Here and now
One of the curious things about writing for magazines, as I do, is that you will inevitably experience a kind of virtual life three or four months before the fact, in order to accommodate print production schedules. This means that in summer, while kith and kin are ensconced in one of these, gin and tonic in hand, in our heads we magazine writers will already be celebrating the perfect Christmas, complete with happy families, a magical tree and the gifts you’ve always wanted.
I was reminded of this yesterday afternoon when, on a rare weekend at home, I walked through the fields that surround the village in which I live. The birds were out in force and some time over the past fortnight blossom had appeared, as had daffodils, hyacinths, muscari and forsythia. ‘So this is what spring is really like,’ I said to myself, absurdly pleased about being outdoors without a coat and feeling real warmth on my shoulders.
Some months ago, around Christmas in fact, as snow blew down from the north (and the east and the west), flights were grounded and any excursion outdoors involved warming a cold bottom against the Aga – ok, ok, the radiator – I had imagined everything about yesterday and, indeed, had yearned for it. In my head I’d inhaled the scent of washing dried on the line, heard the robin, sentinel on a bough of hawthorn springing into leaf, felt the twitch of fingers aching for an allotment and had ridden a step-through bike from the most beautiful bike shop in Great Britain. It had worked. My work looked fine. But there is nothing like the real thing; nothing quite like proper sunshine on your shoulders.
Of course the demands of work mean that June and July are already here but for this season, this spring, twee though it may sound, I shall endeavour practise the pleasure of being in the moment. No longing; no wishing to be anywhere else; here is good.
* I had nothing to do with this image but use it courtesy of the International Bulb Flower Centre, a collective body that was established in 1925 to promote Dutch bulbs around the world. If you are thinking of growing a few bulbs yourself, do have a look.
New year, new start
And so it is that I’m back. After leaving you on a cliff hanger in May last year, promising Irish holiday snaps and Chelsea thoughts, I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth, swum my round and have popped up – ta da – in the new year. I am, once again, your loyal blogger, here to rescue you from an online malaise like a St Bernard appearing to fallen climbers with a barrel of brandy around its neck.
The big news is that I have moved from my beloved Brixton to the heart of Gloucestershire, in order to take up a lovely job in a town which I’m sure has the highest incidence of Barbour jackets in the land. And Hunter Wellington boots. And jodhpurs. And riding crops. Actually, I think I’ll stop there before my fella gets any ideas.
[Have you noticed that I have started a lot of sentences with 'and'? This is because I know I would never get away with that at work, so I am taking as many liberties as I can this evening before the frisson of grammatical rebellion wears off.]
I have intended to overhaul this blog for sometime now and part of what was putting me off posting was my complete and utter failure at mastering CSS – not something to which one can readily admit given the current taste for social media. Every time I looked at my dashboard my heart would sink and I’d sign out faster than you can say Twitter. If you blog yourself I am sure you will recognise that feeling.
However, onwards and upwards as they say. This is a new year abounding with virtual possibilities, even if they do come via Elance. So in that spirit I leave you with a few shots taken over the past month or so, to keep you going.
Firstly Christmas in beautiful Suffolk where at this time of year the landscape seems to exist in a series of horizontal planes, both inside 17th-century cottages where right angles are few:
And out on the fields, where, if it is not reeds, it is barley and wheat that grow on the county’s expanses (can you sense my shivering in the blur of this picture?):
And even in the vegetable garden…if you squint your eyes a bit:
And then onto a hoar-frost, taken before Gloucestershire received buckets of snow and while I was still enchanted by the ice and the cold.
And another couple for good measure:
Keep off the Grass
The lengths I go to, dear reader, to keep you in pretty pictures are nothing short of extraordinary. See this picture? See the those tulips? Nearly cost me 400 pounds.
I suppose I asked for it. There I was, merrily snapping away in one of the city parks yesterday evening, when a thick-set man came and stood solidly behind me. He coughed.
‘You’re on the grass,’ he said.
‘Am I?’ I asked, looking up and then around me. ‘Oh dear, I’d better get off then.’
I’ll admit I feigned ignorance about not being allowed on the grass because in actual fact I was standing right next to a sign instructing one to remove one’s person from said lawn, and you would have to be blind not to see it. Not even pretending to be Afrikaans-speaking would have worked because a) my Afrikaans is dreadful and b) Keep off the Grass looks the same in almost every language that cares about these things, and Afrikaans, you have to admit, has in the past been pretty good at telling people where they can and cannot stand.
Nope, I’d just chosen to ignore the sign, which isn’t fair or proper considering council gardeners work awfully hard at patching up gardens after dozens of people like me have traipsed through them. So perhaps what came next was karmic justice.
I’d snapped and snapped, even lain on a tarmac path with my head just on the lawn to take a picture of some forget-me-nots, when another thick-set man alerted me to the approaching closing time.
As I folded up my tripod and packed away my camera, he looked at me for a bit, took a breath and said, ‘Do you have a permit for this?’
Oh, the power these men wield. Of course I didn’t have a permit. A permit to take pictures of flowers in a park through which all and sundry pass every minute of every working day?
‘No,’ I said, looking at my shoes, which was about the point to which my heart had sunk.
‘There’s a fine of 400 pounds for that, you know, taking pictures without a permit. It’s more with a tripod. And are you a professional?’
‘No,’ I half lied, suddenly awfully glad I don’t have ads on this blog and that I earn more money off writing than photographs.
‘Oh. It’s more if you’re a professional.’
Sighing, and swallowing a small, anxious lump that had rather inconveniently materialised in my throat, I explained that if he charged me 400 pounds for something that wasn’t pointed out on the entrance board, I probably wouldn’t be able to pay him because there just isn’t a spare 400 pounds floating around right now.
Suddenly he changed his tune.
‘Mmmm. See that building? That lot are always taking pictures in this garden. Books, you know. And our parks and grounds people might need some pictures.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Come back on Friday afternoon and ask for me. I can’t promise anything but come and put your ‘ead in.’
Later, when I huffed and puffed about nanny states and curious groundsmen to my fella, I found no sympathy. Instead, he laughed like a drain.
‘Seriously? Come back on Friday after he’s just let you off a big fine? That’s the best pick-up line I’ve ever heard.’
Thank God for Spring Sunshine and Magnolias
Walking along Half Moon Lane in Herne Hill this afternoon to see an Open Garden (beautiful; full of hellebores, forget-me-nots, wallflowers and daffodils), I recognised the sense of relief and well-being I felt last year, when I took these photos of some magnolias in Kew Gardens. See? So pleased was I to be in some sunshine after what I thought was a long, dreary winter that I pointed my camera directly at the sun to make sure it was real.
The date on these pics is March 15, which marks this spring out to be nearly a month later than last year, although, to be fair, some magnolias have already been out for a week or two. Having grown up with almost perpetual warmth and sunshine, this winter has felt like an eternity.
But before I get het up on dates and figures and what we think plants and sunshine ought to be doing at certain times of year, read this lovely piece from A Single Swallow, by Horatio Clare:
Like birds, we take our cues from seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and space, which theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it…We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal’ festivals that is inaccurate.
(I’ve just spent about twenty minutes trying to find that piece which I read last night at about 1am, noted and then neglected to mark on the page. It’s on page 280, if you’re interested.)
He has a point, hasn’t he? Clare refers chiefly to swallows and their migration, which he follows through Africa from Cape Town to rural Wales, but I think it has bearing on plants, too.
Still, it doesn’t diminish my pleasure at having just cause to walk bare legged, wear sunglasses and drink ginger beer in the middle of the afternoon once more.
PS Being close to the flight path to Heathrow, I’m so enjoying the peace and quiet of not having the drone of aeroplane engines overhead at all times of day and night. That said, besides those travellers who really do have places to be, I can’t help feeling for fruit, cut-flower and vegetable farmers whose livelihoods are held ransom by a volcano on the other side of the world – and by what some would say is an untenable economic system, the vulnerability of which is now laid bare. The Guardian has an interesting piece on the subject here
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