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.

Absolutely Animals

One or two days a week Ellie goes to a dogminder. Nikki, who runs her business Absolutely Animals (www.absolutelyanimalspets.co.uk) from just outside Exeter in Devon, is tiny, looks about sixteen (in a good way) and controls her charges without ever raising her voice (at least, as far as I have heard). What’s more, she has managed to get nine of them to sit quietly all at once and have their photograph taken. We can’t even get one to do that. (Ellie is in the front on the left.)

Roselle Angwin in her thought-provoking blog about ‘poetry, holism, the imaginal life, Zen and the natural world. Ish’ (www.roselle-angwin.blogspot.com) talks about the importance of relationships. However much we might long to disappear into wilderness and solitude (big sigh of agreement), it’s through relationships that we learn and change. Relationship may be the biggest challenge of our current age.

Absolutely. And my relationship with Ellie is probably my most challenging relationship at the moment. She is super-intelligent, calculating and determined. In order to stop her creating havoc I have to be so tough with her and toughness does not come naturally to me. As I have said in a previous post, the dogtrainer called her a ‘control freak’. Frog calls her a brat. I call her my karma, my reward for being weak in the past.

Nikki on the other hand always delivers her back at the end of the day saying how good she’s been.

Red-letter day

Here is my Mini back home where it belongs with a new panel to hold the driver’s door on. We fetched it this morning from T & T Coachworks of Feniton, Devon – real craftsmen. (In the background you can probably see a dead white Mini. Frog keeps this for spares. Very useful but it does make the place look like a scrapyard.)

Today is Ellie’s first birthday. We are waiting for her miraculous transformation into a grown-up well-behaved dog.

And do you know what a ‘red-letter day’ is? No, I didn’t either. I had to look it up. It comes from ecclesiastical calendars where saints’ days and church festivals were (are?) printed in red ink. Now isn’t that interesting. And there was me imagining an envelope with red writing on it, like an old-fashioned telegram, or something related to ‘French letters’.



Rosebay willowherb and foxgloves,
seeing who can grow tallest and pinkest



Toad

Because of the good response (thank you Nina) to two poems I posted earlier, I’m inflicting another one on you.

    Thirty-six years ago I ran away to Australia. Six months after I’d arrived I found my way to an island off the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, it was paradise.



A very old, much-yellowed picture of sunrise from my island bedroom window



A few years later, however, back in England, I wrote this poem about something that happened there.

    Toads squatted all along the paths around the hotel where I was working. They were huge and you had to dodge them like un-stepping stones. I think now that they were probably cane toads, native to Hawaii but introduced to Queensland in the 1930s to control pests in the sugar cane fields. They spread rapidly and started to eat their way through the indigenous wildlife. They became – and still are, I believe - an enormous problem.

    Even paradise has its troubles.

Toad

One day you wandered into a fishing net

left lying at the back of the beach.

Your crusty fingers and toes

soon wound themselves

into the mesh

and trapped you.

I never thought to free you then,

while there was still a chance

that you might live.

Instead I watched you struggle

day after day

for a week.

I shrank from your ugliness and your pain,

while your dinnerplate body

shrank in the tropical sun

and hung there like a trophy.

‘One of the men will deal with it.’

‘Let nature take its course.’

‘What’s one toad more or less?’

But, while I dithered,
you died.



A young cane toad