Posts

Cold snap in February

Image
We had a week of snow and frost between 7th and 12th of February.  At night the temperature sunk to minus 2 or 3 degrees and on several days the thermometer scarcely rose above zero.  From my window I could see snow slowly turning into patches, but the most distinctive feature was an icicle slowly growing from a black plastic drainpipe This aggregation of things starts on the right hand side with the plank walls of a large shed in the garden. Moving leftwards, or northwards, is the black pipe with the icicle oozing from it.  The wooden branches are part of a European fly honeysuckle bush I grew from seed I found in 1984 in the forest near Lac Johnson in Quebec.  Behind this the snow lies thick on an old, recycled rubber dustbin lid used to cover the green plastic water butt (rather inefficiently).  The icicled pipe, which drains water from the shed gutter, should have gone into this but its last section seems to have been lost. Other vegetation in the picture includes ivy climbing the
Post a Comment
Read more

A K-pop pancake

Image
I have created this simple, but nourishing, K-pop pancake for those who like quick, but tasty, light meals. It uses simple ingredients: a Staffordshire oatcake, cheese and Korean kimchi, all available from our local Sainsburys and, I am sure, other supermarkets. The Staffordshire oatcakes I use come in packets of six and can be stored in the freezer.  When the time comes to use them an individual oatcake can be separated from the rest with a knife (be careful though - you don't want to finish up in Accident & Emergency).  The rest should go back in the freezer as they do not keep very well in the fridge. When the time comes to use it separate the oatcake and soak it in cold water for a couple of minutes to defrost it, then shake off the surplus water. Lay it flat on a microwaveable plate. Spread the kimchi (forked out of a jar) across the oatcake then add enough grated cheese  to cover the oatcake and kimchi in a layer about 2 cm thick (less or more according to taste). Use you
Post a Comment
Read more

A memory of Cynthia

Image
Cynthia died on 22nd April 2019, an Easter Bank Holiday Monday.  She passed away peacefully in bed at her home in South View with her poor arthritic hands rested gently on her diaphragm like a dormouse that had gone to sleep lying on its back.  She was very white and still after all the previous days of pain and struggle. Outside her window the morello cherry flowers were at their snowy best and the camellias were thick with pink and red blossoms in the garden that she loved.  In the wood beyond the bank where the soft shield-fern grows the bluebells had produced their annual magic under the great oak to which she had a swing fixed when she was a child.  I once wrote to her from Alice Springs that one of the things I missed most was "the translucent green of the bluebell woods in spring".  How often she quoted that phrase back to me.  But now, after 62 years together, she is gone and will rest in the Precious Field part of Sedlescombe churchyard among the trees across the K
Post a Comment
Read more

Belgium

Near Dronkaard in the province of Vlaams-Brabant, Flanders, four business men in a Rover car swept through the border into Belgium. The Flanders Fields flashed by the autosnelweg to Ghent and the language of road signs was Flemish.   But maybe there never was a road to Ghent though the night train could have sped into Li è ge south west of Aachen. Brussels, the Grand Place soot encrusted buildings with pale boned facades like well-drilled guillemots on a cliff, a chiaroscuro of filigreed stone seen through the November rain of an Émile Verhaeren poem from the shop of a celebrated chocolatier.   For all the grandeur a small dark fondant is the heart’s desire. Such overpowering experience make it hard to plan an agenda for a day when I can watch green fig leaves trembling as the raindrops fall on them. Moules aux chicons at La Villette red and white checked tablecloths someone said Belgians were both apes and molluscs mussel shells like seabirds’
Post a Comment
Read more

Thorntonesque

In August 2018 I wrote this sonnet for my friend David Thornton who had been publishing his poems (which I described as 'Thorntonesque') on line.  He asked me what Thorntonesque meant. That style of wordplay known as Thorntonesque Is like a fresh caught smiling arabesque, Neat verses wrote to catch the reader's eye Lifting flagging souls from low to high With unexpected puns and metaphors Laughing at all those tiresome literary laws Displayed in style on blue computer screens Where cyberspace transmits thorntonic scenes That sing the spirit of the Isle of Wight From Bembridge to The Needles shining bright. This bird of words will soon fly to a city, Bold Sheffield craving its own pretty ditty What then? Maybe an opera of rhymes With wicked thoughts for these distracted times.
Post a Comment
Read more

Trade, 28 August 2018

I found on my tongue a fragment of yellow oat straw from my morning biscuit. What are we going to trade?  Bombs for oranges? Tanks for redbush tea? Such stray thoughts pierced my mind like tariff free polished poison arrows.
Post a Comment
Read more

Lines from Sedlescombe

To the east a leafing oak glows pale yellow in the April sunshine, Caught in relief against a dark grey cloud With two windflung crows sailing above the tree. A week of frost has gone: a whirl of sleety rain keeps me indoors. Can I write backwards?  Rewilding the present? I went to Columbine Path to photograph the fragility of Prunus subhirtella autumnalis, the 'autumn' flowering cherry, jugatsu-zakura, that has suckered out of a nearby garden.  Unphased by frost and lovely with its long trails of branches blossomed with a dainty snow of flowers. On Tuesday the first wood anemones marked the ground with stray white buttons Great tits zipping in the trees defied one another and a buzzard complained high above Hurst House. Honeysuckle leaves mined to total whiteness, ash trees spotted like snakes with liverwort and lichen. Bluebells making green lawns of leaves under the hornbeams in Killingan Wood. Afterwards I fell over while washing mud off my boots. A slow totter b
Post a Comment
Read more