The tiniest spider is trying to make this frame its home, along with my candle, book (about birds of prey, so clearly it can’t read), the space for my wine glass – empty: it is Thursday. So now these luxuries have a defence system to ensure none is disturbed by minuscule flies.
Welcome little one, there is a place for you here. But now I have joined you, where have hidden yourself? Don’t feel you have to go. I’m glad you are there.
I miss the sea and most of all the air at the sea. There is so much more of it, it can pummel and push, it is so tangible in its rushing desire to get deep down inside my lungs. To seek out each tiny air sac, fill each one so that they are pressed close to one another and my substance because light.
So that if at that moment I were to plunge off a cliff I might fall through space but then the water would catch me and, finding me insubstantial, would push me upwards to bob about on the waves.
So full of air that I could never sink.
I could view it as a challenge, but I don’t. For to you, no new musical instrumnet is too noisy or unbearably awful, that you do anything other than encourage me. Thank you.
And there are times when it is painful. When I am using your music room and our son is watching television in the lounge and so you find yourself on a hard kitchen chair with your feet up on the Aga. When you don’t complain and encourage me to keep practising and to write every day so here I am writing every day and your chair is hard and your feet are up on the Aga. Thank you.
In my imagination I can express the deepest, unspeakable emotion in the swoosh of the bow and a gentle, precise finger, the notes so truthful that they could go unnoticed through the resonance of my human heart, translating what I feel through your cochlear and into the depths of your soul.
Then I raise my violin to my shoulder and recall that we have not learned yet to be one. That in mistakenly playing two strings not quite simultaneously, and needing to correct the pitch this way and then that just a touch, and not quite swooshing with my bow but rather catching it on an unforeseen dissonance, yet we can still share our feelings. Frustration, determination, impatience and gratitude that although my aspirations are yet to be realised, there may still be time.
That mellow, glowing body burdened with steel stripes may yet produce the beauty of self expression.
Until then, I shall continue practising.
The old iron bridge waits, rusting. The don’t maintain it any more because when they make the cycle way it won’t be needed. For now, they add slices of gravelled matting to the patches wearing smooth. It feels gritty under my feet as I see the gaps between, rather than the steps themselves. Thirteen steps, then a square to turn 90 degrees, ten steps and a turning square, seven steps to the top. The view. A long rectangle of pasture. The white-horned cow and her matching white-horned calf are gone now and the green of the grass is deadened with brown. We would scuttle past on the fenced path as she thrust her horns through in defence of her offspring. I hurried mine in front of me, that is how I defend mine. Where is your calf now that the winter has turned your drinking trough into a long lone sheet of ice and your old cow pats into crispy fertiliser? I hope we will see you both again when the spring comes, but it was not us you needed to protect him from.
The first snowdrop is showing its face, daring to open before its peers, it looks around not knowing the hope it brings, of life and growth, warmth and sunlight.
The mound it grows from is the most forward, several flowers are bracing themselves for their courageous emergence. Is it the sun in this spot, the shelter of that sweet chestnut, or the especial richness of the grave from which they sprung?
On some days the answer is to make the bread flat deliberately. And at times that is all.
There is an ink blot near the wick of my candle. It begins to blur as the candle burns and the wax melts. I don’t know why it is there or what will become of it. Maybe as it burns it will mar the smell of rose jam, or maybe it will just sit there and when I throw away the expired candle I will see it there and wonder again why there are not always answers.
On Saturday, the bread did not rise at all. Today it mostly did which can be regarded as a triumph. There is always that other time when it was just about perfect, and mostly I’m not sure why. There are days when the bread just doesn’t rise.
There are times when I think it’s going badly and she has her head in her hands over 8×4. And then we do it together and all of a sudden it’s the best maths lesson ever, but I’m not quite sure doing it together didn’t mean her watching me.
But then, if nothing else, it’s useful to be reminded that it’s 32 and that sometimes the bread doesn’t rise and sometimes it does.
It is an inescapable dilemma.
For the perfect bath, the water must be as hot as initially is only just bearable. Inevitably then, there is a sting about the toes and ankles as one embarks but it is really as the posterior is lowered that one discovers the extent to which the balance has been achieved in perfection.There may be some disappointment in finding one has not been sufficiently bold. Or otherwise there is much wincing and momentary gasping in the knowledge that, though it may hurt at first, in the end there will be a reliable forty-five minutes of delicious enveloping warmth.
Where the ivy climbs 