Spring day

Already some of the blossom

Is falling; already small shells

Of white, pale petal-saucers

Are scattering the grass,

Settling into the gravel,

Preparing to rot away.

Already the first blush

Of happiness is passing;

And today we have rain.

But in the tall bamboos

The year’s first reed warbler

Is singing his raspy joy.

For all things their seasons,

Their blossoms bright and dark,

Their myriad passing days;

Ephemeral as rain,

Their ways to happiness.

April mist

I wrote this a few days ago.  A bit late for a spring equinox poem, but it's really a friendship-poem anyway, easily as much as a season's one.

April mist

April the first, and a thick mist

Lying close in the Thames valley.

Birds sing unseen above me

And the towers hide their heads.

Trees are fixed ghosts, and traffic

Is ghosts that move.

I cross the bridge, walking away

From one mystery and into

The next.

If you, my friend, were just

A hundred steps ahead of me

I would not know

That you were there.

And perhaps you are.

Perhaps you too are walking

Quiet in the quiet mist

Between two mysteries.

I cross the bridge, as you

Have done, or will do soon.

One would not know, looking out

That there are islands here;

Even the river itself

Can barely be seen.

Still, I am crossing water,

Towards the invisible

Blackbird singing ahead,

Towards the hidden wonder,

And, maybe, to you.

 

Simple pleasures of this February

Sunshine on a winter day.

Getting shot by a tangerine and smelling of citrus for the rest of the day.

Owning Frankentop.

Discovering Tumblr (even if I am a bit foxed by it)

Renner-fetish!

Snowdrops!

Doing some drawing again.

Knowing I am partway through chapter nine of "Gold Hawk" and the revisions are flowing well.

Meeting new interesting people.

Crocuses!

Being able to walk home in daylight.

Remembering crying into my binoculars at “Onegin” last week.

Daffodils!

“The Golden Cat” – finally!

Eviscerating lychees with my tongue.

Getting busier again at work.

Trade Fairs!

Orchids!

I love my life.

Crikey, a month since I wrote anything!!

I seem to be forever saying “I’m so busy!” lately.  But tomorrow is Good Friday, which means church for my church-going friends and for the rest of us, a four day weekend.  Oof. A chance to catch my breath...

I worked through my lunch break today; but it was the first time in over two months that I have done that.  In the previous job I had to do it two or three times a week.  The new job remains refreshingly structured and organise-able compared to the old one, too.  And my new manager Paul still hasn’t shown his Dark Side – if he has one, which I am beginning to doubt.  So busy or no I am feeling decidedly cheerful about work. 

Of course there is the odd chaotic group planner, and the odd startlingly rude one, and as always from time to time I have IT problems.  Next spring is going to be a harder sell than usual because we don’t have our regular Trop-Ex tropical flower exhibition in February, which is a great pity.  And the weather has turned chilly after a beautifully mild March.   So it isn’t all shiny, but shiny enough for now.

But Kew is looking lovely, with delicate new leaves opening everywhere, glorious displays of magnolias and crab apple blossom, the first cherry blossom, early lilac species and azaleas, and great banks of native fritillaries near the river; and my own little bit of garden in Chiswick is looking lovely too in its more modest way.   I have been busy outside of work with sketching (I’m having a real fit of duck-drawing) and sewing, and tidying the garden, and I’ve been to the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy (wonderful: if you possibly can, go!) as well as two very enjoyable mixed bills by the English National Ballet and a couple of excellent concerts, including Britten’s “War Requiem” with Mark Padmore, the chap who was at school with my brother Steve, a heart-rending tenor soloist. 

ENB are in good form, though I managed to get rather a lot of Dmitri Gruzdyev, a dancer I find dismally uncharismatic, both nights – I would much prefer to have seen pretty much any of their other men as Nijinsky’s Faun, never mind as Balanchine’s Apollo – I don’t mean to sound bitchy, but Apollo he ain’t!!  The three Muses I saw were lovely, though, and Erina Takahashi was a terrific sacrifice in “The Rite of Spring”.  David Dawson’s “Faun/e”, a new piece on me, was gorgeous despite the men’s silly “will it fall off or not?” costumes, and “Suite en Blanc” looked even more luscious second time around.  

Steve, incidentally, has got his plaster cast off and is progressing well with physiotherapy.

A ray of watery sun has just filtered through the clouds; may it be a good omen for the weekend ahead! 

Against the blanched white clouds

Where last month there were only

Dark branches like scars, now

Everywhere I see shivers of green. 

Birds sing, or hop scuffling

Among the flashing celandines.

The swans stake out their usual demesne

By the lake, and a thousand coots

Chase one another like ninja chicks

Across the grey spring waters.

News

Yesterday I got offered a new job.  Our department is being restructured slightly and everything has been a bit hassled and chaotic for the last few months while this was sorted-out and negotiated.  There were some glitches at an HR level, which needless to say did not speed things up, and all in all it's been an unpleasantly stressful patch.  But I think everything is now ironed out, and I get a new role out of it.

From February the first I will be working in what's known as Travel Trade, i.e. running group bookings.  It's an area I've covered some aspects of, and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into it properly.  The job carries a slightly better salary and slightly more responsibility, too, which is pleasing.

I just wish the process of getting to this hadn't been a tad protracted.  I am more tired than I would like, going into a new job.  It would be so much better to be full of energy and as keen as mustard...

Mind you, I'm always tired in January.  I think perhaps I have a mild form of SAD, for I always spend a couple of months every winter simply longing for spring.  As it is I would really love to have a week off in February or March, but I feel I can't really since I'll be learning the new role.  Maybe by April I can take a break; I'm owed seven days of annual leave and in fact there are relatively few gaps where I can use it up....

There are masses of snowdrops out at Kew at the moment, as well as a sprinkling of crocuses and wonderful Schiapparelli-pink Cyclamen coum.  Today was cold but bright, but it has clouded over this evening and is now grey and dank-looking.  well, it is still winter, after all.  But the cyclamen are beautiful...

And there's another one gone...

I’ve just been downstairs bidding goodbye to Briskwoman, from Kew Foundation (the fundraising arm). Briskwoman is going to be missed – she’s retiring, and has put in above and beyond the call of duty, so one cannot begrudge her her retirement, but she is one of those completely direct people who aren’t afraid to call a spade a spade, and every large organisation needs a few of them. The first time I met her she scared me stiff! – which is a perfect example of why one should always be prepared to move on past a bad first impression.

Her current boss, Moustachioman, made a little speech and tried manfully to disguise a gift-wrapped Kew Gardens flowerpot as a lampshade by waving it about upside down. Everyone who retires here seems to get a flowerpot. In another twenty years, maybe I’ll get one, who knows?

The more serious part of the retirement present from her team wasn’t ready yet, but merely being told it was coming made her jaw drop. They’ve commissioned a painting by Rachel Pedder-Smith for her. In botanical art terms, this is the equivalent of being given a small Matisse.

Happy retirement, Briskwoman, and go well! – you’ve deserved it.

Anyway, I’ve said goodbye and had a glass of Cava and rather more cake and strawberries than were good for me, and come back to the office to print off some letters which I’ll get into the post tomorrow, and now I’m off home, into the bouncy-breezed evening. Sunshine and wind and wild banks of dark cloud are dancing by outside; Mad March weather indeed.

I’m not quite sure why, but I have been fearfully tired this week – the clocks going forward last Sunday seem to have thrown me rather. What a wimp, eh?! At least now it is officially spring. The Gardens are full of early cherry blossom, though this wind will be playing havoc with it, and outside the Orangery is a carpet of Chionodoxa siehei in flower, like cobalt blue paint spilled across the grass. And the air smells sweet, of petals and honey and the first grass-mowing of the year. Spring is heaven.

Good things today

It’s turned windy, but the sun is shining.

I had a very nice lunch of cheese and tomato salad and rye crispbread.

The first flowers are opening on the myrobalans, and their sweet honey-and-clean-skin scent is filling the air.

And last night I finished the revision of “Ramundi’s Sisters”.

It’s been sticky going, as the final scene had to be totally re-written from scratch. I’m still not entirely sure it works, so I have to treat that last scene as “first draft” level, when the remainder is now at “third revision” level. This is a bit frustrating, to say the least, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t really right yet. But it’s a lot better than the original, which was a really bad example of characters pushed into actions that served the plot with no regard for what would be natural to the characters themselves.

Anyway, it’s nearer to done than it’s been in a long time. Now I’ll sit on it for a few weeks and then try to give it a first revision all of its own.

More writing difficulties... and a daff

I went on with the writing yesterday evening; got through the next scene okay, then got bogged down again. I want to yell at it, but know this wouldn't help. I have committed one of the classic beginner's bad-writing errors, right at the end of the story, and I have to sort it out.

The characters do what I had decided the plot required, rather than what real people would do in their situation. Ah, horsehit and a pile of it, to quote Rhodry Maelwaedd. I have to completely rewrite the last two scenes. Sorry, this may take a few days, and I have to resist the distraction urge meanwhile ("Why not make a start on those short stories again?" "Why not put on a U2 album and draw?" "Why not make muffins?"...).

Never mind; it will get there, in its own good time. Meanwhile, the first real daffodil is out in my garden. Kew has quite a lot of them by now, of course, but I'm a lot more proud of my own personal one.

Been off, come back...

I've just come back to work today after three days off with a suspected case of the infamous winter norovirus, ugh. You don't want the details, it's a miserable condition, though luckily fairly quick to pass. It was either that or food poisoning (I did have a takeaway on friday night).

Have spent today trying to sort out sensible things at work and making sure I had a proper lunch break. Went for a walk in the rain and appreciated the sweet smells of eary spring - snowdrops, Chimonanthus, winter honeysuckle, damp pine needles... The big displays of orchids and bromeliads in the Princess of Wales Conservatory look wonderful. The rainy dusk is calling me home now, though; home to eat some nice wholesome boiled rice and steamed veg.

Rambling wearily; I'm off...

First tiny signs of spring!

Today as I was drawing my curtains onto the dark pre-dawn light, I heard, as well as the usual winter chorus of robins, a blackbird. No mistaking that melodious alto flute amid all the high whistles. Robins call and sing all winter but the other songbirds don't start until in the spring a young bird's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love (apologies to Tennyson's ghost)... So a blackbird singing in the morning gloom is a sweet sign of spring. At work today I have been admiring the early snowdrops, a glorious sight especially as it is a sunny day (if bitterly cold again) and then on my way out to get a sandwich at lunch I saw the first few brave little pale crocuses. The mild weather last week must have encouraged them (and this colder patch will probably stop them in their tracks again!). It is such a cheering sight, these first little quiverings of spring, as the cycle of the seasons turns steadily on.

Beltane

Magical slides from the Newgrange people...
http://www.newgrange.com/beltane.htm

So astronomically it's Beltane today, not last Saturday. Does that mean that in the Southern Hemisphere it's technically Samhain today? Confusing.

Outside the office window, apart from the fresh foliage it looks more like Samhain than Beltane, actually; lowering grey sky and a strong wind tossing the branches. I think it may be going to rain again...

Garden weekend...

I’ve put on weight the last few months – being inactive and comfort eating is a bad combination – and the last couple of weekends I have noticed how out of shape I am. I’ve been trying to get started on the garden, and my back is protesting.

When I moved into this shared terraced house in Turnham Green, the view out of the back windows was of a rectangle of uneven paving surrounded by beds of nettles, brambles, old-man’s beard and convolvulus, plus an old supermarket trolley, a hideous metal fence, and the embankment of the District Line railway... It was neglected and unloved; the soil between the wild plants was dry and bare, and everywhere was thick with fallen leaves from the three trees - two whitebeams and a big Lawson’s cypress - that dominate one side. But where the landlady saw a terrible mess, and the other tenants saw a bit of waste ground where they could have barbecues, I saw a garden.

I’ve put in a lot of work in the year and a bit since then; getting rid of the shopping trolley, clearing back a large proportion of the nettles etc (but leaving a few, because nature has her rights too, and nettles are a food plant for butterfly caterpillars), raking up all the fallen leaves and cypress bits, and putting in rooted cuttings, seeds, and things I picked up cheap in the staff plant sales at work. As well as flowers, last year I grew three kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of climbing beans, chard, spinach beet and a few small beetroots. This year I’m aiming for three different kinds of toms and three kinds of beans, and the same greens. I may try carrots, as I’ve been given some carrot seed, but whenever I mention this everyone I know who gardens says “Oooh, carrot fly!” and groans, which makes me a little nervous…

Yesterday I cleared a lot more leaves, put in my dahlia tubers and some cheap corms of crocosmia “Lucifer” from Wilko, scattered the first of a great many batches of seeds, some home-gathered and some bought, and planted the three little saxifrages I’d bought at Kew. The leaf-clearing is a back-breaking task and of course it will come around annually. Still, at least neither whitebeam nor Chamaecyparis lawsoniana drop prickly fruits. I grew up in a garden with a sixty-foot sweet chestnut, and no quantity of delicious chestnuts ever quite compensated for the vicious stab of empty chestnut husks into my unsuspecting flip-flopped feet.

My wallflowers are almost out, and the honesty I sowed last spring; there are buds on all the aquilegias I cadged off my mother (whose huge, rambling cottage/dry garden is my dream and ideal) and the orange tulips I put in are coming up well. My pots of narcissi are all flowering, filling the air with their sweet scent. The pansies I grew from seed have survived the winter and are starting to flower, and the ones I bought in when I thought mine had died are flowering like mad. My little ginkgo sapling is just opening its leaves. The kerria is flowering. Both jasmines (summer and winter) are putting on new growth, and I discovered yesterday that my little clematis has pulled through. Both lavenders are producing healthy new shoots, though I am beginning to think my purple sage didn’t make it – frustratingly, Mum’s didn’t either, so my source of cuttings has dried up. But every little bit of growth, every opening bud or flower, however tiny, lifts my spirits and tells me again that the wheel of the year turns and turns, whatever our human troubles or obsessions.

If only my back weren’t so quick to protest and seize up! I would like to spend every spare minute out there at the moment. I will look on the bright side, and say that my physical limitations mean I have to keep up with the rest of my life as well as doing the garden!...

Spring cheer and wintry bleakness

I went for a walk in the gardens in my lunch break. It was warm enough that I was okay with only a sweater, no coat. Spring bulbs are coming out everywhere and birds are singing, and the air smelled of wintersweet and viburnum blossom, and of pine trees in the sun. Heaven is coming; it’s spring. This has felt like a long winter, what with the successive snowfalls, the colder than average temperatures, and my bl**dy broken wrist. To see the wheel of the year turning is such bliss at these times. It spurs me on to keep working at my physio exercises as the gardening season approaches again.

Last night I had the first dose in a short course of Janacek shots; “Katya Kabanova” at the ENO. Wintry despair to contrast with my own spring cheer. Gorblimey it’s bleak stuff, guvnor.

It’s a bleak story, of toxically unhappy families, adultery, betrayed passion and suicide, and it's a bleak production, of barren open spaces and crowding, bare walls; a solitary lamp-post, a room full of angular shadows, an icon of Christ that is swiftly turned to the wall...

Patricia Racette is Katya, who has married (god knows why) the spineless, mother-fixated, deeply knotted-up Tichon Kabanov, played by the ever-reliable John Graham-Hall, and is now tormented daily by his truly horrible mother (Susan Bickley having a whale of a time being a poisonous old toad). Katya is a good-hearted woman who wants to be a good wife; she is deeply religious, with a mystical sense of connection with God, but she is also passionately emotional and longs for a freedom of experience her small-town life can never give her. Unable to escape her mother-in-law’s endless demands, she tries without success to get some demonstration of her husband’s love, or even some sort of reaction from him. When she meets neighbour Boris, Stuart Skelton’s six-foot hunk of red-haired Australian beefcake, well, what with his magnificent rich tenor and all, she is lost.

Listening to him, I don’t blame her. I don’t normally go for the beefy type, but Mr Skelton could rock my boat any day. What a voice! And he can act (and he’s ginger!). This is the third time I’ve seen him in action; roll on the fourth – it can’t come soon enough. Stuart Skelton is the heroic tenor for me.

There are a secondary pair of lovers in the story, as well; Tichon’s adopted sister Varvara is in love with the amiable local schoolmaster Kudriash; rather like Anne and Simon to Katya and Boris’s Gabriel and Rose, they are saner and more balanced, in both their love affair and their general way of dealing with life. Shortly before the final scene they decide to run away to make a new life together in Moscow. Their directness and good humour in the face of the situation is a touching contrast to the superficially more romantic but utterly self-defeating passion of Katya and Boris. In their music, simple folk-dance melodies and ballad-like lyrics express their healthily cheerful attitude to love. Boris and Katya, however, have fabulous music of great dramatic outbursts, lyrical and wildly emotional, full of wonderful characteristic Janacek sounds I haven’t the technical vocabulary to describe. It tells you everything you need to know about the uncontrollable intensity of their feelings, and the thoughtless passion with which they rush into their affair.

Of course, their love is poignantly brief, doomed from the start. Boris turns out to be a man of straw; Katya loses her marbles, confesses all, loses some more of her marbles, meets Boris one last time and then, flattened by his farewell, drowns herself. So it’s hardly laughs all evening by the Volga; but well-done, as last night’s performance was, it makes for a very powerful, deeply upsetting evening.

On Monday, I’m off for my Janacek booster shot; “The Cunning Little Vixen”. Again, bliss; and it will give an antidote to yesterday’s tormented gloom. It’s as full of green growing life and natural cycles as “Katya Kabanova” is of fractured hearts, denatured relationships, and death.

And so the wheel turns, and the way of things goes as it wills; and we go on.

Random scatterings...

There was another bit of blue sky this morning, but it went away again.

The red and yellow apple was rather cotton-woolly when I ate it. It's okay, though, because The Rox only got it from a basket of free apples left in the staff kitchen, so someone else is responsible for buying mushy apples, not Her Roxiness.

I simply have to pass this on as despite the strong language it is so funny and so true, even for those who are not professional/succesful/published writers. Once it is known that you write, people say "Will you read my writing and tell me what you think of it? I really, really want an honest critique" - and then they hit the roof, or cry themselves to a saturated solution, when you do give them an honest critique. So you try giving a dishonest, fuzzy one (and know you have cheated, on many levels, just to avoid hassle) or you start saying "I never read other tyro writers' stuff" and sounding horrendously smug instead. Thanks to Hellie in Cape Town for putting me on to that link.

Thomson Holidays are still prejudiced against solo travellers. Their website now announces there are no seats left on the plane if you try to book as a single; then if you try to book for two people, suddenly the plane has plenty of room. They are stupid for turning away custom. And I am equally stupid for hoping they'll change their ways.

Watched half of "Contact" last night; saving the rest for Friday as I'm out tonight. What an interesting film; it explores the tension between scientific detachment and spirituality with sympathy for both sides. It's intelligent and exciting in equal measure, has lovely special effects (and shots of the real - and spectacular - Very Large Array in New Mexico), lovely Jodie Foster, lovely William Fichtner (sadly only in a small part) and Matthew McConaughey proving he can underact if he wants to... Science Fiction is a great genre when it is this well used.

I can now lift a small tray with two coffee cups on it - cups actually containing coffee, that is. I have been given a piece of pink Squeezy Therapeutic Exercise Sponge by the physiotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. By the middle of the month I may graduate onto Squeezy Therapeutic Putty - or even Squeezy Balls... I soldier on with the two-minute-stretching exercises and the labourious lifting of half-kilo weights. I often ache by evening, but I won't give in.

There is a gorgeous white dog with a black patch on one side of his head, running about on Kew Green in the misty grey light.

Someone I was at grammar school with has written to me out of the blue. Hello, Carol!

Life is weird. Wouldn't change it for anything else, though. And even with this dull sky and chilly wind, and all the seagulls inland (scattering before the excited arrival of that eager little dog), it is still, slowly, edging towards spring.