This old phone box is now a tiny library
From the springing wheat-field the lark ascends on shivering wing and, far above the world, links heaven and earth together with his slender chain of song.
Richard Gilbert
*
Over the fields
Attached to nothing
A skylark sings
Basho
May
“On the ground there are beetles and flies of astounding variety and equally marvellous beauty. Some like green opals, flashing gold fire, some metallic green, others red—a veritable jewel-box of heaven has been upset here.”
Everyman’s Sussex: the countryside in varying moods and seasons Richard Gilbert
I am the crow eating the rabbit.
Katherine said the air doesn’t yet have the full fragrance of full spring, when the breezes are full of pollens and scents.
“drugging light hearts”
Blue is the next wave of colour after yellow. Grape hyacinths and bluebells will be in every wood I walk.
“It is a strange thing, this desire to shout from the summit of the Downs. Perhaps it is because of the feeling of absolute insignificance—as if we know that, do what we will, everything would pass unnoticed in such a largeness.”
Richard Gilbert, Everyman’s Sussex: the countryside in varying moods and seasons
(I don’t shout, I sing)
April 2012 ↑ April 2013 ↓
Colours come in waves. First is yellow, when the witch hazel meets the daffodils, the gorse goes like billyo and the fields of rape bloom.
The woods are still bare like winter. All I saw today was a patch of wood anemones.
I heard lambs bleeting but couldn’t see them through the mist. It felt like a sea mist. It came from Brighton and made it as far as the northern escarpment of the downs, where it rolled over the edge and turned into nothing.
*
My nan is unwell and thinks that my grandad is still alive. She cooks dinner for him and telephones to ask when he is coming home. We have been advised to always correct her, tell her that grandad died years ago.
I am a coward and I can never bring myself to say it. I can’t break it to my nan that my grandad is dead.
*
My Ladybird Book of British Wild Flowers wants to be a poet:
Wood Sorrel
Hardly ever grows to a greater height than three inches.
The white flowers are sometimes tinged with lilac,
and are solitary; that is,
there is only one flower on each slender stalk.
They close up shortly after sunset,
and are then almost impossible to see.
The Wood Sorrel flowers from April to June,
and is very common in woods throughout Britain.
In towns and cities they are obscured and dwarfed by buildings, but in the countryside they are kings. They dominate fields and woods. They march across vales.
I took a Holy Week pilgrimage to the top of Mount Caburn.
At the top I worshipped hills and rivers and the soft, springy turf.
This turf is composed of small grasses and clovers mixed with a great variety of creeping herbs, some exceedingly small. In a space of one square foot of ground, a dozen or twenty or more species of plants may be counted, and on turning up a piece of turf the innumerable fibrous interwoven roots have the appearance of cocoa-nut matting. It is indeed this thick layer of interlaced fibres that gives the turf its springiness, and makes it so delightful to walk upon. It is fragrant, too. The air, especially in the evening of a hot spring day, is full of a fresh herby smell, to which many minute aromatic plants contribute, reminding one a little of the smell of bruised ground-ivy. Or it is like the smell of a druggist’s shop, blown abroad and rid of its grosser elements: the medicine smell with something subtler added—aroma and perfume combined, the wholesome fragrance of the divine Mother’s green garment, and of her breath.
Nature in Downland WH Hudson
In the book I’m reading one character reads aloud to another character. He reads the Chekhov piece about Sakhalin. They talk about why Chekhov went there, it was a huge journey and he was unwell.
On the radio, minutes later, a programme about Chekhov came on and they had the same conversation. One was fiction, one was factual, the same conversation.
That seemed like a good reason to look at Sakhalin on google maps. While there I was reminded how much rivers look like sagittal sutures.
We have rivers that look like our skulls. It’s hard to believe that any of this is real, except I have flown over landscapes like this going from Tokyo to London. It is hard to believe any of this is real.
The south downs turned from green to white overnight.
Oh boy, I’ve cleaned so many typecases today. I had to serve lots of spider eviction notices, but they won’t leave, so I get a stick and stick them out and put them somewhere nice. They try to box me.
The worst job my parents ever made me do (and there’s so many to choose from) was clearing the ivy off the side of the house. It was full of spiders, every tendril I pulled was a spider home and they flew towards me, spider after spider. I didn’t like it at first, as I went on it became horrifying.
When I was little there was a murder in my town and the body was left in the park behind my school. I remember looking out of the window from the maths classroom. We could see police tape! The teacher told us all that the victim was a drug dealer from London and our wild little child minds were satisfied.
*
I some sessions with a counsellor a few years ago, he hardly said anything. (I had a shaved head and weighed about seven stone - it’s not as if there wasn’t enough to go on!) I put the money on the table and said I might as well go and talk to the sea. And I did. And still do.
*
“What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
*
Today:
Blackbirds collecting material for their nest
Scores of frogs, lovemaking amongst frogspawn
Magpies (two for joy)
