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Marking Time

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Today is a bank holiday in the UK, once called the Whitsun bank holiday. One of those little bits of trivia tucked away in the brain that’s never really interrogated. The half-remembered poem by Phillip Larkin, hot weather and wedding parties on a train, vague recollections of working class families visiting the seaside (mainly based on my childhood reading of The Family from One End Street), half-formed images of May queens and girls in white dresses. The things we forget we know. On consultation with my friend Wikipedia I discovered that Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter, and in Christian belief marks “the descent of the holy spirit on Jesus’ disciples” (which sounds vaguely uncomfortable to my heathen ears). The day after Whitsun was known as Whit Monday and was made a bank holiday in 1871, marked for 100 years and then abolished in 1971. The moveable nature of the festival was removed and it was then fixed as the last Monday in May for the more prosaically named Spring Ban...
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Connection

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After a slightly stressful start to the day involving a chemistry exam and a disappearing taxi, I really needed to retreat into the calm of one of my favourite places in Bristol’s city centre, the central library. I wasn’t sure whether to be comforted or alarmed by the damp handwritten notice on the gate which read: “Apologies. Due to a power outage, the library is closed until further notice”. Comforted because of its’ handwritten temporary-looking nature, as that should mean a brief closure, but then alarmed at the vagueness of “until further notice”. With the omnicrisis raging around us, a beleaguered prime minister, conflicts in various parts of the world, and as Radio 4 cheerily informed me this morning, an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a little bit of certainty would be very welcome right now. As I urged on the little cab icon on my phone screen this morning, casting up prayers to various traffic gods, one thing became very clear, independence is a myth. ...
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Allotment

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A memory of being small, crouched down between blackcurrant bushes heavy with winking dark beads of fruit. The leaves over my head, a green cave. This space became my private playhouse on Saturday mornings when I visited the allotment with my dad, each gap between the bushes serving as a different room. I am alone in this memory, happy and secure, a contented small child’s certainty that this is the way of the world. Although of course, my father was in reality only feet away, digging, raking or considering his compost heap. During the week he would cycle ten miles each way to central London, where he worked as an antiquarian bookseller, spending his days with illuminated manuscripts on vellum, and incunabula, the earliest of printed books. The contrast between his weekday and weekend selves was acute. Other memories surface, exploring a neglected plot, overgrown with grass, or chasing my younger brother up and down the sunbaked mud path in the middle of the site. Care had to be taken ...
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Relief

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A damp misty start to a May bank holiday, but the rain of the last two nights feels like a relief after a dry April with no significant rainfall. I have been haunting plant stalls that pop up seasonally outside my local shops recently, treating myself to colourful bedding plants and interesting looking perennials that surely I can squeeze into my garden somewhere. When all else in life seems overwhelming, tend the garden. Watering my newly planted pots early in the morning or in mellow evening light has become a daily meditative process. The deal is simple, I give them good compost and enough water and they stay alive, each day I urge them on. This week it was petunias and antirrhinums from outside Bristol Sweetmart, precariously bungeed onto the back of my pannier rack ahead of the cycle home. The snapdragons conjure childhood memories of squeezing the flower heads to make the ‘dragons’ roar. Last weekend I watched my neighbours patiently weeding rogue ox-eye daisies, muscari and clum...
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Knowledge

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This morning I walked in the sunshine down to the local train station with my daughter. I was there solely as a beast of burden, my task was to carry a lightweight but large and unwieldy canvas, a crucial resource for her GCSE art exam on Thursday and Friday this week. Although producing creative work under exam conditions feels rather counter-intuitive to me. Apparently the reason why many exam boards have moved away from the assessment by coursework that was so in vogue when I was taking exams, is that it’s almost impossible to verify whether the work submitted has been produced by student effort alone. Once parents would have shamefacedly admitted that they had done most of their offspring’s coursework, now they have been supplanted by AI. Allegedly. My daughter’s drawing skills far outstrip my own, words are more my thing, and her coursework sketchbook is a thing of original beauty. As I write I am surrounded by many students, as I sit in the barrel-vaulted splendour of the reading...
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Brevity

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  I usually try to set aside Monday as a writing day, but this week I will be working a long day at Forest School, so thought I would share this quick poem instead. The week ahead feels daunting for a variety of reasons and although I have lots of interesting and wonderful things I could write about, my tired brain on a Sunday evening is not equal to the task. All I have is ideas planted for another time. Seedlings Today I have no words I am full to the brim with thoughts But have no idea how to share them Sentences start but trail off Worry clamps my heart All I can do is water the seedlings These shoots saved from conflict I wish peace for both of us The photo shows cucumber seedlings germinated from saved seed that were collected in Hebron in Palestine. I was given them by Petra, one of the tutors on the Grow Leader course and a gardener with Sims Hill Shared Harvest. Germination is always a small miracle, and I hope I can continue to help them thrive over the coming weeks.
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For The Birds

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The sparrow gang is noisy in the overgrown hedge in my back garden. The planting is a mix of a spiky Pyracantha and two variegated Euonymus, one green and white and one yellow and green, which being evergreen glows brightly even in the depths of winter. It is the final reminder of the previous residents' choices, provides a useful barrier to the road beyond and great cover for small birds. I watch them peer out from the bush, dash across to the birdfeeder, then make a series of hops and jumps into my two fruit trees. The apple is looking particularly resplendent at the moment, freshly minted leaves and delicate five petalled blossoms, white with pink tips. We’ve had a bird feeding station in the garden since the children were small, and it’s currently positioned directly opposite the kitchen window, providing hours of entertainment whilst washing up. But now it seems that even a tube of birdseed is not a simple unalloyed public good. New advice released last week by the RSPB warns ...
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