In Between

In between day and night, where birds hop onto the honeysuckle, and fly away making it tremble damply. In between work and leisure, where stuff I need to do starts breathing down my neck, stupid lesson plans on the table beside me. In between solitude and company, L heading home soon from a misty walk and tea with friends. I expect she'll be on the next bus. In between autumn and winter, where the temperature spikes and dips like crazy, and now my feet feel cool and the cold mist is falling over the tops. In between the past and the present, where I don't know if I'm 9 or 19 or 49, or maybe nine months. In between the old life and the new, where I am contemplating starting job-hunting again, where the current collection of pieces of work rattle oddly about my week, where I feel lonely, under-supported and under appreciated - oh and underpaid.

I am drinking tea from a very large cup, a Cath Kidston one if you must know, though I never drink it all up, which is a bit perverse perhaps. In between full and empty I suppose.

Amen

Plot

Today. This day. Now. Remember remember the fifth of November. A day that draws attention to itself.. Later, the big firework display in town, and crowds will descend on the park and pay to churn its grass to liquid mud, eat smelly hot food, drink beer. Wait a long time for half an hour of big bright loud fireworks which can for nothing be seen from many vantage points all around town. This old curmudgeon will probably stay in looking at the wood burner instead. We have a little firework display up here in our village that I don't quite think of as a village tomorrow night, so I think I'll settle for that.

Next year's diary pages arrive from big internet retailer threatening to take over the world. Another year so swiftly added, seamlessly promising to continue on where this one leaves off. I am hoping it will be easier to navigate than this.

Lovely scabious, white and dark red, from the garden, in a vase on the table, many with wiggly stems that still manage to hold them up.

It is nine minutes past three and I have just experienced that moment when you first sense the coming of darkness, that subtle shift in the light, towards dying.

L is out at a lino-printing workshop. I look forward to seeing her creations.

Remember

A girl waits in a house, the dark pressing cold against the windows. She knows the glass will keep the dark outside. She hears the distant popping of fireworks. Later her father will let off rockets, roman candles and catherine wheels in the garden and she and her friends will shriek and gasp, and write their names in the air with sparklers, bright lines etched on the retina for a moment then gone. The garden will be damp and cold and it will be good to get back inside to eat cake and play pass the parcel by the fire. For now she is alone and thinks about her small body, a dot in the vastness of the universe, and then stops thinking of this because it is making her feel like she's falling off something.

This Day

This day comes every year, when the leaves lie thin and wet in the gutter, lining the road with shining ochre and ginger, and suddenly it is getting dark at half past three and you drive home from somewhere with your headlights on and the windscreen wipers on intermittent, and you feel something in yourself fold into the dark, something resist it, trying to smell or taste next spring underneath it all.

Still Point

Sit down in the city

become a still point

people walk past

birds fly over

the river flows by

the man with a fistful

of pizza slices

wanders towards,

seagulls whirling

shrieking round his head.

Down on the beach

below Gabriel's Wharf

a woman with a plastic bag

picks up pebbles.

A couple walk down the jetty

with a photographer

to pose in front of boats

trees, the buildings

on the north bank.

She fluffs up her hair

he shifts from foot to foot

and as they return,

looks furtively to see

who has seen.

All Saints' Day

Half my family seem to think I'm 50... but that's next year!! Obviously.