I am aware that my presence here has been less and less. This has partly been due to pressures of work. However, we (D and I) have also decided to change the directions and priorities of our lives. We wanted to live more deliberately (to borrow Thoreau), to live closer to the elements, to be aware of our lives and the significance of everything we do. We reset our compasses. We now live on a 58ft narrowboat called Erica.
I am writing still, but, as some of you will have known from the old MySpace days (even before Blogger!) that I have always toyed with audio - as evidence from the number of recorded items here.
I am now focusing on an audio journal in the form of a podcast. This is allowing me to explore more deeply the relationship between sound and the written word.
Over Ratley way it's raining; the clouds have given up to the north wind's bluster. Desi meets me at her gate, soft-nosed and excited-eyed. I tell her she is beautiful and it is lovely to see her. She sniffs my hand with warm breath, and wags her tail. She lets me rub her ears. They are soft as bats' wings. It is the closest thing she can do to pierce my blindness. Penny comes up and their noses brush, barely touching; ears relaxed, eyes averted. Small micro-signals, but it is all that is needed. Contentedly, they turn and trot away. Meanwhile, behind them, the lawn mower silently glides and then turns, following its own unseen, unheard syntax.
Lazy sunny morning under a cauldron sky. Two young rooks dunk a piece of dried bread in a puddle. First sighting of house martins that arrow knee high over the grass. Later we go down to wind the clock together. D, Penny and I walk through a snow globe of cherry blossom.
The second or maybe even third hatchings are taking place. The hedges and dark corners are alive with scruffy squawks. The older rooks play dodge and twist on the field followed by their insistent clamouring young. Our runner beans are regularly plundered and the garden now blooms with spinning, scratched CDs and ragged carrier bags that play upon the wind like corporate prayer flags. Everywhere is enthused with the untidy energy of youth...
And now here they come in a small gaggle down main street. A little knot of girls singing and shrieking; daring the world to look at them with that eggshell-thin, fragile, belligerence of adolescence. Dressed in little more than their parent's high blood pressure they trip the kerb to Oxhill Road and the sky is filled again with shrill laughter and foul language. Every shriek, every movement, calls fearfully out to an uncomprehending world in which they have found themselves flung. There are no easy Edens for us sons and daughters of Adam.
"I HAVE ARRIVED. I AM HERE. AND THIS IS ME..." They seem to say.
They fall silent as they walk past and then collapse in snorts and giggles, their arms around each other's shoulders and necks. And I love them for it; I love them for their heroic "barbaric yawp" that signals their presence in this world... in this village... on this little inconsequential street on one summer's afternoon at the razored-edge of their childhoods... I'm drawn into their terrifying, wonderful, invigorating, intimidatingly indifferent worlds in which they find themselves.
Do the little, feathered scruff-balls that dart beneath the garden hedges also feel this? Lifting their voice to the blank, unyielding sky for the very first time. Is their piping call clear and sound? Or do they fear that no one will notice; that their voice is too cracked, that their song won't work? Do they fear that they too might be ultimately... unlovable?
They turn the corner, by the maple that flames wine-red in autumn and pass out of sight.
But their voices still ring among the flights of lazy bees.
"THIS IS ME. I AM HERE AND I AM BEAUTIFUL..."
...and if there is a slight shake and hesitation over the last word that turns it more into a question than a statement, let us pretend not to notice it.
...For yes your voice is loud and it is clear
And your song WORKS.
So exalt in it and let it ring out across these streets
For you are so very, very very beautiful...
...but for none of the reasons you think...
... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of
sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh Lord, how it had broken,
sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing,
bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on
Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones
of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent
rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my
ragged body.
I walked abroad in that
slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky
of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main
Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden
hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep
under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws
wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways
Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise
their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and
its cymbal playing tin monkey in the window. A blackbird stood as proud as
your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The
sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless
spirit in her eternal Eden of sun and ice.
Only two other souls were awake
that morning. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling
fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the
village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak
pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist
wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue
and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded
saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their
stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or
that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and
prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged
bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his
back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that
tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?
The other is the runner who
outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the
village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office,
bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered
tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly
wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of
icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells,
and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past
the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's fires. Down
Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and breathe in the sweet smell of the
cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffles where
foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and
dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed
out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled
and trilled.
As I returned home, the Keeper
of the park gates opened his front door, stood in his front garden
and roared out his approval of the triumph of that morning.
Tyres hiss in the grey rain. Beside the arrowing Roman road the old oak stands; hag like and wild haired. Jumbled rafts of twigs clutter their clawing limbs. Beside each nest a rook stands guard, looking out into the rain at time passing. And then I am gone.
The storm was preceded by Wedgewood blue skies and the goats' hair of cirrus clouds. Then the barometer fell and it arrived. It came, at first, puppy-playful and boisterous, desert-warmed and seeded with rain, tumbling and whipping over Windmill Hill from down Winderton way. The windmill's sails flexed and clanked; straining to once more and fly with the wind, to break free and spin until the sparks flew and smoke billowed feeding the wind with a devil's fire. The larches cresting Sunrising hill roar like breakers on Chesil beach. Their trunks creaking like clippers off Cape Horn. Penny and I stand on this frozen wave of rain-rattled escarpment and listen to the wild thunder of treesong. Penny hunches. She is not fond of this weather.
Below, the church stands on its little island. The rivers and tidal creaks of houses flowing around it. Even today, its profile exudes a sense of warmth and timeless solidity. Older storms have raged and fiercer Gods have been worshipped here in the past. When the world was younger did not the God of Golgotha ride upon the Canaanite storms and make the wilderness of the Israelites twist and writhe?
Now fences are torn and sheds upturned. The elm, across the road, scatters its gnarled finger-bones on the pavement. Even the rooks are grounded. On the lower road, they hang piratical to the thrashing Jolly Roger branches. Crow's nest calamities lie strewn jetsam upon the ground. Earlier I had watched a pair of jackdaws carelessly flung like heraldic emblems upon the perilous sky. Tomorrow they will be back for beak-fulls of the elm's discarded debris to rebuild lost nests.
A blackbird surfs a branch with a quizzical eye; its beak yellowing with the season's turn and the pulse of life.
The little oak that stands beside Winnie's gate still holds on to its crisp brown leaves. The wind worries them; hanging there like thrown toffee wrappers.
Penny blinks the rain from her lashes and we contemplate the sheep. They continue to graze unconcerned by the ripping squalls. So we splash home with the wind at our backs to a packet of ginger biscuits and a discussion on the wetness of wet.
For the first day in almost a week the skies are calm, the trees still; just a gentle breeze ruffling the branches of the conifers. The clouds that rode the back of the blustery south winds have gone and the sky is as blue as blue, as blue as the blues in childrens' books. I watched a magpie fly overhead. There was a large twig in its beak. I love the silhouette of birds carrying twigs, quietly busy about their task; full of hope; excited about tomorrow... Little flames of crocuses burst among the emerald grass of the village green.
Driving up to Norfolk, through the brooding fen country, the heavy sky hung so low that it seemed to brush the tops of the rushes and the wind-blown reeds. The ploughed fields were bare and long fingers of steel coloured puddles pooled the rusty soil. Then a rook alighted by the side of the road. Wings outstretched, toying with the raging air, its feet touched the earth with such delicate precision. The landscape was so heavy it felt as if it would suck you in; enmired forever in mud and iron hard skies - but the rook brought lightness to that place, deftly lifting off from the cloying ground as we sped past and, in doing so, it transformed the world...
