Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

After the washing up, the washing (small house, wet weather, no tumble dryer, don't underestimate the skill required) and a basic level of cleaning is covered, it should be writing time, only Boy has sent a plaintive text: please can someone fetch him his photography folder? And while so close to town, I figure, why not drop in the banking and buy some cup hooks and root ginger. And while I'm near-ish there's a sale and I might as well try on some dresses, there's a wedding reception to go to on Saturday: it would be transcendent to go out and be wearing new clothes. The sale is ultra-cheap: the vision viable. This dress and that, I deliberate: mid-lengths, mostly: leopard print; lovely, but not in my size; skinny fit feather motif; looks good full of curves but it won't hold its shape; embroidered nouveau folk; so quirky but so shapeless; and a random dress picked up accidentally in the clutter of the other choices; this is the one that I buy. At home I ha

Winter sends some weather from the future: it's been some months since my hands felt bitten like this. Double-coated Dog cares not a jot. We are in the park admiring the width of old firs, the silvery trunks of birch, the feral pre-schooler in the undergrowth. 'I should have just got a dog,' the mother says. She is holding his raincoat open and smiling. Ice rain puts him off the feral life. He runs for coat cover. We are at the hill's brow when the rainbow breaks. A dinky white terrier stops to wait for a damp man. 'That's the trouble with this weather,' the man says, 'you never know.'

A Sunday blown through with rain, buffetty, quite plain. Consideration is given to finding long trousers but for now we muddle through with shorts and boots. The front door is open and the stove lit, the jam pan scrubbed from yesterday's boiling; that bubbled obsidian and set ruby; four crammed jars wait for labels, another is open, waiting for the halt of the bread maker's ruminations. A greedy glimpse shows azurite, under the kitchen's electric bulb. Washing in the lovely machine tumbles. The fabulous smell of bread. Dog eats up her chicken scraps and upstairs the sneaky rain-damped Cat is sleeping on some folded clothes.

Handfuls of rosehips and some new scratches are found in the field by the river. Formation geese make a fly-by, flanked by rankled pheasants. Blackberries get picked on autopilot now, it's so natural to step and pluck. Skin gets hot under a light coat, under a thick cloud blanket. Nettle stings edge the welly-tops, provoke no reaction. Just down by the river, standing, the truth filters in: watching the water move around the fallen oak: it could be a film set, a fairy tale: it is not. (Not so awake, walking back to the house; the writing desk; the obsessive notes; nor so asleep.) One gets to work and launches in: follow the syllabus: do this kick, add this routine back-fist; perhaps not such a routine job; in the last class a baby rolls in, fast asleep in her pram. 'If she cries, I'll pick her up,' this nice Instructor says. So for part of the lesson the tiny one burps on the Instructor's shoulder while her mother finishes a kicking drill

Water from the showerhead trails, cold and limp. Bracing: one must think of it thus, if hair is to be washed. And besides, it's simply different to do this. Think of odd hotels, the quirks and inconveniences of adventures. Put a hand on the tiled wall, the sleek white squares. Watch the loose pattering of spray, see how the locker room lights shine through the water's twist. Brace, and step under the chill. Cold awake now. If you are this far, push on. Wash hair, wash skin: watch the foam carry the comfortable dirt to a gridded drain.

Alcoves in the hedges hide the blackberries and the picker. Muddles of flora from bud to seed; spiders, the sort with banded legs, spin thick webs; slow wasps can be picked off the fruit and left to be confused; into the open pot the ripe fruits are dropped. On the other side of the hedge are whispers: hazel fronds or ghosts, it cannot be told. The story is indecipherable, the noise fascinating. This sky could bring any weather. The wind is colder than yesterday. Purple fingers sneak through brambles, pluck away the ripe fruits: into the pot they drop: hazel fronds or ghosts: whispers and wind chill bringing welcome shivers.

'A meal of green tea, scandal, hot Sally-Lunn Cakes, and a little novel-reading.' Pendennis; William Thackeray; 1849 Solange Luyon fled France: in 1680, she arrived to the City of Bath, to Lilliput Alley, where a baker's business bloomed, and she baked the bread of her Huguenot heritage. Her name was anglicized, and the popular breads known henceforth as Sally Lunn's Buns. The baker's house still stands and the breads are still made, though the oven is updated now. But what became of Sally Lunn, refugee, entrepreneur? When her recipe was rediscovered in a secret compartment above the fireplace, was there no clue of the writer? She disappears, in a puff of blown smoke. Marie Byng-Johnson is almost as vague. She bought a run down town house, in Bath, in 1937, and turned it out as a tea room. She found a secret compartment and there was a secret recipe and she told Sally's story and baked her buns and business was good. If you google M

Since our old college is shut down, Jen thinks Bath would be a good central point. Several dates are negotiated. Sorry, I'm in New York! We're away camping, it's booked. Ect! The 7th? Yes! I drive up. Girl says: I hardly remember it at all. It's 20 years ago, I say. We park and check in and get on a bus. Always on a bus, in those days. The 484. Still had to walk a mile or so down the drive to the college. Carried all our laundry on that bloody bus. In those days. Shared a house, all of us. Formative years! I know them, as though we had never parted company at all. Hugs and exclamations! Girl was five or six: and now she's 24?! Ridiculous! That's older than we were… Elaine slides the photo album from her bag… Oh! I remember that jumper; those knickknack things in the fire surround; hideous carpet; that tall girl- Yes, she was at Leeds- Paul the landlord; didn't care for wearing trousers around the house. Afraid of girl

Consciousness glides, up through the shallow snores. Awake? Yes, awake: thinking of coffee and outside. The windowscape is cloud and blue. Walk? Dog's supine loll is compacted and sprung. Ah, we are both renewed this morning. The fields are calling: they are stubbled and bleary, waking like drunks. Wine glasses wait by the sink. They have stains the colour of lips. Coincidental. Out holding a tub, to stalk the edge of stalks, peering for dark gleams. Some will fall into fingers, some require a twist, some a reach, a risk of nettle rash, of wasp, of scratch. Rain circulates, light as breathing. Three horses out, they have heard the field call too. Will the dog mind if they gallop? No, she will thrill at the hoof thump and later eat some dung.

The Nextdoor Chickens quit their dirt pecking and look up. They make a noise that echoes quiver. Swallows take to wing. Damp air brings dinner even if the sky shakes. What is thunder to them? A gutful of gnats, a dinner bell? All day drama has built in the clouds: such scenery! Kiss curls cast in solid iced white. Puckered anthracite. Contortionist flecks. Charcoal smeared with candy-floss. All of it, only water! Rain shakes down, rich quenching drops of it. After this is a flattening off, a sky pasted uniform grey. Early for work I sit in the driver's seat and inspect: the layers are there, subtle, idiosyncratic still. I mark the light and shade of each droplet on the windscreen slope, the crescent curves of reflection.

Nam-ma is driving as the first leaves fall. She remembers how they skitter. Jerky, comedic, enthusiastic: once she had a wind up toy, a pair of chattering teeth, a similar quality of movement. Little Granddaughter, red cheeked, has slumped to sleep in her car seat. It is hot, even with the windows down. Dog lies panting; a tail thumps, irregular, for various scents. They park near Feather Tor. Nam-ma pours a flask cup of tepid espresso, looks forward to the cold leat water. The little Buddha is missing, she sees, stooping the coffee flask down to the passenger foot well. He is not in his usual nook by the gear stick. He was there… when? The day the brakes failed and no-one was hurt. That morning she had rubbed his tummy: she remembers; the cool, the smoothness of it; she had said, 'For happiness.' LG awakes, is enamoured immediately: 'Cows!' Beyond the cows they walk, to the leat, where a dragonfly circles an ancient granite cross and wild po

From faded tarmac steams this end-of-summer heat. Our headlamps catch spools of white vapour, it moves, circular, in the throat of the road, like a liquid pours, only lighter, slower. Things we should recognize loom unknown from the fog. Pairs of lights drive by and sound just like cars.

Two things in particular caught my attention this morning, right before lunch. Firstly, I had an interview published in Martial Arts Illustrated magazine, which was done a while back and had almost been forgotten. I thought 'next edition' might the editorial version of 'manyana.' I knew it was actually in print after a tag on Facebook, so today I bought a copy and there is me and Mr (thank you Layla for the photos, very natural shots) not squashed in a half page (which I was prepared for) but splashed over three. I had to keep looking at it in case I had miscounted or the pictures were moving and this was dreaming. (It's national in the UK, but if you are further away and want to track down a copy, try www.maionline.co.uk. It was not a dream, the pages are there!) Strolls I, stunned in the sunshine, to my car and off to meet Boy and we buy a cherry pie because it's a celebrating sort of day. (Yesterday Mr put on his dark suit and went to the

The field by the river is cut, the cuttings baled, the bales lifted out. It seems quiet without the ripe crop whispering. The water lightly prattles. Surprised ducks make intermittent noises of extreme indignation. Dog appears on each occasion, feigns ignorance. She is slick with river mud: a coincidence, of course. Ripe fruits plop into my wide bag: bobbles of blackberry, early rosy hips, beads of elderberry, firmly purple sloes. At the far corner we turn up from the water. Dog runs over the broad earth: runs and runs for no seeming reason but the love of it.

The ninth month, fields are in harvest, apples yield on trees. Mr heaves the barrow up, he mixes and hefts and his sweat pours onto the ground, it is turning into a shed. It is one of life's simple secrets: that a dream gets fed by sweat, by push, by work. And sometimes you will see the work and decide the dream weighs lighter in your estimation than you thought, and you will let it go. And sometimes you will acknowledge the ache, the injurious frustration, the exhaustion, the painful mistakes, the re-takes and decide that this has the weight of a path that you long to follow.

It's morning. Pigeons chatter. Window open to sunlit breeze, to a pleasing chill that wafts over bared legs lying wryly on a guest bed. We are in Plymouth. Briefly one has dreamt of a pigeon teaching golf. It advises wiggling one's bottom and aiming into the sun: and be sure to squint, it says. Golf? Legs do not want to move. Everything is post-party dehydrated, aches from overindulgence. I had misjudged my tolerance for something; alcohol, buffet food, dancing, heat; a stamina of some kind has been undermined. Poor stomach, all pressed with that purging heat. Tentative toast and water begins the restoration process. Happy 40th Birthday Samantha Redmond! Another glass of water, sip by sip, held up to the light in the kitchen and it glints like sequins. I have brushed my teeth, am enlivened by the mint. I am able to put my day clothes on, the right way around, in the right order. Things bode better. Here are sunglasses, a car window that winds all the way down

Grandparent Pack Mules, hungry children, pregnant Mrs Mac, and Mr Mac; in charge of dogs; are veering from sharing a pleasant trail to enduring a march. One picnic area bans dogs, and the other demonstrates why dogs would be omitted from food sharing areas. Grandad is the first one to see the potential in the old railway bridge: the wide girder edge is a buffet table. The old sleepers slanting are almost benches. If we gather to one side the cyclists have plenty of room to whizz by, and spout little phrases of envy for our proper plates and superior olives. Little Grandson, Little Granddaughter both: they take this dining arrangement as they take all things: in chunks of awe and acceptance. Of course one sits on a slanty plank and eats ham with bike wheels whooshing where the condiments would normally be: of course Granma says not to climb on the table or you'll fall in the river. One must interrupt this feast however to point out the miracle of being able to hide a

Written myself into a fug, though the windows are pushed so far open it's a dangerous reach to close them. I have notes everywhere, things barely legible smudged on paper in blotches of biro ink. I have notes scrawled over several areas of brain and circles and arrows and optimism. I have skin that tingles with possible things: this, one can imagine, is how a cephalopod feels when it changes colour. Like a firework swallowed. Like chemistry in motion. Sensible enough, the day starts with a run but then breakfast has a look of impossibility and that's how the day runs on. In dazed intervals, venture out to the sweep of lawn. Mr is digging feverish holes: the shed begins. Oh! More mind-body shivers! Whichever universe this is, I like it, I choose to stay. I plant my flip-flops firmly in this magnificently cut grass. Breakfast takes three sittings. Well done, tenacious us!

Morning: A small convoy of Nam-ma, Little Granddaughter and Dog greet the ghosts of horses through morning mist. They tread their dew-proof boots: 'You boots, me boots, one two boots!' up the side track in the ploughed field. 'One boot, five boots, one moon, round and round.' Moon in the blue sky, halved, ends like froth, is somewhere between broken egg and breaking wave. 'Go sleep, moontime!' She has an expression of a person who is pretending to be cross for comic reasons. Then she clips Dog's lead onto Nam-ma's shorts and this is very funny. From here, those rubber booted steps are set towards honey and toast. Afternoon: It develops into the sort of hot, blue, shiny day where plans such as finishing the accounts are bypassed in favour of more scenic things, such as fixing a stable door to a polytunnel project, such as a fever pitch of writing by a wide open window, such as walking over the beach into the sea: whe

One is up and out before breakfast, again, though it hardly seems repetitious to be trawling hedges for dark fruits. This time a horsefly bites. The wasps are presumably well fed: calm and slow. Two of the cut fields are ploughed over. The ground is neither damp nor dusty. Being turned it has a soft give, like ample Earth Mother curves. At the corner of the field, the straightness of the hedge, a glimpse of telegraph poles, the bare earth, the clumps of stalk turned upside down: it's odd, I think, to have all these signs of human life and feel so far from civilization. I remember having a sensible job and the joy of looking out of a window, how the rain sounded on the fabric of my leopard print umbrella when I took a lunch break stroll. If anything, those stinted years were the best training to be here and appreciate this scene. At home, a bath is waiting. The Rayburn has smouldered all night making this hot water. On the stove is a brand new Bialetti Venus 10 cup espre