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https://oldmatemedia.com/guides/placing-your-books-in-the-british-library-hub/

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Finally put together some of my writing and art into a publication, available in November.

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Advice from C. S. Lewis

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Cloudberry Lodge- an ode

Patchwork fields of many shades of green

Surround my eyes and mind

Dry stone walls serve as natural boundaries

Ingeniously crafted and nature takes its

Course to solidify, becoming home to plants,

Lichen and moss.

Along each hedgerow path and road

a vision of nature left to grow and take its place-

The lilac Michaelmas Daisy, yellow ragwort,

The pink rosebay willow herb, creeping thistle

Flower Spent and white tuft emerge from its tips.

Gentle robin flutters between wall, grass and bushes, watching intently sometimes

Through our window and skylight.

The only sounds to be heard are cows lowing,

Sheep in the field adjoining our lodge

Watching us as we have our morning coffee.

A sudden loud bleat takes us unaware.

Hardly any sound of cars, just the occasional

Horses hooves clopping down the road.

Wind sweeps through the hillside

and expanse of clouds like an excavated crystal

With a slither of silver and gold atop.

Sky, heaven and earth inexorably connected.

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Prolepsis and Analepsis

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Coronation day

Grey, wet day set against

Red, white and blue.

Sandwiches and cake laid on tables as

Bunting flaps in the wind.

We sit expectantly

Listening to commentary

and watching the spectacle both remotely and remote,

as devoted crowds wet and crammed congregate

Outside the abbey.

A great procession

Travels with gravity and colour

Coaches sparkle in gold

Horses stunning in royal blue headdress lead and follow.

A man about to become king

Walks in a coat of ermine

Stuffed full of pomp

Yet the man inside is kindly

Humble and quite introvert.

He takes the regal chair

The stone inside, the rites of ancient time

The ceremony is performed against a

Soundscape of Handel, Byrd and Holst, to name a few

and commissioned music,

to our ears revealing change and something new.

Singers raise the sound of the

Coronation to the heavens,

Nothing has been left to chance here

Even down to meticulously stitched crown laden cushions

The slow build of Handel

Elevates the scene

The spectacle both real and also like a dream.

A sceptre is handed, a Bible with which to follow wisely

A glove with which to care and govern kindly.

A diamond sword is pinned to his cloak

To remind him to fight for good.

The orb, a symbol of the world,

God at his side but also on his shoulders

He is anointed behind regally painted panels

The weight must feel either spiritual or like a boulder.

A deeply private moment

I wonder how he feels?

Elation, anxiety, fulfilment, concern?

A deep yearning to serve?

Detachment enabled me to consider the man

in a way

I think inaccessible to the crowds in the rain.

I was able to ponder and consider.

He comes in a man and leaves a king

and on leaving the abbey

The crowds cheer to him

God save the King!

The planes fly past

Red, white and blue trail the skies

The new king waves to his subjects

Yet the man is waving his goodbyes.

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I make myself laugh when I read old fb posts 😝

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Garden at home is full of birds at the front and the back and putting food out nearly every day! Snowdrops have been and gone and some plants were casualties of the winter like my hebe, my lemon tree and my geraniums, so we start again. The garden is a win and a lose, mostly a win.

I love going out everyday and seeing new things in bud. Some things which have given me joy have been to see the early star magnolia which was in bloom a few weeks ago for a short time and now a little pink bud on my magnolia.

The greenhouse is full of vegetables, flowers and herbs and I have started a new plot of wildflowers and flowers such as calendula, Nigella, fox and cubs etc., as I will not have to grow so many vegetables in the garden this year as the college garden at Grove Park will be busy with potatoes, tomatoes and beans this year.

The bulbs look glorious, but the weather has been damp, cold and wet so it had been hard to enjoy them as I would like, but they still look beautiful on fleeting glimpses as I walk through the garden or look through the window. The scent of a daffodil hung in the air yesterday as I was putting up new lights in the garden. Daffodils do have a lovely scent. The fritillaria imperialis looms over the other bulbs and is truly magnificent with its golden bells and pineapple foliage. I also love the fritillaria vulgaris, the snakeshead flower with the checkerboard pattern. I will add these to the garden under the magnolia tree when they have finished.

The bursting of life outside and the many buds and flowers, such as those of the quince are stunning in their subtlety and beautiful delicate shades. Although I love the colours of summer, this time in the garden is truly beautiful.

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You are a dog, describe an interaction with a human.

I lay on the floor again, my paws relaxed, some on the wooden floor, my claws, cold, touching the wood. There my family are, watching that thing in the corner, moving pictures and sounds. Sometimes I hear things which somehow take me to a place, a place that feels like somewhere I know or maybe my ancestors knew. Most of the time I have no interest in that box with the moving pictures, not like they do, their eyes glued to it and sometimes to a thing in their hands that makes them laugh or sometimes cry. There were a couple of times, I recall, where I my attention was drawn to the thing in the corner, when I had a faint recollection of who I really am.

One time I heard the sound of my brothers and sisters barking and playing, then I heard the sound of a human I had known, who had rescued me when I lost my first home and was taken to a place called Battersea. This lovely man who looked after me was on that thing, I remembered his voice and it took me to a sad and dark time in my life, a time where my life was uncertain and unstable. I was very sad then, until these new people came into my life and gave me a new home. When they go out a leave me I get that same sense of fear, that maybe this home is not certain too, but then they return and I am a happy girl again.

I lick my paws roll over and put my paw in my mouth and they all exclaim ‘aww’, I expect this adulation from them now. They love me and I am secure.

Another time I jumped up and looked at that box was when I heard the voices of my brothers and sisters, but this sound was joyful and free, not of any captivity. They were dogs, much like me but they were in their true home- the cold and snow. They were pulling sleds in the thick snow and ice. This is my place, this is why I have such a thick coat of fur, which falls out everywhere at home and my family take it out for the birds to make their nests.

I have become a different creature from my brothers and sisters in the snow. I am pampered and loved and when the snow has come, it is alien to me now and I run around for a few minutes and play with my family but then I am happy to come in and sit with them back in the warm, their faces looking lovingly at me in my home. Sometimes I am reminded of who I really am, but love has kept me alive and saved me.

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A night at the opera

Lights dim. Curtain lifts.

Strings flurry, brass lifts, pulses

auditorium.

Voices start and I

Look at faces enraptured

by sound. Heavenly.

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Imagine telling the story of a professional hypnotizer.

I am standing on stage and in the middle of a show. I could be doing this for all sorts of good, getting people off drugs, losing weight, developing confidence, stopping them gambling, but here I am in a dingy theatre spotlight, a bead of sweat falling down my cheek my heart racing with entertainers’ Adrenalin. I look ludicrous, I am wearing the kind of garb you’d expect to see in some old Victorian music hall, red plastered panelled walls and a heavy curtain either side of the stage. Atop my hot and buzzing head is a preposterous fez hat and I am swinging a gold pendant in front of an over-eager audience members’ eyes, he who had stumbled rather too willingly up the steps to the stage about 5 minutes ago- the fool. Better things are to come.

I went into this with some good intentions. I had thought of going into working in psychiatry or in counselling to help people achieve a life without their addictions. Truth is, i found that I enjoyed the underside of my gift. I had learned from school that I had a gift, if you want to call it that. I was considered a strange student, studious but weird and not quite belonging to the world of school and I did not enjoy the hierarchy of which I was bottom. I knew that I was different and I was starting to feel not only different, but better. I had discovered from an early age, that I could cajole family and family friends into doing my bidding just from looking at them…intently. I never wanted for anything, I never suffered the indignity of waiting for my parents to do something for me, give me food, change my diaper, pick up a toy I had dropped- not just once but over and over again. Oh how I delighted in seeing them do the same action continuously without reacting differently each time, like robots and I had the controls.

My mother had thought I had something wrong with my eyes, I stared so hard at her at times. She didn’t realise that I was able to bring her in and out my my spell at any given moment and I was learning that this was a very good thing for me. My father was a little more resistant. He didn’t like me much and would often refuse to meet my eye because he was, I think, a little wary. However, I would find ways to trick him into looking at me, an unusual show of affection would draw the gullible man in and then that was it. He had a terrible accident with a saw and he wasn’t even aware that he was doing any DIY. My ability had cost him his arm, I never liked him much anyway.

At school I continued to develop these powers. I wasn’t liked much, but used my ability to hypnotise (I had learned the proper term by then) to get in with ‘the crowd’. I would target someone as geeky or perhaps even more nerdy than me and make note of those bullies who who had made this child a target and I would seek their approval by making this kid look a complete fool, which the group loved and made them hold me in at least a slightly higher esteem. They were too large a gang to work my powers on because they would see another member of their group falling under their power. Oh yes, I soon came to realise that my skill lay in divide and rule I became a tyrant and soon saw ways in which I would not have to have a boring, life of work and drudgery, I could become a very important and very rich individual. Nice? Using my ability for good? Who gives a ____ about nice?

So here I stand in the theatre. One person under my spell, an audience eating out of my hand. They don’t care about the humiliation of this individual and neither do those who have come with him. The theatre has sent them into a state of desire of hunger. They bay for entertainment in whatever way they will get it. We are here to be entertained and I am here to provide that entertainment, it is my duty to bring this person down, down to be the bait of the audience.

His eyes stop following the pendant and roll back into his head. He is ready, he is primed. What will it be tonight? Make him look gullible and stupid somehow- a tripping down the stairs, a kissing of someone in the audience he doesn’t know, getting him to tell a damaging or ridiculous secret that will show him to be the fool he is? Vicious, wicked. The more wicked the better.

Look into my eyes…

( what will it be?

What will it be tomorrow?

What will it be next month?

What will it be next year?)

How can I achieve the domination I crave?

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Little writing done

Tiredness envelopes me

From hand the pen slips

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Write about a piece of furniture in the room you are in.

In the centre of the sitting room is a big wooden coffee table which has varying shades within the wood and grain marks with run lengthwise along the table. It is a very square, solid table at the top and the bottom of the table does not have legs but a large, modern brutalist-looking block of matching wood which is a plinth to hold up the table. It has no legs at all, which is one of the reasons I like it- it is traditional with an unusual twist. The wood is ethnic-looking like the rustic Moroccan-style tables you see quite often. I have no idea what wood it is, but i do respect wood, as does my friend Larry David 😉

It has a drawer on one side with an ornate brass drop handle and within this drawer lies a myriad of nonsense of life passing by and things dropped in as a convenient deposit. This seemingly innocent feature of the table is the thing that makes one lose one’s mind and wonder, ‘where the hell is …?’ because one of the places the ‘what the hell’ object could be, would be the drawer of this table. Shopping loyalty cards, gallery membership cards, cotton reels and thread, a crotchet needle, a cat identity barrel, a poppy for Remembrance Sunday - these disparate items meet and party together in that drawer quite hard, obviously, because somehow the threads seem to get wound around things even though they seemingly lie there quiet and so still.

The top of the table is fairly broad and has a Perspex panel which is removable in the centre. This is because underneath the Perspex panel is an opening, a box really, into which you may put items for display. The Perspex has gone a milky colour now whereas it used to be completely transparent so the items on display could be seen much more clearly when we first got the table. However, we still put objects in there, mainly to illustrate or adorn the season. At Halloween we put skeleton fairy lights and pieces of Halloween costume jewellery inside, at Christmas I put postcards from A Christmas Carol book illustrated by Quentin Blake and photos from Mrs Beeton’s Christmas cookbook. At the moment we await spring with anticipation, as does the recess in the table, which has spring decorated enamel topped tin, a matching mini hand mirror and a piece of spring jewellery I made in my city and guilds art class.

The top of the table. Abused. I talked about the grain of the wood, but it can hardly be seen. Bottles of fizzy pop, sweets and snacks, a punnet of plums, telephone handset, remote controls and books cover the table like boats traversing a very busy river directionless and uprooted from their homes.