Celandines...

For me the flower of spring isn't the snowdrop or the daffodil and I can hardly be bothered with the crocus (or is that crocuses or crocai?). I'm almost there with primroses, violets, and cowslips, but for me the flower of spring is the lowly celandine. I took these with my new super-duper camera last Saturday walking along the Menai Straits at Caernarvon (zoom-zoom to 18x, 12million pixels, focus, flower mode, auto shutter speed - CLICK).

The celandine is a common enough flower - native to the UK and found in all sorts of places - dew damp meadows, dark shady woods, almost perfect front lawns, under spiky hedgerows, beside cool mountain streams - even in dirty dank ditches. It grows in the shade, in the light, in soils with a pH of 4.4 to 6.9., from seed, from tuber. So it's a hardy little thing, although it doesn't much like the heat or dry and dries up a little in the summer, a little like me, perhaps that's why I like it.

The lesser celandine has therapeutic and medicinal uses, it's been used for centuries as a treatment for piles despite it being poisonous - it's said to have caused the deaths of whole herds of cattle and numerous flocks of sheep.

Wordsworth wrote three poems about the flower including his 'Ode to the celandine (he only wrote one about daffodils). Upon his death (not from piles or celandine poisoning) it was even proposed that a lesser celandine be carved on his memorial plaque inside the church of Saint Oswald at Grasmere, but unfortunately they carved a greater celandine, Chelidonium Majus, by mistake. Whoops! I bet that mason never got his money.

C. S. Lewis mentions celandines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there's a reference in Tony Hendra's The Messiah of Morris Avenue, and even good old J. R. R. Tolkien mentions the plant when he describes the coming of spring in Ithilien. So I'm not alone in my fondness for the flower.

Most people mistake them for buttercups, if they bother to see them at all. So keep your eyes open - you'll see them everywhere now that I've mentioned them. But don't eat them even if you do have piles - as Wordsworth wrote:

I have seen thee, high and low,
Thirty years or more, and yet
T'was a face I did not know.

Well you do now.

Season's first...

First barbecue of the season last Saturday, just a small one, we used our kettle barbecue, very handy and quick to set up.

We always cook too much, this time we cooked too much of barbecued anchovies, barbequed herring in lemon and parsley, bar-b-q-ed salt and pepper wings, barbied herb and clover honey pork sausages and one or two too many outdoor grilled welsh black beef burgers.

To be healthy we also had some salads and things, and to combat that some beer and wine.

The thing with barbecues is that you eat for hours. Eat and eat as it gets darker and colder and then suddenly you realise that you’ve missed the news and it’s too late to do the washing up - then Misty decides to climb out of Holly’s bedroom window and disappear into the night – but that’s another story.

Tiffany sunset...

Sunset outside last Saturday, the first warm day of Spring and from across the usual field. I just stood and watched unable to move for a while as the clouds changed, then changed, then changed again. Deep orange and purple, light orange and lilac. Tiffany lamp colours, the colours of the lamp in our kitchen. That lamp that Gaynor so carefully wrapped and packed in her suitcase bringing it home safely from America all those years ago.

Then, moving inside the cottage I found that the sunset had crept indoors and repainted the seascape that rests uneasily on the kitchen wall, picking up the shadows of the glass wind chimes that hang in our window. The wind chimes that I so carefully wrapped and packed in my suitcase bringing them home safely from America so long ago. Happier days? Yes, happier days.

Remembering, I stood and watched the light play on the wall until it faded to dark and disappearance.

You can’t wrap up the sunset and pack it carefully in your suitcase to bring it home to keep. You may remember, keep it close, but in the end memories fade and what have you then in the dark and disappearance?

Yes, what have you then - an empty suitcase?
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Floating away...

Up and out in darkness for Scarborough today, weekend gone along with the sunshine, a long walk to the car, past the barriers and diggers that are littering the road as they replace the main drains – but I’ll save that for another post.

Ninety minutes down the road, early morning, yawning in the cold grey light, traffic medium, nothing much happening, a very standard day, driving tired and bored to my bones.

Then, a glow of flame in the sky.

Look up. A balloon, a red hot air balloon, floating through the early morning mist and flaming-up to keep it hanging in the air.

It passes over, making me look up. The small boy in me yearns to pass through the windscreen, float up and drop into the basket swinging gently above. I want to go wherever the balloon is going, anywhere the balloon is going, drift away anywhere, the small boy and the middle-aged man drifting away - anywhere.

And if we did, would we ever come back?

A ship of fools...

A ship of fools

My ship of fools,
My ship of fools,
Made by myself
I earned the tools.

It’s me a’winded round the mast,
As masked I stare into the past.
A vanished man I carefully sit,
Where once my sail had wind in it.

My ship of fools,
My ship of fools,
Made from a life
So bent by rules.

I fished the waves with me as bait,
A sea of lust and loss and hate.
I sat boxed in upon the prow,
My head on fire but empty now.

My ship of fools,
My ship of fools,
We’re on a journey
For lost souls.

Hooked, lined and sinkered, taken in,
I hanged myself for every sin.
The beak I hang from is my own,
Above I flap, a thing of bone.

My ship of fools,
My ship of fools,
I am their vessel
And they my dues.

Misty takes a tipple...

My Name’s Mizty and I’m a alcoololic… locoalic… cocolalic...

No um not. But I did fin this bozzle in the bin, an when I snivved the top, it tayted so goo lat I jus had to lickety poo an when I didz I fell all dippety lippety.

Whay iz tis stuff? Fudies and Hizfluff drinks it all time, praps thax why they goes aw wobbley when theyz had a too foo glazzes. Iz not water. Iz not milks. It muz be chin chin. Thaz what Hisflap sez whnhe giz Fodles a glazz.

Chin chin, down thatych, bottms up… it muz be one of those. Oh well. Whazever, I thinn I nee to snooze ths off. Cheeeeerrrs!

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Here comes the gallopin' major...

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I don’t know what to tell you about this old photograph. I’m hidden in there somewhere but I can’t see myself.

This is my Gran and Granddad, my Mum’s parents. That baby could be my Mum or any one of her three sisters Kate, Lena or Muriel. Gran had a lot of children, six of them lived to be ‘all growed up’, Charlie and Ted - her two boys.

Ted ran off to Australia and Charlie – Charliieeeee! - taught me to whistle and fly and dream.

I never met Granddad. He was dead long before I was born. All I know is that he was a Welshman from London, family name Roberts, a boxer, a soldier, an invalid; gassed in the Great War, never really recovering. Dead, before I was born, me born in the bed that he died in after that long illness. ‘Gassed in the Great War, gassed.’ I’d whisper late into the night.

Born in the bed that you died in - remember?

My Gran, Katherine - Kate - kept her hair long, pinning it up in the daytime and taking it down at night even in old age. She cooked fresh fish on market day, smoked roll-ups from a 'baccy' tin, wore flowered aprons, made spotted dick, knitted Christmas jumpers / scarves / balaclavas, could make a rug out of rags and a small boy’s shirt out of an old dress. ‘Bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Here comes the gallopin’ major. Bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Ridin’ his Indian charger.’ She’d sing to me, bouncing me on her knee. There was gypsy blood running in her veins somewhere, gypsy blood and gypsy curses.

Gypsy blood in our veins – remember?

I was a teenager when she died. I didn’t cry at the funeral but afterwards took myself off down to the river and sobbed. I see her in the picture - then some thirty years later, no different, the same - bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Always old, a hard life - hard lives common back then.

Sometimes I think of their hard lives, my mum, the pretty young teenager in her grammar school tie, cardigan knitted by arthritic hands, Gran's stitches - loose and long to save the wool. So young when her dad died - bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump - poor then poorer still. I look at the photograph and remember -
Here comes the gallopin’ major.