Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Capturing the moment when the boys go to meet a friend and the Dads are left to sort the bikes out!  Yesterday morning, after a lazy run in hot mist, but before the shower is free, I am waiting for the 99p store to open: I need a new glasses case. I hope to come back to the car with this solo item. I have huge sunglasses on, there's no case big enough for these. Also one giant t-shirt, ripped leggings, flip-flops: technically I'm still in the queue for the shower. Across the car park I see a lad sporting a grey suit; it looks new. He tucks his trousers into motorbike boots. A Massey Ferguson tractor pulls up, it has a trailer and two shiny trail bikes behind it. Squeals from the road, and the bob of balloons: an open topped bus full of frocked up girls rolls by. Ah! It's the Leavers' Day Parade! Aged 16, after 11 years of schooling, a rite of passage and celebration, quick: before the weariness of adulthood can grab them! The suits and the dresses and the mod

Important to note: that a fish, stranded, exhausted, flips on the shoreline, gasps for more life. It won't worry about how it got there, only where it has to go. If the gravity of the moon has called to the ocean in you, if it has swayed the emotive deep: that is a wave undeniable. Celestial it is: alien, since it ranges beyond human touch: yet we were born of stars, so it is part of us, part of our carbon based heritage. Sometimes we have such feeling, it reaches across space. Full moon storm or full moon calm, wherever your incarnation has placed you: just as the fish knows it must be in the water, you know where your footprints should press a path.

Small in stature, big in personality :-) In Girl's front room there are an unruly row of legs. Fake tan on a mitted hand makes bold strokes. 'Is that too streaky?' Girl peers. Someone fetches another jug of Pimms, and there's a false lash re-gluing session going on in a bedroom splattered with beauty debris. 'I googled it,' says the lady in the leopard print dress, of the look they are seeking for this evening's theme. 'Lots of black eyeliner.' Outside it rains, which is the sworn enemy of glammed up hair. An arsenal of hairspray is lined up. 'Are we doing your hair Mum?' Girl's friends ask in a kind of chorus. When Girl was only very small her and a gang of friends would frequently paint my face in unwittingly whorish glitter, tangle elastic bands in my hair. It was scoops of hooting fun. I take a plastic cup of the Pimms and sit under the hairspray. I'm all ready laughing.

Tree fetches stick. Rare sight. To represent a full cycle of natural rule, there is the Oak King, god of the waxing year, and the Holly King, god of the waning. If there is a Sun King, he wears a fine cloud cloak for his longest day. I like these annual pivots, whatever the weather. In honour of the hours of day and night being at their extreme, therefore, some words: Everything waxes before it wanes Wanes before it waxes It all flows and nothing is static Acknowledge yourself here At this point, under this sun In the spiral of season, of experience Ask for illuminated change For a path lit: Ask for the courage To walk unlit: Poised, as the year tilts Facing fears, embracing love. Smiling mud bank.

Day rolls lazily out of night's blanket. It will only half open its eyes, so everything looks fogged and groggy. Breakfast was decadent. The gold china was used. A cup and a crumbed plate sit in the sludgy light. This world is reflected in gold curves. Now the sky is frosted glass, hills swoop in etched motifs. Lying down, the cows seem unimpressed, but they have beautiful eyes. At lunchtime, a scatter of showers patters the coast. Little Granddaughter holds my hand and we walk out too deep for trousers in the warm sea. We laugh, and we love the way the seaweed swirls.

The frame of my mind is accepting, it lets death into the picture. It is not morbid though, as death and life give each other such power. Today is the 15th anniversary of the death of my father, whose resemblance to Henry 8th always made me hope I would grow up to be Elizabeth 1st. I liked her fierce brightness, her big dresses. I didn't want to be Mary, all glum and locked up. My brother is nothing like sickly Edward either, so the Tudor analogy is humorously selective. Here is a little old diary juxtaposition: 'June 11, 1998 death is too much, too final… one moment and everything changes… You keep going over it: there: gone: there: gone… June 19, 1998 My Dad eased from life to death: no fitting or terrible pain: gradually his breathing was slower, breaths far apart, then no breathing… It was hard to tell the moment when he stopped breathing.' The best preparation and comfort for that moment, whether clearly cut or vaguely lingerin

Last night, midnight, the windows are ajar; after the rainstorm. We have the urge to breathe that cool earthy damped air. Morning is hazy, impossible to decipher. One might as well stride out to find a dragon, in this mysterious weather. We take the long route, enchanted by pastoral views. The path is a tractor track, bumped and pocked with bird prints. Off track is waist high in the smoking grass pollen. To the riverside is a climb; through barbed wire, nettles, brambles, thistles; over steep muddied slipways. And if I didn't push through that, I would never know of this fallen tree dragon. Walk, marvel, make a beautiful life.