flat tyre, and satisfaction had balanced difficulty. But with a pumped new tyre, nine loads flew up from the horse field today. The newest raised bed is nearly filled, is covered with pots where we decide what will take root where. A working wheel is better, though the lack of it enhanced the joy of having. I am learning to love ease. To sit back after the work and admire. In the polytunnel the squashes and the melons have their handmade frames, and I have a mug of coffee.

Summer Is Uncertain, As Expected

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Summer’s first month arrives with its two weather predictions: a drought will come - or relentless rain. The first thirteen hours hold dry, though the air is heavy-humid and the wind skitters in the manner of an overtired child.  Down comes the windbreak, blown flat. Grandchild 2 breaks from learning to skip. It’s cold. We go indoors to eat peanut butter. (She is tired from her weekend party. She loves all her presents. She loved the candle on her cake, it was a number four. She loved the cake but she didn’t eat any except the horn of the pink icing unicorn and a sugar daisy.) A small storm visits our cottage gardens. Next door’s gazebo is brought down, bunting flapping on the grass like bright triangular fish. Our tallest broad bean is bent over the side of the raised bed, it looks seasick. Later today I will tie it back up.  We never know the weather, I will say, until our faces are in it, and however set it seems, it always changes. The plants all know this, of c

The Harbinger Bird

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Houseguest Ben arrives at the door of the polytunnel. ‘There’s a bird in the bathroom,’ he reports. ‘One you know?’ I ask. (This is not a play on slang terminology for female persons.) ‘It’s not the chaffinch.’ He laughs, glances at the hedge. (Ben was stalked by a chaffinch one memorable afternoon. It is this bird to which I refer.) This unknown avian visitor is a summer bird, too quick for him to catch: I come down to see if I will have more luck. ‘You’re beautiful,’ I say. Dark glossy plumage with a red throat, sleek split tail, pointed wings; sat on the shower rail, head at a listening tilt. A compliment is what it has been waiting for, for as the words are uttered it flies out of the window, leaving a tidy curl of dropping on the bath lip. Next door’s garden hosts a teddy bear’s picnic party. A swallow has nipped in to use our bathroom. What else might happen? The new car is out there somewhere still: Southampton, the man on the phone had puzzled, our cars co

Spring Break Sequence

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Saturday: Garden: wheeled up topsoil from the heap in the horse field with a borrowed barrow, ours needed a new tyre.  Mr went to buy a new one, twice: first the wrong size then the right, then the pump broke.  We have a new flat tyre. It’s closer to perfection than it was. The newest raised bed stinks with rotted grass. Saturday evening: drove over the Severn Bridge, squinted at sun-bloom on the wide river, admired the geometry of cables, the bold shadows. Arrived in time to watch theatrical acts compete on various televisual shows. Eager and numerous as the flies on our rotted grass: this is what it is to be an artist my dears.  Just be the fly you want to be. The six year old who was staying up late decided she would rather be a dog. She would go to bed, but she would be practicing her bark, quietly; but her brother had already woken from his own coughing.  Everyone went to bed later than intended. Sunday: morning brought rain. While the earth d

A Gesture Of Faith And Fox

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In Southampton, there is a brand new car. A mid-spec economical white because that’s the least expensive colour car… It is waiting for paperwork. Just routine paperwork. Finance is approved. What will happen? Life will be buzzed with a paintwork gleam, though it’s the same life; this is good, we are grand fans of our lives here. The financial commitment makes us scared, this is not a change. Money worries pelt us with such consistency, we should have learned to dodge by now. But we’ve compromised: we have become bold. A few more bits of paper will move and make the car get on a truck, to be brought to us. We will go to the garage and drive it away. A gesture of faith in ourselves? Yes, we say. Yes. Meanwhile the garden grows. We toil to help it; dig holes, fill holes, fit raised beds. Hand feed our seedlings. The picnic table drops into weathered pieces. We sit at particular angles to keep safe, bowls of rice steaming, birds flinging in bursts of food finding, territ

Car, Free

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The old red car did not pass the MOT. Too many things to fix so we had to let it go. I had turned out all the bits of shell and pebble, untangled the travelling charm from the rear view mirror. Wondered how many hours would add up to equal time spent viewing the world in that back looking glass. Breathed in the earth-salt squalor, the mould, the spills of coffee. Heard myself singing. Ouch. It is only a material thing, a car, no matter how immersed, how we feel our fibres are joined. Everything is a shell, I think: me too, I am made of stuff, so what I feel for the car is a universal compassion, personified, made specific to my story. I lent life to it, and now I’m taking it back. The thought of it crushed was saddening. It was a reprieve when the young mechanic asked, could he have it: I signed it over, handed him a key. So, no car, for me, for a moment. While I think and headache over figures, projections of cost and risk, while I long to live in a hedge. Why c

Quiet Day After A Busy Weekend

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7 May, 2015 Rain lingered but it could not rain: the sky was so full of birdsong, there was no room. Only sunlight could shine through that clear mass of sound. Lawnmowers and birds, singing, and somewhere above, an aeroplane; a ruffle of foliage from an indulgent breeze. All the weekend noise: speeches from Churchill on VE Day, knives and forks and spoons scooping up pie and mash and suet puddings, the band were fun, people were dancing and trying to dance; the hoot of grandchildren wrestling on a lawn while the barbecue spits and somebody catches a ball, the glee sounds of toddlers with chocolate cake; makes us smile to ourselves. Striding around the garden, planning doom and repellence for pests, planting seeds; smiling.  8 May, 1945 9 May, 2015

Notes From A Car Park

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It rains. Car park trees hemmed in, captive. Symbolic of a lessened world? If the roots go rogue, then what? Dream of growing beans up the sides of the prisoner trees, of everyone planting and making car parks futile. A power of fertility. More rain, in spite of the blossoms and pretty leaf: autumn weather. Under the copper beeches, light and water drops. Nearly a rainbow. The leaves are russet-rosé. Under the copper beeches you can bathe in a sparkling pink Raise a toast to autumn: To future harvests.

Three Days In May

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Friday Here begins the last calendar month of Spring. Half-fledged pheasants flee car wheels. Has the frost left? It had clung to the land for too long. This morning’s air is warmly damp. The hedges have grown lace, kept colour. To the beach we traipse; one Granma, one grandchild, one grandchild’s friend, one dog. We are lucky with weather. Mild-damp until the ice creams are eaten up. Fat drops smack on the way home, burst on the bonnet. The girls sleep. At home we hear giggling, and the crunch of apples bitten. They watch a film, they say, ‘Oh I love that. Do you love that?’ Anything with sequins rocks. Grandma agrees. Evening comes, it brings wine. Saturday A garden day. The barrow rolls badly, inner tube beyond repair. Another expense: leafed green growth, the recompense. Future dinners, medicines, sweets, inebriations, perfumery, decorations; the story of our year wiggles up, shakes in the wind. This is the year we added a scarecrow and all the arches need

Zeugmatic

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Zeugma (as explained by the Collins online dictionary) ‘noun: a figure of speech in which a word is used to modify or govern two or more words although appropriate to only one of them or making a different sense with each, as in the sentence Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave (Charles Dickens)’ Dickens loved to turn such a phrase, Alexander Pope was prone also: ‘Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.’ And Shakespeare, and The Bible, and more. Used as appropriate to only one word as in ‘weeping eyes and hearts’ it strays (I think) into metaphor territory, some of it fantastically comic; potentially bombastic, pathetic, overdone. In good writing, amazing, in bad writing, a great deal of unintended entertainment. Old pulp fiction is a fine source. Alas, the best example I ever had was tragically lost in a kitchen swamping some years ago - I forget the title but this sentence ‘I felt a sitting duck’ has st

Yogic

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Me with my first yoga teacher, my Mum. Here we are up a mountain, typical us :-) Word History: The word yoga comes from Sanskrit yogaḥ, "yoking, joining together" and by extension "harnessing of one's mental faculties to a purpose" and thus "yoga." The Sanskrit word descends from the Indo-European root *yeug-, "to join, yoke." In the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, *yeug- developed into yuk-, represented in Old English by geoc, the ancestor of Modern English yoke. The root *yeug- is continued by words in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family, which indicates that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European used draft animals to pull their plows and draw their wagons. [American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.] ‘Whoever desires whatever ob

Xanthippe

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Xanthippe is by legend a nagging wife. Her contemporaries do not report this. Her husband, Socrates, is given words that when I read them stand as admirably commemorative: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me, the horse for me to own must show some spirit" (Her name means Yellow Horse.) It is said that once she followed up loud words by upending a chamber pot over the head of Socrates, to which he remarked, ‘after thunder comes the rain.’ It seems to me that this was a lively household: two strong minded parents, three young sons. (The chamberpot in other accounts is merely ‘washing water.’) I like the stride of the Yellow Horse, and catch a glint of amusement in those imagined eyes.

Whoopwhoop

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W was the letter I would have featured yesterday- Were I so inclined- What was it that I was doing? It was Monday so: One adventure before breakfast (in the Dead Tree Field, an unexpected lake, ice shadows, an outpost of Badgerland) One grandchild was here, for her second breakfast, to draw a face for a scarecrow, to plant melons and snail shells, to mispronounce windmills (minnedwills, millwynds, whealmills, windmiles). ‘Snail shells, do they grow into flowers?’ ‘Nooo, Granma, it makes a tree!’  

Vandal

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I loathe crosswords. This no one expects, because I love words. But if you want to share a word with me why be oblique? I don’t want clues, I’d like to know what word and why you are bringing it to my attention. That it intersects with other words does not inspire. But I do love playing with words. So my new word game hobby is vandalising a book. Not any book, just one I found in the ‘3 for £1’ box at Launceston’s secondhand book store. It has no date in it, but the story is set at the end of the First World War, the binding looks suitably shabby-chic, the paper is impressively thick, it suggests something put together in the 1930s. (Wikipedia says this novel came out in 1923.) Scandalous to mess with it, as an object. But as I found the story objectionable, the ending depressing, the writing imbued with racism and anti-Semitism, I decided to change its history. The game is to find in each page a set of words and/or phrases that form a pleasing flow, then cover over the re