A vanished April
I've always had a sense of the rhythms of the different days of the week - a kind of synaesthesia where Monday smells of laundry on the line, Saturday has a concrete and iron heaviness and Wednesday moves like a see-saw. Friday brings release, a [...]
Trees turned and talked to me
The news with its litany of loss, anxiety and uncertainty is leavened by images of the more-than-human world coming closer to us, encouraged by the lack of traffic, fewer people on the streets and perhaps even the reported reduction in seismic activity. Google 'goats in [...]
Feel the roots of the house move
I dream a lot about houses, my own, other people’s, houses I know and houses that exist only in dream-towns. In waking life, I’m intrigued by the faces houses have, the patterns of their doors and windows, and the glimpses of life within. I was [...]
A hint of eternity
I love solitude but it's strange to spend quite so much time alone. Thank goodness for the connectivity of modern life. Emails, online gatherings and the phone ... as I read somewhere, we are practicing physical distancing but paradoxically becoming socially closer. My close companions [...]
Thinking like a plant
Fallen magnolia petals There's an area of ancient woodland at the bottom of the back-to-back suburban gardens in our corner of Canterbury. It stretches along the side of a valley that's part of the bowl in which the city sits, and is home to foxes, [...]
laid with cloth of quiet
I’m blogging today whilst working on stories, whilst making marmalade, whilst feeling poetry bubbling up alongside the pith and peel in the pan. Last autumn was for me, in the words of Stanley Kunitz, a ‘feast of losses’. Each death creates ripples in its own [...]
