Transitional

As I write, a car with three brightly-coloured canoes on its roof rack, red, orange and blue, is parking in the little car park beyond our garden and our lane. Rain is falling like it never means to stop, so it may yet be that the canoes are needed. We don't like this weather round here after the summer we had, and I have the environment agency website open to check for flood alerts, none as yet. Well, on our river yes, but not in our part of the valley.

In between now. Two weeks' holiday, slightly more, before I start the new job. And oh, I do need it. Tired. Yesterday I left my job with the HIV charity and shared Christmas lunch with my colleagues and Secret Santa (oh no not another scented candle), the whole bit. And a very kind farewell gift of a  voucher for a wonderful jewellery shop in town, only recently reopened after the floods in June and July. I shall have a lovely time choosing something which will remind me of this time of transition (turquoise?)

Enjoying home right now more than I can quite express. It feels like a kind of heaven to me. The twinkling Christmas tree lights, the glow of lamp light, the wood burner, good food and drink, being quietly with L, reading, listening to music. There are even a few presents under the tree though I am not sure how they got there...

Now And Then

Now and then a meme - but not for ages, so thanks Zhoen for sharing.


1. Do you have a favorite blanket, or other bit of fabric? Please describe.

No but I have a blankety bunny. She's a grey felt bunny around five inches tall, sewn with blanket stitch, and with pink wool whiskers, one of a 'blanketeers' series the Manhattan Toy Company did years ago and L gave her to me in my Christmas stocking. I know you're going to want me to post a photograph.


2. Do you take good care of your feet? In what way, or not as the case may be?

Hmm. L sometimes rubs foot lotion into them or heel cream. And she sometimes paints my toenails in the summer. Me, I just wash them in the bath, cut their nails, and put socks and shoes on them. And most importantly slippers.


3. What is your comfort food? Just something easy when you are tired or not feeling well?

Boiled egg and toast 'soldiers' or 'people waiting at the bus-stop' as L and I dubbed them years ago. That's for feeling poorly. Spaghetti bolognese is and always was the ultimate comfort food when I'm well.


4. What is your favorite aggregate website? Or, news, or webcomic?

What's an aggregate website?


5. Do you have any small skill, like braiding or pen flipping or whistling?

Flipping beer mats. Learned it as a student. You never forget. Mind you I used to do nine at a time...


6. What is the most beautiful sort of dog or cat to you? Please describe.

My brother's lurcher, Jet, now deceased. Black. Fast. Sweet, with one ear that crumpled while the other stood up.


7. Are your hands generally cold or warm?

Cool.


8. If you see someone at work (or in public) napping, do you want to cover them with a blanket, or tie their shoe laces together?

Check they are not dead.


9. Name a tv show, movie or book that you love, that most people you know have never heard of. Have you recommended it to anyone who then wasn't interested?

Black Books, Orlando, The Beet Queen, for one of each. Surprised when people haven't heard of them, but interested as far as I remember (or making a good show of it).


10. You can have the original of any piece of art, what would you want on your wall?

Howard Hodgkin's Rain.


11. You are getting a good massage from a therapist you trust, what is the best bit?

God it's years since I had a massage. It's the trust that's hard.


Tagging Signs and Lucy if you're in the mood.

Phoenix Rising

All the summer sunshine we never had arrives now to make the frost sparkle and show us exactly how dirty our windows are. Except now it's low in the sky, making driving a squinty challenge, the sun itself in your eyes, its reflection bouncing up at you from the wet dark road surface, and it only lets you feel its warmth in very still, very sheltered situations. And it only rises over Cock Hill after eight o'clock and disappears away behind Mitchell Brothers' Mill before half past four.

It is a difficult time of the year. Ice and darkness, the cold, the possibility of snow and the chaos it can bring. And then all the seasonal illnesses that are coursing about the valley, one landing in the usually healthy body of L, now in bed knitting and listening to the radio for the fourth day. Nameless virus, making her cough and feel weary, making her brain mushy and her spirits low. I make cups of tea, hot water bottles and hot meals (she hasn't lost her appetite).

I'm busy leaving one job and anticipating starting another. A meeting at the school tomorrow. Fog forecast, yet another seasonal driving hazard. I shall be glad to return to make the whole thing more real, meet my manager and new colleagues properly away from the tension of the interview. And get some initial questions answered. Then another three weeks til I actually start. What this job means after three years living hand to mouth, slowly building back my confidence, slowly rising from the ashes of the horrible-corporate-style-charity job and what those fools did to me, what it means is gradually sinking in at all levels. Has not been lost on the small and frightened child inside me, who has been back-flipping into freak-out and fury at the prospect of taking so much responsibility, of growth and challenge and change, and going further away (literally and metaphorically) from the safety of home. Yes there are still hot embers amongst the ashes. Gradually managing to soothe her, and to let her know that though she was frightened once, she does not need to be frightened now. Though she felt the world could never be good again, in fact I mean to show her that it can, and will hold her in my heart, while I do the grown-up stuff, the driving and the working and the being responsible and bring her out to have fun together when I can.

Sub-Zero

It isn't as if there are many options in the end... but today I set out on my walk the opposite way round from usual... because of the presence of ice, and my preference for ascending rather than descending an icy slope. I set out with my walking pole, up the lane in the wind, snow moving stealthily into the valley all the while. No one in the field, not the mole catcher and his dog, not the bent old man in the sack-coloured overcoat, who always seems to be burying something. Cows and calves, black and white, pigs in the mud, horses in the top fields. In the icy wind I wonder again how they stay warm, how they keep from perishing in sub-zero temperatures. What is the secret of their hide, their hair that they don't need a vest, a t shirt, a jumper, a cardigan, a quilted jacket, a scarf, a hat, gloves, socks and boots? Ice is thick and doesn't yield to the tapping of my stick. I edge around the treacherous tongue of ice that lolls down the wet part of the lane, so carefully surfaced to prevent it once again being washed out by flood waters, surfaced black, shiny and smooth, the perfect setting for an ice slick. No dog at the farm at the top to frighten me but the wind is howling as if to portend the end of the world, and I tell myself I've seen too many films, wonder how my experience of the world would be different had I never been to the cinema...

What

What if today's not easy? What if I cry? What if it's sleeting? What if I don't feel like working? What if I climb back into bed, inside a cocoon of duvet, and sleep? What if I can't function from an adult part of myself? What if I act out, rebel, behave irresponsibly? What if I hate the person I love? What if next door's dog is barking? What if all I ever want to do is light the fire and wear pyjamas? What if there's no rescue party, no compensation, no allowances made, no acknowledgement ever that I was once a little girl spinning in an abyss?

Lost Weekend

Found myself in the miasma of vertigo on waking yesterday morning, and have spent much of the weekend asleep or sitting in front of the wood burner. I still can't lie on my back, and bending down isn't much fun either, but generally easing and enough energy returned for a gentle walk round the village green this afternoon. Weird experience to sleep most of the day and most of the night yesterday, in little sections, peppered with fragments of dream.

I am now wearing 'proper' clothes instead of pyjamas and dressing gown, though the comfiest kind, track pants and my cosy cardigan that's almost a cut-off dressing gown, accompanied by my favourite cowl knitted by L.

We went out to dinner on Friday night to celebrate the new job, at our favourite restaurant, Gimbal's in Sowerby Bridge. The taxi driver who took us and brought us home was the very same one who took us to the pub in town the night of the floods, so we swapped some interesting tales with him. All other plans have been cancelled, including friends coming to dinner last night (the braising steak's in the freezer), visiting open studios locally, and going to my monthly sacred song group. I feel no regret for any of these. I have had no appetite for anything but sitting by the fire with a good pile of logs, the sudoku, and an occasional bowl of soup.

Lights

The sky is losing its pink stripes as darkness falls. Ice has arrived, accompanied by glorious sunshine these last two days.

I think we should only have Christmas every two years. I am never ready for another one after a year. The Christmas tunes in the shops make me want to lie on the floor. I am sure it has all been said before, but I can't really bear this Capitalism-fest any more. I like the tree and the turkey, I like fairy lights and candles and some time off. The rest you can keep.

It really is almost dark, and there are still lights on in the school, where someone lingers, marking books and keeping company the kids with working parents, til they turn up to collect them. And there are streetlights and carlights.

Last night we had the Valley of Lights parade and festival in town. A little flavour of handmade parade in Winter. Plus a shadow performance of the tale of the summer floods and the town's recovery from them, featuring a sort of phoenix-heron rising from the soggy wreckage. It felt part of a very ancient tradition of making stories and plays and songs about local events, and was infinitely preferable to BBC news coverage.

Real

Mean

We bring in logs in the dry times between the rain and wind. Some are split, their pale inner wood revealed, some are round, their circumference still intact, lengths of branch sawn across. We stack them to wait beside the wood burner. We light the fire after dark, and tend it until we go to bed.

Parsley in a pot on the windowsill, beside a beautiful jug, terracotta and blue and yellow and white, glazed with patterns that seem to have begun life as stripes, that were teased into wiggles somehow (I don't know how). A birthday present.

There seems to be something hidden in the shaft of sunlight illuminating the pale throw over the sofa arm, and my red bag. How our minds search always for meaning.

Wild

I got the job!

Bitter experience has, as most of you know, made me very cagey of saying much here about my work life. However what I will say is hurrah! And I start in January, so time for rearranging my head and my life as necessary.

No time for more now, except to say a wild wind is blowing up here! Noisy and inclined to pick up objects not adequately weighty to stay on the ground.

Limbo

Not then and not now, a kind of inbetween place where the dark comes down and the birthday flowers are still rich reds and golds though they are dying, though their water is slimey, and at last I take down the cards and fold them inside one another. Limbo limbo between futures, only this moment can ever be certain. Maybe. Yes, the dark comes down and down and the sun moves out of Scorpio into Sagittarius, from sun to moon in my natal chart, which feels strangely auspicious.

On The Train Home

He's getting a new front door. Thank God!

The train is a sanctuary.

A blind man's guide dog, wet with rain, wears a label saying please don't distract me - I am working. The ticket man tickles his/her chin each time he passes.

Still, the train is a sanctuary, and warm too after waiting half an hour for a delayed train on a cold and windy platform, in preference to a hard and smelly waiting room full of tense people whose train is delayed. I have warmed up now, but it's taken hours to get through to my bones.

Yes, I am home, which is the best sanctuary of all. London brought blessings and trials both. Learning, connection and brightness, also panic, sleeplessness and exhaustion.

Helter Skelter

Rather a lot going on one way and another. My ultrasound results came back and the receptionist told me the doctor had written on the report normal, no further action required. Relief. Sense of weight lifting, new lease of life. Then the next day an email inviting me for an interview at the girls' school next Wednesday. Good news, but stirs up all kinds of anxiety and complicated feelings I have to take care of....

My uncle will be home from hospital tomorrow, with a whole new set of challenges for him and my aunt, in a house with many steps outside and in. But at least he can get something he likes to eat.

And now... tomorrow I'm off to London, where I shall briefly visit my sister and family, go to a training day about doing therapy with children and young people (the main purpose of the trip), visit old friend K, and then go to visit my mother, also briefly. Back Monday to catch breath before the interview.

Seeya.

Uneasy

My uncle fell over in the cellar and broke his hip and thigh. Has had an operation involving a rod or a pin or some such and is still in hospital. My mother, his sister, worries, feels helpless and cannot entirely remember the details.

I attended the hospital for a pelvic ultrasound scan this morning. The one where you must have a full bladder so they can see your womb and ovaries through a sort of urine-filled window! My bladder was not full enough first time around, despite following instructions to drink a pint and a half of liquid an hour before, so back to the waiting room to drain cup after cup of water from the cooler (too cool - tea would have been nicer but not on offer). Half an hour later I was 'filled' and the ultrasound woman's warmth and responsiveness more than made up for the cold water and the wait. I have little reason to fear the results, yet the fact I was even there makes me uneasy until they arrive, hopefully middle of next week.

I have applied for a job, counselling in a girls' high school, and am waiting to hear if I have got an interview. Waiting longer than I anticipated, and there's an unease in this too. I so much more than meet all their criteria I was sure they'd interview me. Now a little worm of doubt nibbling.

It's raining today. Dark at five and the outside world is shut out behind the curtains for 15 hours a day. A sense of entering a tunnel. We always come out the other side don't we?

Wordless Wednesday

Firework

The wooden stick and unfurling wrapper of a rocket, yellow, blue and red, float in a puddle. Standard the little logo in the corner.

Celebrated

Fireworks that made me laugh so much the tears ran cold down my face under a sky full of stars. Danced my legs down to the knees in front of the wood burner. Sweaty and joyful. A roomful of friends.

Walk

Standing in the mud on the valley side, I look down at white water falling over rocks. Red leaves above and below. Friends in front and behind.

50

About 45 years ago. The girl in the hand-knitted cardigan with the brass buttons, on a beach, in Wales.

And today she wears badges saying 50 and Fantastic and Looking Good, eats chocolate cake baked by her wife, and enjoys a large vase of wonderful autumnal flowers. The cake candles are now stuck around the head of yesterday's carved pumpkin, a little melted but still spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

She is grateful.

She says yes.

Hallowe'en

Autumn becomes the Howgills. This is Smardale.

 And this is a very dog-like sheep.

And this a very dead one.

Birthday Break

Bags are packed, a stack of books, a stash of food and drink, a pen filled with ink and two notebooks (poetry and non-poetry), camera, six kinds of footwear, woolly hats, gloves, scarves. Only going to the Howgills and only for four days, but one likes to be well-equipped. There's a wood burner in our cottage so all will be well.

Who's Gonna Hold My Heart?

Been driving around for four years listening to this album. It's kind of my private soundtrack.

 

Decision

Building up to the birthday and on holiday now for 10 days. The colours of the leaves are so strong this year they seem at times to generate light, especially in the mist - was it the wet summer? I stand and stare at long orange grasses, pink yellow and green willow herb, deep red-chestnut-brown there is no word for in the trees down in the valley of Hebden Water amongst the more familiar yellow, gold and fading green. I feel them in my chest, breathe them in in in.

Happy-sad-happy-sad-happy-sad. So happy and so sad. The past is gone gone gone. There is only now, and the old selves I carry with me need me to love them, really really love them, along with my now self. Love them and tell them that it can be different now. But that is up to me and nobody else. Day by day I am making this decision.

West Yorkshire Today

The day was perfectly still, perfectly clear, the light bright gold. The colours of the trees, of the willow herb, of the bilberry, of the grasses on the tops, a palette of gold, ochre, mustard and peach. Mud still sucking the welly-booted foot in a dark porridge. Stone dry, grey, green with mosses and lichens. Distant sheep small pale shapes against green. Wind turbines motionless. A robin singing on a high branch.

I Love Poetry Workshops

So, today, a masterclass with Moniza Alvi at the Ilkley Literature Festival on the theme of the adventure of poetry. Intense two hours full of leaps and excitement.

This is not from the class, but afterwards.

It begins to rain and a little wind
lifts the clematis and the rose
on the wall as if to see what's underneath,
turns the brave October flower's face to the stones
and holds it there like a shirt turned inside out
on a bouncing washing line.

Quietly, small drips of rain splash lengths
of wet down the window at an angle of
maybe forty-five degrees.

Protractors and set squares with broken points
in a grubby pencil case,
on long afternoons when life seemed shut out
behind tall windows
you could only open with a hook on a pole,
when rain ran straight down in parallel lines
and the wind howled in the green downpipe
on the wall outside the classroom.

Years of that - sitting on hard square chairs
at ink-stained desks with heavy lids, watching
the weather, watching the clock, watching the white-shirted
back of the girl in front, watching a teacher in tweed
with chalky fingers, watching
and wondering how this and the future joined up.

Day Is Done

Keep Believing

in the straight parallel stems of cyclamens, the swept-back petals
in the riot of colour of every dying leaf and not just trees but willow herb and bilberry, and the fading flowers of the heather
in tomorrow in tomorrow in tomorrow
in the possibility of poetry
in nothing staying the same
in moods not staying the same
in pain not staying the same

that the fire will light
that everything is in some fundamental sense alright
that things can get better and are getting better
that happiness is actually possible

even probable

My Day Today

a response to Signs

mist
sun
egg
shower
walk
horses
colours
notebook
room
windows
birds
leaves
sun
singing
chants
stillness
hugs
tea
woodburner

Things I Can Say

It's all getting better overall, in tiny steps, and sometimes in great leaps, and sometimes there are days when it doesn't feel like it at all.

Today is one of them.

I was once a small girl in a very soft hand-knitted cardigan with brass buttons, which brought me much comfort. (I mean both the buttons and the cardigan, as it goes.)

That girl is very close to my heart and I feel her pain still. Only I can comfort her.

I slept badly last night, uncertain sometimes if I'd been awake for hours or only moments, but awake much for sure.

My mother likes her wheelchair, the sunshine it allows her to feel, the view it allows her to look at, (though she thinks I push her too fast...) And her food, and white lilies and me.

My mother is slowing down.

Chair

So no flooding this time, blessed be. I am heading south on the big train today to visit my mother again. I shall learn to push her in her new wheelchair. She can still walk around the flat with her pusher, but it is hard work for her over any distance - this way we can get out for a stroll together and I can take her to the restaurant and bar in the retirement village - all of which she misses. It feels to me like a moment to notice, and which I expect to feel odd or sad. But I'll let you know. And tomorrow morning I shall take a stroll in the town of my childhood, and get some shopping in.

What If

Lilies

Wind and fire and sadness.
The shed roof nailed down
by me. Hammer in hand today
surprising myself in competence.
More rain and the spectre of the floods
goes with us into a new season.
A pot of white lilies scents the room.

Equinox

And we tip into autumn. A golden day and we have drunk tea in the garden. Tomorrow we are building a shed!

Patti pics have been delayed indefinitely as K doesn't know how to download them from her new phone and is busy busy busy. Before any more time elapses, I'll leave you with this review which I couldn't better. The evening still glows in my memory. Singing along at the top of my voice, along with the other 189 happy people in the crowd to Because the Night, she holding out the mike to us and smiling like a loving big sister, is something I won't forget. We have been incredibly blessed that Patti came and sang and talked and read to so few of us. She was clearly smitten with our town and the Bronte and Plath connections, and promised to return next spring. Late to catch on to her awesomeness, I am now a full and evangelical convert.

Patti Pending

I am waiting for K to email me photographs of Patti Smith at the Trades Club on Saturday night so I can post about it. Until then I can only say I was about 15 feet away from her, and she was and is beautiful, brilliant, warm and witty.

Hepworth

We went to visit the the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield on Wednesday. I loved the building, the way it seems to emerge out of the River Calder, feels surrounded by moving water, a massive weir just nearby, warehouse buildings and boats its near neighbours. And the gallery spaces are filled with natural light from wonderful tall windows, each of which is set slightly out from the wall, so that you can step half a step further into the view, almost feel that you are going to walk out onto the water. A wonderful collection of Barbara Hepworth sculptures, as well as her tools, letters, photographs and other artefacts. Fascinating, but in the end her work did not move us in the way that Henry Moore, her contemporary sculptor does. There is also an exciting collection of modern painting and sculpture, with many works by artists who lived and worked in St Ives as Hepworth did. The Hepworth also has a good cafe, which we visited twice...

Grow

And there will be other things. The map wearing out at the creases. The summer dying a quiet death, having had a quiet wet life. We are here. Still here, listening to Patti Smith who entirely miraculously comes to grace our tiny gig venue in our diminutive town next Saturday. And yes, we have tickets. We feel autumn's chill and complain, but autumn is my soul's home and my 50th year on this planet is approaching its end and all I can be is grateful grateful very grateful for 50. I am helped in so many ways by my fellow travellers, and lurch back and forth in my growing, but grow I do.

Who

Yup, the mundanity of existence, the wonderful terrible mundanity of tables and chairs, buses and trains, beds, baths, ovens, cats, pavements, postmen, shopping trolleys, gas bills. And this this this sense of curtains being slowly opened, slowly slowly, to let in the light and to reveal a whole world out there. This sense of waking up from a dream - a long long dream - still sleepy, still confused about which is the dream and which reality...

And one of the things that is woken up to is the possibility, the inevitability, the exigency even of loving myself the way I want to be loved. That this and only this will do. The dream of someone finally loving me completely, unconditionally, seamlessly, with consummate understanding, patience, skill, appreciation. Get it? Do you get it now? It's your job - it's you that's been appointed. Everyone else failed at the interview stage or certainly after the probation period. Only you stayed on, only you stuck it out, only you finally got the hang of the job, understood the requirements of the JD, and began to, as they say, deliver... And do you see now how peerlessly well-qualified you are for this position? No-one else knows you the way you do. No-one else has been here every step of the goddam journey, every faltering footstep, every impetuous leap, every shuffle in the dark. Been with you, seen it all, survived the blows, forgiven the eye-watering mistakes, accepted it all and still stayed on for more. Stayed on finally to start work on the real task of being your own unshakeable champion, undaunted supporter, generous appreciater, number one looker after, kindest companion, oldest lover, fondest friend, sweetest soulmate. Who else could possibly do it?

Knitted

For rr - knitted vegetables, a knitted bee skep, a knitted woman of leaves, knitted flowers at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax. (Photographs taken with my mobile phone so small and poor quality.)

Home

Sweet peas in a vase on the table, calla lily, orchid, basil, coriander in pots on the windowsill. Outside a jackdaw on the post office chimney, the bus rattling past. A book about insects, a book about bees, and L's knitting on the table, two diaries, a pair of binoculars, a phone. The bath water suddenly released and slooshing down the drain outside the open back door. I'm back from two days with my mother and trying to get grounded, and reconnect with home. Now I shall go and cook pasta with bacon, vegetables and cheese sauce, the ultimate comfort food.

Observations

On the last day of July

it is cold, the sky covered with white and grey cloud, the forecast for heavy rain this afternoon
the honeysuckle in the garden is blooming dark and pale pink, but sadly scentless
the sparrows are feeding their second brood inside the old burglar alarm bell on the wall just outside our bedroom
cows and calves in the fields around, all different shades and combinations of brown and cream, they stare as I walk past
the bees keep swarming and disappearing even when they have been artificially swarmed - full hive, empty hive, hunt the queen... all this I am learning from a distance, but L is now a fully fledged bee handler

August looms when everyone goes away, especially my therapist.

Days

There are days when there doesn't seem to be an inner structure holding it all together, nor a way to find one. When it all seems to have disintegrated, making any kind of approach to life uncertain at best. I think you could say I am slowly revisiting all those days. Some of them at moments of crisis, traumatic events, shocks, some of them the longer-term effects of those moments. Collapse, depression, grief. Also revisiting the inner world I inhabited when I had to know but not know devastating truths, the complicated and necessary strategies adopted to survive being lied to for a long time. Denial, dissociation, undoing, reaction formation. These the technical terms, for how we try not to know about what threatens our sense of safety, not to feel what seems unmanageable, how we make things just not have happened in our minds, and how we sometimes adopt the exact opposite attitude from the inwardly true but impossible-to-live-with one.

I truly believe that this process will help me to have more choice, to have a clearer sense of myself, my perceptions and feelings, to disentangle myself from the knots of futile repetition, to have more energy for now. Of course I do, I'm a therapist myself for god's sake. But at the moment I have at least one foot most of the time in various parts of the past, my heart is aching, I cry, rage, drink and mourn. My dearest wish is to be taken care of, my greatest challenge taking care of myself.

And the rain is back. Though it's a kinder rain. Not so cold, not so hard, not so relentless, and interspersed with sunshine sparkling the drops.

L has gone to see how the rain looks on Liverpool, and hopefully the sunlight too.

Short

Here

Petals drop onto the table from pink geranium flowers. With hyssop and nigella, alchemilla and perennial sweet pea, in a vase to honour our 24th anniversary yesterday.

A huge and ineffable sense of grief and longing.

M the builder, our next door but one neighbour, comes round to look at the leaking downpipe, tells L he'd like to keep bees if he had space.

Another mouse has died, so I'm using the laptop's hated mouse pad.

Evening sun despite met office severe weather warnings again.

I feel like I might be getting a cold. That prickle deep inside the nose.

My young client full of excitement, her life extending ahead of her.

Nothing is missing. Everything is here.

Pursued

Who I was
in the garden alone
in crepe-soled sandals
under a vastness of sky,
running as if from an assailant
as fast as I could up the lawn
under the canopy of the weeping ash,
throwing myself to my knees
at the edge of an empty flowerbed.

Who I was then
going dumbly into the house,
the wound in my knee
gaping and bleeding.

Down

What the lane was made of
bits of brick slant and broken
stones from the moor
stones from the town
gravel and mud and so many
vintages of asphalt
broken all broken now
the layers revealed
in deep crevasses
all the way down
to the wet silt at the bottom
jagged edges beside the verge
you can barely shuffle along
lumps and clods of millstone grit
all thrown out of the spaces
they were placed there to fill
holes and gaps cracks and rifts
all washed out like fillings
from teeth all gone down
down and on down
scattered wildly
spewing from the ends of lanes
tidemarks of gravel and mud
on the corners where the brown water
turned down towards the flood plain
down towards the level
down

Saturated

Monday's events have knocked me sideways and I shall be retiring to bed with a hot water bottle soon. Delayed shock and the after effects of a lot of anxiety seem to have rendered me exhausted.

The link will tell you the story. We are up high here just beneath the saturated moors, and as the heaviest and fastest rain we've seen yet descended for four hours, fast-moving torrents poured down through our village, washing out semi-made lanes and scattering mud and stones of all sizes, flooding the pub and some houses, and a little way down the hill the house of some friends - water simply cascaded through. They had no choice but to open the back door to let it in, the front to let it out. Later L and I helped mop up and move possessions and take out the sodden carpet. On went the water, down into town, flooding again all the suffering businesses that were just getting dry, getting their electrics fixed, recovering their optimism.

This evening the sky is blue, a sight we had all but forgotten, and evening sunlight slants across the still saturated fields. But it's cold. And the forecast still hints at more worryingly heavy rain to come. More when I have recovered my equilibrium a bit.

Wettest

Will it never never never stop raining?? Outside all is turning to rivers, even up here at 900 feet above sea level. Prince Charles is even as we speak down in town (yes, really) visiting the flood-stricken businesses and there are many. His Business in the Community outfit may be going to come up with some financial help, which would indeed be welcome. Cafes and clothes shops and jewellers and wine bars to name but a few will all be closed for months while the damage is repaired, the insurance claimed.

And today there's another severe weather warning here with loads of Flood Alerts if not yet Warnings. I admit it is freaking me out. I set out to school this morning and turned round about a third of the way there and came home again, such is my panic about getting stranded (and it is so hard to assess the true nature of the threat).

This afternoon I shall sit on my friend's sofa and watch the Wimbledon semi-finals. She only lives a little way down the hill, so I shan't have to worry and the distraction will be more than welcome.

Handmade Parade

The sun shone on the glorious parade...

 

...at least until we got to the park!

L is the owl in the middle...

Not In Manchester

You're in the restaurant where
there's a fish tank embedded in the steps
and I don't know what you're eating
how many other people are breathing
the air there.
Charcoal clouds edge across the sky.
The irises are brave flags against the darkening window.

Three

Rising from the flood waters, lots of local businesses still closed or partially, awaiting verdicts or advice from the loss adjustors, environmental health and the like. Short-lived thundery deluges today do not make anyone feel better. We hope the Handmade Parade will. I will try not to weep throughout.

Two delicate and beautiful yellow irises, raindrops still gleaming on their curved petals, soar in their vase on the table before me.

All my dreams are of being left behind and lost in strange cities.

Flood

Flooding in town last night. We were out for dinner at a pub, rather inauspiciously situated between the canal and the river, celebrating a friend's 60th, a five month old baby of the company. It had rained hard, at times torrentially all day, but it was only over the pudding course that it became apparent what was happening outside - a waitress came and told us the road was closed a short distance away... rather swiftly we realised it was time to leave, and literally paddled, ankle-deep in fast-moving water, which seemed to be overspilling the canal, to the road, crossed, and were able to take a circuitous route to avoid the flooded part of the main road. Further on we had to divert again - fortunately we know all the little back ways and steps in town... but walked without problem down Bridge Gate, where the roiling brown river looked all set to burst its banks but had not yet done so. Our other friends, including the baby, were in cars and had various adventures. The three with the baby never got home at all, but had to stay the night with friends, the others found their way to the next town by the top route. L and I walked home through the torrents, arriving safe and extremely wet and windblown around 10.00. About two hours after we walked through town, the whole town centre was under water, so rather fortunate that we left when we did or we too would have been knocking on friends' doors. The Handmade Parade has been postponed, and the organisers are hoping to get the go-ahead for next Saturday. It is to be hoped the park will not be under water by then...

Wet

The clouds are climbing down from the sky on long wet legs. The wind whistles in the chimney, tugs and tosses the clematis flowers in the garden. L makes sugar syrup for the bees.

Summer Solstice

...and I've had the heating on. Mac drying on back of chair again. Handmade Parade on Saturday - praying for an hour or two of clear sky.

Home

Home is where the knives are
the sharpest and the bluntest
in the drawer together
this one covered in honey
as you stand at the kitchen window
chewing and drifting into thoughts
about the knife drawer
and the sullen sky
that feels like an affront
as if weather were behaviour
perhaps revenge,
and something else about the knives
where they stand, handles up
in the drainer, ready
for cutting or spreading
something else - home is where
you help yourself, right?
To toast and honey, or an apple
and don't have to ask,
and again the rain.

June

Curlews with curved bills, flying over the fields. Their trembling call seems to travel apart from their bodies. Sometimes they permit us to see as well as hear them.
Yellow and orange Welsh poppies in the verges, and here on our little lane the huge red poppies are points of fire against the green.
The sulky sky refuses to let the sun through for more than a few moments each day.

Fragments From A Holiday

Old buoys on fraying green rope, attached to a wood and chicken-wire fence. A green shining field and beyond it the sea which I sense more than see, bleeding into the pale sky like milk mixed with ink. The sun is hot on my arms and chest and head, the breeze cool. Birdsong and the bleating of sheep. A fly buzzes past. The wind rustles the leaves of the lichen-covered sycamore with the wooden seat built around its trunk. A black crow flies across the field, cawing like a crow in a story book.

The combination of the weather - hot - the cottage - spacious, comfortable and well-equipped - the garden - full of birds and many different spots for positioning garden furniture in just the right amount of sun or shade - and the fact that Porth Ysgo with its sandy and rocky little cove, visited by almost no one, is just twenty minutes walk from the cottage - the combination of all these factors makes for a perfectly relaxing and enjoyable holiday. The air is wonderfully clear even when the sun is at its hottest. The road is lined with hawthorn, red campion, cow parsley, foxgloves, Jacob's ladder, vetch, bluebells, navel wort and many flowering grasses, which seem to be making L sneeze.

The road to Pwllelhi is a green tunnel, light just flickering dimly through the glossy leaves, like a road through the woods I was driven down every summer of my childhood.

What I've Been Doing

We're home from sun-drenched Wales, and it's so cold I'm back in socks, long trousers and jumper! More when I have re-entered everyday life...

Holiday Holiday Holiday Time

Clambered through a crazy week and joyfully left my university job today. And tomorrow we head for Wales and the coast for a week. Peace. Notebook goes with me.

What For

What love is for. What life is for. What touch is for. What water is for. What the sun setting like a red ball is for. What trembling is for. What the green tips of the spruce are for. What a young man running is for. What a fly on the window is for.

Right!

Grapes

Tomato pips drying sticky red and yellow on the chopping board. Dark grapes in a bowl catch the light in the soft sheen of their skins. I bought them, and spring onions, and pak choi at the greengrocer's, a pork chop at the butcher's, a bottle of wine and some goats cheese at the cheese and wine place. The paper and a pint of milk from the post office. Decision after small decision I weave through my life. The taste of grapes and goats cheese and sauvignon suffuse my weekend. I buy this and not that, do this rather than that other thing I might have been going to do. Choose this film randomly from the library, my mind now full of its close-up loving of faces, my thoughts of spiritual yearning, suicide bombing, mopeds in Paris.

The client who asked if I'd seen other people like him, with thoughts like his, been able to help them. Treading a line between reassurance he's not the only one, and the unavoidable aloneness of his absolute uniqueness. I have your appearance but I'll never have your reality, as one of my training supervisors was fond of saying.

Thinking of all the sperm that died when the one that made me arrived and embedded itself in the egg in early 1962. The fantastic statistical remoteness of the chances of ever being here at all.

Planless

Alone for the weekend. Peaceful. The fire glowing. Leftover flapjack and 'extremely chocolatey' mini bites from my last session with the students this morning on the table tempting me. The dear students sweetly disappointed I won't be teaching them next year. I had a moment of almost wishing I was, I liked them so much.

Fantastically tired and looking forward to a long time in bed, and then, who knows what tomorrow? Planless.

Moment

I remembered today something Thich Nhat Hanh said when I went to hear him speak in London years ago. Surrounded by monks from Plum Village, one of whom opened a flask and poured water for TNH with such clarity, gentleness and economy of movement I remember it still, he sat quietly, a slender figure not taking up much space yet utterly commanding of attention. And he said at one point that this, now, sitting here talking to us was the most important moment of his life. And what he was saying really was that each and every moment is that, none more important than another if one is truly present. And I loved that. I was thinking of it because I was looking beyond my two sessions with clients this afternoon and beyond my morning with the students tomorrow, to my weekend and time to myself, and then wondering about how that looking ahead impacted on my ability to be present in those settings with those people. Remembering too how guilty I used to feel before a session with a client if I noticed myself looking forward to it being over. I loved what TNH said because it made the moment so vivid, made me feel so attended to, so cared about, but also because I wanted to bring that kind of presence and attention to my own life.

Present moment, wonderful moment, as he used often to say in guided meditation...

Spring

Yesterday hailstones like petits pois tinkling against the windows and doors, lying melting in the grass. Today blue sky and sunshine, the young cows grazing contentedly, walking about slowly with muddy ankles.

Bluebells

The sun was shining through the curtains early this morning, something we have not been accustomed to during this wet and grey spring, and we're both suffering from early waking problems anyway, so we decided to get up and go out to see one of the best bluebell woods in the North of England, at Park Wood, Elland. We were there before nine!

Thick And Thin

Friday brought the more than disappointing news that I have no work at the school where I do counselling beyond the end of the summer term, having been told categorically in February that they wanted me back in September. Gnashing of teeth. This currently represents about a third of my income and the work with adolescents the thing I have been most excited about developing, and was going to apply for a training course in... which you have to be working with adolescents in order to do. This situation is a test of my resolve, confidence, resilience and steel. A test which in the short term I have failed miserably (home in tears yesterday, collapsed in bed believing I am no good at anything.) Medium and longer term, I am beginning to see I have resources I didn't previously recognise. Time to build the private practice. Time to create the website!

Also a lot more rain, also a plague of small flies in the room where I see clients for therapy, also sleep problems.

Also the first rhubarb from the allotment, cooked in a divine sponge pudding, also good books and lovely L knitting away and as ever holding my hand through thick and thin.

11.50 To Manchester Piccadilly

And one day you see that it has always been the same, it has always been you and at the same time not you, not anyone at all. All those memories - the weeping ash tree, the summer evening light through the orange blind, the constant vague unease inside this body of yours. No mystery after all, just something unfolding always on the same screen, all so precious and so provisional, the blue tractor beside the tall pylon, the April sunlight after pounding rain, the young man with a golden Chinese character swinging forward on the chain around his neck as he leans towards his iPad, and you remember notre dame de Rocamadour, the Black Madonna, how many steps you climbed up the cliff side to see her shining face in the darkened church, how you longed for the small coin-like medallion to wear around your neck, watched it drift with you in the waters of the Dordogne. Where is it now?

Blessings

And this morning sunlight illuminates white cloud like a blank screen. Water rushes down all the lane-side ditches with a feeling of emergency. Daffodils and tulips return to something like upright, and begin to dry. Some of them have been nibbled by slugs or snails, lace-edged petals.

I have this morning received gifts from Amazon. Well, obviously I paid for them but they are still gifts. The latest Bonnie Prince Billy CD, Wolfroy Goes to Town, playing now for the first time, gentle and familiar like a conversation already going on in my mind. And a book recommended by Jean months ago called St. Nadie in Winter by Terrance Keenan. I shall take them both on my travels - going to visit my mother tomorrow.

Today meeting the poets for the first time in a few moons. Nervously taking along a version of my Only Nothing poem to workshop. Awaiting the inevitable question have you been doing any writing? Rehearsing my yes.

Drench

Drenching quenching rain that promises to put everything out
the road a black hiss
damp coats hanging on the backs of chairs

Herbs

I seem to want to write without actually having to write, make something without getting my hands dirty. The poem is in me somewhere, implicit in my thought, perception, experiencing. It's just too crude to have to hack out the words. Or maybe this is fear. Or laziness. What is this pattern of behaviour, this not-doing of things known as laziness? I am always suspicious of the term - its judgement on individual inaction which in every case has a meaning, albeit often an elusive one. Something is not being done, not being faced, or felt. Something not being done, something else is done instead - dreaming maybe, or gazing out of the window. I have a sense there's poetry I am looking for, but I don't want to hunt it down. Maybe if I keep quiet and still it will fly to me and settle on my hand. Or is this pure whimsy, an avoidance of work? Laziness. And round and round we go.

And what is the work that is avoided? Writing isn't always done with the pen or keyboard. Yet without the tools, nothing can be crafted.

I didn't tell the medical herbalist I went to see yesterday that I am a poet. Maybe he could have given me a herb for that. Maybe he did.

Glow

The fire settles to its final glow and L is knitting in the comfy chair. Having hurtled from one thing to another all day, I am finally still. L counting under her breath, I anticipate reading my book in bed (Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child - very good so far). Good news today of the pay rise that accompanies my end of probation in one job, offset by the nonsense in another of being suddenly asked to change the day or the room when/ where I work (can't/ don't want to), and more nonsense in yet a third about accommodating someone else's students in my group due to staff sickness (don't want to - no choice). Let all this fade, sing namah shivay om nama shivay om silently to myself.

Rabbit

Driving home in the half dark, I hit a rabbit. It ran, but not fast enough, I braked but not hard or soon enough. In my rear view mirror I see it fall to the ground as if in slow motion.

Lucy Ward

Saw Lucy Ward at the Trades Club last night. She now has blue hair. She's 21 and has an incredible voice and an amazing face and a stage presence that will take her far. Check her out. You'll be hearing more from her.

Happy Easter

Far from resurrection we've had further disintegration here today, with clanking from beneath the car announcing the collapse of a second coil spring in as many weeks. That'll be another three figure sum to fix. I hate the way car trouble makes me feel - vulnerable, powerless, unsafe... and poor.

But the good news is that when we discovered the suspension was falling apart, we were on our way to the allotment, where we dug over a couple of patches, pulling out dock with mighty roots (I wish they were good to eat), buttercup, dandelion and willow herb with its annoying fleshy roots that snap too easily. And then planted the first row of broad beans of the season. A moment of promise and pleasure. Next the potatoes!

Our Easter ritual is to dig out of a drawer the two little wind-up fluffy chicks my mother gave us years ago, and set them dancing about the table. One of them always falls over and lies helplessly on its side whirring. They never fail to make us laugh, and my mother was pleased this afternoon to hear we still enjoy them, and yes, she remembered them well.

Down

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the blizzard began, and was still raging when we awoke some time after seven. I'd finished my cup of tea in bed, and as I got up, glanced out of the window to see that our pine tree had been brutally felled - its trunk snapped by a combination of the weight of the snow and the high winds. It lay half across the road, and we were unable to move it, but soon some men came round in the snow plough, and were able to drag it off the road and into the space in front of our house. Where it remains. L has begun work on lopping its limbs, saving the larger for the fire and bagging up the smaller ones for the green waste at the tip. There is much more sawing to do in the coming days.

As you can see from this picture we have lost what screening our garden had from the road, the houses opposite, and indeed the sun, when it's hot!

We are struggling to come to terms with this shocking loss.

Nothing

Only nothing, empty rooms, uneventful days
the wrong arms, wrong food, wrong voice.
I lay my head on the vast soft seat
of an armchair, in supplication or despair.

Without her I unravel,
I wander the aching house
as if she could be found
in some box, some cupboard.

Only my bed is still home,
where merciful dark shrouds me,
carries me out of gravity
into dreams of timelessness.

I'll pretend to be me,
eat and drink,
say some words
and wait.

Station

Last night I dreamed I was to meet my mother at a London underground station but I had forgotten which one. Marble Arch? No. I had an old mobile phone with no numbers entered in it and no way to contact her, or my sister who seemed to be part of the plan too. I had been at the optician's and they had very kindly (and without my bidding) ordered me a taxi. It was huge and open-backed more like a sort of horse-drawn cart, and about fifteen people got into it with me. I was agitated as I didn't know where I needed to go. I asked and asked if anyone had a tube map, and eventually someone found one, but (as always in these dreams) it was incomprehensible, showed the wrong thing, the lettering too small to read etc etc.

I woke up and went back to sleep, returning to a sort of continuation of this dream, in which, eventually, I was reunited with my mother, a child burying her face in a towering adult's midriff.

Revving Up

In the claustrophobia of the moment
its windows sealed,
I clench my left fist
rev up my legs cartoon-style
for fight or flight,
but there's no one to hit
and like the animated animal
I'll soon discover I've run
right off the edge of a cliff
into thin air.

Shoes

Start with a daffodil. Today's bunch, new, sitting in the terracotta jug from Provence I was given as a leaving present from the wholefood shop back in West London in the early '90s. This particular daffodil is newly seized by the impulse to open, has just swollen enough to push aside the brownish sheath that has protected it like a stocking mask. It is narrow, small still, but now begins to hint at yellow. Tomorrow or the next day all this will be forgotten, the final flourish of flower will become familiar for a few days, seeming stable in that incarnation, until the edges of the petals slowly begin to dry and curl, the colour to lose its initial vibrancy.

I use the daffodil like the ground beneath my feet, like the in and out of my breath, to try and bring myself back to the moment, to the page, or the compose box, the bright white of the screen. Here I am, here, tonight, a strange season that is neither spring nor summer as we usually understand them but a curious hybrid, hot sun on as yet unopened leaves  in the valley, daffodils on the verges, viewed through a rolled-down car window. Here, with Mingus's Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife playing, and a phone-call from one of L's sisters to say their mother is out of hospital, her blood sugar once again stabilised. And my mother earlier on the phone, not entirely remembering the content of a doctor's appointment whose details I already know from my sister's email, but remembering that she forgot to talk to the doctor about her memory. Laughing with me at that.

L at the pub with her bee group, preparing to join one of the teams of bee handlers, after her training over the last few weekends. L drinking beer, me a glass of white wine. How did this evening gesture creep back in? Warm as summer, I throw off the duvet in the night, but the forecast suggests wintry showers are possible next week in the far north, but doesn't say how far.

One of my poet friends has a new collection out, and I write the launch date in my diary, feeling that acid blend of pride and envy. Easy on the envy. I did have an idea for a poem two nights ago and it had to do with time and length. I wrote down a few words in the notebook beside my bed, given to me by L in my Christmas stocking, empty until then. Time and length. Length of time. The endlessness of separation.

I have not filled the tank of my car with petrol. I have no need to drive anywhere for some days. We were going away for the weekend, but L is recovering from a knee injury, so we stay at home. To me this sounds like music. Nowhere to get to, even a pleasant destination. Home, and peace, and the notebook.

Glow

The bright crescent moon, a shining fingernail, floats in a sky of blue ink, with its companion planets. Just a breath of wind now. My face glows from sun worthy of July.

All Over

The past is all over me like a rash
like an ache
I'm in school uniform,
I'm in Doc Martens,
I'm crossing the road at the lights near that flat,
waiting for the postman day after day in another,
running down three flights of stairs
to see what he has brought me,
waiting for my mother, in a house I scarcely remember,
to return from hospital to pick me up,
which she can't.

This Wednesday in March must be about my 200th.

Half And Half

Equinox: when the tilt of the earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the sun. 


The sun has shone in at the windows, first one, then the other, this equinox -
the centre of the sun is in the same plane as the equator
and we're in balance, twelve hours dark twelve hours light.


I live on a planet that spins in space, held here by gravity.
They broke it to me gently when I was five years old
in brown school uniform. It's a spinning ball, going round the sun.
God!

Try

Is there something I'm not saying? Waking up and trying to remember all the dreams in which I was on the wrong train with the wrong ticket, unable to gather my possessions quickly enough to get off the train in order to catch another one going back the other way.

A scarf over the back of a chair can break your heart.

Tomorrow the vernal equinox.

Search

Daffodils in a vase on the table, like dancers with their arms out, hands spread, a flourish, a fanfare. The sun catches them morning and afternoon, through the two windows and they glow, transfigured.

I feel dull and can't lead myself out of a small enclosure.

I sip sauvignon blanc, plan to eat apple crumble, to search for holiday cottages.

Dancing

I stand in front of a wood burning stove, dancing very slightly, my back to the heat, looking out at rain and blossoms, hearing accordion music and the voices of friends. The smell of baked potatoes and apple crumble. Cats asleep on the sofas.

Riz

It's
light at 6.30 at both ends of the day
sometimes warm enough without the heating
time to plan a holiday
almost a year since I went out Census collecting

There are
broad bean seeds germinating in pots
tiny flies with wide wings on the lane
goldfinches in the garden
cows in the field
daffodils on the verges
blossoms on the trees
sparrows viewing our nesting box

Lamb

March comes in like a lamb, with the first sunshine, as I open the curtains, for more than a week. Forecast is for sleet on Sunday, however! I'm off down south for a couple of days to see my mother. A new chapter begins.

Tunnel

The dreaded day approaches. Daffodils on the table gainsay the impending ending, as they did 24 years ago and every year since. For many years I couldn't bear the sight of them. And every year at this time there's this awful alternation between days with spring woven through them, new light, new warmth, more and louder birdsong, birds with things in their beaks; and days of terminal bleakness like today, when the sun is not even close to showing its face, my feet are cold, it drizzles all day, the sky is pale grey and sullen, everything screams ending and dying and the abandoning of hope. I am always shocked on the late February days that speak of spring, that this was the time when he did it. Now, just when hope seems to be returning. And then there's a day like today...

And today I weep, and today I know the lure, the magnetism of the day and those that lead me towards it, the twenty-somethings of February, of the path into the darkness, from which there is no returning. The lure of being close to my father, of trying to follow him there, to find a kind of video playback inside my mind of the inside of his mind on that morning. But I am not not not going to follow him there, on his last journey, and although I don't believe in anything in particular after death, as all I know is that I don't know, I find I can draw a shred of comfort from the idea (thankyou G) he might in some sense be here beside me, and want to help me continue to find the way not to go there. Help me find ways it could get easier (as over the years it has, except on days like today).

Killing yourself is a long-term project, even when no-one knows you're engaged in it. It doesn't just happen on the day the trigger is pulled, the blade wielded, the pills swallowed, the platform jumped off. There are so many small ways to kill yourself day on day, to silence your anger, swallow your hurt, squash your protest, override your instincts. Year on year. Decade after decade. So many ways then to feel dead, leaden, empty, hopeless, exhausted. Until only food and drink and sleep seem to bring any comfort, any relief, and even the tiniest hurt becomes a weeping sore, and no-one knows how much pain you are in and how alone you are, and you can't tell them, and eventually it is not to be borne, and becoming the instrument of your own end appears logical, and humane. Inevitable. That's how far I can follow. A book I read when researching my dissertation on suicide and self-destructive behaviour talked about mistaking a tunnel for a stope (a horizontal working in a mine - in other words a tunnel with only one end). Always, I must always remember that when I am in the darkness I am in a tunnel, and there is always light to be found (eventually) at the other end. Some tunnels are long, though.

Door Open

Sitting here with the door open. Forecast said 13C and it feels like it.

I just had an email from A. He got a first for his first big essay on the Masters course and I am proud.

Today

The rain is a cold wet blessing up here in the north. All the mosses on the moors have chosen today to begin their spring growth, or maybe it's just that I have chosen today to notice the soft bright green garlands which suddenly adorn the bilberry bushes, the little red spikes emerging among the lower growing fuzzy moss.

I also feel blessed in my brother and my sister. My family and my friends.

Casserole

Cooking a big beef casserole this afternoon for a family congregation tomorrow, with celery, parsnips, carrots, swede and butternut squash, and a winter fruit salad with orange juice, lemon zest, honey and brandy. Murk rolls in over the tops and it's wet and darker at just gone five than of late. I think the weekend will feature a lot of sitting by the wood burner. Though yesterday in Manchester I actually ate my lunch sitting in the sunshine outside the wonderful Barbakan Deli. L is cleaning boots and shoes. An old friend phoned, who went on a 19-day silent retreat at Christmas, and sounds calm and happy. Tomorrow I have to get up at 6.00 to go and teach my students about professionalism (!) and when I get home around lunchtime, my brother will be here, having flown in early with his partner. Later my sister will arrive on the train.

Season

Stone walls still covered in a shiny ice glaze, the effect reminiscent of the vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts we buy at Christmas. Drops of frozen rain in trees and bushes, the third day now, like congealed tears. Icicles on the gate and bird box.

A vase of daffodils on the table. First of the season.

Glazed

Freezing rain coats everything with a slick layer of ice, like the sugar shell of a smartie.

Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey

Strange to return from the stone-gathering mission, feeling a little raw and shy here. The daily stone-writing practice was a joy and a revelation. An exercise in mindfulness, a retuning of my poet's eye, I found it made January slow down, or made me more present to January. There were usually many stones on any given day, which, like a beachcomber, I sat down and sorted through at the end of the day. Poetic licence there, but sometimes there was more than one, and it was fun choosing. Other days I was stuck for even one. Usually on especially busy days, when I had rushed past them, or forgotten them in the clutter of content. L sometimes suggested something, but only once did that work. They had to be my own. So, great gratitude for this lovely practice. It's also nice to stop, and have the opportunity to explore other forms here again. But I shall always know that a stone is a possibility. What seems so small and unimportant becomes, when singled out, resonant, poignant, a marker along the way as the days and weeks go by.

I have my third cold since December. This is most unlike me. I have taken a sicky from my teaching job today, and postponed a visit to my mother's this weekend. Snow forecast tomorrow was also worrying her, and certainly the sub zero conditions don't make travel an appealing prospect, even train travel. I am, predictably, sitting at home with the wood burner. Less predictably perhaps, listening to Nick Drake. L is out for drinks with friends, which I've cried off. I rather like this feeling I get when I opt out of planned activity through illness (minor), and can just be cosy and quiet, a little outside of my life. And my life has suddenly become much busier, so I need some respite. Work has begun to develop and grow, and I am finding more confidence, resilience and enjoyment in it, especially the work with young people. Troubled though they are, and sometimes challenging, they have a freshness of vision, and a lack of defensiveness (compared with adults) which is refreshing, disarming, deeply moving sometimes.

I am solvent and feeling good about myself. Amazing to place those eight words in the box. Two years ago we moved up here just beneath the moors, in the snow, and for a long time after that I felt as if neither of those things would be possible ever again. Hard to take the long view when you're in crisis or its aftermath, trauma and its devastating after-effects.

(There goes the gritter!) 

I have stopped, and I mean stopped a constant inner narrative of self-criticism, self-doubt, self-blame. Replaced it, by and large (yes, there's slippage, of course), with a kind and gentle one of encouragement and reassurance. How I've done it is a kind of mystery, a kind of grace, but let's just say I've been stalking this particular prey for a long long time.

Blackbird

From the window I watch a blackbird drink from next door's pond, dip its bright orange beak into the water, then tilt its head back.

Beck

I stand between the beck and another small stream, its tributary, which comes cascading down to meet it. My ears fill with the sound of fast-moving water over stone.

Play

A small boy presents me with a red balloon, invites me in his own language, to play.

Steam

Steam from a condensing boiler blows out of the side of a house on the bend in the road, makes a swirling white cloud which I drive through.

Tent

Through the train window I see a man emerge from a tiny black tent pitched on a muddy patch of grass in the shadow of a tower block.

Hair

The hair fairy came with clippers and scissors and mirror, her own hair bleached blonde and standing up in a mild version of a Mohican. My hair in drifts on the red kitchen floor.

8.10

From up on the Heights Road I look down into the valley, see a string of tiny cars on the A646, their red tail lights like shiny beads.

Fog

The beam of the right headlight bends in the grey white fog. I see people standing at the top of the lane who are not there, who are in fact a signpost and a stone gatepost.

Blood

Last night I dreamed that Bruce Forsyth was, with some difficulty, taking a blood sample from the fourth toe on my left foot.

Squash

Butternut squash cut into sections, the pale luminous orange flesh, the creamy seeds in the middle caught in a mesh of slightly darker orange fibres.

Slap

The wind pushes me along, almost knocks me over. I stand still for a moment or as still as it allows. Turning down the lane, it is suddenly blowing full in my face, a cold wet slap, numbing my cheeks, making my eyes water.

7.16

Sudden loud birdsong, and I'm cold now as I stand on platform 2 and await news of my delayed train, imagining not going to Leeds at all today, the sky growing light.

Buckets

Rattling sound as of buckets of dried peas hurled at the window. I pull back the curtain to look, and hail is falling hard, whitening the road, covering the cars.

Silence

11.20 - the bell rings and suddenly there is absolute silence around the school. You feel it as an absence in your ears. For a minute everything stops, and it is as if everyone has left. 11.21 - the bell rings again and at once the school is filled with the rumbling from above and below and from all sides, of feet on floors, chairs hitting metal table legs, voices high and low.

Adjust

Astonished by the difference between his appearance and the way I had imagined him from his voice on the phone, I take a few moments to adjust and accept that voice and person belong together.

Ice

Underneath a patch of thick ice on the lane, thawing slowly at the edges, melt-water trickles downhill, makes dark shapes that wiggle through narrow spaces in the ice, like tadpoles in constant motion.

Frozen

The ground is frozen hard, all the muddy puddles now solid and rutted. The trees are startling white with hoar frost, and icicles longer and thicker than fingers hang in crannies alongside the river.

Glass

The brilliant morning sunlight is projecting the deep blue diamond of a stained glass window panel onto the wall, where it floats with its little yellow art nouveau tulip design.

Frost

Frost today, still white-edging blades of grass with tiny crystals in the early afternoon, thin ice on some of the dark puddles on the tops.

Rocket

In the sunshine I bend to pick rocket from the raised bed, nipping the leaves with my thumbnail, the peppery green smell rising. I hold the large bundle of collected leaves in my left hand.

Joyful

Forty women learn and sing a four part Shona song of welcome. Joyful, my tiredness melts as the whole room resonates.

Crawling

I find myself snarled up in rush-hour traffic, stop-start, looking at the red brake lights of the car in front, the moisture streaming down its body. I am curious, dispassionate.

Moon II

The moon is now full and bright, high up in a clear sky, and I crane my neck to see it on my right as I drive home up the hill this evening, reminding myself that, although beautiful, it isn't worth having an accident for.

New

My friends have had their kitchen redecorated in delicious shades of red and orange, and everything seems new to me. You didn't have this before did you? This is new isn't it? The table didn't used to be this way round did it? I ask, and then spot and enquire about a slim pine cupboard, whose narrow doors H opens to reveal shelves filled with jars of home-made jams and preserves.

Tree

In the car the pungent resinous smell of Norway spruce accompanies us as we drive to buy kindling, wool and a tarpaulin. In the back the dismembered Christmas tree, branches collected in a blue IKEA bag, the trunk a sad amputee, awaits delivery to the green waste skip at the tip.

Sky

The sky this morning is palest blue washed over with the pink of the rising sun - the result a delicate shade of violet behind the dark weave of bare trees.

Windbreak

Filling up the car's screen-wash, two litres mixed up in tall green plastic mineral water bottles. I tip the bottle carefully over the hole it goes in, and begin to pour, but the wind catches the narrow twisting column of water and begins to blow it anywhere but into the tank. L stands in the wind's path, and I can finish the job.

Feet

My feet are warm inside my socks, inside my new slippers. My heels and the balls of my feet make the strongest contact, through these layers, with the softness of carpet, the hardness of floorboards beneath - hot-spots of sensation.