Make a wish...

Holly was sixteen at the weekend.

She spent her birthday delayed in a French airport waiting to get a flight back from her language study trip to Nice, with a quick tour of Monaco thrown in for good measure.

She was due to be home late evening giving us a little time to celebrate, but by the time she landed it was three in the morning the following day, and her birthday had passed.

A pity, but her friends and teachers celebrated with her at Nice airport with the free meal vouchers that the airline gave them, and we opened presents and cards when she arrived home, going to bed around five-thirty, just as the birds were beginning to twitter.

So the day after her birthday became Holly’s birthday celebration day. Here she is blowing out the candles on the little cake we got for her. We could only fit eight candles on its chocolate strewn surface, so she had to blow them out twice.

Happy birthday Holly – and no you don’t look a dork in the pictures, you look great. Now, make a wish!

A walk to the dentist...

I went to the dentist last week. Nothing major, but major enough to have both top and bottom gums frozen with half a dozen injections and then twenty minutes of deep, deep, cleaning.

Walking to the dentist, all fresh breeze, scudding clouds, bursts of sunshine, and the ever present threat of rain, reminded me of my long walks to school as boy and teenager. It was that sort of day, one of those past days so full of potential, odd really as I was only going to the dentist, but at the same time I there was a strangeness to the walk, and I hadn’t even had the drugs yet. I could see an early autumn on the way –chestnuts forming, conkers already brown inside the spiky green, some leaves beginning to attract their autumn hue – must be the hot weather

Walking back from the dentist was even stranger. I needed more injections than expected and I was floating. The world had a rosy glow, colours were even more vivid, everything had a slightly slanted perspective and I seemed to float a little above the pavement. Amazing.

I get the second half of the treatment next week, can’t wait.

Ride‘em Misty…

So this is a horse.

Doesn't look much. I don’t know why the Whirling Dervish Girl Thing makes such a fuss about them, all they this one seems do is stand in the corner and stare. It doesn’t even sleep, and I’ve never seen it eating. But the WDGT rides one all the time I’ve heard, so there must be something in it.

Well, what’s so hard about riding? It doesn't look very hard and I had no problem mounting this Dobbin, one leap and I was in the saddle, totally in control, fully in charge of my steed - no hissing problem.

Right, time for a canter, time to take the reins and get this thing moving. Come on Dobbin, giddy-up, giddy-up, let's get movin' - WAGONSSSSS ROOOOLLLLLLL!!!

Move will you, goddarnit, you lazy critter! Why am I doing all the hissing work!

Forty days and...

The fifteenth of July, St. Swithin’s Day, and it’s raining.

According to my grandmother it will now proceed to rain for the next forty days and forty nights.

Driving home through Oxfordshire yesterday I could see that St. Swithin was getting into the swim of things, trying to make his mind up whether to deliver forty days rain or forty days shine and it looked like he came down on the side of the rain. The clouds were huge, the sky was black, and at times the rain so torrential it was like driving underwater. I stopped to take a picture of a rapeseed field and got drenched running back to my car.

Swithin was a Saxon Bishop of Winchester. Born in the kingdom of Wessex and educated in its capital, Winchester, he was famous for doing ‘good works’ - making charitable gifts, building churches, feeding the poor, rescuing the odd fallen woman or two, the full gamut of ‘good works’ as listed in ‘The Would Be Saints Guide to Getting Sainted’.

As he lay on his deathbed (no doubt brought low by all the ‘good working’) he asked to be buried out of doors where he would be trodden and rained on. An odd request, but then imminent death probably gives you a new perspective on things like ‘final resting places’, and for nine atmospherically fine years his wishes were followed.

But then, one sunny 15^th July in 971, the monks of Winchester decided to move his remains to a brand spanking new shiny shrine inside the cathedral. During the move, just as the monks were getting into the swing of their chant topping new single, the heavens opened and a huge rainstorm ensued drowning out the sound of their droning. No doubt, this signalled St. Swithin’s wrath over his removal, and since that day if it rains on St. Swithin’s day and… well, you know the rest.

Of course the flip-side of the rain coin is that if it is sunny on St Swith’s Day then we will have glorious weather for the next forty days and forty nights - although, according to the Met Office, it is all (surprise, surprise) a myth, nothing more than an old wives tale (or in my case an old grandmother’s tale). On the last 55 occasions when it has been wet on St Swithin's Day 40 days of rain did not follow and weather was pretty much as one expects from a British Summer – mixed.

Oh well, we’ll have to wait and see won’t we.

'St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain

For forty days it will remain

St. Swithin's day if thou be fair

For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

More from the beach...

Sometimes even I don’t know why I blog a thing. It can be anything that sets me off, a cloud, a tree, a stone. This time a plant, a beach plant, a plant that I so wanted that I considered digging it up and taking it home for an instant. But I didn’t.

After all, how could I disturb her quiet existence?

Just another beach and wandering through the dunes I came upon a Sea Holly. I tried to grow one once, bought from Woolworths in a paper packet and placed in a sandy soil. ‘Guaranteed to grow or your money back’. It didn’t flower, it didn’t even leaf, instead it died and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for my money, so deep was my sense of failure. But here she was, so full of life and prime, locked in sand and shingle, all thriving to make me smile with my almost happiness.

Such beauty within the waxy stem and leaves, the yellow green of the young florets, the deep lilac of the adult, a slowly changing movement from one to t’other for every floret aged between.

The leaf of a Holly bush and the flower of a thistle, but neither – a member of the carrot family - dig up the pale, thick, fleshy root and boil with sugar to make candied eryngoes. I never have, but 'they' say it tastes good. They know so much those them, almost everything - almost but not quite all.

I’m pleased to see her and I don’t know why, anymore than I know why I’m telling you that I found her, anymore than I know that the Sea Holly is a she, anymore than I know why I’m blogging her.

Even 'they' don't know. Perhaps it was the almost happiness that for an instant she brought to me.

One of those places...

This is the hill at the end of our lane, or it might be at the end of our world, who knows?

It’s one of those places - you find them everywhere, they’re not particularly breathtaking, there’s nothing special going on, but when you see them you know that you just have to keep on looking, you can't help yourself.

Maybe it’s the light, or the space, or the way the wind moves over the surface. Maybe it’s the emptiness, the noise of the breeze as it moves through the grass, the fear of the climb, the shame of the tumble. Perhaps it's all of these, or maybe it’s something locked within ourselves that connects with the place and holds us there, captivated and imprisoned.

I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t pass the hill at the end of our lane, or the end of our world, without looking long and hard, as if I’m expecting to see something new, something wonderful, something that will make me understand whatever it is I need to understand.

Just an empty hill – some grass, some sky, some gravity. One of those places; you find them everywhere, one of those places where some day something will happen.

Those three dots…

Walking by the waves looking for wash up, what small tragedies you sometimes stumble across.

Once in Criccieth I came across a line of shiny silver fish, whitebait I think, a foot deep and almost half a mile long. Thousands on tens of thousands of tiny lives washed in by the waves and dumped on the sand to die a wriggly death.

Another time it was birds, Guillemots, dozens of the poor things. Brought down by the wind and washed up to be left to dry to matted feather lumps on the shingle. I reported it to DEFRA, it was at the time of avian flu scare, but they never came back to me.

Starfish carpets, jellyfish mattresses, a seal or two, once a small dolphin – there’s always some echo of drama on the tide-line.

This time it was spider crabs, legs, claws, bodies - a long line of spider crab pieces stretching the length of Hell’s Mouth like some kind of crazed model kit. I found over twenty large shells in a couple of minutes, orange, yellow, brown, green, and hundreds of legs and claws – a complete colony of spider crabs, washed up and wrecked on the pebbles.

As I carefully arranged them on the driftwood backdrop I’d positioned to maximise the photo-opportunity of their tragedy, I wondered what had happened to them. How did so many creatures come to their end simultaneously to be thrown up onto the shore at Hell’s Mouth creating a two mile line of crustacean debris? A fierce storm, a strong current, a giant wave – what maelstrom of nature did they get caught up in I wonder?

Perhaps that’s the way - one moment swimming happily along, the next caught by something completely unexpected and…

There they are again, the three dots of uncertainty – how I hate them.