From the window. 7.30 am

Silence. Nothing moves. A thin layer of frost covers the gardens, rigid washing on the line, the sky the palest of ice-blues.

Suddenly, shockingly, a continuous cloud of steam escapes from a house where the gas boiler has been switched on.  Warmth and moisture, free and unchallenged, ever-mutating, meet a frozen world.

Someone else is awake. A diffuse yet clear and strong white light from the east.  Sun up. 

Friday

The honour crimes campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera has just been talking on Desert Island Discs about her life and her relationship with/estrangement from her family.  Extraordinary and moving, and I was caught up in her story of how fear and inflexibility can close hearts and what grace and forgiveness entail. Both, in their way, equally terrifying. She chose a couple of memorable tracks, too.  Losing My Religion by  REM and Moonshadow by Cat Stevens.  Blasts from the past.

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A chill wind still blows from the east, cutting through however many layers of clothing one happens to be wearing when venturing outside.  The birds seek shelter in the evergreen bush in the garden, only emerging for food when they must. Soup simmers in the stockpot in the kitchen and I have been comfortable in the armchair listening to the radio and admiring this week's daffodils in their vase.  After emotional storms yesterday, anxiety has retreated to low-tide level.  But it is lapping away on the horizon, too distant for me to hear this morning but I know it is there.  Ebb and flow. 

Lungwort

 noun

1a bristly herbaceous European plant of the borage family, typically having white-spotted leaves and pink flowers which turn blue as they age.

[so named because the leaves were said to have the appearance of a diseased lung]

Oxford Dictionary

 

In the garden the lungwort is flowering under stress. It has been ambushed by the weather, having been lulled into a false sense of optimism by the few relatively warm days we experienced earlier in the month.  I'm fond of it. I was given a couple of plants about five years ago and they've spread like wildfire.  With its mottled leaves and small, delicate heads of two-tone flowers it makes for great ground cover, plus it's hardy and resilient with a long flowering season.

I've some fellow feeling with the lungwort. It's been a rough couple of days spent folded up in the armchair with gut and back pain, wrapped in a duvet and drinking lots of water and hot ginger tea.  According to the naturopath the root cause of all this is dybiosis (the GP simply doled out repeat prescriptions for industrial strength antacids).  It will take time and persistence to crack.   I was in a bad way - worse than I realised at the time - in January when I started the treatment.  There has been improvement but flare-ups happen, and may well always do so to a degree.  Persistence is all.

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At almost a month in I'm glad to be blogging again. I'm doing it almost entirely for myself, which for me is the only genuine motivation, though I'm always delighted and appreciative when old and new commenters drop by. But if one person reads what I have written, that's enough; in the real world I'm not one for crowds.   It's becoming a lifeline, the writing and the photography, that I'm grabbing onto to haul myself back to what passes for a more normal existence. No, I don't have exciting or deep things to write about but that's not the point.  The point is that I'm doing it.  Practice.  Like the Buddhists. The way I was put to the piano as a child morning and evening to practise my scales. 

Most importantly of all, it's a way of stepping into the current of life, of sticking two fingers up to pain and weakness and all that goes with it.   Each post, each photograph taken, builds momentum. 

Colour and Warmth

On the third day of spring, when the sky is leaden and the slushy overnight snow is melting slowly and grudgingly and we are told by the news bulletins to take care because it will all freeze tonight and the roads will be treacherous and a wicked easterly wind straight from the Urals is forecast and power supplies may have to be rationed if this weather continues, I am hunting around for colour and warmth.

Candles help.  So do red peppers.

Contrast

 


Cardiff 2008.  The nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

A Victorian port, Cardiff, built on the coal from the valleys.  My grandfather was as Welsh as they come, born and bred here in the 1870s (this makes me feel really, really old), my grandmother an incomer from Devon, orphaned at age seven when she was packed off across the Bristol Channel to live with an aunt and uncle in the city.   Poor little mite.  She eventually became a teacher, met my grandfather and married him.

He was born into a large, bilingual working-class family, Welsh and English, but the Victorian education system was definitely not inclined to pander to wishy-washy notions of cultural identity.  English was the language of progress, of advancement and enlightenment.  Accordingly the children were forbidden to speak Welsh in school and punished if they did so, and eventually English took over their lives completely and, yes, he did indeed advance, got a good job and after the First World War moved his family to London.  Yet he returned to his origins, to Cardiff, with his second wife when he retired.  In his eighties he did try to relearn his lost mother tongue.  Too late, perhaps, he couldn't do it.

As I recall he disapproved of much of the modern world - pop music, football players - but he'd be surprised and delighted at how much of the Welsh language there is around the place in 2013. 

Waiting

The back is a bit stronger; the camera has been dusted off; the new PC/printer installed, and there's been a totally satisfying decluttering of my little office. I'm doing more. 

But decades of comfort eating and stress have caught up with me of late, brought to a head by the last three years of opiate painkillers for the back and glucose energy drinks.  Plus a couple of courses of antibiotics for good measure.  Grappling with some horribly tenacious digestive issues and a very inflamed and temperamental gut which triggers migraine-like headaches.  (If you're reading this and you're prone to both stress and overdoing the sugar, don't be like me and think it won't catch up with you ).  The positive news: I've been able to stop the painkillers and hospital tests show nothing dramatically nasty in the stomach.  So for now I'm  living on good quality protein, home made chicken bone broth as recommended by the naturopath I'm seeing, and lots of vegetables, probably the healthiest diet I've been on since mother's milk.   And vitamin supplements plus a probiotic at night. No sugar. No yeast.  No grain.

There has been improvement. But it's taking a long time.  Some days (quite a few actually) are distinctly yukky.

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Three weeks of Mercury retrograde finishes this coming Sunday, so maybe more of a sense of movement.   Looking forward to spring. 

Flowers. Daffodils - pale cream this week.   They come to my door each Saturday during the season with the online groceries.  Last week's were an intense egg-yolk yellow, standing straight and resolute in their blue vase.

   
Taken a few years ago, this one.  National Museum of Wales coffee shop, Cardiff.