Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Coffee cup basks, sits on my desk, idly steaming. Clouds are lit up, rolling past, processional. Over the river, white birds with sun struck feathers fly. I walked Dog up to the cut wheat field, which is part dug over, which is becoming the field where the wheat was. Followed the turned earth, the stark chopped hedge that looks like winter, sharp bladed winter. I heard something; I could believe it was the sound of birds, or I could believe, there, the air warbles. Breathed deep; damp earth fresh sky. Under booted feet a soft soil thump. Three blackberries squish, tangy, in a chomp of molars. Back to my desk, to think, to quiver at lists, all the snarly details that aren’t so bad if you just pick through them. Sigh deep: desultory picking follows. I long to lounge and read a book. Naughty eyes sneak to the window. I fidget for more coffee. Hours are slippery, tiredness glutinous. At the end of a dark drive homewards, reverse clumsily up to our front door. Rain fal

This morning, three stems from the pampas clump rest at the back of the car, all bunched up and fluffy: a car with a bunny tail. Six wild strawberries, each, are foraged from the hedge. This is all we pause for on the stride to Treniffle and back. This is Trolley Bay Day 2: this time, time gets tighter… We have pushed pennies from jars for a half-day’s van rental. The objective is for one more trolley bay to be in bits in our garden by early afternoon. The cloud cover fails to keep us dry. At noon, the workmen are dragging any unclaimed shelters to the skip, via an angle grinder. Also I must collect Baby from her Nana’s house. Which is why there is a small child in a car seat waving keys and a mobile phone at grandparents who are wet to their undergarments and grimly wrestling twine around unwillingly rolled Perspex sheets. Flecks of blood from minor flesh wounds catch in raindrops. Such loveliness to be at home in dry clothes not shivering. To drink warm tea an

Sticky mud lives up to its name, coats my boots till my feet are near hobbled. Step into long grass just in time; it licks the mud off with soft bladed tongues. Wind my wide-eyed way up to the flank of the corn crop. Here, no human sight can spy me. This is not a people place. The nettles bite. It takes two hands to break a spider thread. The ground lurches. Dog is drunk on scents, running jagged. Low-bellied badgers have been here, dragging paths through the crop rows, waistcoat pockets full of cobs. Fox prints ford the stream. For all its fine feathers, a pheasant has a slattern’s shriek. I daydream a house woven from the plants in the centre of the tallest deepest rows, a secret house that sways with the wayward breeze, where I sit with my legs dangling and my hair all tangles and wild sparks in my wide wide eyes. 

This morning, three stems of fluffed blonde pampas grass were flicked over the car roof. A car looks preposterous with a wig. Mr collects some extra eyebrows on the lane walk, in threads of spider silk. ‘Is it fake hair day?’ I ask but he only laughs. We have four wild strawberries each and clear sight of the river mist. This is the prequel, but not to fake hair day. It’s trolley bay day. Mr has been clever, asking the supermarket refit manager what will happen to the old trolley bays. We are allocated two. He has put his budget greenhouse plan into action by hiring a van, and then we have panicked. We love the plan, a sublime blend of sensible, imaginative and ratchet spanners, and then there’s that dredging background static, the wearisome fear, the miserable part of a low end income: we can’t afford it, we will be caught too short, in desperation, sink in debt . We’ve done it, though, we’ve hired the van, we’re in the car park, wrestling nuts and bolts and several

Sleep is a tide and the moon is full. Eyelids slip, disappear under the swell, swept deep. Travels, toils, triumphs pass; the languid limbs move, quieted, under the liquid weight. On dry land, covers are kicked, bodies shift, sprawl, knock pillows to the floor. As the light turns, so does the tide. Minds shiver up from the lunacy of dreams. They come up in silvery pieces, in a shoal of bubbles, up to the shallows, to bump the shore, to nestle into rock pools where the remnants of dream are caught. When this mermaid finds her legs, she makes coffee, remembers only the emotive rapidity, the cogent force of it. 

Feels like distant memories, like we’ve been stuffed in cryogenic suspension and travelled half a galaxy since we last came to the beach. And since an outpost of family is camping near Woolacombe, that’s the side of the sea we drive towards. It would be easy to never leave home. We live in a beautiful place, have lots to do, are not bored. Who could feel sorry for us, stuck in our beautiful rut? And yet, it surprises me, always, the change in a change of scene: no matter how good I am at looking, new things open my eyes wider. Mr takes his mini-mal into the pitch and trough of white-topped ocean, me and Boy take a handful of dogs, walk, ogle, untangle leads. A landscape of textured craters rolls out flat, rolls into a lunar haze. At the water’s edge bumps an alien pod of jellyfish. Boy catches digital images. My mind shutters click, over and over; look, the pools are sky mirrors, see the clarity of that cloud shadow, the turning angles of waves, the reptilian

Dog and me, jogging in the lane; no other human or canine in sight. In through the window of Luccombe Cottage a television screen is filled with talking face. Two horses play in a field, spin like dizzy kids. A bullock somewhere is making a cow-trumpet noise; me and Dog exchange a look; such a fuss. We peek in through the gate. They are running around, pelting helter-skelter: as they see us, they stand still. Then, eyebrows already twitched, still pondering this mystery, we are at a place where the lane is deeper than the field level, a few paces from Treniffle. Ten feet above, a steam of breath, a line of bullish hair flanked by soft black bovine ears; this is all we can see of the creature. Stand in the pit of the lane: yes, this could be a labyrinth. And even without a minotaur, clouds are of a shade mostly described as ominous.