Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

An hour's yomp to Feather Tor and back. Mud sucks boots. Wind slaps face. Coats inflate, puff the walkers up ping-ping like popcorn. The watch is consulted. It gives seven minutes to climb the slabbed granite and wrestle the air. We are on time for Little Granddaughter, who has been playing and needs glasses and an eye test and has not drawn a picture of a cat: the very idea! But she will see the cats at Nanny's house and they have hair and she has hair but cats don't have glasses or a eye test. She relates this information to Nanny. 'Peppa Pig!' we say to each other, remembering the episode. Pedro Pony sports a fine pair of spectacles. Rain falls, heavy, smacks an acorn onto the windscreen. Cardboard is coaxed to flame. Gravy simmers on the Rayburn hob. A table candle pulses, creamy white.

After the frost moon hail falls. Cells of ice hold tight On the weathered planks of the pallet table. The sun wakes up cold, splashes watery light. Leaf by leaf colour blows from trees. There's a perceptible breath of winter: It pads closer: a thing luxuriant Stark, sparkling, perilous.

The moon is a summoning eye All things are drawn to it. A line of hopes and fears strings From here to there; swings shakily In that peerless pearling light. There is no denial. The moon gazes on everything Serene, steadfast, startling.

The earth turns our view out of day, into night. A deepening mottle of cloud, silk-soft, harmonious, settles low.  All is shadow in the antiqued light. Eyes adapt, ears are confused: there is music: the percussion of which is traced to water twisting in a ridged drainage pipe. Cool air on skin; scent of wet grass. A lick of dark coffee, lingering. Like the water tumbles a convergence comes. It is enough, in life, sufficient of itself, to have this sentient experience: to be delighted by it. Anything that is not part of this is superfluous. It is not what is done; not endured, adored, embraced nor denied; it is the perception of it. It is walking through this blend of evening shades, soul centred, blazing.

If I like a path I like to walk it to the end. Most often it steers to another path. Maybe I'll choose this one, maybe I won't: it's all whim, here in the park where the wind plucks trees bare under a vague sky. I like to walk where I walk, off the path prescribed in tarmac: locate fallen leaves, amble under portly old firs, stand, observant, on the concentric lines of the stump. Hands and knees are the best kind of cold: wakeful, not painful. A random taupe leaf sticks to my boot's toe.

Hail strike on windowpanes wakes us before the day has begun; one of those frustrating days where simple tasks are complex traps although no crockery slips off the draining board and tea is prepared in time and there are moments where rainbows loop themselves in cloud even if Dog sighs, disappointed in a shortened walk; my phone case is easily mended and Little Granddaughter says 'So'ry Nam-ma,' unasked, sincerely. (So'ry being word ointment for situations in which, somehow, something is broken or food or beverage, somehow, makes contact with carpet.) It feels colder than the gauge reports.  The night sky is clear, in part; three quarters of a rotund moon exquisitely visible. On the way home we stop to buy milk. Car park trees, shivery in the wind chill stand isolate, planted apace. Home is warm, dishevelled; has a smell of coal smoke, wet dogs, boiled vegetables. It is, in short, a suitable mess.

Frost spreads in the night and the morning arrives sparkling. The sun keeps a clear path, melts it all, it keeps the sparkle: the twink, the sense of mischief and glamour. Dog and I run through field grass kicking diamonds. Oak leaves blow down, opulent in colour: one falls into my hand, almost directly, a clear gift. At home one has wetted boots and an old brown leaf: yet the experience will not depreciate.