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Lunch On South Hess

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At Princetown we set out. (There should be a Princesstown, I decide. The Little Granddaughters would love that.) Overhead clouds are passing, grandiose, pausing to monologue, wandering, yet intently, stage left. We start with a hill, The Chap advises, then the rest of the walk will seem easier. North Hessary Tor suffices to warm us up: me, The Chap, Houseguest Ben and effervescent Dog. She spins in dry dung, chases birds she'll never catch. How many people die here, Ben asks, after the instructions on bogland and hyperthermia. He observes the cloud drama and pulls up his hood. Thousands, says The Chap, kindly smiling, but less now there is good mobile coverage. He has full kit. We have water and dried fruit. Dog chews some grass. We can stick to the path, I say, let Chap go wandering. He has highlighted our map for a rendezvous lunch. The path we drop down to was a railway, once upon a time, when the quarry was a grand business.  My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Straw Music

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Down the river lane and at the wide corner strawberry patches carry leaf, not flower, not fruit: but elsewhere; Barton, Carzantic, Treniffle; blackberries fatten. Four pots of jam have been made; blackberry with banana; one is opened for breakfast; another picking pot is full in the fridge, will be pudding later. The hedge is tentacled, prickled with mild perils, thorn, wasp, horsefly, nettle. Young green berries, hard as carapace, have their small heads nodding. Dog is grateful for the breeze; she sits to wait and listen; the recycling truck is late this week, has all its windows down and the radio loud. Clouds draw and a gate is open; we explore, we make the cut straw music, a late summer plink. Here the berries are not abundant, nor ripe, but the field is gold-red striped, puffed with stray seed. In the corner where the stream drips thorough Dog frolics in its hollowed bed, roofed in oak leaf; and out comes the sun. 

100 Years

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05/08/14: Last night we lit one candle, turned out the electric lights, let the house stand quieted, in memoriam. It was late when war was announced, a summer's late evening in 1914: some other family may have sat, then, freckled by sun, with a dog snoring and their grown boys playing cards, the radio on. Perhaps they made tea, as is still the custom, not knowing what else to be busy with. Keep calm and put the kettle on . Speculate that it should all be over soon, let other worries fuzz a cover: bombs will scare the dog, who will clear the guttering if the boys enlist? If… 06/08/14: Morning rain is musical; percussion on leaf; in the twist of a sluice like faraway bells. 

Don't Forget Your Torch Batteries

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(A report from the TAGB Southwest Summer Camp aka Our Family Holiday) Eight nights under canvas, six days of Tae Kwon-Do training, weather most obliging.  Saturday: arrive, sign in, pitch up your tent. In summer Cornish roads are squished. Caravans bounce off hedges. Even motorcyclists get wedged, with steam squeaking out of leathers. Bored children cry, throw up brightly coloured sweets. Tracks over moor lands pulse with headaches of lost families and Satnavs advising turn around, turn around, in every direction. Even with the advantage of local knowledge it is such relief to reach the open field, kick off shoes, pace out under the pine tree edging. We raise our tent easy: those less practised are spotted and offered help. Boy and I are training this year: Mr is injured. He will be cooking and playing in the sea (not simultaneously.) Forays for supplies are made. There's a fish and chip van in the village and decent coffee available from the Post Office. At

Humidities

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One young fox pads across the village road, unnerved by a squabble of magpies. Heat is thickening. Flowers reach unbearable brightness. Dark fleas show on Dog's white fur. Back at the house six excessively purchased bags of cheap salt sit on the kitchen worktop. It is hot work to salt the carpets. It takes one bag of salt to cover all of them. The other five sit, over prepared, lined up, a show of strength. A couple of hours wait is recommended, while the fine mineral dehydrates insect eggs. Fleas are poor swimmers, too, they thrive in the moderate zone: not immersion, not desiccation. It makes the river obvious. Dog hobbles (infected paw: she is having an unlucky week) over the dry grass. The crop field is unstirred. All the wheat stands as though it would crumble to dust: we dare not touch it. But the water is close: cold, clear, edged in light that flows up, that plays over the broad tree trunks, over the tumbling weeds. Wading in happens fast. Heat calms, damsel flies

Thursday's Thunder

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In The Afternoon: The loosest cotton still traps heat. Every breeze is embraced. People are walking in food halls to linger in freezer aisles, they are loitering at every air-conditioned doorway, they are sitting on shaded benches, postured like slightly deflated balloons. There's no explanation for the girl in a woollen hat. Girl and hat cause ripples of surprise. Only ripples: it is too hot for waves. Plymouth's streets hover heat. In The Evening: All the city errands are done. The air is thick, a clear fog, even in the wood shade, even at the river's edge. Coolness lies in the murk of water, calm as a carp. Beyond the upside down trees, clouds reflect. Later, wet clothes are dumped in a washing machine; from the doorstep of an untidy house, a thunderstorm is observed. 

Five Songs Of Summer

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Castle Beach, with my daughter, 1990 One: The first sounds of summer are not song, exactly, but I can't ignore them. They are too entwined in this experience of life. My strongest sounds of summer are primordial: waves that wash slow over quartz pebbles and medium grain sand; chirrups of split tail birds; the breeze idling though a full-leafed tree. After this I think of beach chatter: what you hear when your eyes are closed in full sun, when the beach is busy, that blend of every human social vocal. There are human musical sounds that evoke summer things too, though, stuff you could put on a mix tape. There are: Two: Kelly Marie. I Feel Love . Because disco works best in the heat, because this is the song I associate with going on the Waltzers at the travelling fair. Sequins, candyfloss, coloured light bulbs spinning. Walking in a wonky line with innocently sticky knees; everything smells of sugar, onions, cigarettes, fruity lip gloss.  Three: Janice Joplin. Summerti

Dorothy And The Self Made Pie

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I walk Dog and my elderly neighbour around the block. I do not put Dorothy on a lead, please understand, although she does alarm me as the tractors pass. 'That's all right,' she says, stopping unpredictably under the bucket of a Massey Fergusson; waving at the grey bearded driver; 'is that one of ours? Oh yes, I know his mother. That's Christopher.'  Christopher waves back. 'Yes, I know his mother,' she grins, walking on, after the machine has crawled carefully by. 'It is lovely to be out here,' she says. Her eyes flitter like a butterfly over the hedges, the old chapel all done up, the quarry busy with forklifts today. I had been walking past Dorothy's garden when she asked where was I going: around the block? Could she join me? 'Well of course.' I wait for her to check that she's turned things off in her neat home, and she keeps pace very well and breathes easy up every hill. She tells of how she used to walk

Weekend Diminuendo

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Saturday: begins with finding a butterfly in a newly opened sunflower. A day in which one drives a loop of town hoping for a free space, settles for a car park, finds the pay machine is out of order. Pennies earmarked for parking are counted over to the proprietor of the second hand bookstore, the remainder buys an avocado.  On walking Dog, a tennis ball is un-lodged from a hedge; wild strawberries and meadowsweet grow; ransoms and red clover offer up ripe seeds. A swimming costume is found in the shoulder bag underneath the unneeded raincoat; there's a stretch of water clear of rocks. Swimming with Dog, upriver. Skin shivers, damply redressed, jumps old storm felled trees to warm up.  Home to show Mr foraged goods, and how a poppy has appeared in the vegetable patch.  A granddaughter is brought, tired, with cake to share. 'Did you have fun at the party?' 'We played football and chasin-' she prods the icing. 'I don't love blue. I love pink.

Surprised By The Memory Of A Pen

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Trying with the borrowed laptop. Not liking the borrowed laptop. Feeling apologetic.  Such a first world problem! Trying again. The moon that is sighed to is as wide as it can be, milky as glaucoma. Mistakes every third word, at least. Tap tap- oh, not that- tap- oh… Try again: oh… Conscious of a lack in flow. Hands tap knees instead. Outside the moon has worn thin. The sky is swirled out and sequined: one star is spun free. Remember the fibre tip pen you had? After the years of cheap biro that leaked ink in your pockets? The lump on your finger from gripping the plastic? How beautiful that fibre tip! It glided. (Special effect produced by a marshmallow on a fiery stick)

Cotton Cloud

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I pegged a pale wash to the line  before work. I worried  about a stain on my white shirt  it's a shirt, only, a length of cotton stitched  cotton that was grown from seed picked and handled to the loom  woven, bought, cut, made, sold, handed on.  I should not take any presence for granted.  Then I remember that to care for a thing  might not mean to worry over it.  The sun will shine. Blotches fade, or not.  I will still like my shirt. It blows rounded on the line, not unlike  a pegged cloud. Loganberry Jam: delicious! Must remember to wear an apron for the next batch though :-) 

The View From Buddha's Tub

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Inch high pomegranates perky in their individual pots: lettuce, revived, has a shine like slivered mineral, like banded malachite displayed backlit in a local museum. Labels have dropped from repurposed tins, they are rust dotted silver, nurturing life. A sequinned star that fell from a fairy grandchild's wand waves in the tops of tomato forestation. Under the intoxicating white flowered lime with many curious orange and peppery eyes squats a nasturtium. Laughing Buddha, missing his left hand, still is jolly in his resting tub: all the green, the colour splots, they are magic, treasure, cheer.

The River Speaks

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Widdershins we walked, on the Longest Day, late, as the sun descended to a bed of pink cloud. Around the lanes we walked, the lanes that lay low in the mountains of hedge. Dog's whitish fur was bouncing back light: our trotting glow worm. Through the tree shadows cow cries came, and dinosaur snorts that startled Dog.  Since then the feverish time is spent, hot, melted without a pot. Boy finishes his exams: is making frenetic plans for moving on: The Novel is ready to start rounds of editing: this is all change. We do not know what will happen. Our little world turns. But in the hedges bloom meadowsweets and wild rose. The path to the river is light and shade together. The river water muddied and I cannot see my feet. The cooling feel on these sore feet is calming and then the way the light is playing on the surface, and the smallest glimpse of rock: it seems to be inviting me in.  The river has something to convey.  Blind feet slide, several times slip, no ha

Octopus Garden Soup

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Gronmere emerges from the relative dark of her writing room. Chapter Ten is done. She knows the missing element for Chapter One. Little Granddaughter lies on the sun blanket. 'Gronmere,' she says, 'I'm sooo hot. I need to make some soup to calm down.' Gronmere understands. She fetches the bowls and the ladles. Into multiple pools of finest hosepipe water are dropped exquisite ingredients such as daisies, buttercup, grass heads and fleabane; in stirs one beaming octopus, some seashells, magical flavourings of coloured chalk. Behind this activity Blackbird hop-hops. He has more cheek than even a magpie, making him a main suspect in the Great Cherry Heist. But since he also, without even needing to be asked, has taken up the job of diligent slug patrol, he is forgivable. Gronmere smiles, surveys her empire. After a stern word, the butternut has begun to swell its fruit. Courgettes grow podgy like cherub legs. Rocket is running to seed. Basil fills it

Beans And Birthdays

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Friday: Lawhitton: All day the wind blows. Even in the lea of the house the broad beans are laid flat; sheltered stems twisted and snapped. Some are salvageable, the rest: compost or dinner. At night we see the moon too is cleft, and one half lingers in a pale sky. Saturday: Ilchester: Hailstones were forecast. They must have melted in the unforeseen heat. Everyone sits in the shade of the tent, where pompoms sway and birthday balloons drift like lazy animals. The children herd them up. On the table is a summer rainbow of fruit, a princess castle made of cake. Steaming hot children pile down the new slide, snacks in hand and laughing. Bubbles stream, some big enough to trap grown men. Baby Girl, one whole year old, claps her hands. 'Remember at the wedding,' we say, 'she was a bump!' Little Grandson speaks to the girls, he says 'Well: my friend: my friend is nine.' He leaves them to absorb this momentous social advantage: he has a cardbo

Cows, Clouds, Chairs And Cheese

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Wednesday afternoon: Cloud is foam on a dark sky: blows like spray. Wind in the broad oaks is wild music. Everything shakes. Even the dense perfume of the lyme trees is blown out across the field where the cows, overwhelmed, have lain down. In the garden, under the Perspex arches, heat gathers, pressures like a pulse. Thursday morning: Clouds are tall ships, moored, out on a Mediterranean blue. Wind furls. One small girl lies on a rug, counting aeroplanes, telling a dog not to chew stones, telling pirate tales to a plastic crocodile. Thursday afternoon: The renovator smiles. Her hair is dusted red from rubbed off rust. The first coat of paint was rushed, because of the quick darkening of sky. The rain did not transpire. The chair frames are drying in the back of her car. Weather can change. The brush is resting in white spirit. She forgets about the brush. She sits at the picnic table with her granddaughter: they make stories for aeroplanes. Where's

Magic Three

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A calendar year begins in winter, stark and spiced. Spring pokes through, budded, pretty. The bloom is biggest in summer. Even the late to leaf ash trees are feathered in green, now, in the year's second change of season. The hedgegrass has gone wild: gobbled up the village name; licks at the speed limit signs. Wild strawberries and feral loganberries take warmer and deeper hues. Flowers spray colour everywhere and the roses droop with scent. ' I love it!' Little Granddaughter greets her third year: swirls in a princess dress, swings a plastic tool kit. Her mother calls her 'Princess Fix-It.' Gronmere has painted her a tree mural: she loves that too. In the garden her first sunflower opens its warm yellow face and is loved.