The Dog Days of Winter

Breughal's peasants doing what needs must

If the dog days of summer are the hottest and most sultry then how to name their wintry counter-part?  The dog days of winter coming after the winter solstice between Christmas festivities and the crank up to New Year celebrations are, frankly, dull.  The weather is dull; the sky is low and white. Facebook posts are increasingly lethargic as they valiantly proclaim: ‘look, we had a good time.’  

The winter hangover is upon us and limbs are heavier than heads.  This is not rest, it is convalescence.   Time is standing still and the days have lost their values.  The future is on hold.  For now.  And, oh no, we still have the annual reprise of last year’s events.  There will be formulaic radio and television magazine programmes assembled, like the worst Power Point presentations, by jaded producers who will press ‘run slideshow’ and quietly leave the room.  Manic researchers will publish the results of their having counted the counting; as if that is some measure of quality.

Work is difficult to re-start.  Accepting the automatic assumption that rich food must be consumed to the exclusion of anything crisp and green and even remotely connected with a wholesome outdoor breeze, I find myself lingering skurvily over my keyboard; dullness and dehydration dampening every sense. 

To arms!  There must be salad stuff; it must be eaten cold with nothing more than a sprinkling of salt.  Limp parsley must be plunged into iced water.  Iced water must be trickled between parchment lips. Rehydration will occur and with it, the glory that is New Year Resolutions.  Oh joy.

G

Seven thirty, the woman woke to the demands of a pain that pushed through her core and said, 'listen to me, nothing will happen for you until I'm finished.' By midday her baby was in the world and their silent struggle began.  It would be a week before the child's piercing shriek protested at her many hungers.

Toni Morrison wrote that Sethe's love was too thick. But how can a mother love thinly when she sees how much a baby wants life? Twenty two years later the silent struggle continues unspoken by them both.

Steaming through

These thoughts came to me in the shower so I apologise for the dampness of the post; droplets are still trickling from my wet hair. Earlier as I reviewed the familiar terrain of my body I was reminded of the significance of my recent birthday.  There was the undeniable proof of my history and, to my mind, it was ok.  I’d always thought that Lucien Freud would have been a good candidate for portraitist but then, I never moved in his circle and he’d never have chosen me.

Among the many cards and gifts I received was a book: Things to do at 60.  Curious – what is this strange discourse?  Are there things that no-one younger can do?  I haven’t read it so I don't know if I'm to accept a contraction or expansion of experiences.  But I have read about a 93 year sheep farmer living alone on a hillside with no mains electricity.  I read about her ‘rescue’ so she could live out her remaining days in a stuffy, overheated, cabbagey care home.  I've read about the average life span of a woman in Burkina Faso, who can expect to die at 52. I wonder how she’d feel if she knew there were things that could only be achieved eight years after her death.  Or whether she’d care.

What this post is really about is the external forces that construct bizarre ideologies and attempt to impose them on us. In our desire for sociability we carefully ‘like’, comment at Face book’s bidding and ‘share’ like little lemmings.  I have ‘friends’ I’ve never been friendly with and friends I love but I read all their posts with equal appetite thinking that, in some way, I know them.  I hardly know myself.  But this I know, my body will tell me in in its own time what I can do.  My mind is already showing its maturity; only now do I realise what I wish I’d known when I was younger.  It’s ok not to pretend to know everything.  It’s ok to forget things; sometimes it’s necessary.  It’s ok to ask people to slow down and explain things clearly.  It’s ok because I don’t think we decline mentally in the way prevailing discourses would have us believe.  Maturity gives us the confidence to accept and admit our limitations and find a way to progress within them.  So it’s ok.

I remember now a woman who died at 85.  She didn't’ want to die, she fought it with a strong mind.  It was not an easy death to witness as she was swallowed into the miserable depths of another of our society’s processes: The Liverpool Care Pathway – what a hell hole of a mess did they make of that.  More Care, Less Pathway is the title of the pathway's July 2013 review. Once upon a time, the 85 year old was vibrant and young but the pathway worked to strip all that away.  I even wrote a poem at the time to try to work out what I hated about the irresistible conveyor on which we were both travelling.

So today I looked at my soapiness and the lack of special fixtures in my shower and I said, 'sono ancora in gambe':  still on my legs, which brings me to thinking about cultural discourse and attitudes to aging.  In Italy there are idiomatic descriptions that do not delimit people.  On their legs means they are about the place, lively and engaged with life.  It is a positive reference to their state – it is never, ever qualified by that most damning of expressions: ‘for their age’. 

Someone recently asked, ‘did you ever think you’d be doing this at your age?’  I didn't know how to answer then and I don’t know how to answer now, except to say ‘what has age go to do with it?’  If I can I will, if I want I’ll try, if I can’t I’ll find a workaround.  But what I won’t do is read that bloody little book.  I think it was Rousseau who said we must treat with people as they are not as they should be.  Enlightened man that, and Robert Bage by the way.

Music, music, music.  How about love in excess as it’s the festive season – Maria Callas singing O Mio Bambbino Caro because she would have been 90 today and Freddie Mercury because it’s World Aids Day and love is crazy…

We're all in this together

1956

2013

'Be a good girl,' they said so I put my hands together in prayer because I was told a praying child was a good thing.  So the photograph was taken; by a peripatetic photographer with little sense of setting - in this case against the frosted glass of the kitchen door

The grown up version - a selfie on an iPad - also with little sense of setting but the wise advantage of gravity.  Did I say grown-up?  I suppose it's time. 

Two images, fifty-seven years between and, to my mind, very little difference between them - except my mother doesn't cut my fringe any more. 

There's a great impulse to somehow reflect on the the intervening years: countries visited, children born, trials, triumphs, loves and losses. I leave a marker here.  There have been more gains than losses and if it all ended now, I'd howl in protest because it's been good.  It is good. The heart that beat in that little chest beats still and still is full of excitement and expectation. People still to meet, to know, to love, to grieve over. Mistakes still to make, lessons still to learn. And still trying to be good.  And still failing, happily.

Gabby Young

Writing exercise

Sir John Tavener oil on canvas (Michael Taylor 2001)

8 June 2013 - writing inspired by a postcard

Today I am going to write and write until the theme is set firmly down.  All night the thoughts came through my mind, so here I sit with my face turned towards my God, my light and my inspiration.

I have all I need and I am going to tell my listeners that there is nothing to fear from death for it is but a passing thing.  The music plays and will play.  I will not tell you listeners that there is nothing to fear from dying, for I do not know you but I do believe that death is but a passing thing.  My gift is is in me, I am filled with it and my only ambition now is to leave as much as possible before my time grows cold.

It has to be Song for Athene which was played at my mother's funeral. 

My hanging man

She watched him climb, hand over hand.  She didn't watch him climb.  Gone were the superstitious days when she thought a mother’s gaze, a mother’s thoughts should be locked on her child as if the creature couldn't exist without constant vigilance.

‘I’ll just take a picture,’ she quipped ‘so his unborn child with have a record of its father’s face before it hits the ground.’  The Facebook series already in composition: Going, going, gone.  Or more satirically:  chain saw masacree – will this mean a pocket-money increase? 

She watched him climb; stop, check himself, assess, focus, make his decision, careful, cognisant of his own safety.  His belt, heavy with tools, chain saw rumbling.

‘Won’t it cut his leg?’ she asked.

‘No, the safety catch is on, it’s only the motor running,’ an artificial calm coming from his father; another type of men’s work: don’t unnecessarily agitate the women unless for strategic gain, don't show your anxiety. Such is the nature of honesty.

She watched him climb.  Up swung the saw; caught expertly echoing the barman’s flaring he used to show off.  Scream, cut, catch the branch, aim, throw to the ground.  The next one: size up, measure by eye, by skill.  Scream, cut, catch, throw. Again, scream, cut, catch, throw.

Her aching shoulders relaxed but her neck remained stretched, stiff, watching.  More climbing, more cutting, catching, throwing.  Until the job was done.

She experienced neither his climb nor his descent.  What she experienced was his growth, his manliness, his care for himself and for the future of his child.  She was satisfied; a man who loves himself will love his child.

NYC 3

Rocked to the top and guggened out
Bring it on...

http://youtu.be/icXB25Ltg3w

NYC 2

Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie on Broadway.
Va Penserio at Columbus Circle.
Frozen custard.
http://youtu.be/DzdDf9hKfJw

NYC 1 of who knows

Just this
http://youtu.be/aTch3AC7tQ0

Gotta have more guitars and find a way to get past Google+

Water

 

 

 

 

 

 

The drop of water on my hand

is drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

from the sky-ascending hoar on a seal’s whisker,

from broken jars in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index-finger

the Caspian Sea is an open sea

and the Pacific meekly drains into the Rudawa,

the very river that sailed in a cloud over Paris

in the year seventeen-hundred-and-sixty-four

on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

There aren’t enough lips to utter

Your fleeting names, Oh water!

I would need to name you in every tongue,

voicing together every single vowel

and simultaneously keep mum – for the benefit

of the lake still awaiting a name,

with no place on earth – and for

the heavenly star reflected in it.

Someone’s been drowning, someone dying has been calling you.

That was long ago and happened yesterday.

You’ve dowsed homes, you’ve snatched them

Like trees, snatched forests like cities.

You were present in baptismal fonts and courtesans’ baths.

In kisses, in shrouds.

Biting stones, feeding rainbows.

In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light a drop of rain,

How gently the world touches me.

Wherever, whenever, whatever took place

is recorded on the waters of Babel.

Wislawa Szymborska

I want to write like that #2

She raised her head enough to read the red digits; 5:08, before ruefully reflecting on the mistake of her early retirement the night before.  She knew, of course, that of  fifty seven pages of the current novel she had left to read, twenty would see her off before she’d finished.  Like sex, reading in bed is different in the morning.   Reaching carefully, she tapped the base of her lamp once before quietly picking up glasses and book: Stoner, A Novel.  A slight shift beside her, then her partner’s breathing regulated itself.  Good, no intrusion on his rest to suffuse her reading with guilt as, guiltily, she thought of someone else who might now be driving west, the sunrise, if it should show, behind him.  Doubtless she’d hear how tired he was if she should bump into him later.

The novel had been troubling her all weekend, as had domestic imperatives, her forthcoming academic supervision and the procrastinatory nature of her decision to conduct one of her biannual wardrobe swops. 

Sunday afternoon and the novel had supplied the necessary human drama to keep the story moving: p198 - a pleasant exercise in conscious self-delusion, ‘half believed … possibility’ and dreams of perfect worlds which had power to charm whilst simultaneously depressing its readers. But Stoner had been more than that to her; both troubling and stimulating.  Read as a straightforward polemic between positivist traditionalism and new critical approaches to literature, Bill Stoner could easily be heralded against the dual ‘deformity’ of literary relativists’, Lomax/Walker, mangled views.  But as a prescient introduction to the nightmare that has become post modernism, she felt the timeliness of the novel’s re-publication and worried about her own project. The more she read, the more she was delighted by the writing but the more she recognised Charles Walker in herself; the winger about to be grounded.  Lomax, Stoner and Holland would surely find her out to be so far removed from the academically idyllic Katherine Driscoll that even her own supervisor would wear that familiar look of disappointment. And sigh. What to do?

She mulled the problem over as Williams finished off his character, perfectly pacing the meta-narrative while giving back his readers some hope; that although it’s a one-way street, and mistakes will be repeated, we’ll all find a way to make some sense of it somehow.  Even if it’s only the importance of feeling a cool breeze on the face.  No-one is all Stoner, all Lomax, all Edith or all Driscoll.  The secret, the real secret is not to risk anything at all and be Gordon Finch.  As she mused on the benefits and disadvantages of receiving a university bursary, she hoped one didn't get too much of a sore bum from sitting on the fence.

Eliza Gilkyson, not a great recording but she's looking for a place...

I want to write like that

7^th September 2013, Guardian Family, a piece on her father. Usual front page story but this time I didn’t feel alienated by the middle class braggadocio of nostalgia and sentimental smugness that usually accompanies these pieces.  You know the formula: he/she was a bit of a colourful character but look at the great success I am.

This time it wasn’t me, me, me, it was accessible, no protective film, no surface tension to break through and no misery memoir either.  Despite and maybe because of this, engaged penetration was allowed.  No clunky phrases but the lightly placed horror of living with a beast and despite that a reverence towards his engagement with the world.  A recognition that a man has passed this way and left his mark.

The reading of this piece accompanied a realisation that it wasn't my class prejudice that prevented my engagement with these narratives; it was the authorial decisions that writers were taking to mask or cloud the real story.  Hidden in Evie Wyld’s narrative was the humanity that would allow any reader entry to it.  Note to self: remember to let them in.

That morning with my running buddy, married to a second generation immigrant of Polish antecedent;  I use the word deliberately because membership of some human clans can be like carrying a criminal record. His mother’s children felt unloved; never a hug, a bedtime story.  This mother-woman had been in a concentration camp at the age of five.  She wasn't  Jewish, it was a labour camp.  Survival, she learned from her own mother, was food.  Energy was not to be wasted on sport or play, it was for work.  Work was not going to set them free, but showing they were strong enough to work meant their captors still felt there was some value in keeping them alive.

The inheritance second generations receive from that type of experience is a set of material values in conflict with a culture they themselves have to negotiate.  S and his siblings always had food on the table.  His mother could feed them, thus ensuring their survival.  But she couldn't hug them. How can one judge such different experiences by contemporary standards?  That we have generations of conflicted individuals who frequently feel excluded from the experience of their peers, coupled with the fact that older generations wish to protect their children from carrying the hurt and grievances of the past, leads to fractured generations unable to relate to each other. And there's the tragedy, we have nothing to hold onto.

Remember the past but don’t become burdened by it.  Your new life is yours to make any way you choose because at least you have a choice.

Early days

Ooh.

Floored

Completely floored by Walter Benjamin, grasping at his fragments, fractures and 'the sensuous-concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of the abstract-general".  It is at moments like this that my intellectual incompetence innervates my consciousness and I retreat to visual imagery to find a way through the labyrinth.

Gustave Caillebotte's 1875 painting Les raboteurs de parquet which j'adore to the extent that I see a postcard of it every morning at my mirror.

Helpfully the Musee d'Orsay advises that this is one of the first representations of urban proletariat.  However the interpretation goes on to explain that these men are painted in an academic and traditional style:

Caillebotte had undergone a completely academic training, studying with Bonnat. The perspective, accentuated by the high angle shot and the alignment of floorboards complies with tradition. The artist drew one by one all the parts of his painting, according to the academic method, before reporting them using the square method on the canvas. The nude torsos of the planers are those of heroes of Antiquity, it would be unimaginable for Parisian workers of those times. But far from closeting himself in academic exercises, Caillebotte exploited their rigour in order to explore the contemporary universe in a completely new way.

Explore the contemporary universe in a completely new way, which is what Benjamin was doing but from a bourgeois perspective and there's the problem.  In everything I read I am attempting to manipulate what he wrote in the Arcades Project to some usefulness in a story of urban ordinariness.  Then I come upon this:

...the history of the urban proletariat has usually been written – under the sign of redemption, with the Party or the revolution or the “socialisation of the means of production” as always the Messiah who will give suffering a meaning, a destiny.

So down goes this anchor until I can make some sense of it.  And in the meantime, a little suburban proletariat's recent venture onto nineteenth-century parquet and other bourgeois floor coverings:

 It's a long hard path from rural obscurity to this type of opulence and a longer, harder path to justify it as we sleepwalk towards another catastrophe.  

I am finding, however, that the occasional visit has its rewards... as long as you don't bang your head on the ormolu headboard!

A little revolutionary zeal from Victor Hugo via another bourgeois activity, ah me but it's so stirring...

One shouldn't

Take two large glasses of Chianti, eat a bowl of spaghetti and listen to Mr Cohen's 2008 rendition of 'Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye'. No, no, one really shouldn't.  Ain't no cure for love.

Now this video says it's 2009 but whenever, here's the man himself stirring all the muddy parts the way only he can, and for quite some time too.

Peacocks and Performance

Ma chi poi e caduta nella disperazione come sono caduta io?

Woken by the moon

A perigee full moon
Yes
You can see it
I can see it too
Let's share it
With everyone

May, the most pretentious month

2) 'A claim, by implication, an unjustified one' so says Chambers.

This is May, full of promise with flapping blouses of cloudy blossom blowing delightful expectation into our eyes.  We hardly notice brown crunchy daffodils making way for fresh green vanity bursting like silent bullets all around.  Oh yes, much promise accompanying mad birds and high white cumulus scudding the wind in painfully blue skies.  Where is the grey now? What is making people smile like lunatics at the same folk they'd have scowled at two days before? How can we resist such a show to draw us from our stuffy interior existence, casting off clouts like there's no tomorrow, let alone the end of the month. Ah me, how we display our need for Spring.

So, starting the pretentious month, halfway through, I cast off my mental clout and pretend to engage with life well lived: Karine Polwart singing 'bout her birds with birdlike precision, two barbecues (one warm, one freezing) and an immersive historical experience at the Mary Rose Museum preview.  And all that finished off with a Sunday evening Tweet-fest with the Design Museum's #fontsunday - this week, fonts on books. Well, who could resist - maybe four entries might have been overdoing it - so hard to choose between Calvino's Invisible Cities, Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy - truly - then two of my favourite other-worldly, Eastern European covers and my very, very favourite St. Augustine. Not, yet, oh no, not yet.

Yep, I have joined the list people.  Of course it's 1) 'Foolish vanity or pretence, self importance or affectation' but it's also grabbing some of this wonderful life and the wonder of what it has to offer and just bloody well taking it.

This from Karine Polwart: Follow the Heron at Brighton's Komedia, where I did not see her but someone did!  She really does love tweeting too.

Pretension will always catch one out

It

is not a preposition !

Death's other kingdom

Silence, heavy, hanging. Damp as a foggy wash day, hung the heavy silence, shrieking with the unspoken as they carefully moved around each other’s brittleness.  Carefully, carefully not touching the edges; the intense tango of a dreary Sunday afternoon.  Despite the potential of glassy acreage letting in the world, nothing less than a sonorous doorbell would break the spell.  This self-inflicted muteness could only be penetrated by a witness.  But who would brave the tension long if they came a-calling?  And if some guileless, breezy caller did come, would the hastily proffered offer of thick coffee - something stronger perhaps, an aperitif - afford sufficient respite from the piercing unspoken knowledge that too many days like this will break them?  Too many years left to shift and slide around.  Too many weeks - too many Sundays and too long - feeling that silent chill creeping into veins and bones, killing them softly as softly as all the atrophies of age by a lingering, suffocating, damp, heavy, silence.

Udaipur

Some things are good

When a beautiful girl goes to work in India what happens at home?

I'll tell you, her mother's thoughts go with her; calmly smoothing anxiety away so the space can be filled with pride and, occasionally, the last remembered view the day she left in her car.  Waking every morning, wondering a parent's care.

Until, news flits through space and time - all reassurance.  News that food and drink is brought to her desk by servants, on the hour, every hour; that she has a car and driver who takes and waits; that she feasted on the roof terrace of a six star hotel restaurant under a starry sky accompanied by Indian music and fabulous food;  that every evening she dines on a three course meal. That the work is progressing well. And that she loves the beautiful crazy place she's in. Of course she does, she knows how to look.

And then the photographs start to arrive.  Clever girl to tell her mamma about the food, eh?

Start spreading the news

Well not leaving today but have a full six months to be excited about the Upper West Side, Jazz at the Lincoln Centre, Columbus Day Parade, Prohibition, MoMA, the Guggenheim, Beacon Theatre, Central Park.  Am I excited?  Just a bit.

Cocktails, live music, neon, indigestion, sore feet, yellow cabs, exaggerated greetings, world renowned gourmet temples (whatever they are), cheese from every corner of the world (I believe it) and, yes, even Little Italy.  She put in her finger and pulled out a plum and said 'what a good girl am I.'

Oh and Chihuly at the Botanical Gardens...

There is a season

 If I could send a missive to the sad and lonely, I would say, 'please don't be sadder than me.'

 If I could

send

a missive

Detail from Persian Ceiling 2008 - Dale Chihuly

that's what I would say

Should

So, pondering on the word: should.  Should implies a moral imperative.  Should one blog during work time?  Should one miss one's friends?  Should one feel sad for and bereft of the happy times? Should one tell another how to feel?



Now, take is.  Is, is a much better word. One is blogging during work time. One is missing one's friends.  One is feeling sad for and bereft of the happy times. One is not being told how to feel, surely?

Scat that

Yesterday

They came, they ate, they talked, they laughed, they rested, they went. It was good.

Tomorrow

They will come and they will be hungry and I will delight them with food and they will feel loved and I will feel happy.

A Lesion of the Soul

Oh, and oh, and oh, the more I read, the less I know.  Then Rappaport, talking about Derrida talking about Benjamin and Freud: 'the opening toward a future which ... is the condition of all performativity [is that] ... the end is never anything other than a repetition of the end in which each moment is and is not identical to the others. [but that it is] ...a prior wounding or harming that is also and always part of the openness of future to come - a future at the crossroads of a truth and madness - a return to something traumatic that has happened in the past and that will come back at some time in the future.' Oh, and oh, and oh, where's it going?  I don't know.  Here's a poem about someone in my reading group who troubles me...

A Lesion of the Soul

Her teeth I notice first,

No, that’s not true of course.

Her visage, hurt to see,

All over irritated, cross.

Furrows grow between her eyes,

The mouth so tight, severe.

Reproof is writ on all she views,

Her words unhappy sneer.

Impatience covering all,

She callously pronounces.

Opinion raw and rough,

Dogmatic in her trounces.

So far I wish to flee that gaze,

But mesmerised I stay.

For down within her lonely eyes,

A sadness deeply lays.

Snow Angels

'Nuff said.

Yellow

A colour that apparently cries out for attention.  Originally made from arsenic and cow urine, it was used in the 19th century to create emotions.  Wikipedia tells us this about yellow:

'Yellow is commonly associated with gold, sunshine, reason, optimism and pleasure, but also with envy, jealousy and betrayal'

 Largely considered cheerful, yellow has a troublesome history: Judas Iscariot's robes depicted as yellow apparently, traversing through its iteration as The Yellow Wallpaper (Perkins-Gilman 1892 reference to 'a slight hysterical tendency') yellow also became synonymous with fin-de-siecle misdemeanor  in The Yellow Book before its particularly vile association with exclusion inherent in the wearing of a yellow star.

Gold, sunshine, reason, optimism and pleasure are infinitely more appealing sensations than envy jealousy and betrayal so it is with great effort that I choose to promulgate the necessary show of positivity to shove a load of daffodils onto my post instead of what I'm actually feeling right now!

Be cheered,  it'll be a temporary outbreak of wild emotionalism.  I think...

Where do you see yourself?

 

'In five years' time?, the managing director says over dinner, having just outlined her role in the future of the company, its fifty million pound turnover and how the major utility companies are tracking her work.  Her work.  Her creative work.  'Keep the ideas coming, give me ideas.  They're watching you, they're imitating tomorrow what you're doing today.'

Creativity springs from her like a constant stream of rightness.  It is so much a part of what she is; her sense of zeitgeist, the way she spots the moment and is ready with a creative response.  When Jonathan Jones replied to, 'Who invented art?' his response could have been describing S.  Lyrical, as he speculated that art may be millions of years old:

'If art is as old as that, it probably did not need to be invented.  It is as natural to our species as smiling and running.  And who invented those?'

Well my girl can smile and run and show herself through creativity.  This is to the art teacher who tried to talk her out of training for the fashion industry because she thought she was too shy; paraphrased from Frances Burney, it appeared in S's sixteenth birthday card and it so turned out to be true:

  'You are not, indeed, like some modern young women, to be known in half-an-hour; your modest worth, and fearful excellence, require both time and encouragement to show themselves.  You do not, beautiful as you are, seize the soul by surprise, but with more dangerous fascination, you steal it almost imperceptibly.'

You stole mine the day you were born my darling.  Today you gave me music, the Lumineers.

 

Rabbit

As children we thought as one.  We shared values without the language to articulate them and certainly without the insight to question from where they came.

Playing chase was as instinctive to us as breathing.  Everyone wanted to be the chased, not the chaser.  The chaser could fail, he or she had all to risk but the chased could practise skill and cunning stimulated by fear.

Running then, through tracks in long grass, we understood and were in tune with the nature of our childish gait, with the nature of our chaser's need for speed, the mistakes that might be made as plimsolled foot followed plimsolled foot. 

If sufficient time could be gained it was short work to duck or pretend to fall, grab a handful of long grass from either side of the narrow track, and tie a rabbit trap; high enough to catch a rabbit - high enough to catch a foot - if the knot was tight enough. 

Sweating in the summer sun that gave sweetness to the meadow, down would come the chaser, howling outrage, ' 'snot fair!'  It was seldom fair if you were on the receiving end of it but it always seemed entirely reasonable to experience the burst of jubilant triumph that haled  you a hero among your peers when your trap succeeded. 

It seldom did succeed though and there was no-one more surprised than the hero when it did; who, in my case, was always left wondering if it was really possible to catch a rabbit that way, and what on earth was I to do with it if it happened.   

Mary Hopkin singing 'Those Were the Days'

Ain't got no...

New Year resolutions.  None, not at all.  Nothing, absolutely none. Per niente. Not even a Google+ profile to 'call out' or a page from my blog to help people notice my post.  Nulla.

I've got a glass teapot and a bag of chamomile, nettle, lemon balm and peppermint tea, labelled 'evening calm'.  I've got honey and a pretty picture and that's enough.  For now.