Devices

Oh bloody hell, it's been another month already. Partly down to the demise of the old laptop, or rather the decision to buy this new one as a pre-emptive strike against the impending demise of the old one... We are grumpy about the change as the old one was much nicer, talked much more politely to the wifi, and was solidly built with a nice metal casing instead of this horrible shiny black plastic. I am unhappy to report that we now have five devices in the house (two smart phones, two laptops and a tablet in a pear tree). I have the most ambivalent relationship with all this technology. I did not want to get a smart phone but somehow a smart phone insisted on becoming mine and now that it is... well, I'm doomed basically, having an addictive strand to my personality which has caused me problems more than once with blogging, email, texts. The last time I had access to my emails on a handset was when I worked for horrible corporate style charity and had a device... not for nothing known by my colleagues as the Crackberry.... and I was forever checking my emails, work and personal. It becomes a sort of nervous tic, and much as I resolve not to allow it to happen, it happens. Bleugh.

Meanwhile I realise that comparing one's life with other people's is a mistake, yet struggle sometimes not to compare my life with other people's. Then other people compare their life with mine, and can't understand why I have so much difficulty, when it all looks so good, and I just feel lousy and ungrateful. My life is one of ease and luxury compared with many, yet I am struggling with the transition back to a 'proper' amount of work, and to squaring up to the demands and rigours of self employment - self-promotion, publicity, networking and the like being considerably less my 'comfort zone' than actually being a therapist, which obviously I rather like and am somewhat competent at. Going back to employment would of course have brought different challenges. Steady income, holiday pay etc, but much more difficulty controlling workload and therefore stress levels.

Sometimes I'm fine, sometimes I'm not. It will be three years in December since G died and two in February since my Mum's death. I still get anxious sometimes, depressed sometimes and struggle with confidence. Less, much less, but still, when these things are happening, they're happening and losing perspective seems to be something to which I am prone. As my latest therapist is wont to point out. No you're not losing your mind, you're just losing perspective.

Meanwhile Autumn is here, the clocks go back at the weekend, my birthday next week, and we had the first fire a couple of nights ago. I think I'll light another tonight to watch the final of Bake Off in front of. Please no spoilers....

Equinox, Bird

Autumn Equinox has crept up and now it's getting dark at half past seven, getting light at half past seven. Up at seven this morning I put lights on in the kitchen... Lots of sunshine this September, the gentle way in to the change of season, though as soon as the sun goes you feel that familiar drop in temperature, and there are scatterings of leaves, dewy cobwebs, blackberries, the whole bit.

And yesterday a loud thud on the kitchen window as I sat at the laptop. Could only have been a bird, I reasoned, not likely to be a prankster child throwing clods at my window. Opened the door and at first saw a sparrow on the patio, looking perky enough. Surely not you? Then a tiny bird caught my eye, sitting, looking stunned on the flags of the path along the front of our house, which leads to all three of our neighbours' houses. And when I say tiny I mean tiny. About as long as my thumb. Mouse-like. And beautiful, with some greeny yellow in its plumage, wing markings that suggested the finch family to me with my limited knowledge, and, most strikingly, a yellow stripe on its head lined with black. So tiny was this bird I had no hesitation in assuming it was a baby, newly fledged that had met an unfortunate obstacle on its maiden flight. There it sat on the path, eyes a little closed, breathing visibly. I crouched down, looked, spoke, wondered. I was about to go out and worried about it being trodden on. What to do? I wondered if picking it up would be traumatic for it, stunned as it already clearly was, but in the end decided this was preferable to death by crushing underfoot. I picked the tiny bird up, soft, light, a little warm, and it clung to my fingers with its scratchy claws and didn't want to let go. I had to prise its little feet off me, ease it to the ground, safely off the path. Wished it luck and made ready to go. Along comes C, our neighbour, returning from school crossing duty just along the road, in full lollipop regalia, and I show her the bird, tell her what's happened. She thinks she'd like to take it to her house, give it a bit of warm, let it recover, bends down to pick it up, and whoosh! Off flies the feisty little thing, twenty yards or so into a bush in the corner of the garden, and we both cheer and smile, congratulate it, wish it well. I go off to work feeling pleased and privileged.

Later, I tell L the story, show her the very small photograph on my phone, expand it to show more detail, and she goes to the RSPB website and... lo and behold, it was a goldcrest! An adult goldcrest mark you... It's Britain's smallest bird I learn, and yes, it sure is small. Quite a meeting.

Baby Teeth

I dreamed last night of a baby, held in someone's arms, not mine, and I talking to the baby and to the one who held her. I said something to the effect that the baby would soon be at the stage to start putting everything in her mouth, and at this very moment she grabbed my hand and raised it, with some force, to her mouth. The side of my index finger felt so clearly in the dream those little hard soft gums, the dribble and the determination, and I said oh, those little teeth will soon be coming through...

The Jumping-Off Point

Rising upwards from your baseball boots
you looked out, looked down, looked sideways,
a second look, a backwards glance,
and everything behind you was the past
and everything in front of you was a blur,
like trying to look at a speeding freight train,
like the dreams where you can't see
the names of the stations
to find out if you're on the right train.

Twilight With Jackdaws

About a million jackdaws flying across the fields to roost in the tall trees below the chapel, in the twilight. They come in waves, in loose, tattered groups, the opposite of synchronised, making the loud harsh cries of the corvid family. They come and they come and they come, as I stand staring up at the sky above my head, and I begin to think they will come forever, almost to believe this, then slowly the groups grow smaller, then a last few stragglers, and that's it, the sky now empty. Their cacophony rises and mingles with the sound of the church bells from the other side of the valley.

Shaken

I am here and four months have passed. The bilberries are coming to an end and soon the blackberries will be ripe. I look forward to September's sense of new beginning. I have moved my work to the large, sunny practice room in town. I have created a space in which I feel at ease, and so can my clients. The process of 'leaving home' with my work has stirred my depths, with memories of another 'leaving home' surfacing and demanding to be remembered, felt, understood. 1978, when my parents separated and I left the house where I'd grown up, the town, the school, and my father. It's been a process that has shaken me to the core, and I've survived once again. Ready to love and forgive myself everything I thought was somehow my fault. More growth, more change. On we go.

Hello again.

April Come She Will

.... and go! So much for the April blogging challenge. There have been other fish to fry and I have kept meaning to come here and say so. I have found a room in town for my therapy practice and it's been an exciting and rather tense process, looking at a few possibilities, weighing up pros and cons, saying yes and saying no and then getting clear. It looks like I'll have it from July, which gives me time to prepare, mentally and emotionally and in the IKEA sense!!

I'll try to get here again in the next few days, but there seems to be a lot to do and think about before we go off on holiday on Friday. Skiathos beckons.... So if I don't get here before, I'll see you when I return.

In other news - clearing four inches of snow off the car yesterday morning was certainly a memorable finale for an exceptionally cold April!

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Back

A lapse in the project, caused by the indisposition of the laptop on Tuesday evening, which threatened to be terminal so L swung into frantic backing-up mode as we hadn't done any for some time and felt at risk of losing all kinds of documents and photographs. In fact, the machine has at least for now made a full recovery, but it is ageing and who knows what's around the next corner?

And yesterday I just didn't get it together, partly because I joined a meditation group in the evening, and upon my return, though peaceful and happy, felt entirely devoid of inspiration.

In other news, I am looking at business premises around town, with a view to taking my work out of my home. A radical step if it happens, and I think it will, and I suspect it will be a turning point. Finding the right place is a tricky thing, especially determining the general quietness of the building, and sound-proofness of the walls.

And ... I am the almost proud first time owner of a smart phone. Not so proud to have twice inadvertently phoned my sister whilst trying to enter her various numbers. The back of my phone is red.

And I'm reading Wallace Stevens

and Knausgaard of course.

Energy

Today I planted out broad bean seedlings, as the wind began to stir their bluish green leaves. On our walk, the lapwings and curlews were evasive, and we saw ten lambs running up and down a field as if in a race. The sun was warm, the air still cool. We are beginning to think about our Greek holiday in May, which now feels close!

Wordless Saturday Night

Today

A beautiful morning, with clear blue sky and dazzling spring sunshine, so I went off for my walk early. Also in order to be back for another delivery of logs, most of which hopefully we won't burn until the autumn now. Then I stacked them, which took forty minutes and was not popular with my back. Better than L doing it with me though, since it isn't popular with her nose! I've also made bread today, which is in the oven and will be ready very soon. I always have to eat a crust of bread fresh from the oven, as it never again has the same wonderfully crisp crust and melting warm crumb. Mmm.

Synchronistically, if that is indeed a word, I have made contact thanks to the wonders of Google, with one of the people I worked with many years ago at Neal's Yard Bakery, in Covent Garden, and so I wrote her an email this morning, and felt the amazement of realising it is thirty years or thereabouts since that time.

This afternoon I went to my friend J's house, to find she had most touchingly saved me the very last slice of her birthday cake, her birthday having been Tuesday. It was lovely sponge with a mascarpone cream and fresh raspberries, baked by her partner, and was delicious.

Knausgaard

I have just finished the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle A Death In The Family. I have to tell you this is the most brilliant book I have read in a long time, and I am about to start the second part without delay! They're around five hundred pages a go,without chapters, and I have been gripped from start to finish, immersed in the interior life of Karl Ove, who begins to feel like an intimate friend. I keep thinking that this is just not like anything else I have ever read, and surely that alone is exciting and inspiring.

Some reviews have dwelt critically on the number of words, lines or pages Knausgaard devotes to the mundane details of life, like making a cup of coffee, lighting or putting out a cigarette, or cleaning a filthy house. This is one of the things I love. Knausgaard knows no fear of showing the mundanity of existence exactly as it is, and devotes page space proportionate to the amount of awareness it takes up in our daily lives. It's almost an exercise in mindfulness at times. Descriptions of cigarette ash falling to the ground, or the colour of tea swirling into the boiling water in a cup become almost meditations in their own right, without being required to serve the narrative or plot development in any special way.

But more so much more than this, Knausgaard lets us inside his mind and his body, the moment by moment impressions, feelings and experiences of an adolescent in love with music, enchanted by alcohol, fascinated and puzzled by girls. Later, the intimate experience of learning of the death of his father in his late twenties, and the process of dealing with the aftermath of the death with his older brother in the following days. I have never read an author so willing to reveal the workings of his mind, his emotional reactions, his idiosyncratic observations, and weird personal associations with what he observes. The only writer who comes to mind at all is WG Sebald, whom I also greatly admire. There's a sort of brooding mood, an awareness of the deep significance apparently ordinary events and impressions can assume in the mind when they touch off memory, emotion and literary or artistic associations.

Now

In many traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, the circle is a powerful symbol for the sacredness of all things. Throughout these traditions there are rituals in which the image of the circle is used like this: by drawing a circle around yourself and standing in the middle of it, you realize that you are always at the centre of the universe. The circle that surrounds you shows you that you're always in the sacred space.

..........

The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you're in the centre of the world, standing in the middle of a sacred circle. It's no small affair, whether you're brushing your teeth or cooking your food or wiping your bottom. Whatever you're doing you're doing it now.

Pema Chodron

Cross

Stomping up the lane after throwing the dead daffodils on the compost heap. It's windier than I thought and the lane is having one of its extra steep days. I feel cross with the wind as I emerge at the top of the lane, and turn left onto the wet and muddy path. I am cross with the mud which is slippery, messy and inconvenient as hell, despite my wellies. And cross to find a dog running up behind me, its collar tag clinking, a young woman following, who smiles as I turn enquiringly to see whose dog it is. It looks like George, L the joiner's dog, so maybe this is his daughter? I am cross to feel this dog following me. I'm not good with a feeling of someone behind me. Nothing feels right.

Something about my clinical supervision session this morning didn't feel right and has left me feeling uneasy, and, well... cross, angry, fed up, upset. I think maybe she isn't after all the right supervisor for me. It's a challenge to have to start looking for someone suitable again, to move on after nine months, but I need to trust my instincts. I don't come away feeling supported, enriched, challenged. I am feeling so much better about myself and about the prospect of more work, it feels crucial I have the right support in this process.

L is suffering with allergic rhinitis and its most recent twist is painful sinuses, or is it toothache? She had an appointment with the nurse practitioner today, who pressed on her various sinuses and expressed a view it probably wasn't sinusitis, and recommended a dentist's appointment, which has now been made for Thursday. Meanwhile the earlier rhinitis symptoms seem to have receded somewhat. She's had a nasal spray and been taking antihistamines for a few weeks now with intermittent benefit. It's all very confusing, frustrating and for me there's this awful feeling of not being able to help when my partner is suffering and miserable. And she is rarely this miserable...

In better news, I'm off with a fat cheque in my hand to pay off the mortgage tomorrow, my Mum's estate having finally been distributed!!

14.27 From York

Huge lakes of rainwater like cold tea in the fields. Silver birches at the bottom of the railway embankment, their thin trunks catching afternoon light filtered through pale cloud as we approach Micklefield -.the first stop, as the conductor announces. I have a new blue pair of trousers in my bag with a small damp patch where the torrential rain penetrated my bag. I declined the paper carrier I was offered in the shop, as it would have been reduced to pulp by the time I'd walked to the station in the downpour. Enough sun to cast shadows on the platform at Micklefield.

I visualise being at the centre of a sacred circle, as Pema Chodron suggests, and consider that everything that enters the circle is there to teach me something. How would my life be if I could sustain this perception? Who would I be if I were always at the centre of a sacred circle? Who indeed would I be if, as Tara Brach asks, I didn't believe there was something wrong with me? Already shaking free of this belief, though it clings in places, sticky. If I didn't live with the persistent dim fear that I'm doing something wrong, or ought perhaps to be doing something different, something other than what I am doing now, and now and now... what then? If I believed that there's nothing wrong, nothing that needs changing, and at the same time that change is always possible, indeed inevitable. But the kind I can have a hand in can be hard to identify. Puts me in mind of the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Home

Whenever we think of home we come to this
the handful of birds and plants we know by name
John Burnside


Home

This small space in which I live my days
This square or two of Ordnance Survey map
My house a tiny rectangle beside the road
The boundary of my garden a dark line.

This place where I sleep and wake,
Eat my breakfast as the sun creeps over the hill
While small birds visit my garden; sparrows,
Dunnocks, starlings, blackbirds,
And sometimes a pair of goldfinches.

My feet in slippers tread the same familiar path
Across the floorboards, my feet in wellies
Step by step up the lane and through
The mud and puddles, and sometimes
Fast-flowing stream of the path
That leads to the Moor.

This Moor I know like the rooms of my house,
The backs of my hands, this Moor
In its seasons; growth of heather,
Bilberry, bracken, moss and bramble,
New shoots, flowers, berries, then the
Colours changing with autumn's decay,
The ginger grasses vivid in the rain.

And where the water flows when it rains
Too much, and where it sits, the path that
Skirts the biggest puddle by the broken gate,
The sheep that watch me from their field,
The wind at my back on stormy days
Threatening to push me over.

Possible

Returning home
everything seems possible
fine clouds thinning

Chim Chim Cher-ee

The chimney sweep came today with his apprentice, whose role was rather simple at least on this occasion. He brought the gear in, he took the gear out, he lent Richard, the boss, his mobile phone in order to use its torch to establish the presence of a flue liner, and he brought in two business leaflets and a Certificate of Chimney Sweeping. This last headed The National Association of Chimney Sweeps, strapline 'Helping to protect the consumer'. Richard informed me my chimney should be swept every six months (six months??!!) For shame! It's at least three two years since we had it swept last. Ho hum. Well, now we know. The handful of little and not so little lumps of shiny creosote he showed me was enough to convince me. He had a face hewn from the local millstone grit and a manner to match. The sort of bloke who makes me feel posh and awkward. And he managed to take an extra tenner off me, on the basis that in six months' time he'd charge me a tenner less than the going rate. I am not quick to spot these kinds of manoeuvres. I said I'd want to talk to L (who was out, and would have spotted this) before booking the October sweep, but of course now I'll have to - or sacrifice my tenner.

Can't stop singing this now...

March Hare

Wonderful up on the moor this morning. Sun, at first a pale disc, emerging from chilly high cloud. Six lapwings whooping and dancing, one in particular puts on an amazing display of aerobatics, swooping and diving and fluttering. And a hare, big as a dog, racing away through the heather and bilberry, the white backs if its long ears disappearing over the top of the hill. Meadow pippits and grouse, jackdaws, ewes with lambs, and not one single human soul my entire hour-long walk. I love this.

I've decided to set myself a little April challenge - to post something here every day. A small stone or a larger pebble, we'll see.

A Piece of the Storm
(for Sharon Horvath)

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
'It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.'

Mark Strand

Brussels

And there was Brussels. Where my brother, sister-in-law and her son live. They are safe, and my dear nephew A, who was due to travel the next day home on Eurostar, sent me an email around 12 yesterday saying simply 'I made it'. They will all be together for Easter. I grieve for the families who will not.

What's Going On

Seemingly interminable waiting for our solicitor to complete, conclude, finalise, finish all matters relating to my mother's estate. Probate having been granted some six weeks ago, after what had already felt by the time it was applied for an interminable process, it is a strangely tortuous process to continue to wait when everything appears to be set for 'distribution'. Now our solicitor's secretary is off work as her husband is seriously ill (some might argue this is too much information from one's £205 an hour legal representative) and so a letter explaining where we are up to is 'out for dictation' with apparently no one to whom she can dictate. It's not so much the money at this point, though goodness knows we shall be happy enough to pay off the mortgage, and I count my blessings daily to have been left an undoubtedly useful sum of money by my Mum. But the whole thing now seems so laden with feelings of finality. This last piece of admin to be concluded, money distributed, and then - all done and dusted. As I write I remember the one other thing still to be done - the stone for my mother's grave. I guess that will be the final final moment of 'nothing left to be done'. It's hard to describe how unsettling this waiting is for me, because it isn't that I think about it constantly. It's more a background tension. A sense of something pending, something not being where it ought to be, but getting nearer, nearer.

Cold weather - still out in woolly hat, mittens and umpteen layers of clothing for my daily walks. Sullen grey skies. When the sun gets a look in it does warm up, for a while.

Drawing - been doing some.

Writing - been doing some.

A deepening understanding that everything is included. Everything internal and external. The sullen skies and the struggle with waiting, the writing and the drawing, the awful moods of loss and yearning, anxiety and unsafety, and hypochondriacal tendencies, and the times of joy in small everyday aspects of my life. Acceptance of it all. Nothing that has to be got rid of or avoided. All can take their place at the great table of my life.

Underneath

Tell the hand that holds the pen
not to listen to the voice that shuts you up
shut up shut up shut up
this feather sensitivity this desire to be comfortable
give it up, shut it down, make do
and pretend to be fine.

Tell the hand that holds the pen
not to believe it not to pretend, not ever
keep looking for the source
this other voice the quiet one
underneath the earthquake
the one that won't stop
even when you won't listen
that inhabits a quivering body,
knows the light, has stolen all it knows
from the source -
toes, knees, hips, ribs
awkwardly
a body knowing itself
by its discomforts
between the shoulder blades
in the throat,
this burning along the collarbone.

Time

There's never been a better time to say
now is the time
to know that it's now not then
to let the scrapping ghosts quieten down
to walk in my own shoes

Cold Spring

A poem, from 2007, this season of winter-spring keeps reminding me of. Ice crackly and thick on the tops on my early walk, and I'm sitting here with the heating on, the door a crack open, the sun warming me through the window... and suddenly the sun has gone, and I must close the door.

An earlier draft featured the line
confusion of climates
which I'm rather sorry to find gone now I revisit the piece.
Anyhoo.....

March 14^th

White blossom emerges like snow oozing

from dark branches. Spring wades out of Winter,

the warmth held inside a cold envelope.

A tractor gets to work

and my mother has the painters in.

But this morning the pale dust of snow again

as I set out early in heavy coat and muffler.

Wordless Wednesday

February 29th

I travel to York this cold, frosty, bright morning. At York station, a woman poses strangely beneath the iconic Victorian clock above the footbridge, and I see a clear plastic knife on the steps down. I collect a pair of bottle green trousers I have ordered online, from the website's corresponding shop, where customer service is taken seriously and I am treated with kindness, and invited to try on my trousers, which I decline to do, telling the young assistant that I know they are the right size (I have others the same but in different colours).

In the cafe where I eat my favourite Bostock (or brioche aux amandes) and drink a decaff cappuccino, I share a table with a young man wearing headphones and reading Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. I go to therapy. Mostly I feel glad it is February 29th, since in leap years the actual day of my Dad's death arrives and stays for a day - before going away again for four years. In the other years its absence underscores his and is always upsetting (as I have often written about here and in the old blog before, so you know it's true). Today's Google doodle might have been made for me and my family. 28 years. So, so.

Travelling

Tomorrow we head for London. It will be my first trip since travelling down to help my sister clear my mother's room a year ago. L and I will stay in the pleasant hotel where we stayed just a few weeks before that, round the corner from the care home, when I went to visit Mum for the last time, though I didn't know it then. Right in the heart of NW3, it is also only a stone's throw from the flat where we lived when we first moved to London from Hertfordshire, where my mother remained until she married R some ten years later.

These are also the last few days running up to my Dad's four yearly 'real' anniversary, and he too lived in North London for many years, between my parents' separation, and his death in 1988. The whole thing feels something of a pilgrimage, though there are other exciting objectives to our journey too, of which more later.

Sometimes

Sometimes I am the dead
stamping all over the living.

Sometimes the dead stand all around me.

Time

Hot honey lemon and ginger. Not ill, but the immune system being kept busy after being in the artist's studio last week with several people with coughs, colds and the like. Flurries of snow this morning, first pellets, then sleet, as I drove over to Leeds, but none that settled. Wednesday it felt like spring in the sunshine, today definitely winter again. It's that time of year.

Eight Images

Dip

I will share some images from the drawing course in the coming days but for now let me just say

a studio in an attic with panoramic views and acrobatic jackdaws wheeling
pencils and chalks and charcoal and Indian ink and paper a plenty
music to draw to, dream to, play to
a sharpened stick to dip in ink and dance across the page
lovely S who created a space of freedom and safety
lovely B who brought tea up to the attic at just the right times
a group that halved overnight due to the lingering bugs of winter
leaving the remaining three of us today with privileged space and focused attention

the freedom to play and dream, and not know and see what happens
make marks, discover media, and be amazed

Tonight the rain

again

Baby Sun

The season of Imbolc. I read somewhere: It is the day we honour the rebirth of the sun, and we may visualise the baby sun nursing from the Goddess's breast. How great! Thanks to Sabine for the reminder. I am noticing the time I am closing the curtains is a little later and a little later, and when I wake up sometimes there's a hint of early light. Tomorrow I'm off to my drawing course, with sketches, photographs and poetry relating to the willow herb I love so much. I don't know what will unfold and I'm excited to find out. I'll also take my camera since I now know (more or less) how to use it!! The rose bay willow herb, as you may remember, is the phoenix of wild plants, also known as fire weed since its seeds can survive fire. Hence its colonisation of bomb sites in WW2. Fire weed for the fire festival. Synchronicity. The meaningful coincidence.

Something's Happening

Bread in the oven and I can smell it now, the washing machine accompanying Bob Dylan singing Ballad of a Thin Man

You know something's happening 
but you don't know what it is
do you Mr Jones

Soon I'll light a fire, already laid. We have a new fence and a new shed door, and have just paid our lovely new joiner friend L, who constructed them. He also plays in a band who will be playing at the community centre across the road in a few weeks' time in aid of the Flood Fund. We look forward to some dancing.

Tomorrow I'm going to a one day course called I've Got a DSLR. Help! Watch this space. Next week a two day course called Exploring Drawing.

Gotta go - wine in the oven, bread out of the frig.... or, err, something.

Flood

The river is everywhere it is in places it has never been
it is rolling down the street like a waterfall roaring
it is filling gardens and back yards it is seeping under doors
pouring through letterboxes in at windows
filling up shop windows like fish tanks
its force is demolishing walls, cracking roads
sweeping cars away and we see suddenly that it could kill us,
this daily companion that flows through our town
sometimes gentle and sparkly sometimes brown and choppy,
but never before this river giant this watery monster
this cascade, this unstoppable force, this necessity
to go somewhere since its banks cannot contain it
since the rains have swelled and swelled it,
the moors a saturated sponge, the paths and lanes
down from the tops fast-flowing streams.

Goodbye

Happy New Year

I can't believe it's only eight days since the floods in our little town. It feels like at least two weeks. Time, always strange at this time of the year, has become unrecognisable. A most extraordinary amount of energy and determination from the local community plus volunteers from far and wide, including the army (!) have achieved more than seemed remotely possible a week ago, and our local website now boasts a proud list of twenty shops and cafes open this weekend! My friend J, owner of a most useful van, has been working tirelessly helping folks clear their ruined possessions, piles of mud and rubble, and in one case the entire stock of the toyshop. She has seen a lot of distress as well as a lot of hope and hard work. We did what we could last Tuesday, our most significant contribution to date being the cleaning up of yoga mats and meditation cushions from the little Zen house in town which was badly flooded. There has been a fair bit of wandering around trying to help, where skips were being awaited, or miscommunication led to wild goose chases. Still, we all offer what we can.

Here, our efforts have been interrupted by L feeling unwell over New Year, and having to attend the out of hours primary care clinic at the hospital on Friday evening. All is well, I am happy to report, but it was a difficult and scary time for us both, and we are now feeling exhausted. L is uncertain whether some sort of allergic reaction to some of the molds and debris in town could be behind her unaccustomed shortness of breath, but nothing is certain. Only that her peak flow, and blood oxygen readings are very healthy for her age, and blood pressure only a little up. The 111 phone service, and the doctor at the hospital were incredibly helpful, kind and efficient, and once again I am awed by the wonder of the NHS (long may it live.)

In spite of all, we managed to make eight jars of marmalade yesterday and there are enough oranges to make the same again when we have the energy! It is pouring with rain again here today, which is not popular with anyone right now, but hopefully will not persist, and the good news is that river levels have fallen significantly.