Knowing the country and its culture as well as they do, it must feel like a sort of home-coming. It certainly provokes such delightful situations as when one asked about the flowers on the secretary’s desk: “Are those daffodils? Like Wordsworth’s daffodils?”
Continue reading “clichés and home-comings”
A house with daffodils in it is a house lit up, whether or no the sun be shining outside. Daffodils in a green bowl–and let it snow if it will.
There is no snow forecast – though when did we ever believe a forecast? Whatever the weather, though, I have a jar of sunshine on my windowsill.
In Spain, I lived for many years in a house where the main heating was provided by a log stove, so whenever I went out walking, I was always on the look out for fallen pine cones. When dry, pine cones – or, perhaps, fir cones – are highly combustible and make it so much easier to get a fire started. Now, although I’m living in a house with central heating, the instinct to gather kindling and cones remains, and the recent storms have strewn much temptation in my path.
Today I succumbed. 
Well, OK, it isn’t quite a pine cone, but I reckon it would burn just as well.
I should have resisted, but I’m afraid my attention was snagged by all those prickly wooden “petals” and it was impossible to walk on by. So now there’s a rather glorious branch of a monkey puzzle tree about three foot long standing in the corner of my room.
For some unknown reason the local council left the street lights on all night last night, so when I woke in the wee small hours I could see just how much damage the wind was doing in the garden. It was not a pleasant sight, but the thistledown street lamp almost made up for it.
Right now, listening to the wind worrying and wuthering outside my window, and knowing this area is by no means the worst hit, I’m really not in the least surprised to hear that the Met Office has issued a red alert for high winds.
A photo snapped through a rain-dotted window can hardly do justice to the one I saw this afternoon, but it will serve as a reminder.
And of course, the Bible tells us that that is precisely what the rainbow is: a token of the covenant between God and earth, a reminder that “the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
This may be hard to believe, given the recent flooding, but there is a certain comfort in re-reading the part of the story after the flood has resided, when God makes the promise to Noah:
Continue reading “red weather, rainbow weather”
don't confuse the narrator 