Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

In the eleventh day of Operation Relocate Domicile. In another 29 days it actually might be over, bar the fruit garden, but we will approach that as a separate manoeuvre. Tomorrow, new home chimneys are to be swept and the Rayburn lit. New Farmer Landlord says we can have wood from his shed, if we don’t mind cutting it down; do we have a chainsaw? Of course we do, it’s one of the few things that has set us aside from medieval peasants. We have been used to cutting down our own wood, in branches or by whole tree; chopping and dragging it by bits up the steep slippery stony thorny thistle strewn fields of Rosehill. Visceral, close to nature: also tiresome, time consuming. Mr can drive down to the shed in New Farmer Landlord’s yard, bring back all the wood on one trip. My grin is so huge it curves off the earth like buffalo horns. In honour of the hours spent, in celebration of the hours freed, here are eleven verses from a paused project, a poem of 1,000 ‘miracles,’ which I w

Another streak of day flashes past too fast for me to write. These days do happen. We have a home forming with furniture almost where it needs to be and pans on shelves and coat hooks put up in the hallway, this is my compensation for the inability to catch any writing time. Also, just as I think I might sneak off with a biro and notebook, Boy needs someone to beat at chess. I play a random game, he engages strategically, hence the inevitability of outcome. We sit at the table; it has a tablecloth. I drink coffee from a cup and saucer, from my vintage gold tea set. We are civilised. We no longer wear muddy boots in the house. Sip, chink, smug smile, checkmate: marvellous. I study the new abode, I think my mouth is gaping. Look, there’s a place to hang coats! A shelf for the muddy boots! Behold, the gold china is not lost at the back of a greasy shelf! How many times shall I count the shelves in the pantry? I will never stop! This morning is for exploring: me and Dog f

Last night: Rain on glass panes keeps me entertained, in pattern, in percussion. The view is dissolving in drops and the descent of darkness. An awareness flares, catches the heart of me in a healing flame: I picture it like a Christmas pudding, safe and warm under a dome of ignited rum. Maybe it is merely sleep hormones, maybe not; thoughts and feelings flicker in a balanced performance of shadow and light. This morning: Baby brushes my hair with the wooden hairbrush. I have a bruised temple to prove it. Reminds me of the phrase ‘that will knock some sense into you.’ We harness Dog to the pram and walk around the block of fields. Here the hedgerows are magical habitats, winding with wild rose, tumbling vetch of many colours: so many flowers I have not time to name them all. I note how the rose expands: a shoot reaches up, flails in breezes until the weight of leaves and buds arc it back to earth, to pop open flowers, circlets of sparking colour: like the world’s slowes

Through most of May of this year I was on a fabulous mission to appreciate, to drink life up, to be aware of every breath. This happiness is giddy, has a sense of intoxication. I didn’t have the budget for actual intoxication, there was only coffee and a genuine joy for life. This kind of pace is unsustainable, not necessarily a bad thing. As I am still reminding myself now, transition, and all of life is a transition, happens in oscillations; there is chaos, expansive and excitable, and there is anti-chaos, stabilising and reflective. I considered splitting this month into two posts, but that cuts off the cycle and it’s more useful to see it in one go, I think. I have bleeped the naughty word, rather than overdub and lose authenticity. Anyway, here I am, aged 24 and living in a less cramped shared house with a washing machine, which also accounts for some of my heady delight. ‘17 th May 1994 A morning in Wakefield watching people and patterns. If you sit for long enough they se

Yesterday pen was not put to paper, nor fingerpads to keyboard. Sentences wriggled compulsively from behind distractions: I held them briefly in my mind, admired each form, let them fly into heavy rains. We aquaplaned to work and back. Thursdays are busy. We eat our evening meal in a lay-by; the hedge trees shake water all over the car, show us a picture of the world made of splodges. Today a tide of cloud rolls in and the trees sway in wind currents. I have the picnic table set up in what will be our spare room, office and storage space. I am acclimatising to this new horizon. Some frustrations still, of what will and will not fit.  Mr is in the kitchen teaching his drill some dreadful language. Boy is in his bedroom, keeping it tidy. Dog flops as though abandoned, waiting on a walk. At the old place I could sit by the window while my thought process travelled along the valley out through the mountainous moorlands. Here I have not yet learnt the direction in which

Grouchy as an unwalked dog this morning. In the kitchen, Dog herself is stood, mournfully, by a slop of vomit. Diagnosis: unsettled. We need to a) clean the floor and b) reset our spirits. A walk around the block is proposed. The block is arable fields, the walking surface single track, just big enough for one moderately sized tractor, which we don’t meet, but we do find the remains of a less lucky squirrel. I had planned a break from this house move daily update; a return to sharing my old diaries, I determined, would bring more fun to writer and readers. Which didn’t happen today as the laptop and the journals were in different houses. And my headspace remains a 3D jigsaw puzzle of kitchen implements; of hats, of books, of towels, brewing buckets, root vegetables, houseplants; or it might be some kind of stacking game, like Jenga, like Buckaroo, but mostly there’s more things than places and not space in the poor swirly head to think of anything else that might be

Oh woman! Why are you flip-flapping like a fish on a dock? Kick yourself back to the water, throw yourself to the flow of it. Have you forgotten so much, with just this slight distraction? In the back of the car, in the midst of this load of transported objects, a stack of pans strike a rhythm with every bump of the lane. In my head incessant things are shuffled round but will not make the shape of a tidy cottage. The car windows are wound down and brambles flick in. Lurch, clang, whip, we go up the rough old lane. It’s only moving from here to there, so why obsess over it: kick yourself back to the water, woman, quit flitting, you know you can swim. ‘This is an adventure,’ I observe, after a pause for consideration. Another favourite quote of mine, so favourite I remember the source: GK Chesterton, he says, ‘An adventure is an inconvenience, rightly considered.’ At Number Three, almost our new home, the electric oven is wired in. I make poached eggs for supper. W