Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Stitched up and head strapped into a plastic cone, Dog walks uncomfortably but with much determination. Even if the cone wouldn't get wedged in brambles, she is kept on a lead. I do permit drinking from a clear puddle. She likes rainwater. The sun shines. We find four almost ripe hedge strawberries. The hedge is a normal place to find them: fruiting in November, peculiar. The flavour is a foreground of water and earth, a background of summer berry. Something almost always turns up, when you need it. On the squashed up busy road to work there are too many cars but mostly lights are green on approach. Idle thoughts stir as we swing the roundabout: the ability to control the lights to make them green always has no real skill to it. The ability to admire is the one that flows your journey so that red lights coincide with wanting a rest, and green lights with the desire to move. 

I thought it might be another normal November day: trees on fire and sky as grey as smoke. I took Dog to the beach to run in the sea and let the salt water heal up the barbwire slice she came out of the Forbidden Woods with. There's an old fly-tip down there, fascinating and dangerous for all animals including me. As a child growing up on a beach I was programmed to regard seawater as a cure for anything but drowning, but also sensibly banned from climbing through tips. Dog chased cormorants at the edge of low tide and the worn down rocks lay like ossified blocks of things long gone, and I walked, thinking of claws and scaly tails, pressing bare toes into cool damp sand. Back at home I bribed Dog to roll over and let me check the wound, only to find another, deeper gape carved in her flesh: the kind that even I can't believe the sea will mend sufficiently. Knowing how limited our resources are I tried to believe the sea could do it. Dog slunk to her basket, apologet

I don't know why I felt the need to paraphrase Baudelaire's 'Get Drunk' poem: to understand it better perhaps. I read it yesterday and it won't leave my head, although there are worse things to be echoing than this call to be vibrantly alive. On this table, under the ticking of the clock, there is a glass which should not be empty. The more you fill it the bigger it gets, and the clock shrinks in size and noise; the clock that holds a scythe and is circling for you. Into the glass pour the essence of intoxication, of delirious loves and hearts that beat with wings, pour and drink and be always drunk from it. There may be a time that you wake, cold and sober in a place unknown, but only ask; what time is this; only listen; the answer flows in every thing to every sense; even in the tick of the clock, the answer holds. It is the hour to fill your glass. I love the appreciation of life, simultaneously am repelled by the suggestion of selfishness, maybe

I stood still. I was getting a casserole ready, had a chopping board full of root vegetables and the Rayburn lit ready. I was checking the clock for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I had the iron pot warming on the coal lit stove. The hands on the clock said it is time to be still.  The First Two Minute Silence in London (11th November 1919) as reported in the Manchester Guardian, 12th November 1919. 'The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition. Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside he

Had a sincerely convincing dream that I won £250,000 on the Euromillions lottery; I bought a ticket, on the strength of that. I won £2.50. How dreams can shrink in the light of day! Spent the winnings on Lotto tickets. Sometimes a gamble is a leap of faith, just a way of saying hey, universe, I embrace a change. All the road to Exmouth was hedged with gold leafed trees. We spent a day with Little Grandson, assorted grown up children, a bag of toys, ample platters of savoury and sweet. Bouncy Beagle taught himself to eat an orange, which took several wincing at the citric attempts. Outside the cold wind flowed over the windows and the sun's light poured through. Bolts of gold drape our shoulders. If the ticket pays up, we could all take a holiday, and sit out in foreign heat. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, crunching up the last jalapeño, content. 

Circa 1993?  In my usual daily regime, something fresh gets scrawled, and often it seems like I'll chuck a post together. The construction is not as random as I make it look. When words come slow I just type anything that pops in my head and sometimes this is a white water river ride and sometimes a shopping list. Then I play and snip and tap and between the flow of this present moment and the years of blistering practice, a presentable piece of work emerges. But it had to start somewhere, didn't it? Should I owe something to these words? I had nearly forgotten this story altogether. I think it references the emptiness of needing objects to verify personal identity. It's the work of a student, the sort that walks out of the canteen, accidentally stealing a mug, getting wet muddy feet collecting autumn leaves and most likely has paint in her hair. I think I might follow it all the way through to as far as it got, but I can't face it all in one go! The Red D

Clouds get bigger all day: huff up, big as basilicas, easily as grand: I see a sky full of cathedrals. Except that the building is the imitator, is designed to reflect the creative glories of mountains and caverns and celestial shine. It occurs to me that outside, in the actual presence of mountains and caverns and celestial shine, I am more humbled: connected, but such a mere part of the universe I hardly need pay myself any attention at all. I love this feeling, there is a unique freedom in it. Within the walls of old churches is a concentrated sense of human belonging; of being huddled with endless ghosts, with their warm hopes and aching desires: the whisper of prayers over hundreds of years of footsteps, part of the fabric of the place. That is what a church can hold that I would recognise as consecrated. A space for humanity to express itself, not something segregated, but all voices joined together, worshipping everything that is wonderful, bringing love to heal wh