Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

When Girl was a tiny blonde thing, she would push the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner along the carpet and say ‘hoove, hoove, hoove,’ until the game of housework was trumped by a walk to the beach.  Entertaining. I have spent time without a vacuum cleaner, as I have lived without most appliances at some point. Unintentional yet educational: time spent sweeping carpets, thrashing rugs, boiling a pan for a cup of tea, cooking on an open fire, cooking in a woodburner, treading washing in the bath, making shadow puppet improvisations. (The washing machine, the internet and a hoover, if we must live with carpets, are the things I choose to keep most. In that order.) Yesterday, after viewing the front room carpet, I trundled our hoover out. It is a small machine and for reasons of compactness the hose attaches to the body of it at a 90 degree angle. This bend gets blocked. To unblock, brave fingers must venture in, unsighted, and seize a clump of, hopefully, Dog hair. Yes, disgustin

The wind is learning to whistle. It pipes through the rotary washing line while I’m putting extra pegs on the dog’s blanket. The clouds go up so high, this patch of earth seems shrunken. This scale of things in which I am barely a speck is comforting. The wind grows, from a whistle to a whale song. I followed my father along the seawall on a post stormy day and I was about six and the wind was lively but warmish. Wave spray was catching at my legs, the cheeky stuff. Gulls, more gulls than usual, spun overhead, back and forth to the odd shaped rock where my father stopped and waited for me to catch up. The air stank but it wasn’t like the sewage outflow. And there, when my eyes realised what they saw, I learnt the true magnitude of the ocean. A blubberous mountain of whale lay turned and smashed on the shore. And the scale of things opened up; I was barely a speck but I was a speck of this vast creation; and it struck a ceaseless awe in me. 

In which I present to you draft 2 of verses 11-20 out of the 1,000 I am aiming for. Each verse should represent a moment worth noting, and all of these moments are to happen in one imaginary day. It was an easy idea to have, and at around 500 verses now (in first draft) I wish I had hit upon a lower number. But 1,000 Miracles In One Day is what I started, and it will thrill like a miracle when I get there. Reworking the earlier verses is helping to spring more forth. From sleep one sigh emits, an exhaled Aspiration that will persist Until action is provoked From the haunted dreamer Limbs shift, covers uncover, Disrupt rest, limbs tangle untangle, Cozy back, settle, the drama Resolves into contentment Outside, tides ebb and flow over hours Over sand. Dark waves roll, bring To the shore the energy of night Endurance, catharsis Peaceful, acquiescent sleep In this muted cotton-dressed bed The right place to be, the right time Neither too warm

This alien proved difficult to decimate. But quite helpful at fixing Buzz.  Little Grandson has more swagger than all of the Rolling Stones rolled together. Him and Buzz Lightyear strut the kitchen floor, decimating alien forces and demanding biscuits. He gets a laugh and a banana. Dog and Bouncy Beagle are in the garden, stealing each other’s sticks. ‘Grandad,’ Little Grandson enquires, ‘is Dog my cousin?’ Cousin being a word which to him, we glean, currently means ‘a living being who is in my family group but does not live in my house and has not got an obvious title such as Grandad.’ For lunch, there is leftover meat, quiche, flan, pie, profiteroles, but no cheesecake- Boy finished that at breakfast. After summer pudding and lemon meringue pie. The fridge groans like our bellies. We go to Great Grandma’s house to refuse further food. Little Grandson gets his biscuit and a bag of duck food. Down at the canal, past a hissing parade of swans, we find a good lobbing spot. Two

Nearly time to get in the car and go. Not enough time to get everything done before that, but that is how it is. A small adventure of family awaits; time to stop writing! Pack a notebook and a pen, scribble in a corner, a writer is an addict of sorts, but if you neglect life, what to write about, eh, idiot? Step away from the keyboard, come back when you have reportage! Outside the rain is blown past the window, I imagine the droplets as looking surprised, being swept at gale speeds. We are going for a barbeque… What to pack, other than a notebook and pen? I don’t know what else, proof that I need to leave the house and try talking to people before I forget how. Do I not love my family? Of course, everyone loves my family, they are delightful, funny, generous, amazing people. So why still typing? Okay okay, I’m nearly done here! Barbeque in a storm; it will be fun, I know, it will be wet dogs trying to steal sausages and accidents with ketchup. Time’s up! 

Baby listens to the music of Dog running; plink plink plink; through the dry stalks in the cut field. I don’t know what she makes of this world, but she clearly attends to it. Solemn mouth imitates the sound of the wind in the trees; studious hand opens to gauge the movement of the air. Big eyes reflect the sky. Words of purposeful nonsense are addressed to us.  ‘Ogledoggle.’ ‘Dog?’ ‘Uh huh.’ I whistle Dog from her roaming: this is funny, belly laugh funny. A whistle conjures a dog. A happy dog at that. Dog’s tail wags in a circular motion, seems to propel her forwards. I listen to the music of the dry stalks, to the operatic snort of granddaughter. 

For my birthday, Girl bought tickets. My birthday is in January, but the show I favoured wasn’t till now. And I was quite certain I would not write about it, for mostly I prefer to take something ordinary and paint it up in the glitter of my proficient vision. To start with the extraordinary seemed like cheating, like a lazy exercise. But sometimes an imaginary elephant turns up and fills you with such wonderment! I have been to the circus, ladies and gentlemen; a circus unseated, where you wander, with the crazy performers, and they swing over your head and stewards in leather kilts are busy keeping the balance between thrill and law suit. What the troupe present is inspired by the journey of a wedding gift elephant. Walking from Lisbon to Vienna, thrilling and alarming, it represents the bewildering, discomforting delight of the unfamiliar, the push to believe that things can be different, the very extraordinary wonderment that transforms what was previously regarded as m