Travelling

As we leave civilisation behind and move onto small winding roads, pools of white shimmer and multiply. It is early March and it is our first trip since the pandemic, more than three years since we packed up the car and left for elsewhere. Rain hits the windscreen in fat blotches, blurring the way ahead. We pass through lanes of green and brown: muddy edges and meandering curves, trickling burns and pasture. And everywhere the white of snowdrops; tufts and clumps and rivers of them, luminous against the sepia and grey background. I have never seen so many.

We stay in an old Gamekeeper’s cottage on the edge of a tiny hamlet. It is golden stone and sash windows, flagstone floors and chintz, vintage furniture and latched wooden doors. It is the crackle of coal and logs shifting in a stone fireplace. Lanes edged in copper beech. Dry stone walls cushioned by moss. Damp, muddy tracks and fallen pine needles. The muffled boom of artillery from the military ranges nearby. It is too dark that first night. I fear not being able to see anything around me so I leave a porch light on to relieve the darkness. But in the early hours I’m woken by a strange noise. The darkness is thick, with no friendly light to re-assure me. I get up, confused, using my phone for illumination, trying light switches. I can only conclude that it’s a power cut, but it seems somehow sinister on this our first night. I sleep fitfully.

The hill broods over the landscape. Flat-topped with a bite taken out of one side, it dominates the southern horizon. It is visible from every viewpoint. Sometimes it becomes lost in mist and cloud, but it is still there, ready to re-emerge, a dark shadow in the distance. Clad in heather and pines, mostly it is an ebony silhouette, sometimes a patchwork of mauve and green. This is a magic hill, a place of bronze age burial tombs, cairns and rock carvings; a home to fey folk and dwarves who lure unwary travellers to their death. We have approached its flanks before, seeking cup and ring marked boulders and the impression of ancient hill forts.

We fill up the empty bird feeders in the garden and the songbirds come. Robin, blackbird, chaffinch, goldfinch, tits. They flutter between the beech hedge and a rhododendron and empty the feeders in a few short hours. Copper beech leaves twirl and helicopter in the wind. A pair of thrushes scuttle in the leaf litter. Every evening, rooks fly over towards nearby rookeries, raucously calling. Every morning, they pass again at the start of their day. At dawn the sun glows above the hills. At night Orion shimmers in the darkness.

There are many paths to explore. We skirt the edge of a ploughed field, wander lanes between farm buildings and pasture. A small copse of pines leads us past a lake of snowdrops and a pink child’s dressing table discarded among the roots of a tree. We wander a grassed path bouncy with disuse. Sheep chuckle in the fields. Sometimes the wind follows us, rising to a roar that makes me think something is coming. We have struggled to settle here. Despite the welcoming cottage and quiet paths. Despite the pleasing landscape and the fluttering birds. We are glad to go at the end of the week and that makes me wonder if we will ever leave home again. On the way back, a hawk perched on the ground seems to look right at me and the rain starts to fall once more.

Two months later and white has retreated from the ground. We travel down the motorway for Winston’s hydrotherapy and yellow has taken over. Cowslips and primrose, as numerous as the snowdrops were, a few clumps of daffodil and shrubs of gorse. White has moved to the trees, trailing blossom.

March Moment

I almost miss it. It has been a hard and hectic week at work so I am still in my head, eyes down, not paying attention to the world. Cold, hard rain tips down, wetting me and my packages. I just want to get home. But something tells me to look up.

I notice the colour of the sky first, a rich denim blue befitting the rain it contains. Then there is the rainbow, a vibrant singing arc embracing the town. The colours are so bright that they seem to fizz out of their stripes. It has a companion, another complete arc, a little more faded than the first. And perhaps, there is just the suggestion of a third. I walk through the park, turning back regularly to see the rainbows span the houses, to watch them peek between bare branches.

A man stops to tell me he is admiring the rainbows’ beauty. Another stops his car at the edge of the park to take a picture of it, sharing his excitement at how vivid it is. So for a short time, it is a shared moment, bringing strangers together with its beauty. I get home minutes later and urge my wife to go outside and look, but it has already faded. The rain has stopped and the sky has returned to a dull grey, as if the moment never happened.

Re-shaping

I stand under the wild cherry tree, hand resting on its shattered heart.  This is my portal tree.  Stand beneath it in spring and you are intoxicated by the froth of blossom and light.  In autumn, its gilded canopy bathes you in gold.  Stand there long enough and you feel that you are no longer in an urban park, but in another place altogether, shimmering between worlds.  But last year, a winter storm cleaved the trunk in two, shearing away a large bough and leaving the heart blasted open.  I count at least fifteen rings where the wood has shattered. The vulnerable heartwood is sticky with sap.  I wonder if it will survive another fifteen years. And yet blossom time arrived and it blossomed just as it always has. The branches are sparser now, but it is surviving, with small green cherries already visible among the leaves.

For months, I have been silent, with no words to offer to the world. The year turned through each season, from spring to spring again. We were seared by the hottest day on record, watched wildfires burn out of control and suffered from the lack of rain. The landscape visibly changed. Storms, floods and fire re-shaped the world and our neighbourhoods. After our human pandemic, thousands of crabs washed up dead on our local beaches and our coastal birds were decimated by bird flu. Businesses have closed and our town is full of empty shops. People worry about how they will pay their bills and use food banks so that they can eat. Our health service crumbles and there are strikes by doctors, nurses and others. At times, it seems like everything is broken. At times, it seems apocalyptic.

And as the world changed, I changed with it. I have been buffeted by the winds that felled the trees, baked by the scorching sun, felled by the virus, but more than that. I am feeling my age. There is a re-making, a re-shaping of myself afoot. I have moved into the third act of life and the crone is approaching. It is a time to measure with joy or regret. A time to grieve the things I will now never be or do and put to bed those imagined other lives. There are now things it is pointless to spend time on because the return won’t be worth it. Nor should I worry about a legacy when we are all forgotten in the end. It’s a time to consider how I want to spend my precious future. Rekindling my creativity seems urgent. Every Friday I think this will be the weekend I write, but I can’t quite translate thought into action.

On the morning after the winter solstice, when the sun was new once more, I stood under a sky streaked crimson and wondered how to make this year count. I hadn’t watched a sunrise for months. I’d lost that everyday connection to the natural world and I wanted it back again. I started with the basics: attention and curiosity. Each day I would spend at least five minutes paying full attention to the world: rain-washed pavements like polished jet, old stones gilded by the setting sun, a full moon turning the clouds sepia, a rainbow in a denim blue sky, gulls huddled on a frozen lake, waves like white horses with manes of spume.

In the park, scores of baby trees, planted by children, are surviving. Some grow crooked, some seem too fragile to persist, but they grow all the same. Wildflower seeds scattered last year have brought poppies, cornflowers and scorpion weed. The town square has been restored to its Georgian finery and a nearby street pedestrianised, in the hope of bringing people back. Birds proclaim from hedgerows clotted with hawthorn blossom. I see my first swallow and my first butterfly. The world may have changed, and us with it, but that is nothing new. Hope carries us forward until the season turns again.

Rolling

It is the last day of March, but it might just as easily be April Fool’s Day.  We leave the house in weather that is sunny and dry.  A five minute Metro ride later and the sky has darkened, gushing hail and snow.  It’s a short dash to the beach, where we take refuge under the canopy of the old watch house at the top of the cliffs.  Built in the 1800s for the life brigade to watch out for vessels in distress, it is an eccentric stone building with a clocktower and a tiled roof that curves downwards like a heavy brow.  We sit on an old bench, gazing out over a wild seascape as the life brigade volunteers would once have done.

A heavy black cloud above the horizon compresses the land.  The RNLI flag snaps and flutters in the wind.  A veil of sleet billows across the sand.  The sea is a dark grey doily edged in boiling white.  Waves spill onto the sand between the piers as the tide advances.  The beach is glassy wet and pimpled with worm casts.  Gulls gather at the edge of the tide.

A pair of women in wetsuits and bright swimming caps brave the water.  They whoop and yell.  The beach isn’t passable now, the tide has come in as far as the caves, cutting the sand in two.  Waves wash over the piers leaving foamy puddles.  Beyond, at Tynemouth, the waves leap the defences and form white clouds above the water.

We walk the steep bank down to the bay.  Sometimes the hail and sleet return, sometimes the wind whips the sand into a frenzy.  But I throw the ball for Winston and he retrieves it, oblivious to the storm.  We’re alone on the sand.  There is just us and those hollering women in the water, shouting with abandon.  We are in a cold, windswept and exhilarating bubble.

As we walk back up the bank, the women return to land.  They wrap themselves in towels and drink from flasks.  We share a smile as I walk past.  I had come to the sea expecting comfort and contemplation, but instead I got motion and energy, something I probably needed much more.

A month later I return to the sea.  The sky is pale blue and jostling with fluffy cloud.  An indigo stripe marks the horizon.  Large, slow waves roll in like a lullaby.  Sunlight catches the offshore turbines and the lighthouse.  The lifeboat chugs towards the river, funnelling water behind it.  A long dredger is moored down the coast. 

Today we are with a friend on her first break since the pandemic began.  We treat her to fish and chips and play two pence games in the amusements.  Before and after, we walk along the promenade, mesmerised by the incoming tide, listening to its song as it washes away any vestige of pandemic fear.  Today I had expected nothing from the sea but beauty, but instead it restores us, bringing renewal just in time for spring.

Broken

The first delicate greenery has appeared. Hawthorn leaves unfurl on slender branches. Fresh nettles and cow parsley push through the soil. Winston enjoys eating the surfeit of young cleavers. The ivy looks ragged and the majority of branches are still bare, but change is afoot.

We haven’t been to the dene since before the last few storms and we walk into a broken landscape. The fallen tree at the edge of the bowling green is still there, taped and coned off. But this is only the beginning. The already-damaged rowan near the entrance is a blasted trunk. A sycamore lies prone behind it, broken off at the base. A smaller tree lies to one side.

I notice that my favourite tree is in full blossom, but it doesn’t look quite right. When we get closer, I see that it too is broken. I’m devastated by the loss. It is the first tree to flower in the spring, with long tumbling blossoms trailing the ground. Another mature tree lies fallen near by, its limbs crusted in lichen. The wind has torn through the upper dene and left devastation behind it.

We walk under the bridge. Beyond, the dene is calm. The burn slowly trickles. I see occasional movement as small fish dart below the surface. A wood pigeon sits in a blackthorn tree, feeding on the buds. Daffodil shoots have appeared as usual beneath the two birches on the edge of the stream. A swathe of purple crocuses bloom in their spot at the end of the linden avenue. There are violets in the hedgerows and the daffodils by the pond are already in flower. Blackthorns are in blossom.

The pond is quiet. Two male mallards swim lethargically. A gull keeps pace with a mallard. A pair of crows forage at the edge. I can hear tits and a robin high up in the trees. But one of the weeping willows that fringe the pond is weeping a little too much. A break high up makes it lean closer to the water.

The trees aren’t the only things going into this spring a little more broken than they were two years ago. I struggle with a persistent low mood that I can’t shake off. Motivating myself to walk further than the park at the end of the road is hard. I tire of a routine that is little more than work and home and back again. And yet bad news stories of war, soaring prices and poverty remind me how lucky I am.

Spring equinox is tricky. We’re propelled forward, from darkness into light, from lack into plenty, trying to find our balance while losing an hour on the way. I always forget how unsettling this turning can be. The equinox brings bees and celandine. It brings gentle mists and grass shimmering with diamonds of melted frost. Seagulls canoodling on chimneys and great tits fluting their call in the canopy. A mini-forest of saplings planted in the park. It brings light, tickling my eyes as I lie in bed, calling me to get up and enjoy the day. I follow its call.

The end of winter

Starlings seep and hiss from the chimneys. The sun is blinding, low in a blue sky, clouds just a white tinge at the horizon. We haven’t had rain for a while so the fallen leaves crisp as we walk. They are mostly a uniform dark brown now, clumping together in a soggy pulp in damp weather. Tree skeletons and holly leaves catch the sun. Cow parsley leaves push through the mulch. In the short cut that leads to the dene, a tree has been doctored, a cut branch now in logs beneath it. Rubbish has been cleared from around its base and the umbrella that has been there for years, filling up with leaves or snow through the seasons, is gone.

It is almost Candlemas. Another turn in the year, when the first fragile signs of spring appear. Usually I’m ready for the change, but this year winter has barely graced us with her presence. The old crone of the season has wrapped her furs around herself and decided to stay underground, occasionally sending out a few fingers of frost just to remind us she exists. I have hardly worn the warm coat I bought for the season. The frosts have been few and far between. Bulbs began sprouting in December and the birds have been calling loudly. Experts say we may have to say goodbye to winter as the climate warms, and the changing winter is already affecting wildlife.

A robin sings a delicate song. Blue tits chitter and flit between the trees. Two magpies clash over an old nest. A tree has fallen at the side of the bowling green. It is balanced on the fence, roots in the air and branches reaching for the green. The disarray of winter remains: shrivelled berries, ragged leaves, a handful of stinking Iris seeds in their pods. Somehow I had expected more signs of spring, given the lack of winter, but the spring flowers remain firmly beneath the soil and the trees are still naked.

The reeds are spun gold. Skinny fingers of willow drape the pond. It is full of activity. A flock of black-headed gulls roams between water and grass. Mobs of mallard drakes gather around the hens. A moorhen chases another, channelling water across the pond. The air is full of the gentle quacking of the ducks and the low cries of the gulls. People and dogs wander the paths and feed the birds. This is not a winter’s day as we know it.

A few days after Candlemas, winter pays a visit. The old crone whips up a storm of freezing wind, rain and sleet. But it all seems too little too late. In just a few days, signs of spring have appeared. A single pink cyclamen flower brightens the rubble of a wall collapsed by Storm Arwen. Crocuses sprout like small cups of honey and I see my first daffodil. I can’t be sad that spring has arrived, but I am sad for the season lost.

By late February there have been five named storms. Some unlucky areas suffer flooding and power cuts, a few have snow, but there is no retreat from spring. We walk through the cemetery at the tail end of Storm Franklin, the wind a soft roar through the trees. The grounds are full of windfallen trees, large and small. Chaffinches hop among grounded branches. Magpies squabble high up in those still standing. But mostly the birds offer a muted soundscape, as though cowed by the wind.

The light swings between sunshine and gloom. Rain is in the air; later it will rain all night. I hunt for hibernating ladybirds. Since Bug Woman wrote that they like to huddle on grave stones I have looked for them. I’m delighted to find some harlequins huddled in a crease of stone and orange ladybirds tucked into weathered letters.

But here, spring means snowdrops. Enclosed by graves, blanketing the ground under the trees, sprouting in small clumps and shimmering rivers. There are a few purple and yellow crocuses, but they can’t compete with the sheer volume of snowdrops. Luminous and almost transparent when the sun catches them, they are like pools of light. A stone angel boasts a bouquet, but snowdrops quietly adorn the home-made cross left for ‘Joe’. There is no doubt here that spring has arrived. There will be more storms to come. And more uncertainty. We wake the next morning to war in Europe and wonder, yet again, what the future will bring. All we can be certain of is that winter has ended and spring will always come.

Disrupting

As twilight comes, the street lamp across the street begins to sway back and forth. The trees begin to dance. A storm of leaves and dust are swept up into the air, swirling past my first floor office window, occasionally slapping the glass. Biting sleet accompanies me on the walk home. Storm Arwen has brought a rare ‘red’ weather warning, advising of potential loss of life due to flying debris. We are told to stay away from the coast and not to travel if we can avoid it. All night the wind roars. There are occasional bangs and crashes. But we are lucky, with no more than a few overturned things in the yard. A buddleia has swept out of a neighbour’s yard into the lane. A yard wall has collapsed across the road. In the park, a tree sized bough of the poplar has sheared off and now balances in the canopy. Pavements are heaped with golden leaves, twigs and red berries, like seasonal offerings. That afternoon, wind is replaced by snow – the first of the winter – a light dusting that soon turns to ice.

In these dark days of winter, routine lies heavily on my shoulders. I struggle out of bed in darkness to the daily routines of washing, dressing, breakfast. It is just getting light when I take Winston for his walk and on our return I go to the library, where the daily routines of work begin. The storm is a welcome distraction for me, after the third warmest autumn on record and settled weather, but not for those deprived of power for weeks to come. Now the landscape is damp. Soggy leaves. Twigs and branches vivid with lichen. The damp accentuates the colours: vibrant greens of ivies and ferns, rich browns of leaves and bark. The trees are suddenly leafless, but a party of wood pigeons has found something to feed on, on an evergreen across the railway tracks. Hidden sparrows chirp in the privet, starlings call from the trees above.

Mid month there is another break to routine. l have a meeting at headquarters which means a sunrise visit to the country park across the road. By the time I arrive, the sky has already blushed orange and subsided to a subtle blue. The sun is a molten semi-circle, just peeping over the horizon. The landscape is dull and water-logged. Clumps of drooping brown grass, mud stippled with paw prints, spongy patches of moss. A few stubborn leaves cling to bare stems. I hear a plaintive seep now and again, but the birds are well hidden, until a trio of goldfinches flutter overhead.

Gorse leads me up to the sundial, spiky green stems that give no hint of their luminosity in other seasons. I have to shield my eyes when I reach the top of the hill. The sun is almost a complete circle now, breathing fire. There is a hint of orange to the gnomon, the shadow of a bench crossing it. The sundial has been painted and cleaned. It will be part of a new memorial to those lost to the pandemic, linking art works at the four compass points along what were once waggon ways crossing the borough.

I hear robins singing. To north and west, the distant hills are layered with mist. The sun begins to catch the landscape, turning sea and clouds to pastels. The ferry is on its way into port from Amsterdam and the sun lights it pale orange. A metro crossing the fields reflects copper. There is now a dividing line in the park. Below it, the trees remain a dull brown, but above it, they glow bronze.

I walk down to the pond, past wild carrot nests and alders studded with cones. Guelder rose berries and rosehips gleam at the edge of the water. Mallards, moorhens and a tufted duck float on a pond that reflects the sunrise reflected from the surrounding buildings.

Later that day, there is unanticipated news. My story ‘The Muse’ has been published by Toasted Cheese Literary Magazine. Inspired by stories of foundlings, it is a story about identity, that you can read HERE. I also get some more great feedback from an assessment of my novel. In these last days of December, my routine is being disrupted in the best of ways. There will be many more dark, dispiriting days before spring but I hope for a touch of the unexpected to spur me through them.

Preparing

The first day of November bears gifts for those who watch the skies. A line of four swans flies in silence among huge flocks of squawking geese arrowing south. A thick, vivid rainbow embraces the library as I get to work.

November brings golden sunrises and swirling pastel sunsets, but when we visit the dene the sun is just a blur of light struggling through gloom. The floodlights have been lit on the football pitches nearby and they seem to be hazed with mist. I remind myself that it is only lunch time, since it feels like the prelude to twilight already. The weekend’s gales have faded into a gentle breeze. I am warm because I am moving, but if I stopped I would feel the bite of cold air. Meteorologists have forecast snow for the coming week and the sensationalist papers are making a fuss about it, but the chances are that we won’t see it much below the north of Scotland.

The dene is slumbering, or so it seems. A few soft twitters from a tit, a brief alarm from a blackbird, but otherwise the trees are silent. The burn is a chain of still puddles. Tawny leaves are interlaced with ivy, raspberry and bramble leaves. A handful of sow thistle and a lone herb robert are the only blooms left. The rushes have yellowed. The avenue of lindens has dropped many of its leaves and they lie in heaps along the path and around the tree roots. One birch among a row of others has been lost to fungi, huge brackets climbing the trunk that have killed it from within.

The pond is peaceful. Trailing willows and floating birds. An older couple circuit the water slowly, holding hands. But then the black headed gulls rise in a frenzy, their screeches filling the air. A man and his son are feeding them. The mallards and moorhens move quietly and determinedly to take their fill among the flurry of white wings.

I know this season isn’t as quiet as it seems. Some creatures are still preparing for winter, hoarding what food they can. Some are busy munching their way through the leaf litter, breaking it down to feed themselves and whatever is nurtured by the remaining mulch. Spiders have been encasing their eggs safely in silk for the winter. They won’t see their children born but have given them the best chance they can. Fungi burst into fruit so that they can send out their spores. Trees pull nutrients back within, renewing themselves for the year to come.

And I’m preparing too. I’m no longer sending stories out, I’m holding them in. At Halloween I festooned my altar with photos of women writers. Not only to honour them, but to honour the thread of creativity that has been passed down through the generations. To remind me that there are others who have come before, women who can inspire and hold space for me when doubt comes. I am no longer languishing, but venturing out in search of stories. And then venturing in to find the words with which to tell them.

The air is full of drizzle on the day after Remembrance Sunday. Knitted poppies adorn the entrance to the cemetery. Rain patters softly on the remaining canopy. Leaves crackle as they fall. These gentle tickings are the only sounds. A discarded pumpkin lantern leers from the base of a tree. Here too, the landscape seems to slumber. But crows dig deep beneath heaps of leaves to find food. A squirrel weaves among the trees. On a nearby gravestone, a gull perches, watching us with interest. And these are only the preparations that we can see.

We walk past the crematorium and overhear part of the eulogy as a funeral takes place. The celebrant talks of a man who enjoyed photography. I smile at that creative thread that links me unexpectedly on this day to a stranger. We prepare, but we never know if our preparations will be enough or when they will no longer matter. Still, we do it, because we hope for a future in which they are enough. I am lucky to have shelter and food for the coming winter. The larder I fill is a creative one. Stories and images are the things I gather to see me through.

Languishing

After the first chill of autumn, comes an interlude of sun and warmth. The tiny creatures respond. On the warm metal of roadside barriers, ladybirds gather. Every foot or so there is another, all with varying colours and arrangements of spots. There are a few ladybird larvae, with their black bodies and orange stripe. Tiny aphids, sunbathing bluebottles, a cranefly and a tiny insect that looks like a stag beetle all share the unexpected warmth.

There is little left in bloom now. A few bindweed trumpets and a single violet among the brambles. A clump of mayweed beside the road. The occasional dandelion shining among fallen leaves and a cluster of wild roses. And yet the violas I planted for summer colour are still in flower and next year’s bulbs have started to shoot. Seeds have been swept up and blown on their way to take their chances. The hogweeds are no more than skeleton spokes and there are only rags of down on the willowherbs.

Summer kept me close to home. I worked from home until September and the heat was too much for adventures. Our walks were short, timed to coincide with cooler parts of the day. I found myself less attentive to the world outside than usual. But I wasn’t idle. The yard has been tidied, weeded and adorned with new plants. I returned to the novel I sent for assessment before lockdown, to complete the suggested revisions. Some of my spring submissions bore fruit. With each rejection I made another submission to keep the work out there. And not everything passed me by. I watched a leaf cutter bee harvest leaves from my rose bush for her nest. I saw a mole building a tunnel on a piece of waste grass, surfacing with a small somersault and retreating underground once more. I watched goldfinches gather on the telegraph wires and sparrows flit through the yard.

In early August, I caught Covid. It seemed ironic after nearly a year and a half of working to keep people safe, a double vaccination and staying close to home, that I caught it at this stage. It was like a bad flu: cough, stuffy nose, congestion, aches and pains, fever, weariness, no appetite. I had bad nights, in which panic attacks returned and I started to worry about the coming winter. I slept and I watched daytime TV. I didn’t have the energy for much more than that. My wife caught it too. As I started to recover, she got the worst of it. But that was nothing. In the same month, a friend of ours in America, also double-jabbed, passed away from the disease.

As summer passed to autumn and the air got cooler, we reclaimed the beach from the crowds. Sanderlings fluted into the silence. A old-fashioned tall ship sailed in front of wind turbines towards the lighthouse. Time has often felt strange during the pandemic, and watching this ship was like seeing another age breaking through. Later, we came upon a group of stones, trailing bladderwrack, planted in a circle, as though the sea gods had placed them there to hold a meeting.

Berries have replaced blooms in the hedgerows. Blackberries are mostly picked or shrivelled on the vine, but there are shiny, plump rosehips, snow berries , haws and elderberries. The ground rustles with leaves and paths are edged with fallen gold, yet looking up, the trees seem as if they are only just on the turn.

I have been languishing in the space between now and normal. But now, everything has changed. If not truly normal, it feels as normal as it will get. I am back in the office for my full working week and have returned to some of my old wandering grounds. I am thinking less about what I have harvested this year and more about what I can do to reap a good harvest in the next. It would be easy to languish here forever, but the season has changed and the winds are calling…

My favourite fairy tale was always Beauty and the Beast, but I was never satisfied when, in the end, the Beast turned into a boring prince. You can read my alternative version, called ‘The Beauty of the Beast’ in the current Firewords magazine, issue 14 on the theme of ‘wild’. You can buy a copy here.

Basking

Late May has brought banks of ox-eye daisies and campion to the motorway verges. It has brought sheep and the yellow of rape to the fields next to the veterinary hospital where we go for Winston’s hydrotherapy. A pheasant, statue-still on the banks. Paddocks of horses and foals.

It has brought a fret from the sea that hangs over the river and rolls through town. All weekend, ships sound their horns, the moans echoing in their wake. The park is unmown, freckled with daisies and dandelion clocks. Cleavers climb the fences with sticky fingers. Clumps of grasses and buttercups have been allowed to flower. Tiny cranesbills carpet the foot of the poplar. The woodpecker drums softly – it sounds like the trees are purring. Everything is in that fresh, abundant state of growth, before the straggly mess of late summer.

Before we get there I imagine how the cemetery will be in the soft sunshine of a bank holiday Monday. I imagine the shafts of light between the trees, the dance of flies and the tangle of wildflowers. Others head for the coast. We avoid the crowds for a sanctuary of green and dappled light.

We’re greeted by blackbird song, high up in the trees. An undertone of wood pigeon and the chirrup of magpies. The mournful vibrato of a robin. A crow approaches, feathers accented with white and very tame. He is joined by others. I’ve seen people leave seed here, along the path by the chapel and these crows are obviously used to people leaving them food. They follow us some way along the path.

The cow parsley is almost as tall as us. Drifts of bluebells mingle with pockets of buttercup and campion. We walk overgrown paths bathed in green and patches of grass laid to meadow. The sun plays over the grave markers, casting some in shadow and highlighting others with pools of light. We bask in the tranquillity of dappled sun and untrodden paths.

When you think nobody will ever like a story of yours again; when you think you’ll get nothing but rejections, it’s then that a little good news comes. You begin to doubt the worth of your words, as you tout them from place to place, imagining them a little more jaded, a little more dishevelled as they are studied and turned away. But then suddenly, someone likes what you’ve done, and then it seems altogether better than you remembered. Often, rejection comes in threes, but this week it was successes. A story that made the longlist for inclusion in a prestigious literary journal. A story to be published in another journal. And a story longlisted, then shortlisted, then winner of the runner’s up prize in a competition.

I wrote The Carousel at my local writers’ circle, following a prompt where we were given a number of ‘things’ to write about. It came almost fully formed, a short story of 500 words. I’m pleased to announce it has won ‘runner up’ in the Retreat West quarterly themed flash fiction competition. One of the prizes was to have it professionally recorded by a sound artist. If you have 5 minutes, click on the link to listen to (or read) the story, but be prepared, it’s a creepy one….CLICK HERE TO READ THE CAROUSEL