"We're all going on a Summer Holiday..."

"We're all going on a Summer Holiday, no more working for a week or two;

fun and laughter on our summer holiday,

no more worries for me or you -

for a week or two..."

 

                                                                  

Towards the end of May my parents and I (and the dog) went over to our house in France for a fortnight's holiday.

Cow parsley, buttercups and pink roses

We arrived to find the verges up to my waist in cow parsley (to be strictly accurate it was Burnett Saxifrage, but it looks like cow parsley), and tall golden buttercups. The drive was liberally bespeckled with leggy daisies so overgrown that they wobbled, and bobbed around in the breeze; and there were roses everywhere. They grew up the sides of the house, and tumbled down over the barn; they crept sideways along the walls, their buds peeping out here and there through a tangled mass of greater celandine; and they arched up and over, and twined their blooms amidst the sweeping branches of the weeping willow.

The weather was gloriously sunny and hot, and I lay on a blanket under the willow tree every day, and read Geoffrey Trease and Jennings and William Mayne and Hans Brinker, and 'Where Matthew Lives', and other childhood classics, whilst the bees hummed busily around me, and the cuckoo sat at the top of a nearby sweet chestnut tree and 'cu-ckooed' with all his might. It was a good holiday!

A bunch of Queen Elizabeth roses

At the end of the fortnight we had a leisurely drive up through Normandy, took the ferry over from Caen, and arrived back very late on the Saturday of the jubilee weekend. It poured with rain all the way home from Portsmouth. Oh to be in England...

But before we left France, our Queen Elizabeth rose had come into full bloom; and so we felt that whatever the next few days might hold, our jubilee celebrations had at least got off to a good start.

Time to stand and stare

These weeks of rain, followed by a weekend of warmth and sunshine, have done their work. Over night it seems, our garden has changed. It is no longer bare and brown with just a few smudges of spring colour here and there; now the spidery branches are once more thickly covered with leaves, the creeping clematis is beginning to poke shyly through the hedge, and the lawn is dappled with fallen apple blossom.

In the mornings I make buckwheat porridge for breakfast, and now and then I will pause in the midst of my culinary hustle and bustle to look out of the window over the garden. Most days it is just being its ordinary self, but sometimes I see something special - maybe the greater spotted woodpecker tapping away at the peanut feeder; or a thrush standing quite still in the middle of the lawn; or a sparrow hawk resting on the hedge. And then I take a moment to stop, and stare...

"What is this life if full of care,
   We have no time to stand and stare?
 No time to stand beneath the boughs
   And stare as long as sheep, or cows.
 No time to see, when woods we pass,
   Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
 No time to see, in broad daylight,
   Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
 No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
   And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
   Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this, if full of care,
  We have no time to stand and stare."
                                   - William Henry Davies

Rotten trees and wild posies

Where the tree was...

Even before I look out of my window in the morning, the difference in the quality of light tells me that the tree isn't there.

Rotten on the inside.

I feel a little as though I have suddenly lost a close friend in a car crash. Every morning when I wake, the tree isn't there; and in the evening when I go to bed, the tree is not there. When I walk out of the front door I see in the empty expanse of sky that she is missing; and when I come home, she is still not there.
But she was a sick tree; and though it's possible that she might have lasted many years yet, it is also possible that the next storm would have brought her crashing down, and if that happened it would have been a miracle if no one (or no house) was harmed...

But life goes on, as my mother tells me. And though my tall, graceful sycamore has gone (and the red kites keep swooping over, with nowhere to land), the wild flowers are beginning to bloom in the hedgerows and verges. I went out yesterday and picked myself a posy, and tied it with a piece of grass.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower..."

  - William Blake

Black edging...

Dogmatix can't bear trees being pulled down

Black edging... That's what this post should have. You see, they are cutting down the great sycamore that stands opposite, and I don't think I can bear it. I feel sick in my stomach, as though a piece of me has been ripped out. I know the tree is rotten and dead inside, but that doesn't make it any easier. One doesn't refrain from mourning a loved one simply because their body was riddled with some awful disease.

The worst thing is being here while it's actually happening; every grind and roar of the electric saw as each branch is chopped off and thrown to the ground cuts me to the heart. I can almost feel it moan and cry.

My beautiful tree...

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                     - Joyce Kilmer

"I can see clearly now the rain has gone..."

"And in a little while the heavens grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain."
                                                                                 1 Kings 18: 45

For weeks past the ground has been getting drier and drier. In the fields around the village great cracks appeared in the earth, as the land grew parched and weary; the levels in the reservoirs crept lower and lower, and the threatened hose-pipe ban became reality.

And then the rain came. On and on it rained, for days and days, sometimes in heavy-sheeted downpours, and sometimes in a gentle monotonous drizzle; sometimes it threw in a bit of hail, just for a change, and sometimes thunder and lightening would throw in their two penn'orth (so as not to feel left out of the fun).


They say (whoever 'they' are) that no amount of rain at this time of year will make any difference to Britain's Situation of Drought, because it all gets soaked up by the plants and there's none left to fill the reservoirs; perhaps that is true, but I think there would have been quite enough left for the reservoirs, if only the water people would keep them in proper trim, and not let them leak all over the place. 
However! the plants certainly did soak it up; and in just a week our lane has been transformed from a brownish youth, only just out of winter, into the full verdant glory of Spring's young womanhood...

Early morning walk

Yesterday, my dog and I went for an early morning walk. We set off straight after breakfast; the sun shone, the sky was blue, and every thing looked fresh and bursting with life after a few days of rain. Up above, the flag on the church flapped joyously in the breeze, and in the copse a thrush sang.

++++++++++++++++

I am rather fond of gates.
They have such an intoxicating combination of invitation and forbidden entrance, that I cannot walk past even the most mundane without feeling a little twinge of excitement. On our walk today I had the joy of walking through two kissing gates (so romantic, even if one is, in fact, on one's own...), the second of which opens onto a glorious view of the Chilterns.

We walked slowly on, taking a little path beside the copse where I heard the thrush, and came across another gate; and here was richness! An old iron, padlocked specimen, it's stone pillars covered in ivy, and the path beneath all over-grown with grass, it stood tall and proud in its half-forgotten state. I should not have been surprised to know that the house it led to was named Satis...

Who knew Miss Havisham lived in Oxfordshire?

It also reminded me of Shelley's Ozymandias, except that these 'legs of stone' were surrounded by green fields and not lone and level sands:

"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Peter

On the eve of Good Friday, Jesus was arrested. His trial lasted all night and well into the morning. All his followers took fright and ran away, leaving Jesus to face death alone; only Peter followed along behind in the darkness. When Jesus was taken to the high priest's house, Peter crept into the yard outside, and tried to squeeze in unnoticed beside the night-watchers' fire; but a Galilean has an accent, and a firebrand follower of the strange new teacher who claimed to be God, was likely to be remembered by the more observant members of the public...

"Hey, you! Aren't you a friend of the man who's been arrested?"
"No! No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are. I've seen you with him."
"No. You must be mistaken. I don't know him."
"Of course you do. You're obviously from Galilee, like him. I bet you're one of those 'followers'."
Poor Peter. If they kill the leader, how much more quickly will they kill the follower.
"I told you, I've never met him!" he cried.
And then the cock crowed. What was it Jesus had said to him? "Before the cock crows today, you will disown me three times."
And Peter went outside, and wept bitterly.

When my mother was at university, a friend taught her a song telling the story of that night. Over the years, it has become a family favourite. Never having come across it anywhere else, we have come to the conclusion that it must have been actually written by that friend - or perhaps a friend of that friend. The song is called Stand in the Shadow, Peter. I have recorded myself singing it, and you can find it in the column on the right.