Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

What is it that we should remember? Not a blanket patriotic blurb. A common humanity. A day of souls. A day of unselfish acts. A day to mark our consciences, whether we fight or not. A day of measuring regret. It should connect us, this experience of human life. The severance is what breaks us. However war comes, it breaks us.

From daylight, the hours slip. Into night the hours arrive. I see them as new hatched fishlings: blinking, gaping, full of instinct. Leaves; autumn is famous for leaves; for the ruby’d mulch. It is daylight, I am walking with Dog, we go under trees, alongside the swelled river. Walking is thinking but thinking outside is release not compression; the scenery is not lost. Head full of projects and lists, aims, objectives: internal mulch. What next? The paths are covered. A winter story is coming: barefoot, towards the hearth. Smells of candle wax and cocoa.

This cold is made of sharp-shiny teeth, dainty-pointy, gripped to one’s extremities. Thicker socks required. Toes and soles are tenderised. A hungry cold. Night gapes like a gullet. Some night perhaps when the wild of me wakes enveloped in the beauty of that consuming ache, then bare feet will run through snow, over sheer ice, then, a throat, a naked throat, a body dressed only in skin and wonder, can be offered willing to those teeth: but it is not that night yet. A thick knit of comfort pulls around: woollen socks, a glass of rum, the Rayburn churning hot water in a flimsy tank, a cheese board, two kinds of chutney (homemade) and one sweet pickle (shop bought, a shameful favourite.) Without hunger, satiation means little. Without comfort, adventure lacks contrast.

Such a wind blows as can turn tall masted trees to galleons and take them into the dark searching for gold and secret islands. In the morning we look and find two self-seeded broad bean plants: as good as bullion here is things that grow into food. The fat-trunked ash twitches, moored back to our hedge; the wind blows softer; they reminisce; we make-believe their whispers. Last night’s wind has blown the weather out of shape: odd bits of rain fall hither, thither. Fragments of sun, not enough to dry wet clothes, and half-rainbows, which hold their beauty and maybe the fragmentary nature adds a sense of luck to have any rainbow at all. Back to the dark sails the day. On the rotary line outside one sodden towel testifies to a swashbuckle system of belief: optimism, acceptance, derring-do. 

Oct 30: Some call the weather mild, some ‘unseasonably warm.’  A midday sun can catch the treetops all tropical; such parrot-yellows, such paradise-reds!  Wild strawberries vivid in the cut hedge, plucked, nestle in a warm palm.  Even where the mud has fallen from farm traffic the lane is bouncing light. Later but not so late the dark gathers in. Soft focus and sepia in mist, the trees are rusting, flake by flake. The dark gathers in, closer in, to breathe damp-earth air, to breathe the woodsmoke. Oct 31: Most of what we meant to do was done, though it was jumbled up: a box with all the bones in it, not a wired up skeleton model. All the time one is thinking that those bones need sorting: can’t quite relax: one itches, like a broken bone that’s mending.  In the afternoon it is warm and calm and Little Granddaughter favours vampire attire. She dresses up our faces with thick paint. She cheats at apple bobbing, all the children ...

Scariness level: beginner Posting my Halloween Story early this year... it is a full story with beginning, middle and end, and in the conventional order too.  The ending is left open, and if you are an imaginative sort you might like to supply a scenario for the sequel. Writing (boo hoo) can be a lonely sport, so a bit of holiday collaboration will be greatly appreciated.                                                                                             [With thanks to  Mary Shelly  and her Monster] Gardener Fred’s Monster Gardener Fred had ideas. Ideas and dreams. Ideas, dreams and ambitions. Ideas, dreams and ambitions that he worked for; he dug for them, he weeded for them, he pruned and raked and was out in...

Vocal are the geese at their interruption. They are not easily flapped, these birds. They are the same birds that sat watchfully unruffled in a cropped field, while Dog and I ran by, one energetic, lightly misted cross-country morning. Under the overhead honking is the whir of a blade wielding tractor: not a goose killer, a hedge cutter. It is cutting the hedge in the field we had hoped to be picking rosehips in. Huff. It is the sort of greyish dampish day best fitted to introspective thoughts, not suitable for noise or interruption. We drag our heels and then an off the usual track open gate to an undisturbed field is what we find. Like an answer when you weren’t sure of what your question needed to be. Here the overgrown hedge reaches out, it hands us a bag of ripe red hips and a pocketful of dark sloeberries. Dog runs routes circular, angular and out of the field flees three deer, two rabbits, one fox. There are so many pheasants Dog can’t fit them all into her sched...