The Passing of Winter

The winter solstice bonfire wouldn’t light, at first. fire1

Days of heavy rain had soaked the pile, even though it had been cut months ago and the wood was dry enough inside. And much of it was elder, cut back from the hedge and reluctant to catch.

It smouldered, there was smoke, a few sparks, a sad crackle. More paper, more matches, noises of discontent and futility: “it’s too wet, it’s the wrong wood, there’s too much air, there’s not enough air, it’s too late, it’s too dark….”

Three fire witches emerge, with a lighter and boards of something rigid and corrugated. After a judicious dissection and re-formation of a corner of the giant smoky tepee of lank vegetation, and the application of a lighter, the fire-witches address the heap with repeated sweeping bowing gestures, wielding the boards to fan the fire.

The fire catches. It spreads through the pile. Over the tracery of sycamore against the night sky, the smoke billows white and tenuous into the dank, chilly air of midwinter. Brilliant flames shoot skyward. The year, this year which promised and gave so much loss and so much gain, turns slowly, creaking out its bewildering, blistering, beguiling existence through the night, as the fire burns steadily, in spite of the wet, unsuitable fuel.

fire3 It burned on through the following day as well. I tended its last hour as dusk fell, turning in the straggling twigs and prodding the embers buried in the ash back to life. I watched the light fade, and soft rain start to fall, suppressing anxiety as I waited for children to arrive for Christmas, heart aching. And though no returning light is yet discernable in these misty, damp days and nights, for sure the year has turned.

Yule, Christmas, Solstice, New Year…….here’s wishing you all the best. May all beings be happy and at peace.

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Last Flight

I said I chose not to fly again , except in an emergency. This race to see and speak seems to be emergency enough. I look for the quickest way south. I choose to fly. As the little propellor-plane taxis along, I suppress thoughts of Indiana Jones films and think, this may be my last flight.

It turns out to be a flight like none I’ve had before, a child’s magical birds-eye flight, skimming over a clear, unusually cloud-free landscape at a height where details can readily be identified, and anything not visible is imaginable. I note the snow on the Stirlingshire hills as they retreat behind me. Snow puffs and scrapes across the highest hills of Galloway, and streaks the mountains of England’s lakeland.

I watch the strange, human patterns of fields and settlements. It all looks so much older from the air, like something that has grown organically; haphazard, unplanned. It is the random cracked glaze made by fire on an ancient cauldron, imprinted on glacial landscapes by millenia of human occupation.

I see how nearly bare native trees and unplanned woods snake along river valleys, and cluster beside routes that connect only in a roundabout way; wandering paths and roads that go round things. By contrast, the dark plantation forests of Sitka spruce are bald and angular and the reparations of modern forestry design have done little to alleviate their awkwardness. They still do not fit.

When I next look out, we are passing over Wales. Snowdon and its consort peaks are proud, triumphal, dazzling white and icy, but dark hills lie all around. An extinct Welsh volcano, crimped with snow, broods over a green plain of farms and fields. Its crater hides a cache of snow from all bar those who fly over it. On the Black Mountains, the snow seems to trace the contour lines. It’s like looking at a giant 3D map or one of these models you find in landscape interpretation centres.

Here is an Iron Age landscape, a Celtic domain. Hillforts rise above farmland, the timeless strongholds of Arthur, Merlyn, Caractacus and those who went before. This one has six ditches and ramparts, etched in snow. Its neighbour has only three. And there, quarries and open-cast mines with their working terraces create an optical illusion of hillforts turned inside out.

How green are the valleys, with their wandering rivers and the streams of towns and villages that run along them, made silver by the sun shining on roofs and streets, their buildings, estates and conurbations making swirling patterns of dots and squares. Way off, Swansea nestles in hard among its cockles and laverbread and all its lovely words, and below lies the black, coal-rippled sand of the South Wales coast.

Crossing the Severn Estuary, the bird’s-eye landscape fades. Features become shadows, obscured, hazy. Cloud lies over Devon and Somerset, a ponderous, doubtful fog. But beyond the unknown, to the west, another landscape beckons. I cannot tell if it is sea or sky, dark streams of cloud or a distant land; lost Lyonesse or the islands of the blest.

aircraft airplane aviation dawn — Photo by Christine Renard on Pexels.com

(I didn’t take any photos on the flight. Even if I had, they’d not be of any use, since I’ve left my phone on a bus!)

Observed from an Exeter bus

music black money entertainment — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In the cacophony of the high street precinct, there’s a busker. But the appellation doesn’t quite fit. More like a troubadour, a wandering minstrel, shouting out songs, quite badly it seems from inside a bus, to the twang of an inaudible guitar. Notes and words are screened and distorted by the glass and metal of vehicles, the kaleidoscope movement of body-swerving passers by, few of whom give him as much as a glance. Sound waves get corrupted, diffracted, curve away.

He is dressed in quiet brown; muddy, understated. Tweed and corduroy, flat cap and curly brown hair. Behind his pitch a pony cart, jumbled with boxes and sacks, by which presumably he traveled here. Harnessed and patient, the grey dappled pony waits, blinkered, still, at ease. On the back of the cart, a scruffy lurcher rises and turns, to fall back resignedly onto a blanket of indeterminate colour and fabric.

Just as I am being pixie-led into the Wessex of Hardy or the allures of Widdecombe Fair, the troubadour whips his phone from a corduroy pocket, ditches the guitar and embarks on an animated conversation, striding up and down.

While he is thus distracted, people pause, children approach to pat the horse, photos are taken of the photogenic lurcher on the cart.

No-one places coins in the inviting guitar case.

Unforgiving Minutes and the Tyranny of Time

think2

My mother liked to recite aloud the poems she learned at elementary school in the 1920s. These poems were generally heroic, patriotic, moralistic, meant to be uplifting in a time of post-war depression. Rupert Brooke, then, not Wilfred Owen. And lots of Rudyard Kipling. His famous poem “If” was one of her favourites. The last lines begin:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…..”

The Unforgiving Minute has dogged me like the grim reaper ever since. What if I don’t fill it? What if I waste a minute – an hour – days – years? What if Things Don’t Get Done? Over the years, I have felt guilty when I’ve been unwell. I’ve developed elaborate “multi-tasking” strategies like typing up party minutes while chatting on the phone AND watching an improving TV documentary; reading books on cosmology while watching less challenging stuff like Midsomer Murders; affecting to meditate while gardening AND working out what’s for dinner. Trying to bake bread while cleaning out the shed and answering emails is why my sourdough is such rubbish. I’ve had “holidays” where each day is planned and packed with minutes full enough to be righteously forgiven. I’ve created endless, bewilderingly enormous to-do lists, for a day, a week, a year. When I’ve finished everything on the list, I tell myself, I’ll have a rest and choose for myself. That never happens. I just start on the next list.

The fashion for having “bucket lists” doesn’t help. Ticking boxes, like bagging Munros, can be fun, but distracts from living and relishing an actual experience. Sure, there are things I’d like to do before I die (Ben Lawers, talking of Munros, to see the alpine flora, if I can find someone prepared to go at my glacial pace and not make me feel like a decrepit numpty for wanting to take all day about it). But I’ve had it with compulsive list-making.

Another much-loved poem at home was A.E.Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”.

“Now of my four-score years and ten
Twenty will not come again
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

However, as I’ve watched the balance of my years passed to years conceivably still to come tip, and now that I’m well on the light side of time, I observe that each of my remaining springs affords more each year than a tick-box opportunity to enjoy the blossoming of the gean, and all the other flowers in the woods. Savouring the intensity of each moment more than compensates for lack of time.

And what is time anyway? Not what you think it is. At the speed of light, time freezes altogether. I’ve read enough Stephen Hawking to dimly grasp that if I could fire myself way up into space, my unforgiving minutes would get longer, become hours even, to someone watching me through a giant telescope from Earth. But not to me; up there they’d still be minutes, because time only operates from the point of view of the observer. (Or something like that.)

So, as time is not fixed, but wavers around according to the laws of relativity and probably does something completely different on the quantum level anyway, let’s not be tyrannised by it. Let’s have more minutes with no guilt attached when we don’t fill them. More watching the clouds, less time trying to re-create them on canvas. Less grubbing around in borders and beds that will never be weed-free, more lying in the hammock watching the dandelion clocks expand and blow. More love and laughter, less – or no – time spent trying to prove it exists in our lives by frenetically posting the evidence on facebook.

More randomness – more random writing, perhaps, without fretting to meet self imposed blogging deadlines?

Loch Maree

Kipling finishes:

“…yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a man my son.”

Really?? The Earth is not mine, or yours, or Kipling’s. It does not belong to the human species at all. I don’t want to own or master it and nor should any of us – we’re already proving we’re not much cop at that.

And let’s not even get started on Edwardian gender balance!

Winter Geese

geese

Breathing in, the air is clean and cold, that sharp tang
That preludes winter, edging around frost and ice
But not there yet.
Horizon endless, sky that translucent pale blue – a trail of smoke
Distant, wavering,
Moves towards the watcher in the field.

Earthbound, crows prod lugubriously at the stubble,
Clumsy pigeons clatter from tree to tree, voracious,
After each other. High above, the smoke separates,
Cries out exultant, forms streamers and ribbons,
Waves in and out of formation, as the winter geese pass.

In the marshes and seawalls of Essex, long ago,
I watched through binoculars the arrival of the little Brent geese,
Who stayed with us all winter, sweeping up and down the estuaries,
Squabbling and crying for joy in multitudes in reclaimed fields.
Here, Greylags and Pink-foots (I can never tell which) mark the season:
The harvest-home, the burning leaves, the smell of turned soil.

Once a Pink-foot landed, exhausted in my garden, left behind,
Confused maybe by the demands of Goose and Gander for their breakfast.
We fed and watered her, marveled
how small she was
Against our farmyard geese. The next day she was gone,
As the morning skeins’ urgent calls measured her pace and purpose.

Solid yet ephemeral; never to be held;
An instant of joy in an ever-changing and darkening sky;
Winter geese, this moment, here and now.

Midstream

river trees

In the past ten days, two friends have died. Not unexpectedly, no shocks. A couple of weeks ago, when they were both still alive, everyone and everything around me seemed painfully mortal, and this poem is what I wrote then.

I cross the bridge, but
Midstream, I stop.
So much water, passing under.
I cannot hold it back.

Midstream – upstream – a dipper,
Mischievous, concealed among stones and ripples,
Bobs, and waits.
Midstream – downstream – a fisherman
Casts and retrieves, over and over,
Silent, focused, amid swirling water.

I, too, have cast,
Over and over.
But now my line diffuses and is lost in movement
And what, now, is left to retrieve?

By this great river I sit
Beneath the fiddle-tree,
A gnarled and feathered oak, gashed
By storm, decay and distant ghosts of song.
Riverbank trees, like frozen statues, arch and crane,
Their token reflections broken
Like dreams in the midstream of sleep.

On dark ripples, tiny sounds of water on water,
Midstream, the undercurrent
Chases the rain from highland to lowland
Into deeper water yet.

Midstream, unseen fish bestir
And battle homeward. But I
Am snagged, log-jammed, midstream
Watching lives flow on and vanish into river,
Slippery, elusive as salmon, impossible to hold,
Passing, on unfathomed journeys, beyond my sight

While I stand helpless and wait
Midstream.

Magic Moments, New Toys and the Bread of Heaven

breadofheaven

I continue my obsession with the micro-organisms that make bread. The sourdough starter got filed in the fridge for a while when I became enthused with spelt. Spelt flour is made from a grain that is like wheat, but not a variety of wheat. It’s engagingly described by marketing types as an “ancient grain”. It makes, really, really nice chewy, flavoursome bread with yeast and honey and olive oil, and it’s very quick to rise and do its thing (unlike sourdough, for which, I now know, you need patience, planning and much mindfulness.) One supplier calls spelt bread made this way Roman Army Bread. No wonder the Roman army was a conquering one (except in Scotland, of course!). I noticed that even with this easy bread, my technique has improved through slaving over the sourdough. I am no longer tempted to flour the worktop.

Anyway, this week I go back to the sourdough, and duly refresh (or feed, though apparently that’s the wrong word) my dead-looking starter. I pour away most of the black oily liquid on top of the jar, stir the rest in, and add roughly equal amounts of warm water and wholemeal Rouge d’Ecosse flour from Fife. Same again next morning, except for the black liquid, which has vanished. Being besotted enough to sit and watch, I can scarcely tear myself away when small whirlpools, bubbles and movement began.

That magic moment when your sourdough starter says thank you for breakfast!

Now I’m looking forward to using all the new toys I got for my birthday – a baking stone you heat in the oven that I’m told will make all the difference to my spreading, cow-pat like bloomers, the scraper that will preserve the kitchen sink from becoming a nursery for yeasts and lactobacteria to proliferate because I can’t get all the sloppy dough off surfaces, bowls and hands; a magic kneading implement to which the dough mysteriously doesn’t stick, a slashing knife, and a Very Deep Tin.

Thanks to the confining nature of the Very Deep Tin, dough has no choice but to go Up. Thus I produce the above Bread of Heaven, with a chewy salt and pepper crust under which lies a cavernous hole – because I forgot the slashing bit to let out gas while it was baking.

(Three days later, I completely wreck a freestanding loaf by cavalierly forgetting to weigh the right amount of production starter I put in, and using nearly double the appropriate quantity…. The dough refuses to leave the proving basket and I create a 2cm high pancake, baking stone or no baking stone. It made a good savoury bread and butter pudding mind.)

I’m still learning… !

The Morning After

unicorn mushrooms

The morning after the march I went mushrooming again. There were no mushrooms of any kind left in the fridge. I nearly didn’t bother, because I was dog tired, and, after all, I would pass at least three supermarkets in the afternoon.

But something about the air that morning was irresistible. Cool, zinging with the promise of sunshine; light, ethereal and just a little autumnal; dust motes and electrons dancing a jig. The dam and the woods and clearings energised and soothed simultaneously – an antidote to the adrenaline that had kept me up and awake till gone 2am, head birling with ideas and reflections and hope no anxiety could dampen.

Every secret hollow, bank and bog in my regular itinerary yielded something edible. Shaggy Inkcaps standing like soldiers, Hedgehog Mushrooms like tiny undercooked loaves, spiny as urchins beneath, chunky Orange Birch Boletes that go alarmingly black when you cut the flesh but taste divine. And a few late Saffron Milk Caps, only slightly infested.

jed Rohallion

The sunny gold of Chanterelles glistened like the yolk of a happy hen’s egg. Deer came skipping coquettishly out from the wood and crossed in front of me, one of them practically pirouetting in her glee – anticipating perhaps, the rutting season nearly upon us.

From my dog gazing lovingly at his stick floating away on the loch to the shafts of sudden sun on the ripples he makes, from the happy brown collie and his owner to the mute swans and their big grey babies – the morning after, all of Scotland seems to be smiling at me.

Earth Apples

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So up they come, the Second Earlies,
Along with a cable tie, three plant labels,
The remains of a scouring pad that’s been through the compost heap
And limpet, oyster and mussel shells
That went in with the seaweed
(of which there’s little trace now),
And a wealth of sand, in spring.

Apples of the Earth, buried treasure!

Lift them all, if you can find them all,
Even the tiny ones destined for the hens, but know
Volunteers will still mysteriously spring up next year.

And there they are, washed and waxy.
The few speared by the graip’s narrow tines
(So infuriating!) will be dinner tonight.
Creamy Marfona; yellow and red-mottled Inca Belle; IMG_20190819_134228596
Shocking pink Maxine; improbable Shetland (not-quite) Blacks,
Who’ll burst apart at a mere puff of steam.

Still to come: red Desiree and the Redoubtable Pink Fir Apple,
September’s treasure trove.

Buried treasure, apples of the Earth!

Hope, Fear, Pride and Rabbie Burns

burns and zebs
When you wake up literally singing line one of a Burns poem
“Is there for honest poverty….”
and you can’t remember what you were dreaming
and you open the curtains on another dreich day
but look, the rain has paused
and the news is as horrible as yesterday, maybe more so,
but Out of Doors is on Radio Scotland
and all your pets seem to be arthritic or spewing megalithic fur-balls on the bed
but it’s your partner’s side of the bed
and the weeds have grown a foot overnight
but the wren’s firking about in the compost heap
and swallows are lining up on the wires, considering Africa
but they’re still here and chattering
and there’s bread to be made and flour sacrificed to the god of sourdough
and after all, Rabbie Burns was young and might be cut some slack for his faults,
and Ian McKellen is coming to Perth for a Pride rally
and might he not just cast a spell or two?
and a mediaeval fayre will be filling the town
but you’ve got a bus pass
and things might get worse but

this is Scotland and

“for a’ that, and a’ that, it’s coming yet, for a’ that,
that man to man, the world o’er shall brithers be, for a’ that”

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HOW DID YOU WAKE UP THIS MORNING?