spring – Page 4 – don't confuse the narrator

the path through the woods

I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, but the local park is really rather lovely. It’s far more natural than the town parks I was brought up to, with their bright formal flowerbeds and low box-edged parterres. Although it’s tiny and it has a local council office in the middle, it still manages to boast a brook, a bluebell wood, a vast range of native, fruit, and ornamental trees, and lots of wild flowers.

Even the redbrick records office is set on the site of a ruin and surrounded by swathes of very apt forget-me-nots.
Continue reading “the path through the woods”

sacred and secular

Today is Palm Sunday – the Sunday before Easter, when the Christian church remembers Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and the welcoming crowds strewing palm fronds in his path. In the UK, there are no native palms, so traditionally we use willow branches; I remember as a child picking branches of grey pussy willow catkins to decorate the local chapel my family attended.

This year, whether it’s due to climate change, the vagaries of the English weather, or simply a later Easter than sometimes, the sleek fur catkins are already fluffy and yellow with pollen.
Continue reading “sacred and secular”

flowers and leaves

In the UK, we have had the most glorious sunshine for much of the last week, although some days have been quite blustery. It’s been the sort of weather that calls to you through the window to get out and blow the cobwebs away.

Although I don’t have a garden, I’m fortunate enough to have a park just across the road. It’s a small, semi-wild park, without much in the way of attractions: no café, no boating lake, no rides for children, no exercise circuits etc. It’s a short cut for me to get to the station or to the doctor’s, and the picturesque route to the supermarket. In fact, I find plenty of excuses to go there, and it’s not usually very busy.
Continue reading “flowers and leaves”

on poetry and puppetry

If it weren’t for social media, I would probably have blithely continued to not update this blog. But today my Twitter feed is full of hastags trying to distract us from global concerns and help us focus on other, more enlightening and uplifting, matters and I have been nudged into action.

Without the reminder from Twitter, I would probably have forgotten that it was #WorldPoetryDay. After all, in the UK, we get a lot more excited about National Poetry Day, which happens some time in early October. But I haven’t written any new poems for ages, so why should that make me want to post here after months of silence?

Indeed, it probably wouldn’t have been sufficient if I hadn’t also seen another hashtag and realised that it is also #WorldPuppetryDay. That seems to me to be a day worth celebrating.
Continue reading “on poetry and puppetry”

predictable

The problem with taking pictures of plants is that they tend to be the same ones every year. Especially as we are creatures of habit and we take the same routes to and from the same places on a regular basis.

But even though I see these yellow fields from the train window in spring and early summer every year, as I travel from Gloucester towards south Wales, they never cease to impress. So here they are again.