Some fifty plus years ago, when I was a little girl, my mother made my brother a butterfly net out of a bamboo garden cane, a hoop of wire and an old net curtain. I don’t know how often he used it, but I suspect it wasn’t that often.
Whether he tired of it in the first few weeks, or whether it was when it came out of the shed on the second summer and he was off on his bike in the park with his mates, somehow, I managed to inherit it.
Continue reading “small blues”
There are stories that parents tell their impressionable children that remain with them for their whole lives. I’m not sure why I’m feeling nostalgic, but I’ve been remembering two such stories, one from my mother and one from my father.
Both are set in the dim and distant past, when we lived in Scotland.
Continue reading “monsters & fairies”
I’m pretty sure that when people think of Wales, and in particularly of Welsh architecture, the images that spring to mind are of grey stone castles – moats and keeps, flying buttresses, gatehouses and turrets, crenellated parapets and battlements, embrasures and arrowslits.
The castles of Wales are certainly wonderful, and just typing up that list of terms has set my spirit soaring with the sheer joy of fairytale magic, medieval romance and valiant deeds of derring-do. Continue reading “bridging the gap”
I have no idea who would have put them there, nor why, but I found these strings of conkers looped around the railway fence when I went for a walk the other day.
They reminded me of my first visit to my brother’s house many, many years ago, where I found a collection of desiccated rabbits’ feet nailed to the shed door. I asked about them as I’d been told that Sammy the cat was a holy terror and I wondered whether it was a shrine to his hunting prowess.
Continue reading “leave well alone”
Autumn means different things to different people.
Summer is over and the sun has lost its strength, so every warm day seems like borrowed time and the chance to step out into the sunshine must be snatched whenever possible. Even in the twenty-first century, there’s still a feeling of Harvest Home: a desire to gather in and stock up, ready to weather the long winter ahead.
Continue reading “fruits of the earth”
don't confuse the narrator 