Tears in space

Dark Side of the Sun.
On one eight eight, I suffer,
Terry Pratchett loss.

GPS knows nothing, nor calendars neither.

I stand, cold,
Chin over the kitchen sink.
Watching diagonal rain sprinkle the winter garden.
And recreate a Provencal August day,
In an orchard's shadow.
With a bite,
Of ripe,
Pear.

Little to be said

In a quiet house, yesterday morning, I was in a reflective mood, watching out of the dining-room bay, towards a sunny sky. The brightness on the, less than clean, windows made me invisible to a goldfinch that alighted on the slenderest of stalks. The bobbing bird, on its twitchy stem, jerked its head about, watching for threats while it scanned for food; each movement mirrored in the stem.

The finch was in its gold and red finery, I was on the cusp of changing into my dullest. The suit I'd wanted in charcoal that only came in dark navy; my saddest shoes.

The bird flicked wings to a dry iris head, finding it empty, onward to verbena. I took the stairs to find the suit hung in covers. I slipped it out and two black snakes of cloth slithered, dropping supine on bed and floor. I chose the finest thread count for my neck.

My only formal shoes have seen as many funeral services as I. They cling to vestiges of mud from many a diocese; I dust each with a sock.

Hunting in the gale

On my childish route to school I find an unrestricted parking spot and leave my car, with a coat in the boot. I know I'm ill-clad for the weather, perhaps on purpose. I need to feel something, even if just cold.

Ranks of late twentieth century estate houses face the street that in my infancy was fringed with low prefabs. Bricks stacked for profit supplant homes built in hope. Only the topology of the roads and the constant presence of an electricity sub-station holding a junction are truly familiar, until I see a running culvert that dives through curved steel bars under the road - dangerous, come away.

School used to be right, past the memory of the corner garage, but I go straight on, into the breeze. Commercial property gives way here to retirement flats, petite stacked homes with forgotten balconies, clinging on, as close to the sea as is safe. In front, land falls away and I see the grey-green sea advancing in scribbled lines under a slate sky. The wind makes its presence felt, and I regret now, the coat, but only briefly.

A curving, sloping asphalt track leads down, revealing water crashing on groynes and I realise I have miscalculated. At half tide I anticipated a walk along the top of a beach, between the rotting foundations of a tumbled clay slope and a sometimes sandy tide line. Breakers are rolling in, touching the clay all along the strand. A knot of people are skipping from island to island on their way towards me and a lone dog walker is walking through the shallow wash in tall boots. I make a step from shingle to sand to mark the beach and, to let it mark me. Another dozen steps sideways widen the view and I face the incoming sea, the buffeting wind and watch, and watch, until the dog walker passes, smiles and starts the climb towards her car park.

Something has broken through, something has been touched. I leave the curious dog enough time to pass and follow it, back up to the top, where gulls and corvids alike hang or swoop with the rising currents.

Plainly

I drove out, in shadow, on a flat plain roofed by grey stratus. The visual flow recalled an X-wing fighter game from a hundred years before; its parallel walls flashing past in glorious wire-frame. Ahead, where the Death Star vent waited - pregnant - the furnace of the sun glowed orange and gold through gaps in gathering cumulus, hung over the distant Solent.

Early winter picture

Two dozen jackdaws sit in my neighbour's ash. They "chack, chack" to each other and, every few minutes, a few leave and are replaced. Four arrive, two leave, three arrive, six leave. They dot the ends of branches now clear of leaves. The three pinnacle twigs have a starling each.

Across the blue marbling of the sky, goldfinches dance. Their characteristic passage, half falling, half flying and "chit, chit" calls to the bobbing rhythm give them away.

The sun is lighting only reds. In the cornus stems, the deep peaches of a few clinging apple leaves, the rubies of holly fruits. The rest is muted with the shaken blackboard rubber frost.

I think we can see where this is going

Two weeks ago I remember putting on a scarf for the first time this back end. Saturday I wore walking boots to walk - and got thoroughly soaked, even if not cold.

The trees have been shaking their heads at the floor which is littered, this year, with the fruiting bodies of copious fungi. The first grass frost has touched the exposed blades.

Not arose

Path-side fennel kissed my shoulder early, wetly. Yesterday's rain still mists foliage and the spiders' traps glow in the sun, no-longer hidden. Bright and a little brutal, as mornings are as we turn to autumn. I watched shadows shorten as I washed the crockery; the beginnings of a mist began to rise.

Just now, a pixel green on gold, brighter than all the rest, picked out atop a withered umbellifer crown. Down the garden, hundred feet away: rose chafer.

We turn this

Herbal, North corner.
Oregano, lavendar,
fennel; butterflies.

Off Dodman Point

A curl of breaking wavelet outlines a fin. The curve of travelling wakes become rolling, arched backs.

The dolphin direction changes with the sea state and the wind; it changes with the angle of the light and cloud pattern. It ranges narrow, ten degrees, up to a full half compass rose. The dolphin direction is the place you look and see the most imagined dolphins; the direction of dreams and of deceits.

To actually see dolphins, real dolphins, you must first work out where they are not, where even if they were you would not believe them, and then look the other way, to where the dolphins are not just mirrors of delusions.

We air the three stringed kite

We soften over winter. Our ears re-acclimatise to simply rushing round the Earth's centre at 600 miles an hour whilst circling the sun at twice the speed of sound. Return to the water requires restoration of memories of motion learnt from two metre swells, from being rocked to sleep by oceanic waves attenuated by harbour walls and sticky silts.

Hands need to re-grow calluses and re-accustom to the gentle woundings of artificial fibres twisted into ropes, stainless edges on tackle and the ravages of seawater on fingernails. Lips chap and salt reflected sunlight burns.

We return slowly, gently to the sea's rhythms this year. Force 2 to 4 and sea-state calm. We test the off-season's changes: new engine, cruising chute. Our engine has run for less than ten hours; we anyway minimise its unfamiliar rattle by sailing when possible; sailing Saturday and Sunday onto moorings where an engine would have eased the action, but spoilt the experience.

A quiet NNE wind breathed us along yesterday morning, barely holding the genoa open, hardly noticing the addition of the mainsail. It seemed an ideal time to test the chute and, after two attempts misthreading and minor tangles it swelled and filled and gave us a beautiful calm 2 knots of speed and a sense of achievement - unmeasurable.

At night we resynchronise to the sun and the urgent cry of the oyster-catcher, the greedy call of the greater gulls and the croak of little egrets. Faint singing of halyards and the occasional slap of waves haunt our dreams without waking us from well earned rest. Tides come and go with hardly a murmur except the bouncing kiss of a directionless tender on the transom composite and bathing ladder.

We victual and provision. We plan and delay. Time will come for tide and travel. Soon.

Not one, not two, but three foals

You just nip out of the forest for a couple of days and foals are suddenly like buses.

Trying to make a point

My youngest is just discovering the value of stuff. He's still not quite absorbed the value of money, although having his bicycle stolen last year impressed him when he had to add up the costs of its parts, but the careless disregard for property that once defined him is now much better in tune with my own attitudes. He finds some of the behaviours of the young people he works with quite abhorrent; carelessly breaking or discarding stuff that, though it may have little intrinsic value, represents some use of resources or energy or some investment of time or of money.

I suffer the tyranny of stuff as well of course, but that angst is largely existential (at least until I wish to move house). My relationship with the inert can be quite significant.

Some years ago (we're talking five, no more than ten) when the children were still holidaying with us, I recall a summer when we seemed to visit a large number of National Trust properties and, since we had children in tow, visiting attractions always ended in a swift exit through the souvenir shop. While children were fantasising over ownership of stuffed toys, I found my attention was generally directed towards the stationary. For all their faults, the National Trust, certainly at that time, did a mean line in stationary. I could only afford to admire these wares however, never to indulge.

It so happened that on this particular holiday to the South West of England, we visited Trengwainton Gardens, near to Penzance. Trengwainton is an unsurprising property in the National Trust mould. I remember that the weather was not especially warm, I recall some views from the lawn outside of the house grounds, which, for sensible financial reasons, we were not entitled to enter. I know that on the pines up there I found a spectacular moth caterpillar. Walking back down to the entrance, through woodland with chipped bark trails, the children rushed around, finding their own paths in the leaf litter. I brought up the tail, ensuring that no-one was left behind.

Just off the path, lying abandoned, I came across a pencil. It was one of the Trust's own, as available for some outrageous price (maybe they were a fiver, it's not important). A mundane writing stick made plush by the application of some fine marbled paper wrap, now damp and limp and looking less attractive than the ones in the shop that we were certain to encounter momentarily. I took pity on this unloved object, likely once gifted to a child with careless pockets who, perhaps, would have preferred a less grown-up memento of their visit to damp gardens.

The pencil dried out, though it never quite returned to the glossy original appearance; I came to like the slightly distressed look; the paper not quite adhering to the wood as it should, the surface still pretty, but matt.

I found it convenient at home to keep possession of this unique object. Most other stationary in the house had common ownership. Writing tools were prone to being tucked into school bags at the last moment whenever the previous implement had gone astray, but the marbled pencil was sufficiently unique, sufficiently tatty, to avoid this fate. I used it for years, always gaining that small pleasure from its beauty and from it being a found object; my thoughts would have been different if I had known it had been paid for. As happens, it became shorter with sharpening, the remaining scrap of marbled paper began to lose adhesion with the pencil and it used to crackle faintly if I rolled it in my fingers while I paused to think.

Eventually, not ever so long ago, its length was so reduced that sharpening it, indeed holding it, became inconvenient. I've switched now to a Scooby Doo pencil, once briefly the pride and joy of one of my brood. It seems to have stuck. No-one has rushed away with it to write a telephone message, no-one has stolen it on a morning when caught short of writing tools on their way out. Two thirds of this tool remain. If I feel an attachment, it is to the child that once owned it. Yet, as I sharpened it over the kitchen bin this morning, I could already feel myself begin to mourn it. It may, after all, only have a couple of years left.

I'm sure that somewhere I still have the stub of the National Trust pencil. perhaps I'll find it in a drawer one day and fond memories will return. For now though it is just part of the accumulated tyranny.

Just popped out into the garden to tidy the front path a bit

From bramble winding.
Amongst bare beech hedge's sticks.
First thorn pierces flesh.

Hand grab

Fiddling, between the new engine and the port-side engine bay wall, I'm interested to discover that there is a certain pattern of pressure on the palm of the right hand that creates a visceral panic reaction. Conscious control returns in a second; I know that the engine isn't bolted to anything and my hand cannot possibly be trapped, but what an instinct. In what murky past did one of my ancestors survive only by having this built in fear?

The cold of it

The Forest’s puddle frost lay unquiet this morning. No planar crystal panes showing clear undershores, but a twisted crazing of partial melts and freezes forming gentle lozenges or sharp shards like creamy guttered candle runnels or inundated torn tissue papers.

I crouched to feel the surfaces, their curled micro-ridges like reflected finger whorls, slicked by light human touch. Cropped grass blades cut the surface in spattered ink patterns; green lances pointed at the sky, rimed with hoar.


Where transient pools sit over porous ground, the thin ice caps get left behind, looped round stranded branches, propped on drained leaf litter. Ghost pools on the forest floor.