summer – don't confuse the narrator

signs of life and death

It seems as if August has flown by with little to show for itself. I try to update this blog at the weekend, at least once every week, but I’ve been very remiss recently and two complete weekends have passed with no word from me. If the updates happen at the weekend, and I’ve missed two weekends, that’s actually three weeks without an update. Nothing since the first of August.

Strangely, there have already been more visitors to the site this month than in any month since May 2020. Perhaps I should continue not to post.
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bee aware

I’ve mentioned before KWP, the minister at the church my family attended when I was a little girl and the stories he used to tell. They were simple stories with morals, usually based around small domestic occurrences – like the Green Shield stamp that had lost its stickability and was therefore of little use. (The notion of “stickablity” as a value to be cultivated and encouraged has remained with me all my life.)

Once KWP told of having been in London with a friend who was an ardent nature lover. As they were walking, the friend suddenly stopped; he paused while the rest of the crowds surged past them, then turned and in a moment or two had located a tiny green grasshopper sitting on a kerbstone.
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of pests and petunias

I used to love petunias and geraniums and all the vivid windowbox flowers whose colours brighten up grey days and grey urban spaces. But I fell out of love with petunias when the ones I was growing in pots on the deck in California developed an infestation of caterpillars. I can’t bear to kill creatures of any sort, but nor am I impressed to see my small gardening efforts reduced to the buffet at a bug-feast.

Later, in the early 90s in Spain, my love of geraniums was sorely tried when there was a plague of butterflies – Cacyreus marshalli – in Madrid. Their larvae bored into the stems of many plants around the city and wreaked havoc with the traditional Mediterranean balcony displays of scarlet flowers bursting between wrought iron railings.
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strawberries and cream

When I used the title “ways and worlds” for the last blog post, I had no intention of referencing Laurie Lee. And yet now that I’ve gone looking for his poem “Home from Abroad”, I find it begins,

Far-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,

so it seems likely that I had that at the back of my mind.

I was looking for the poem today as I wanted to quote a line from it. And although I’ve quoted it here on the blog in the past, it was a good opportunity to re-read the whole poem. Continue reading “strawberries and cream”

ways and worlds

Tomorrow is the summer solstice, a time when the veil between worlds is supposed to grow thin.

I’ve read plenty of stories of people wandering unintentionally into the realm of the Fair Folk, but fewer that tell of deliberate trespass or offer instructions on how to find and open any of the doors between worlds.
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