Picture-fest

A Frog masterpiece.
Yes, I know, it's got meat and cheese on it and I'm supposed to be a vegan
- but I'm a very bad vegan, I hate labels, and if food is cooked for me I make an exception.



A particularly beautiful musk mallow - dark pink rather than light pink.



Meadowsweet and weeping willow.
Meadowsweet can smell rather sickly but at the moment it smells of vanilla-honey.
(How do you describe smells?)




This old bath was full of tadpoles a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately I couldn't check what happened to them because cows, calves and a bull took up residence in the field.
I hope they didn't drink them. (I mean, I hope the cattle didn't drink the tadpoles, not the other way round.)



Still crazy after all these years*

I follow four blogs at the moment (details in my profile) and each of them teaches me something different – about how to be and about how to write. ‘Reading the Signs’ (http://www.readingthesigns.blogspot.com/ ) is my most recent discovery. The writer suffers from ME and the blog is an extraordinarily honest account of her pain.

    I wasn’t brought up to feel pain. I was brought up to ‘get on with things’, to ‘stop making a fuss’ and to smile. The trouble is though, if you stop feeling pain, you stop feeling anything. And, for someone who wants to write - or live, that is poison.

    My pain is my numbness. Every three weeks I have a migraine and that, I believe, is my accumulated psychic pain looking for a way out.

    There, I’ve said it. I’ve admitted to feeling pain. And you’re the first to hear it.

    Aaagghh.

*This is a Paul Simon song title. I hope he doesn't mind me using it.

Leys

I love wacky ideas: the gods were visitors from another planet; the Earth is controlled by reptiles who feed on our fear; the pyramids, Avebury and Stonehenge were built by Atlantean refugees. I hate to think that we have the world sewn up. Does it matter if ideas are true or not? Actually, I don’t know what true means. To my mind, if something works or makes me feel better then it’s true. Truth isn’t fixed. All you can say is – this is true, for me, at this moment. To say more is to head towards the realms of arrogance and bigotry.

    All of which is a preamble for talking about leys.

    It was Alfred Watkins, in his classic 1921 book The Old Straight Track, who first pointed out that prehistoric and natural features seem to be arranged in straight lines. He thought that these lines might be ancient paths or direction-finding devices and called them leys (pronounced ‘lays’) after the place-name element (also spelt lay, lee, lea or leigh) which has never been properly explained. Conventional archaeology scoffs at his ideas but computer analysis has discovered that ancient sites in the UK are in fact aligned much more often than chance alone would allow.   

    A more recent idea about leys, first suggested by John Michell in his 1969 book The View over Atlantis, is that they are ‘energy’ lines, part of a worldwide system perhaps inherited from Atlantis. In acupuncture, energy is believed to circulate around the human body along ‘meridians’. Leys are the meridians of our planet. Prehistoric people put their stones and so on along these lines to enhance both the energy of the Earth and their own when worshipping at their sites (or whatever they did at them).

    If you want to check leys out on maps for yourself you can include long-standing crossroads and churches or other historic buildings (often built on older sites), ancient tracks and ponds (possibly dug by prehistoric people to enhance leys) as well as obvious prehistoric features such as standing stones and barrows. When out walking in the countryside look also for sudden vistas, markstones hidden in undergrowth, or hills with notches in them. 

    The beautiful Scots pine is native to Scotland but you can see clumps on the tops of hills all over the UK. Watkins suggested that these trees (or rather their ancestors) were deliberately planted by prehistoric people to mark leys.

    On one of my walks I pass a Scots pine and on a hill in the distance is another. It wasn’t until this winter, however, with the ground icy-hard, that I ventured into the middle of the neighbouring field and was able to align the two trees and stand in the line myself. I looked behind me and there was the ancient farmhouse of some neighbours, directly in line with the two trees. A thrill went through me. And it still does, every time I stand in that line.

    Earth energy, imagination or just a lovely view?

    Who cares.

I took the above photograph when I was up there this morning. The second pine is on top of the conical hill in the distance just to the right of the first. (You can't see it in the picture, but you can when you're there.)

The last day of June

A blackbird on the path eating wild cherries

A turbine on the hilltop, holding its arms out to the wind.

Nazgul cloud-shadows flying across the fields.

Red poppies and yellow cat’s ear. Lollipop colours.

Wafts of heavenly honeysuckle, and of the sea.

Heavy-bellied clouds waiting on the horizon.

A sudden silence.

Then the twittering of a million birds just out of earshot.

The dog’s tail, all I can see of her, a white pennant waving through the long grass.

Happiness arriving for no reason. Yesterday, hanging out the washing. Now, sitting under a tree.

A bubbling in the throat.

An almost-laugh.

Felicity

I'm a bit shaky today as our cat died yesterday so I thought I’d do a nice easy post. It’s one I’ve been planning for a few days, inspired by Nina’s lovely blog ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ (http://www.ninafenner.blogspot.com/ ) in which she lets us into the secrets of her wonderfully practical life.

As I say in my profile, I enjoy customising my clothes. This may be partly because of my height (five foot ten) which means I can never get clothes to fit, and it may also be because I'm a perfectionist (unfortunately) and like things to be right.

    Last year, because they actually fitted from bum to knee, I bought a pair of dirt-cheap jeans. Below the knee however they were shapeless so I put a flare in the bottom, as we did in the ’60s and ’70s, to give them a bit of kick. (Dreadfully unfashionable, I know, but who cares about fashion.)

    I then, as I nearly always do with trousers, added an extra waistband at the top, so that the trousers didn’t stop right in the middle of my stomach (uncomfortable and unsightly).

    I wore them like that all last year but then this year I thought I’d dye them. They were pale blue and showed every muddy dog print as well as being fattening. As you can see, I dyed them royal blue.

    As I went to put them on however, the first time after I’d dyed them, I discovered that the zip had broken. Bother. I'd spent more on dye than I had on the trousers themselves so I wasn't going to abandon them but nor was I going to attempt to put a new zip in a pair of jeans. So I cut the zip out and put buttons and buttonholes up the front instead. I'd never done that before but it worked well.

Now, a year and four modifications later, and just as they are beginning to wear out, they are my favourite trousers.

I discussed this post with Frog, as I do most of my writing, and he said he thought the sewing bit sounded of limited interest. What the heck. And, coincidentally or perhaps synchronicitly (is that a word?), I see that Nina’s just done a blog about altering clothes as well. Weird.

Felicity arrived in the garden fifteen years ago, a starving feral kitten covered in lice. She dominated our previous dog, walking over her if she was in the way, but didn't seem to have the strength to stand up to Ellie (I know the feeling) and aged rapidly once Ellie arrived. She had to be escorted through the kitchen (where Ellie lurks) each time she wanted to get to her food in the utility room or to go out.

    Yesterday morning she had a fit. We took her to the vet, who did some tests and said she was reasonably OK, so we took her home again, whereupon she had another fit. Probably a tumour on the brain, said the vet. Best to let her go.
    Frog dug a big hole in the garden and we buried her with some catmint.