Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

The old red car did not pass the MOT. Too many things to fix so we had to let it go. I had turned out all the bits of shell and pebble, untangled the travelling charm from the rear view mirror. Wondered how many hours would add up to equal time spent viewing the world in that back looking glass. Breathed in the earth-salt squalor, the mould, the spills of coffee. Heard myself singing. Ouch. It is only a material thing, a car, no matter how immersed, how we feel our fibres are joined. Everything is a shell, I think: me too, I am made of stuff, so what I feel for the car is a universal compassion, personified, made specific to my story. I lent life to it, and now I’m taking it back. The thought of it crushed was saddening. It was a reprieve when the young mechanic asked, could he have it: I signed it over, handed him a key. So, no car, for me, for a moment. While I think and headache over figures, projections of cost and risk, while I long to live in a hedge. Why c

7 May, 2015 Rain lingered but it could not rain: the sky was so full of birdsong, there was no room. Only sunlight could shine through that clear mass of sound. Lawnmowers and birds, singing, and somewhere above, an aeroplane; a ruffle of foliage from an indulgent breeze. All the weekend noise: speeches from Churchill on VE Day, knives and forks and spoons scooping up pie and mash and suet puddings, the band were fun, people were dancing and trying to dance; the hoot of grandchildren wrestling on a lawn while the barbecue spits and somebody catches a ball, the glee sounds of toddlers with chocolate cake; makes us smile to ourselves. Striding around the garden, planning doom and repellence for pests, planting seeds; smiling.  8 May, 1945 9 May, 2015

It rains. Car park trees hemmed in, captive. Symbolic of a lessened world? If the roots go rogue, then what? Dream of growing beans up the sides of the prisoner trees, of everyone planting and making car parks futile. A power of fertility. More rain, in spite of the blossoms and pretty leaf: autumn weather. Under the copper beeches, light and water drops. Nearly a rainbow. The leaves are russet-rosé. Under the copper beeches you can bathe in a sparkling pink Raise a toast to autumn: To future harvests.

Friday Here begins the last calendar month of Spring. Half-fledged pheasants flee car wheels. Has the frost left? It had clung to the land for too long. This morning’s air is warmly damp. The hedges have grown lace, kept colour. To the beach we traipse; one Granma, one grandchild, one grandchild’s friend, one dog. We are lucky with weather. Mild-damp until the ice creams are eaten up. Fat drops smack on the way home, burst on the bonnet. The girls sleep. At home we hear giggling, and the crunch of apples bitten. They watch a film, they say, ‘Oh I love that. Do you love that?’ Anything with sequins rocks. Grandma agrees. Evening comes, it brings wine. Saturday A garden day. The barrow rolls badly, inner tube beyond repair. Another expense: leafed green growth, the recompense. Future dinners, medicines, sweets, inebriations, perfumery, decorations; the story of our year wiggles up, shakes in the wind. This is the year we added a scarecrow and all the arches need

Zeugma (as explained by the Collins online dictionary) ‘noun: a figure of speech in which a word is used to modify or govern two or more words although appropriate to only one of them or making a different sense with each, as in the sentence Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave (Charles Dickens)’ Dickens loved to turn such a phrase, Alexander Pope was prone also: ‘Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.’ And Shakespeare, and The Bible, and more. Used as appropriate to only one word as in ‘weeping eyes and hearts’ it strays (I think) into metaphor territory, some of it fantastically comic; potentially bombastic, pathetic, overdone. In good writing, amazing, in bad writing, a great deal of unintended entertainment. Old pulp fiction is a fine source. Alas, the best example I ever had was tragically lost in a kitchen swamping some years ago - I forget the title but this sentence ‘I felt a sitting duck’ has st

Me with my first yoga teacher, my Mum. Here we are up a mountain, typical us :-) Word History: The word yoga comes from Sanskrit yogaḥ, "yoking, joining together" and by extension "harnessing of one's mental faculties to a purpose" and thus "yoga." The Sanskrit word descends from the Indo-European root *yeug-, "to join, yoke." In the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, *yeug- developed into yuk-, represented in Old English by geoc, the ancestor of Modern English yoke. The root *yeug- is continued by words in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family, which indicates that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European used draft animals to pull their plows and draw their wagons. [American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.] ‘Whoever desires whatever ob

Xanthippe is by legend a nagging wife. Her contemporaries do not report this. Her husband, Socrates, is given words that when I read them stand as admirably commemorative: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me, the horse for me to own must show some spirit" (Her name means Yellow Horse.) It is said that once she followed up loud words by upending a chamber pot over the head of Socrates, to which he remarked, ‘after thunder comes the rain.’ It seems to me that this was a lively household: two strong minded parents, three young sons. (The chamberpot in other accounts is merely ‘washing water.’) I like the stride of the Yellow Horse, and catch a glint of amusement in those imagined eyes.