Stroll

Ah, sun again; the rain has been non-stop for three days. Red chestnut glows against the blue sky. A single swan, wings whistling, flies low overhead as I made my way to the river.

I stand aside on the narrow path to let a stocky young woman power-walker in a brown sweatshirt and her cocker spaniel overtake me.  These days I'm slow.  I walk, I stroll, I meander.  I no longer stride out and I certainly don't power-walk.  In typical British fashion we smile vaguely, slightly embarrassed, and avoid direct eye contact. 

Today's goal is the large white stone to the side of the path.  Done. Not far now to the gate that leads into the field.   Thus is progress is measured.  As I turn back, two canoeists can be glimpsed through the trees, their voices surprisingly loud across the water.  They don't see me.  The river, brown, fast and swollen carries them swiftly on.

On the way home, foxgloves in my favourite garden.

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The face pain is turning from a sharp nerve pain into a nasty, throbbing, torn ligament-type ache.  Intermittent thankfully. And here I must put in a plug for the  Do-It-Yourself-Joint-Pain-Relief.com website.    I've been following instructions for jaw, neck and upper back pain.   The techniques don't cure the ligament pain of course, that would be unrealistic.  But they loosen things up in the surrounding area and sometimes turn the pain volume down and, as importantly, take away some of the feeling of helplessness.  Doing something is good therapy in itself.  (If this were an astrology blog I would mention that Mars is currently in my 1st House and moving oh so slowly!)

Green

Mist morphed into a soft and gentle rain on the morning walk (or should I say "very tentative stroll"  - still can't get used to being outside and mobile on my own two feet).  A neighbour's lichen-covered fence and shrubbery provides a kaleidescope of shades of green for the delectation and delight of anyone who cares to notice.

Ending

The first signs of decay show that this season's work is almost complete. Still so beautiful though in the early morning sunlight.

Decluttering

A good day.  More energy.  Major decluttering in the kitchen, the logic being while I'm sorting out my digestive system in the spirit of fengshui why not spring clean the surroundings as well and maybe help things along. Deeply embarrassing to discover so many food items in the cupboards that were way past their sell-by dates. I mean two or three years. Mainly stuff in tins and packets.  So they go on the compost or into the bin. I hate throwing food out but it's got to be done and the streamlined shelves and cupboards are now a joy to behold.

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I've recently discovered Ann Cleeves and her northern detective stories and I'm hooked.  Brain fog means that of late crime fiction is pretty much all I can focus on, and she is very good. 

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The silver birch sways languidly in the fresh north-west breeze and the evening sun warms the brickwork. The horse chestnut is clothed in a pale green mist, not yet leaves but no longer buds. Dandelions, daisies and forget-me-nots have sprung up on the lawn. I'm happy to see them all, even the dandelions.  No, especially the dandelions - there's something so cussed and undaunted and cheerful about them, as if they know they're not always welcome and they don't care.

Like I said, a good day. It finally feels like spring.

Bedtime

Prompted by Dale's recent post:


I think of my father particularly at this time of the year. He died in April over a decade ago, during the bluebell season.

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I was eleven years old and heading towards a difficult adolescence, my sister, L, around one year. At her bedtime and because she insisted, my father - in his late forties by now - would carry her around the living room, moving from picture to picture, object to object, stopping briefly at each.

Goodnight ships (in front of a picture) ... goodnight other ships ... goodnight table ... goodnight trees ... goodnight window.

During the ritual my sister clutched her favourite stuffed toy, a koala bear. The pronounciation defeated her. The rest of the family followed her lead and called it Kayola.

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He was at his best with babies and very small children: something tense and taut unwound and his defences lowered a fraction to display a quiet tenderness. He would have doted on grandchildren almost certainly, but neither L nor I were cut from a conventional nor a maternal cloth.


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Our relationship feels easier at this distance. I struggled. So did he. The difficulties - there were a lot - matter less, his integrity and humour matter more.

Green corn

On this misty, rainy morning we climbed a hill ...

and walked through the bluebell woods ...



... and along a leyline and passed a church and two dogs and their owners and marvelled at the bluebells and the cornflowers and the pink campions and the rape (ugh, hate that word but the fields are shockingly, wonderfully yellow) and the red soil. And against the red soil the green, young green wheat, green woodlands. In the field, larks rose around us, singing.





A verse from the John Masefield hymn came to mind

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn
and thou wilt bring the young green corn
the young green corn divinely springing
the young green corn for ever singing.






Echoes of long ago school assemblies. Horrible, I hated my schooldays but on this particular morning the angst has faded and I'm not going to quibble about the religious theme. Masefield, the avid reader, seafarer and eventual Poet Laureate, was a local lad: he knew about red soil. And it is a beautiful poem ....

... the laughter of holy white birds flying after

On this hill, the parliamentarian armies laid siege to our royalist city in the valley below over four centuries ago. The men were so hungry they ate the cider apples in the orchards and the potatoes and robbed the farmhouses of bread and towards the end in extremis resorted to eating acorns. Difficult to imagine today in all this greenery and lushness. Indeed, the land is almost too perfectly cared for, too well manicured: wild flowers flourish along the lanes, no pesticides on these verges, no litter that I could see. A mystery solved when the landowner's name is spotted on a notice. Enough to convert one into a present-day royalist.



The hardest part of the walk was the last part, climbing the hill for the second time. A steep, hard pull. Near the summit we rested on a log on the edge of the wood in silence for five minutes or so. The field in front of us rose steeply, the line of the horizon curved like a giant's back recumbent against the sky. Raindrops on leaves. The moist smell of earth. The harsh call of a pheasant. The distant murmur of traffic, faint but just discernible. I hadn't wanted to come out this morning, had something on my mind, hadn't wanted to see anyone. Yet growing older, I have learned from experience that I don't always know what's good for me and consequently can be persuaded. By people I trust, by an uncertain yet stubborn faith in the apparently random flow of life.




"Shall we go?" my companion asks. We head for the car. Next stop, the house and a late lunch.

...

The shoulder still stiffens when I spend too long here at the computer. I overdid it on Friday and it took thirty six hours for the pain to subside. Thank god that nothing is obligatory in the blogosphere. Short posts, long posts. Whatever works. Right now, photographic posts seem to fit the bill. I love taking photographs and it's easier on the body than writing.

Misrule (Updated)

"It's a three day visit by the Lord of Misrule", someone who should know tells me. "All bets are off.".

He's talking about the May Fair, which has just ended. Apparently a fair has been held here in one form or another since 1100-and-something, and it almost certainly originated as a pagan celebration that the church was canny enough to take under its wing.

These days though it's nothing more than a gigantic funfair. Now I'm used to such things in allocated, contained areas - parks, fields, open spaces, whatever - generally out of town and well away from the real world of offices and public buildings. But the fair rolls into the centre of our town and just takes it over.

The main streets are closed to traffic: big wheels and dodgems, roundabouts and burger bars, candy floss and helter-skelters - often strung out the length of a road in a long narrow line - replace the usual cars. Locals grumble about the consequent traffic jams and dearth of parking spaces and even on the outskirts you hear the distant thump-thump of the music. Squeezing past the hordes of parents and excited children, the groups of teenagers, you go about your business on the way to work or shop, step over unnervingly large electricity cables and enjoy the crackling energy and excitement of it all. But there's also a jittery nervousness in the air and the noise can be deafening.




The rides start around lunchtime so the early morning is relatively peaceful. The sacred provides a backdrop to the secular.

By mid afternoon the crowds arrive and the action will continue well into the night, when things really warm up. People travel here for miles, from way across country.

"Look at the faces", says my local friend.

Rides soar above the throng of pedestrians, dwarfing the cathedral skyline ...

... just yards away from banks, solicitors offices and GPs' surgeries. Heaven knows how all this is squared with current Health & Safety legislation.

In my own life during these three days there were two unexpected events - one tantalisingly agreeable, the second less so. Upheaval and catharsis.

Maybe it's easier if you work with Misrule, or Chaos, when he comes to visit. He's not necessarily an enemy.

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Although I didn't like it for writing purposes, I've a smidgin of nostalgia for the template of my previous blog which allowed larger photographs. It's really, really worth clicking the photos to enlarge.

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Update: More photos of the fair on Flickr.

R & R

Bank holiday weekend. I've changed plans and stayed close to home, mainly out of fatigue. Intermittently I've gardened, cleaned house and pottered. The last weeks at work have been difficult. Much distress and upheaval, not involving me directly but the cumulative effect has been draining. Until recently I've enjoyed this job: the organisation's work ethos is an excellent one and the people are more than compatible. In fact they've been a gift, which makes it worse. One day the acceptance will come that this is how life is sometimes.

Early morning. In my dressing gown I take a cup of tea outside and sit on the patio. It rained during the night and the paving stones are still damp, the sky heavy and overcast. The temperature is comfortably warm: for the last few days - the first time this year - there's been no temptation to switch on the heating. Daisies and dandelions have sprung up overnight on the lawn, scatterings of white and gold, and the scent of the blossom from the next door neighbour's fruit trees permeates the morning to the point of sensory overload. I sit back and try to disentangle the threads of birdsong: blackbird and thrush are simple, the rest need work.

That evening I go to take out the scraps for the compost. The blue crocs - kept outside for garden wear - have been comandeered.

Blossom and Bicycles

Early blossom. Yellow celandine and the bruised blue of grape hyacinth. Greenfinches dart and flutter in the branches of the rowan tree in the garden. Exhausted relationships morph into shapes I'd never imagined because truth will always, always out. Yet it doesn't do to give up on love and joy. On warmth and tenderness and touch. How could I? Something close to elation is tracking the footsteps of loss.

It still feels strange to be alone in my mid-fifties, without partner or children. I am an anomaly, in spite of all those futile efforts when I was young to blend in. (There's nothing wrong with blending in per se providing you don't do as I once did and make it your life's purpose). I ponder the seeming inevitabilities and conditioning that have led to this point, what - if any - gifts of mine are needed by the planet and whether it's time to stop dying my hair to cover (or blend in as the blurb on the packet says) the grey. I enjoy the town and the job - its ethos and people - and fret over balancing my budget in this low-wage county.

The days slip by smoothly one by one. Impossible to decipher the bigger picture, how the pieces of a life fit together. Uncertainty is what makes living such a whacky business, and it's all ridiculously transitory. Fossils have been found in the fields where we walked a few weeks ago - those hills once formed part of an ocean floor. And there's a place locally where you can book an environmentally friendly burial plot with a tree as a gravemarker. I'm a little surprised at my own pleasure at this discovery. Silver birch perhaps, with sweeping branches that are never totally still? Or a lime tree, for the heady scent of the blossom on a summer's evening?

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A friend tells me on the telephone that the real high point of her life to date was not meeting her lover. Nor giving birth to her daughter.

It was, she says, learning to ride a bicycle as a little girl one morning on a dirt track in East Africa, the day her father finally took his steadying hand off the saddle. Short chubby legs pushing down on the pedals, picking up speed in the hot, dry air, the shock of the realisation - one that she could never have articulated that day - that it was possible to break through limitations, to fly out free into the wide world.

I've rarely heard her voice so certain and joyful. As she talks she's back on the bicycle again.