Well, well, well...

St Cybi's Well

Am I getting old? I feel like I’m getting old. My bones ache a little more each day - the most recent casualty of the aching - my left knee. Ouch it hurts. This along with my shoulder and back leads me to believe that I either have rheumatism or arthritis. I’d go to the doctor again but he’ll just stick me on some more pills and tell me to lose weight (he’s right about that one of course). Yes, I’m getting old and starting to wear out.

We needed to go a calling yesterday, over to our quite new friends at their lovely sixteenth century house at Llangybi. The house is fantastic. It used to be an inn and has massive slates for floors, some of which are recycled gravestones. It’s all oak beams and cream stone walls – enough of that though it makes me jealous.

Llangbi is a lovely little village, lots of history, and Jayne offered to show us St Cybi’s Well. I knew there was a well in Llangybi but hadn’t ever got around to getting myself welled-up enough to bother to go seeking it out – after all one well is pretty much like another isn’t it - hole in the ground surrounded by a low wall with a bucket on a rope – right?

Wrong.

Crossing the part-cobble road from the house we walked to and through the slate tombstone littered Churchyard, then over a gated stone stile into a sunlit meadow, down some worn stone steps built into an ancient wall that surrounded fresh, green, lush pasture… and into another world.

St Cybi’s Well sits in a beautiful hidden valley, under tall Oak and Ash trees, beneath a small mountain of a hill crowned with an Iron age hill fort. As we walked towards the well buildings I half expected to see a white unicorn come galloping across the field or catch a glimpse of a butterfly winged fairy out of the corner of my eye. Sounds corny, but it really is a magical place, one of those quiet places where enchantment is everyday and ‘stuff’ has been going on for tens of centuries in the background, almost unnoticed, hidden – a kind of ambient mystical buzzing.







Inside the well house

The well is in ruins but still recognisable as a dwelling. There are two well chambers, a cottage for the well-keeper and a small attached bath building. We approached the well across a stone causeway on one side of a flower strewn water meadow. Meadow flowers of pink, yellow and white peeped through the coarse water grass - after a few days of rain the ground would be boggy, but following two weeks of sunshine and almost no rain, it just squelched a little.

The main well chamber is built of large stone blocks with a deep open doorway. St Cybi’s Well is a place of pilgrimage - the place to come to cure warts, lameness, blindness, scrofula, scurvy and rheumatism.

Rheumatism? Maybe I could… no don’t be silly.

St Cybi settled here in the middle of the sixth century from Cornwall after travelling in Europe and Ireland. When he landed on the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Mon), legend has it that he struck a rock with his staff from which water immediately flowed. I don’t know how that connects to this well, but magic water is magic water wherever you find it so let’s not get too hung up on the detail.

To become well (pun, sorry) and cured you had drink an equal quantity of well-water and sea water, morning and evening, for around a week or so, bathe in the water once or twice a day, and spend the nights in the attached cottage. If you became warm in bed then you were getting better and if you were cold… well let’s just say it was time to throw some more silver in the well, pray harder, and consider a fitting epitaph for that slate tombstone that will soon have your name on it at the church across the way.

Inside the well building, sunlight from the open roof sends light and shadows tumbling around the walls and water. It’s cool inside - not cold, dim - but not gloomy, damp - but not dank. It’s a comfortable place, not physically, but spiritually. Calm, serene… and very pagan. There are good forces here, forces that have been here since long before St Cybi’s arrival, and maybe some forces that are not quite so good - Nyads and Sprites, Dryads and Hamadryads. I can feel them, but not see or hear them, they echo and shadow around me.

I kneel and reach down into the clear, cool water, scooping out a handful, water bugs and all. The crystal clear water falls nimbly from between my leaking fingers and back into the pool where it belongs. I rub some onto my knee. It’s cold and refreshing, making my knee tingle and warming it.

Did something flash in the water? A face, a hand reaching out to me, a healing hand? No, it couldn’t have been – just a shadow, a trick of the light, imagination - it'll get me hanged one day.

Afterwards, making our way back across the meadow and through the churchyard, I wish I’d left something as payment – a coin or two, some bread, a little wine maybe.

Next time.

Has it helped? Actually I think it has a little. When I got up this morning my knee felt better than it had in ages and I was pretty warm in bed last night.

Still got the scurvy, warts, and scrofula though.

Oh well.

The healing well water

Blooming brilliant...

Here she is - my first Aquilegia of the year.

Isn't she beautiful? Aquilegia Cameo, a miniature variety, an Alpine. I grew this one from seed. It's growing in a large bowl planter at the cottage in Wales, and I'm growing dozens from the seed this one produced last year.

I got up early this morning to catch the softer light. Aren't the colours delicate. It's called Cameo because the flowers from each single plant come mixed within the same plant in various hues from deep pinks through to pale yellows and creams. The colours look very much like those cameo brooches that my aunts used to wear on their cardigans when I was a child - my well-to-do aunts on my Father's side.

Anyway, Aquilegia Cameo, the first Aquilegia of many this year I hope.

I'll make sure that you know all about them as they bloom.

Bored yet?

Misty? Misty? Misty...?

Misty has been acting very strangely recently. She sometimes won't come to her name and seems to be able to disappear into thin air at the drop of a hat.

I was in the kitchen the other night and I could have sworn that she was sitting by my feet... well, the next minute she'd disappeared and all that was left was a thin wisp of grey smoke that must have been coming from the oven.

She's also taken to performing acrobatics in the small wee hours of the morning. Odd, as she's always been a ‘sleep quietly in a corner right the way through the night’ sort of cat but something, maybe the warm spring air, has turned her into some sort of feline circus act. I found her the other morning leaping from banister rail to banister rail performing a double somersault in mid-air as she did so.

Our house is tall and thin, and the stairs run up and up through the centre of it – three floors above ground, two turns, half landings and a long way up… and down.

Very worrying...

Also… funny things have started to happen in the night. Maybe I was dreaming but I’m sure I saw a rabbit on the stairs the over evening and playing cards keep appearing all over the floor… that can’t be Misty - can it?

‘Ladieees and Gentlemen presenting… the Amazing Mistoffelees!!!

How good does that sound? Mistoffelees. So much more fitting than plain old Misty. My new name, my stage name, is Mist-off-el-ees… it has a certain ‘je ne sais quois’ don’t you think? And isn’t it fitting that I should call myself after such a famous cat - "the original conjuring cat", that’s me, "deceiving you into believing that I’m only hunting for mice".

As the song says... They call me Cat, They call me Misty, They call me Moo, They call me Pain...That's not my name, That's not my name, That's not my name, That's not my name.

I’m learning all the tricks you know. Rabbits out of hats, sleight of hand, silk scarves out of thin air – that ones a bit tricky, my claws keep shredding the hissing silk.

I’ve come a long way since Foodies taught me ‘paws’. I can do loads of tricks now. Good job I found that book of poems, it was an inspiration to me. T.S. Elliot… now there’s a trainer. You can forget ‘paws’ - too easy - just a starting point - T.S. has taught me everything I know.
I learn it from a book. It has been an education.
I can do more magic than Harry Potter and Harry Houdini put together - and I look so much like the original with my white gloves, spats, and waistcoat. Maybe I should be a bit blacker – but dark grey IS the new black, so I think I qualify … and I’ve been practicing loads when the ‘Keepers’ are fast asleep.

I’m sure Lord Lloyd-Webber will be impressed when I audition, by then I should be ‘trick-perfect’

Here’s where I’m up to so far... I can creep through the tiniest crack, I can walk on the narrowest rail, I can pick any card from a pack, I’m equally cunning with dice - and, as you know, I am always deceiving them into believing that I’m only hunting for mice. I can play any trick with a cork, or a spoon and a bit of fish-paste; and If they look for a knife or a fork then they think it is merely misplaced - they see it one moment, and then it is gawn! But they'll find it next week lying out on the lawn… and, I’m even trying to teach myself how to fly!

Abracadabra, Hey Presto, Shazam! The original conjuring cat - me – the only such Cat in the metropolis – Manchester that is - I hold all the patent monopolies for performing surprising illusions, and creating eccentric confusions. At prestidigitation and at legerdemain, I'll defy examination.

Anyway – must get on. I have a lady to saw in half and I haven’t quite perfected the flying yet – I’m going to try it from the third floor banister to give me plenty of lift. Better get it right though, I’m down to three lives…”

... You know what I found her doing last night?

Jumping from the top banister rail - she only just managed to turn in mid-air and land on the second-floor landing, it could have been really nasty if she’d fallen all the way… good job she’s got nine-lives.

Maybe I should get a net. What do you think?

The Mistoffelees link.

God for Harry...

Saint George’s day and Shakespeare’s birthday - very nearly makes you proud to be English.

Of course the England that I think we all associate with both our patron saint and our greatest literary figure has all but disappeared.

Soon there will be no village fetes (you won’t be able to afford the insurance), maypole dancing (health and safety issues), country pubs (it’ll cost too much to drive there and when you get there the pub will have closed due to lack of custom from the locals because there aren’t any - only second homers – and even if it was open you couldn’t have a pint without running the risk of being caught on camera, so what would be the point anyway?), The Women’s institute will be full of men (otherwise it’s sexist), and even village idiots won’t be idiots (they will be people in the rural micro community with further learning opportunities).

Oh Well, at least we still have the works of the bard – whoever he (or she) was.

Anyway, look at these three. Not sure who they are meant to be, but guess where I found them? Where do you think? Salisbury plain… The Welsh Mountains… the peat bogs of Ireland... Easter Island?... Nope!

I found them on the M6 at a motorway services tucked away behind a rubbish bin and a disabled parking space. Yes, really.

Magnificent aren’t they. Very quirky. Typically, wonderfully, eccentrically English. I wonder if they simply appeared one night, waking with a yawn, pushing straight up through the damp earth to bathe in the moonlight and decided to stay above ground for a while. Or perhaps they were three white- vanned builders who, stopping for a cup of tea and a fry up, annoyed some little old lady by parking in the disabled space she was about to draw into. Do you think that it might have come as a bit of a surprise to them when she turned out to be a little old witch?

Or maybe they are the witches, the three witches from Shakespeare’s Scottish play - ‘With the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes…’

Anyway, happy birthday Will and as your chum Henry V once said… ‘The game's afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!

Get lost...

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Ever been lost?

Lost a little is quite fun. I’m talking the sort of lost where you aren’t really lost at all - just not quite sure of where you are in relation to where you want to be; knowing that you are definitely in the right vicinity, and sure that you’ll get there in the end.

Comfortable lost. A matter of time lost. Very slightly dangerous lost.

We’ve all been there at some time I guess, and isn’t it a relief when you get to where you want to get to.

It’s hard to get lost in the UK. Places are so close together, and we are such a small island, that you can’t really drive more than twenty miles without bumping into some place or other that allows you to roughly know where you are in relation to where you want to be. In the UK you pretty much always have some reference point or other – a church, a pub, a motorway service station - unless you are in a strange city.

I once drove around Edinburgh at night for two hours trying to find my hotel. I must have passed the castle at least twenty times – always from the same direction, always up the hill – but each time the minute I’d passed it I was lost again, heading along a road that I didn’t recognise towards the castle.

I found my hotel eventually though.

What a relief.

My most lost was in America. My first day in a strange city, driving an automatic for the first time, on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, with no reference points to guide me. Up and down the same bit of freeway, through the turnpike half a dozen times, paying the toll just to get back to where I started from, then paying it again, and again. At one point I could see where I was trying to get to – but couldn’t find how to get off the freeway to get there.

Eventually I asked (despite my ‘man thing’ aversion) and five minutes later arrived at my destination.

What a relief.

Asking isn’t always the answer though. Another time in America I got lost at night – well early, early morning really – in Philly, driving to the airport to pick someone up from a flight. I found myself in what I now realise was the ‘wrong’ part of town, but at the time it looked okay (well it was dark). I pulled into a gas station to ask my way. Going into the pay booth I didn’t notice the three black guys at the back of the store at first, although I did think it a little odd that the cashier was encased in a steel mesh cage, behind glass and was shaking his head as I walked towards him.

I explained that I was lost and asked him for directions.

“Just get back in your car and drive” he said.
“Which way?” I responded, a little confused.
“Any damn way you want, but out of here - fool.”

It was then that I heard the movement behind me as the three guys I’d noticed when I’d entered seemed to thaw and started to move towards me. I flew out of the pay booth, jumped into the car, started the engine (first time thank God), and drove away at speed as hands and feet slapped and kicked at the back of the car. I think I was still screaming when I realised that in my haste to get away I was ‘really’ driving on the wrong side of the road. Thank God it was so late.

By the time I got to the airport I’d just about stopped shaking… I really was very nearly lost that time… nearly but not quite.

What a relief.

Sometimes I have this dream where I’m lost.

At first I seem to know where I’m going and I’m going there in a completely straight line. I’m quite comfortable, almost content and then… there’s a very slight shift and I realise that I’m lost. I don’t know what shifts, but something does, and I’m immediately and completely lost. Sometimes I’m on foot and other times I’m in an open car, but I’m always on a long straight road that ascends into the far distance, It goes up and up, getting narrower and narrower, until I can’t turn around and have to keep going forwards. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m lost. There are no reference points. There’s nobody to ask. I’m lost.

Then something shifts again. I’m lost. I realise that I’m never going to arrive at wherever it is I’m going because I can’t remember where it is. I’m lost. Perhaps I never even knew.

I’m lost. I feel the moon pulling at the tide and I know that it is changing it as it does it - but I don’t know how it is changing it, and I can’t see it changing it… I don’t even know what it is… but as it changes I become even more lost.

My despair is so deep that I begin to look for a way off the road. I’m lost. It means climbing up onto the narrow parapet and jumping out into the darkness, off the edge of the world. I’m lost. Sometimes I climb up onto the parapet and stand there swaying as the wind howls around me, other times the parapet is too high for me to climb and I continually fall back into the concrete dust - once I climbed up and jumped out into the empty dark only to find myself being knocked back onto the road by something that felt like the wind, but was much heavier. I’m lost.

I’m lost and then I wake up or don’t… but that is all I ever remember. Thank God.

What a relief.

Lost a lot isn’t fun. There’s no way back. Ask anyone who’s ever been there…Glen Miller, the crew of the Mary Celeste, Captain Oates, one hundred and seventeen Roanoake Colonists, Joshua Slocum, Amelia Earhart, Michael Rockefeller, Lucky Lucan.

If you can find them.

The sky is falling…

Oh no, the sky is falling…

Remember that story at primary school, the one about Chicken-licken?

Chicken-licken, Turkey-lurkey, Hen-len, Cock-Lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander, and of course Fox-lox. Do you remember them? With names like that you could hardly forget them could you?

Chicken-licken caused a real panic when an acorn fell on his head and he mistakenly thought that the sky was falling down around him – well now it’s happening all over again.

Well not quite, but almost. And when I say almost, I mean worse almost, much worse almost. I heard some very bad news on the radio this morning…

I’m afraid that the sun is going out.

Those bloody scientists, not content with worrying us to death about climate change, are now saying that the sun has been getting cooler for decades and that there aren’t any sunspots and very few solar flares any more.

Q. Solar flares? Sun spots? What does that mean?
A. Well, do you remember that hot summer back in the seventies, I think it was seventy-six, when you couldn’t get a decent picture on the telly and it was really annoying because you were watching Wimbledon? Navrátilová and Borg. Well, that was solar flares and sun spots - so at least you should be able to watch the tennis in peace this year. Ivanovic and Nadal – go on put a bet on.

Apparently the Sun normally undergoes an eleven year cycle of activity and at its peak it spits out solar flares and chunks of super-hot gas the size of planets causing sun spots – this shows that the sun is working. Then it all dies down for a bit. Last year was expected to be the end of a pretty quiet spell in solar activity terms, but instead the sun hit a fifty year low in solar wind pressure, an even bigger fifty-five year low in radio emissions, and a massive hundred year low in sunspot activity.

Q. How do they know all of this?
A. Dunno, but they do.
Q. What does it all mean?
A. Dunno.
Q. Is it bad?
A. Dunno, maybe.
Q. Are we all doomed?
A. ... Eventually.

The last time this kind of thing happened was in the mid-seventeenth century and it led to a mini-ice age that lasted for seventy years, but before you dash out to buy a pair of skates in readiness for the skating at the New Thames Frost Fair, the scientists are saying that this isn’t going to happen this time around. So - no chance of anyone leading an elephant across the ice at Blackfriars Bridge, as they did at the last fair in February 1814.

Q. Why?
A. Because even very religious elephants can’t walk on water.
Q. No, why no mini-ice age if the sun is cooling?
A. Because of global warming.
Q. But surely if the sun is getting dimmer and it’s getting colder that means that we can all stop worrying about global warming?
A. I’m afraid not. It is actually not as hot as it would have been if the sun hadn’t cooled off and if it warms up again we are all going to fry a lot quicker.
Q. What are we going to do?
A. Dunno.
Q. Dunno?
A. Dunno.

I wouldn’t worry though - remember the tale of Chicken-licken? Well, Turkey-lurkey, Hen-len, Cock-Lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander, and Chichen-licken weren’t killed by the sky falling on their heads after all, or even by an acorn. No… fox-lox ate them all.

Something similar (well maybe we won’t get eaten by a fox) is bound to come along and get us before the sun goes out completely.

I wonder what it’ll be?

Wishes and Sea Nymps...

Did I mention that I have a thing for pebbles?

Of course I have, and on more than one occasion. It may come as a bit of a surprise to you to know just how deep it goes though. I know it did to me the first time I found one of my special pebbles. That was over twenty years ago now. I’ve found others since, and I’m about due for another to turn up - I just hope it’s a good one.

Anyway, as you know I have a thing for pebbles. I can’t walk along a stretch of sand without looking for an interesting one to pick up and inspect for… well, I don’t really know what I’m inspecting them for, or even why - I just am.

Sometimes I’m attracted to the colour, I particularly like bright green pebbles, you can get really vivid ones on some beaches on the peninsula - but I don’t really like shiny white pebbles… or blood red ones.

Other times it’s the shape that gets my attention. I once found a large perfect egg shaped pebble, and only a couple of weeks ago one that looked just like a foot – five toes and so perfect underneath the striations that it might have come from an ancient Greek statue. I’ve a collection of heart shaped pebbles, and one with a perfect capital ‘G’ for Gaynor in a fancy script face, etched into the dull slate grey oval flatness of the stone with white quartz glitter.

I love flat, round, sea-washed slate pebbles. They are perfect for skimming and I’m an excellent skimmer – five is a poor skim for me, and when I flick my wrist and hit the water at just the right angle I can send a pebble shimmying for tens of yards, a flash of multiple ducks and dives, so fast and far too many to count - a real water dervish.

And I’m superstitious about them. I know their power.

Pebbles with holes all the way through the centre are lucky, half white and half black pebbles bring good fortune when rubbed, and pale blue pebbles are pieces of the moon.

It isn’t always about the colour or shape though… sometimes it is about form, and I don’t mean the outer form of the pebble. I’m talking about the inner form, the living form inside the pebble. Some may not believe, but occasionally a pebble has more at its core than simple stone. Some pebbles contain spirits. They aren’t easy to find and some would say that you don’t find them at all - and that they find you.

I have three.

My first is a large round pebble that contains a sea nymph at its heart. It sings to me sometimes, telling me tales of long lost ships that sail beneath the waves. It is warm to the touch and as soft as a silken purse. It’s a good thing to hold in your palm, it lifts.

The second and smallest contains a wish at its centre. Not my wish, but a wish long forgotten by the wisher and so secret (in the way of wishes) that I’ll never know what the wisher wished for. I keep this pebble safe in the drawer of my bedside table in case its owner comes looking for it one night – we all deserve our wish.

The last of these three pebbles holds tight a dollop of fate. Whose fate I don’t (and don’t want to) know. I try never to touch it. Not even look at it unless it calls out to me and even then I shoot it only a passing glance. The fate stone is bluest black, square-shaped made, and cold as an icicle to my touch.

Three in all my years, and all over the last twenty. One on pebble beach in Wales, another on the white sands of the Caribbean, and the last in a murky pool on a mountain in Ireland.

I expect I’ll be found by a few more yet - I hope so… before the final one finds me.

If you’ve never found one, start looking. You’ll know one if you see one. Or you can simply wait patiently for one to find you.

Have no doubt – it’ll happen sooner or later.