Briefly...

watching the horizon, a shooting star, a rain dance which hasn't worked...

Hello beautiful people, if you’re new here, you are so welcome. If you’re just popping in out of curiosity, you too are welcome - I hope you enjoy the chaos. To each of you who return every time I post, I am honoured to know you are here again, thank you, I don’t take any one of you for granted.

I would send every one of you a hug but its likely to be rather unpleasant…

Have I mentioned how murderously hot it is?

Seven long, languorous weeks of summer holidays lay ahead of me. Again and for always, gratitude that my work allows this is of incalculable size. Nevertheless, something intangible feels different this year, some witchery carried in the hot air or the dust from tinder dry earth?

But, I suspect, more likely it is news in a new contract. I will not return in September to my beloved village school. The one I have worked at almost every one of the twenty-one years since living in France. Decisions have been made by those that do such things without any notion of the reality and I must leave for a college in a neighbouring town. No reason given, no signature required, just a notification received and expected to be adhered to. I have wept and raged on repeat. An appeal has been requested. I wait… what else can I do?

The waiting… that feels wrong. The stepping away from the known into the unknown, that also feels wrong.

And, this eternal heat which hurries me from sleep to throw open the shutters on all sides of my home in the hope of seeing a clear horizon, no fire, no smoke, that feels wrong too.

Please, please, no smoke…

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In the stark light of high-noon, when everything sensible is resting, light has no fear, light picks out light, it dances…

Even now, when every bone of me begs to be still, when the heat makes breathing an exercise of such monumentally concentrated effort I wonder quite how I will take the next breath, light, that trickster of both time and reality, intervenes. By which I mean the shadow of a line of trees across the fields, the twisted woolly glow of my sheep in the evening as they bend their heads to feed, the light both on and beneath the surface of running water, the reflection of moonlight on the barn roof, the inky light of the horizon in the morning and, when I remember each of those moments is already eight minutes old, that the next will be the same, again and again for all time, I cannot be still. It is a beguilement—or madness—I cannot contain.

I have been told throughout these mounting years, that to be still is to venture into the infinitesimal beauteousness of everything, those otherwise unseen details so often missed in the hubbub of a world hell-bent on speed and who am I to disagree? Yet I find too often I do… my life carries an ambiguity between stillness and motion. Try as I might to clarify the murk entre les deux it remains a paradox. If I say it is motion with tiny, albeit frequent pockets of stillness I am approaching the truth, but even so, I cannot quite bring myself to believe in stillness entirely. Far more is left undiscovered by remaining seated. Tell me how to be still when the light shimmering over a field of barley on an unimaginably hot evening in July lasts but a few minutes—is already eight minutes old—will never be repeated in the exact same way, ever again, when that light catching in those particular trillions of barley beards is like phosphorescence or the Milky Way or thousands of damselfly wings?

I’m listening…

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“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”― Walt Whitman

In July I want to speak for hours about storms; how I hope—with every cell still capable of accepting cerebral signals, probably very few—on two nights just passed that clouds filling up a molten, white-hot sky, electricity lighting up their edges as they ring thunderously, gloriously loud all around the hill that soft, earth friendly rain will follow. I want to talk for hours about rain. I want to make it rain!

The same storm carries music up the valley, live notes dance onto the slopes of the hill, in through my open window, a rock beat on the wind, ripples muslin curtains, the wild in me wants to dance—a rain dance, perhaps? Ten drops fall. I dance more wildly.

My chickens are panting. My sheep are panting. They hide in the bamboo, stationary, all bar the twitch of an ear, like four woolly stones.

Rosie arrives in a flurry of hot hugs and heatwaves for two days. We are invited to an evening of star gazing taking place at the back of the hill. We watch Venus rise while the sun slips into daybreak in the hemisphere below us, learn that it does this at 274º West. We wait for true night to fall. A hare watches us, stilled by the cooked earth and curiosity. Perhaps because the presence of a dozen humans at the top of this hill on a swelteringly hot night in July is a rare and puzzling spectacle, he senses we are not the average hunter types that roam through dusky light. He senses we are no danger, though he watches us closely, alert just in case. He is oblivious to our misfortune on this night. He understands nothing of broken telescope mounts after all, neither the lively bickering of our hosts and their futile battle to repair it. He knows only that we arrive and leave again. Only mildly disappointed, smiling our goodbyes to both hare and stars and hosts we return home.

On that same evening, hot shoulder to hot shoulder, Rosie and I gaze at the trailing glitter that is The Milky Way in a silken black sky, unimaginably vast, unimaginably distant. Out over roof tops and tree tops and hill tops we watch an unknown shooting star speeding right through the belly of the Great Bear then disappear into unknown silent, inky space. No telescope necessary… As we make our silent wish I wonder if the hare may have seen such a beauty also…

My handsome red-nailed mechanic who scored 19 / 20 in his maths Baccalaureate !

I have a nearly-heart-attack moment when I discover my car needs a new head-gasket. You can imagine, or maybe you can’t… it’s complicated, very expensive complicated! But enter Seth, my brilliant, beautiful boy. Within hours necessary parts are ordered, special tools to dismantle the alarming number of pieces I have no idea of the name of an engine contains—because cars are made that way these days—the barn floor becomes a deconstructed mechanical mosaic of oil and pipes and metal. Within days they are all returned from whence they came! I thank him as only a mother can when her son has just saved her more than two-thousand euro saying ‘How do I love thee, let me count the ways…’ he gives me an oily faced grimace, eyes heavenward, but I cannot contain my overwhelming pride.

Top; The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow is a passionately and profoundly beautifully written seasonal account of a shepherds life in Vermont, I didn’t want it to end! Middle; Souvenir Magazine is an exciting new literary magazine, published three times a year in Paris, founded by Kyle Berlin and Augusta Sagnelli including essays and stories from Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and Eleanor Anstruther - my holiday read for all those too hot moments when only something utterly absorbing will take my mind from the heat! Bottom ; The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger is stuffed with hilarity and simply prepared scrumptious recipes, my new go-to cookbook for all those nights when I am utterly sick of trying to think of something new - which is most nights!

I receive unexpected gifts; beautiful books and a real magazine in the post which by some serendipitous magic of telepathic friendship all arrive on—separate—days when I most need them. To the beautiful, extraordinarily kind people who sent them I cannot thank you from here in any way sufficiently, oh but I would were you living close by. You know who you are, know you are all loved and hugged massively. Huge heart thanks, mille fois et encore…

A family of Coal-tits are squeaking under my window again!

I see them so briefly, even leaning precariously—dangerously—from the window. I guess, only through spying each evening, tiny feathered clues on close branches, that they are a family of Coal Tits. After all, those tiny black and white badger faces can belong to no other passerine bird… can they?

I see fire…

At 5h50 on Thursday morning I push back the shutters, a plume of smoke which looks like a cloud is moving across far hills, I realise two things at that moment; it is too distant to cause me any real fear and it is not a forest fire. Later I read that three hundred goats, never having seen the outside of the barn they were kept in, are burnt alive within. I cannot decide which would have been worse, three hundred goats, or three hundred trees…

While wishing for the impossible miracle of an ocean close by, I remember three days with Rosie in July last year spent in Porto, one unforgettable evening by the Atlantic Ocean and the two especially beautiful people we spent it with. Veronika Bond and dear Joshua Bond we were honoured. We will be always.

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With forever love and—eight minute old—light

PS I am sure my skin is melting, maybe even my bones…

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