Rest cure

 Nothing to read here.

What a relief.

No signs.

No instructions.

No advertisements.

I find myself incapable of ignoring any lettering

however banal.
These days we are bombarded by messages,
but the habit of reading them all started young.

I remember feeling obliged to decipher the words

mesembryanthemum criniflorum

on the back of the loo door at home.

I can't have been more than five years old.

My father had pasted up some pages torn out of Amateur Gardening to

the panels on the door.

There was another sign in his spindly writing taped

to the geyser that heated the water for our baths.

It read,

Remember. Before lighting remove paper from chimney.

We read this nightly and eventually set it, somewhat bizarrely, 
to the hard-to-scan chorus of

In a feeble attempt to stave off this madness

I peel the labels from appliances

and products that cannot be mistaken for anything else.

This may yet be my undoing but so far it offers a little merciful respite.

How do you cope?

Treasure

I dug this up in the garden.

Isn't it sweet?

Measuring just 6cm in diameter,

probably a little souvenir pin tray from the 1950s.

It is so Parisian,

and such a charming thing to find when one is being

scratched by brambles and stung by nettles.

Losing it

He jumped down from the bed,

took off his pyjamas and looked for his trousers.

He looked on the chair where he'd left them and

he looked on the floor under the chair -

and then he looked through the chest of drawers

in case they were there.

But they weren't.

They were nowhere.

You wouldn't think it was possible to lose a pair of men's trousers

in regular rotation.
Especially as there are no other men in the house at present.

Naturally it was assumed that they were somewhere in the washing cycle.

Laundry basket. Washing machine. Airer. Ironing basket.

Nope.

'But they must be somewhere,' said Little Bear.

'Trousers don't disappear.

I'll go and ask Old Bear.

He'll know where they are.'*

But Old Bear didn't know where they were

because they weren't her trousers.

But once she knew they were missing she was a woman possessed.

She re-examined the washing cycle places.

She looked in the wardrobe.

She looked amongst her own trousers.

Just in case.

She looked in other people's wardrobes.

Just in case.

They wondered if they had been taken to the cleaners.

Nope.

They wondered if they had been left in another house

because they had stayed away,

but no, that would have meant coming home in underpants.

But they must be somewhere, she wailed.

This is ridiculous.

A suspicion was entertained that Old Bear had taken them to a charity shop.

But she knew that she had done no such thing and was very indignant.

Time passed.

They began to believe that trousers could just disappear.

Just like her favourite necklace or the bee brooch.

And then one day a strange flash of intuition

pierced Old Bear's befuddled mind.

She looked at the laundry basket 

and held her breath for she had remembered something.

The basket has a drawstring liner so that you can lift the washing out

and sometimes people drop things into it

before the liner has been replaced.

And then the liner is brought back upstairs

and popped back in -

on top of whatever lurks in the dark at the bottom.

You are ahead of me.

Now we must turn our attention to the missing metal tape measure.

Used only yesterday for measuring up pictures

that are being re-hung on the freshly painted walls.

It is a new tape measure, self-locking and retracting.

Could it be in the laundry basket?

*Little Bear's Trousers by Jane Hissey.

Have at thee Christmas!

Four jars of mincemeat made

and one Christmas card bought.

A Post-It note saying:

Goose?

Make table bigger?

Get/make curtains.

Put curtains up spare room.

The illusion of being satisfactorily on top of things 

in that department

cannot be allowed to persist.

The accidental bouquet

Fennel, nepeta and salvia

being given a late and rather

half-hearted Chelsea chop.

Let it go

Please check your pockets, drawers and outhouses.

I have lost a necklace.

It is made from dozens of tiny multi-coloured semi-precious gemstone beads

with one central silvered wooden disc.
It was bought as a present from the Dartington Cider Press.

It isn't lost because I hid it in a safe  place.

It is just lost. 

I wore it every day - would take it off 
and put it in my bowl every night.

Every morning, I put it on again.

I have looked in all the reasonable places.

Pockets, drawers, bags, pockets, bags, drawers, 

under the bed, down the side of chairs, the car,

pockets of summer clothes, kitchen bin, inside wellies,

purse, pockets of other people's coats, the fridge,

linen cupboard, saucepans, compost bin, 

other people's bags, medicine cabinet,
behind the wardrobe, 

pockets.

And now I want you to look.

Or should I let it go?

The new old walks

Whenever I set off for a familiar walk

I invariably wonder aloud whether

I really want to carry my camera

because I can picture it so well

and nothing will have changed much.

I am always wrong.

I left the camera behind when I went for a short walk by the sea.

There was a beached ray on its back, smiling up from the sand

just like a Disney character.

Greater Dixter

The garden that goes on giving.

Mine goes on giving too -

mostly weeds at present.

I think I should never have gravel

or slate chippings

anywhere ever again.
Ever.

This evening

I am not yet ready to relinquish summer

for pencil sharpening and new notebook autumn.

But I do appreciate the way that the light

reaches in to spotlight neglected corners now

that the sun is hugging the horizon

a little more closely. 

Ever hopeful 2

Summer did come at last and, when it did,

it was one of those summers of poems and stories 
and country pictures,a once-upon-a-time summer,

it was hot day after day, week after week,

so that we slipped into a dream,

where we imagined it never ending,

a paradise world of long golden days.

Time stretched out into the pale far distance

and the mists that girdled the day about,

so that we seemed to be somehow suspended,

floating in them.

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill 1982


Pictures from Great Dixter 2013 on a rare sunny day.

Just add sun

It was a small hopeful sign yesterday.

Hopes dashed again with the reappearance of 

the dreariest sort of snow this morning.