Rough Winds, Ramblings & Badgers – (and Prometheans bound and unbound)

Well, after such balmy beginnings, ‘rough winds’ soon made their presence felt to ‘shake the darling buds of May.’

A few days after I wrote my earlier post, rain-wielding gusts swept in like a temper tantrum. Petulant winds gripped the inside of our chimney with fist-like twists, the upstairs window boomed occasional surprise, and we were glad to stay indoors and lose ourselves in a double bill of Alec Guinness films – Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit.

These classic Ealing comedies are worlds of brittle-gleaming. Big, satisfying doses of pure storyteller care for the imagination. Character – in more senses than one – asserts itself fully. Ours – and that of the people on the screen. What they, and we, think and do mixes in a dark-delicious concoction of humour, drama, pathos, farce, satire – and rumbustious chasings through and over and around a situation. We play catch with the touchstones that scuff our boots, as we tread the soil of the story.

In The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guinness’s face is a picture – a story and a code. My daughter loves what it tells her; wants to hug Sidney Stratton (the brilliant, inspiration-driven scientist Guinness plays) for his irrepressible curiosity and his naivety, but is also shown the harm single-focused pursuit of an idea might do. We watch too as outside forces gather round that idea, and less savoury motivations seek to take hold of the information gained; to manipulate it for their own ends and to bury inconvenient facts. The initial intention of an idea becomes warped, or is met head-on by all the complexities and flipsides of progress. The fears, pitfalls and connotations are revealed. The monsters we might unleash run like shadows through the mill town streets.

Whenever we switch channels to these old films, we travel to another age. I glimpse scenes similar to those I remember from the 1970s. Streets with only a smattering of parked cars; shop fronts piled high with practical wares; a community busily lingering in purposeful dance through the day. Are these the scenes I remember? Or are they constructs I recreate from film reels coiling between screen and mind? I’m with Wordsworth on this one; that we both ‘perceive’ and ‘half create’.

Here in the West Country, May was a month book-ended by sunshine; the weather between the two bank holidays an assortment of seasons, tumbling after each other in Ealing comedy chase. On a gloriously sunny day in early May, we followed an astonishing wayside blaze of dandelions along the route to Westonbirt Arboretum – and found a dandelion riot there as well.

The day before, I had grabbed some moments to sit in the garden and read H.E. Bates.

Folio Society edition of The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates. Illustration by Alice Tait.

As the early evening descended around me, our garden’s own crowds of dandelions began to close. Miniscule black flies appeared – like flecks of dusk – and darkened the ragged yellow flowers, settling there for a last-chance feed. Above me, swifts – the first back above our garden this spring – circled as if winding down the day. Their screams sliced the blue sky and served out a new section of the year…

By the end of the month, lingering crumbs of spring still flavoured the days - bluebells shaken out through the unfolding summer. Back on that early May visit to Westonbirt, we found them crowding the ragged feet of coppiced trees

– and were greeted by blossom as it was coaxed – slowly, slowly – by the sun.

Early purple orchids and lady’s smock scattered their usual haunts

Lady’s smock – or Cuckooflower, Cardamine pratensis

– and sculptures captured light and shadow…

and reminded us of the words of an artist whose eyes saw all the colours of the world

‘If you love Nature you will see beauty everywhere’ – Vincent van Gogh

On a dazzling Sunday 26th May, blue dashed its own reminder, like spilt paint, amongst the trees above the town of Wells. As we descended the hill towards its outskirts, we gloried in the blur of bluebells, still fresh and seeking the sky. Blue was spread there above us too – and the green of the trees was a startling April-new. Strange juxtapositions were threaded through the month. We were jumbled into boxes of being, opening lids and finding the unexpected amongst the familiar old folds of the year’s pattern.

Wells Cathedral and cedar tree

Adopting the slow pace of the tiny and ancient city, we sat outside Wells cathedral’s north transept and watched Time – waiting for the old clock to strike Four.

Our daughter, escaping into these precious moments away from GCSE revision, sat beside us, free-roaming the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Folio Society edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Illustration by Harry Brockway

On the sun-warmed bench, she clung to the glacier alongside the Creature – and, as we got up to leave, was unable to tear herself away from his drama. Bowing to the demands of a good book’s ancient-mariner-grasp, we sat down again, listened to the cathedral walls hum with organ music – an apt and atmospheric accompaniment to the Promethean struggles that were riveting our daughter to the spot. That night, back home, she came downstairs for tea sniffing back tears – and we knew which scenes she’d been reading. We’d been there too.

High on the Mendips, there had been new beginnings and a long, resounding wave of birdsong – like sound caught inside a drum; the blue sky taut and seamless. A falcon (we think a peregrine, though we weren’t sure) smoothed it tighter with the silent sweep of arrowed wings. Countless tadpoles filled the pool on the Priddy Mineries reserve…

Priddy Mineries Nature Reserve, Somerset

…an adder darted across the car park to evade a passing dog, and the butterfly theme of the day was White – green-veined, small white, orange-tip – with the occasional peacock colouring the edges. The reserve felt like it was sleep-walking the spring, trailing the previous seasons behind it and tangling them up in its dreams. The new, dominating green was languid with a shut-eyed tardiness; van Gogh’s colours hidden deep beneath in slow waking. The landscape stretched thinly a sense of teeming – gradually, gradually – into resurrected life. A Frankenstein landscape-in-time, pieced together by mismatched elements of happening and expectation.

And, as we drove back across the Mendips and down into hedge-lined valleys, past stone cottages patched into being with mined-out parts of the hills – we were saddened by the lifeless bodies of badgers on the roadsides. We counted four during our circuitous journey through Somerset and back towards Bristol. Our thoughts turned to the senseless badger cull about to begin in Somerset and Gloucestershire on the 1st of June – an unjustifiable measure undertaken against the scientific evidence, against the parliamentary vote and against the wishes of the majority of the public. It is a step that will serve no purpose – except to further justify the sadness and consternation Frankenstein’s Creature felt, as he began to learn the contradictory nature of humanity. All the time, something tugs against the heights of our achievements and our better side, and proves the destructiveness of mind sets that drag us down. Prometheus bound and unbound – in a constant round.

Earlier this year, in April, I was putting milk bottles out late at night, when a movement by our front gate caught my eye. I glanced round as a small, squat animal passed by our car. Thinking it was our neighbour’s grey cat – and stupidly wondering why it had suddenly morphed into a strange shape, with such short legs and a stubby tail – I suddenly realised I was watching a badger. As I clinked the milk bottles in surprise, the badger startled into action, lolloping away across the road – its wide, low-slung body rocking in very un-catlike motion. Just at that moment “our” local fox appeared from further down the road, catching up with the badger with a playful, questioning leap as they both fell into step like old pals, and disappeared down the alley behind the houses and back towards the woods.

I knew that badgers had long been visiting our suburban garden – the evidence was everywhere – and our neighbours had seen them several times. Last year, we were excited to see them ourselves, when we were called to the window by an almighty disagreement over a slug between two badgers on our garden patio. “Our” fox too had been very much in evidence. During his nightly travels, he - and possibly the very habit-following badgers too - have worn away the grass, creating a narrow trail alongside our hedge, making our garden part of the local wild mammal map. At dusk, we often see the fox trot along the trail towards our compost heap and round through the gap in the hedge. Sometimes he will linger on our lawn, and sit gazing around him – or absently scratch an ear, totally relaxed, listening to the twilight murmurs. If he sees us watching, he will dart beneath our damson trees, but if we remain still, he will emerge again, stand on his hind paws to drink from the bird bath – his wary, black-backed ears pricked our way.

Once, years ago, I inadvertently disturbed a fox asleep in a hollow in our flower bed. It was late morning on a sunny day in early spring, I was hanging out the washing; the fox woke and stared at me in alarm. We both stood transfixed, each in our own space; Creatures of nature – near and far apart – and it was too much for the fox. I wanted it to stay; for me not to be the thing it feared. I felt in that moment that I was the Frankenstein’s “monster” – un-belonging and set apart. But so often, when it comes to a meeting between humans and wild creatures, that’s how it has to be. Some lines in the sand are made out of respect for the differences, and to ensure flourishing and protection.

But others are made out of the complete opposite – out of a profound disrespect for what should make us feel kin.

In the face of the terrible badger cull that has now been unleashed, I ask myself – is humanity doomed to always pin its own lack – its own ills – to some scapegoat; to make a Frankenstein’s Creature out of “progress,” to tangle the truth in a net of power play, politics and vying motivations – and to reject the chances we have to truly learn, move forward and grow?

Sometimes, I just want to put my head in my hands and despair. But, I’m still hanging on to the belief that the better side of human nature can win.

Many voices have joined together to speak out against the cull. And a few days ago, a song was released that brings together the voice of the legendary Sir David Attenborough - with a guitar solo courtesy of the also legendary Slash! Here they are as part of the Artful Badger and Friends, joining forces along with Brian May, Shara Nelson, Sonny Green, Kerry Ellis and Sam & The Womp, to protest via the Badger Swagger:

‘…scientists reject the idea of scientific support for the cull, which could wipe out 100,000 badgers, a third of the national population. The cull policy is “mindless”, according to Lord John Krebs, one of the UK’s most eminent scientists and the architect of the landmark 10-year culling trials that ended in 2007. “The scientific case is as clear as it can be: this cull is not the answer to TB in cattle. The government is cherry-picking bits of data to support its case.”

- From an article in The Guardian – Badger cull ‘mindless’ say scientists

Head over to Daniel Greenwood’s blog to see his great photos of the Stop the Badger Cull march, which took place in London on Saturday 1st June.

Another fellow blogger, Louise Hastings, has timed the release of her new children’s novel, Beatha - A Badger’s Story, to raise awareness of the issue. From the sales of her book, Louise will be raising funds to donate to The Badger Trust.

The petition against the badger cull can be signed at:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257

Badger (picture taken at Wildwood Trust, near Canterbury, Kent in 2005)

And the purpose of art is...?

Reblogged from Amanda Banks:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

"Sometimes, without darkness, riches will never be revealed. We need patience and faith to wait for things to unfold out of that deep valley between the two worlds…" Melanie Doherty, Bookish Nature

What is art? What is dance? What is their purpose...? I remember having heated discussions in years long gone, debating what art is, attempting to define its parameters, establish what makes 'good' art.

Read more… 973 more words

When I followed the Muse to begin writing 'Bookish Nature,' I never could have foreseen that one day my words would be woven into a beautiful dance piece, choreographed and performed so far away on a distant shore... It is such an honour and a privilege to feel a part of this magical expression of the spirit of art; a piece which, in itself, was formed out of art's powerful ability to connect, transform and constantly renew... It is amazing where the Muse might lead... Please visit Amanda Banks's beautiful post to read the thoughts and aims behind the dance's choreography, inspiration and creation...

‘…the darling buds of May…’

On Tuesday 23rd April I wandered the garden, scooping up fragments of light.

I eyed them above me, where they were whole again - a wash of dazzling blue cast across the day. And found them pooled on holly leaves like offerings; shining coins quietly placed.

Some were scattered through trees, or had fallen amongst wood piles. One shimmered on a magpie’s wing - whilst others were caught by scant threads of damson blossom, each flower an open purse fraying at the seams.

As I watched, a queen bumble bee nudged bright edges out from the shadows, testing their resilience against the infant teeth of fresh, green nettles – and I willed her to found a nest in our small patch of earth. Manoeuvring her heavy body close to the open soil, she seemed, for a moment, ready to give up wandering and grant her approval to a spot not far from my feet. As I leaned in to watch her, the holly trees tipped their leaf-light amongst the primroses; let it fragment further in the dew.

Those holly trees are wanderers too; incomers cast adrift from a parent tree that keeps watch from our neighbour’s garden. They have a sturdy, reckless air – like someone who has found their place. Feeling comfortable, they sink into belonging – and give us a sense that we’ve been chosen. They adorn our place and make it more our home too.

Our damsons also arrived this way. Over the wall. They are the unfurling of fruits dropped by trees long since cut down by a neighbour; last chance investments deposited in our garden the year my husband and I were also newly transplanted to this soil. Now, these refugee, house-warming trees are over twenty feet tall, full of birds, blossom – more fruit – and a green-fire glow at sunset. They are gifts – beginnings and endings indistinguishable from each other.

Meanwhile, the queen bee is still taking her turn in the cycle of beginnings. She tests the territory, inches back and forth in a mid-air-drone, finds wanting the patch of earth below the damsons; gives herself up to a gust of air – and disappears over the fence and out of sight…

She leaves me scratching about in my own equally wanting soil – seeking words. Elusive things, like the peacock butterfly suddenly blown high over my head; a shadow extinguished from sight too fast to reveal its colours or pattern.

The significance of the day is uppermost in my mind; 23rd April – Shakespeare’s birthday, and death-day. An end swallowed by a beginning.

And Shakespeare – consummate spinner of words – can always catch what I ask for…

He throws it back to me like something plucked from a sunlit web – and I seize it, gratefully:

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet:  Words, words, words

(Hamlet Act II, Scene II – William Shakespeare)

Words. They can say so much and contain such power.They can capture and convey beauty – and be, in themselves, beautiful. They can be cruel, kind, magnanimous, insightful, inspiring, blunt, elegant, sinuous, glorious, hypnotic, ugly, obtuse. They are the conveyors of ideas and intention. They can sting, they can soothe. They are mighty.

And yet they are just – words.

‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’

(Hamlet, Act III, scene II – William Shakespeare)

Words sometimes fail. Words can be bricks in a wall, obscuring what lies behind. They can disconnect from meaning - and truth.

For some people, words are not biddable at all. They live without them, their senses aligned to other frequencies; tuning in to listen, but answering – and maybe hearing – in different ways.

My son doesn’t have words. He cannot speak. I’ve often heard it said that language is what makes our species somehow “special” – that the ability to speak defines what makes us human. But is my son not human? And are our words the only language at work in the world?

Language is all around us – in the birdsong; in the chemical signals passed between the trees; in the wind as it describes the mood of the day; in the pungency of fox scent reaching my nostrils as I listen to the robin claim his territory. The whole day is full of wordless voice.

‘Perhaps there is a language that is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.’

(From A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett)

‘And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones…’

(As You Like It, Act II, scene I – William Shakespeare)

During our long weeks in hospital with our son, we often felt keenly the lack of words. Doctors and nurses would look to my husband and I to interpret our son’s feelings, his reactions, his thoughts. We were often lost in a blank of not knowing – in a pit of bewilderment and distress; his and ours. We could guess, but could not be sure we were being accurate. We were in a new situation for all of us. Our usual parameters were gone. And even with words, we could not know our son’s mind. He could not know ours. Can any human being know another human being’s mind, intentions, feelings fully?

But without words, we can sometimes listen more closely – and keenly – to that other language which is heard more loudly by intuition – and which is so often dismissed or obscured behind a tangle of surface communication. Language is in my son’s eyes, his expression, his demeanour, his wordless singing. It is in a connection built in ways I can’t describe or explain with words. When asked how my son communicates with me, I can’t tell someone else how it happens. It just does. We feel and respond. And when, during his long ordeal in hospital, I found words that might work, I fed them to him like manna of reassurance. I laid each coin of words on the palm of his hand, so that he could feel the weight of the thought behind them. I saw his eyes listening to the intentions and the whys the words carried, if not to the precision of their particular meaning. I saw him understand.

‘Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.’

(Richard II, Act II, scene I – William Shakespeare)

During 23rd April – the day that was both Shakespeare’s birth-and-death-day, my thoughts were already beginning to turn towards this week and to May Day; Beltane; time of renewal, new beginnings; the death of winter from which the summer is born; festival of fire; the phoenix from the ashes; Persephone travelling from the underworld to rise again.

And now it is the second of May – and in the passing of the days between Shakespeare’s birthday and today, the green firing of spring has ignited from tree to tree, bush to bush – the leaves opening more and more in front of our very eyes.

And we feel and respond to the wordless language of the season…

But words fail me again. This post hasn’t said what I wanted it to say; hasn’t conveyed exactly the thoughts I wanted to convey. But then words never do. When describing the true nature of the tree, words never (unless you’re Shakespeare!) reach to contain every far flung leaf adrift on the wind.

I’m very aware too that quotes from Shakespeare, placed out of context as I’ve placed them here, never really represent their true reach. Sometimes they transmute, taking on a significance that tips the scales a particular way. But, put them back into context and that apparent significance becomes problematic. We then have to follow a different trail of light-clues; ask ourselves what Shakespeare built around those words in terms of form and structure. How it all interacts. And whether the character who voiced the words is perhaps fooling himself, or lacking belief in what he professes, or maybe deliberately deceiving others…

When words dis-locate from their original surroundings, they become chameleons – both liberated and limited by the colours of their new environment – though, in Shakespeare’s case, ever retaining their magical, delicious ambiguity. But, behind the words is their intuitive touch on our mind – which, through and around those clusters of letters and shifting locations, reaches us direct. And if, in our response, we have heard the poetry behind the poem, felt that connection, we experience a deeper, wordless something begin to piece together – another fragment of light illuminating a little more of the whole.

Time is impatient with my own inadequate attempts to capture thoughts, so I shall have to be content with the fraying threads of this blog post and let my words fall where they will. So this is me, scooping up the fragments of light, trying to piece them together – and moving on into new Bookish Nature beginnings…

Thank you again to everyone who left such wonderful messages of support and encouragement during the darker times. They meant a lot to me.

So far, here in the South West of England, ‘the darling buds of May’ have not opened to ‘Rough winds’ but to balmy and glorious sunshine. These early May days have been filled with a wordless voice of awakening and shimmering exuberance.

My words fail again in attempting to transmit the true spirit of that voice – but, thanks to Sonya Chasey (who pointed me towards the Loreena McKennitt page on Grooveshark – many thanks, Sonya!) I discovered a while back the beautiful Huron ‘Beltane’ Fire Dance (from Loreena’s album Parallel Dreams) – which brims with that spirit of this time of year – and which pieces together for us those sparkling facets of intuitive, illuminating light via music; another wordless language that speaks so profoundly.

Whether you were out and about enjoying May Day revels yesterday, or are planning some for the Holiday Weekend – or are simply revelling in the spring – (or, indeed, are enjoying whatever seasonal fragments of light illuminate your own particular part of the world right now) – a very Merry May-time to you all!

Huron ‘Beltane’ Fire Dance, Loreena Mckennitt, performed live in Spain (part of a concert recorded on the DVD/CD set Nights from the Alhambra):

“Heffalump Traps” and a Blog Hiatus…

At the moment, I feel a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh when he ‘stepped on a piece of the Forest that had been left out by mistake’:

Winnie-the-Pooh falls into a Heffalump Trap. Illustration by Ernest H. Shepard

– or like Lyra, in His Dark Materials, on the brink of slipping into a parallel universe…

Soon, my son will be having surgery, after which he’ll be in hospital for several weeks. So, we’re about to be launched into days swallowed up by hospital corridors, and many challenges that will need all our energies…

But, I will return to blogging again when circumstances allow – before the spring is very far advanced. Hopefully, we won’t miss too much of it! I’ve been told that, after the first couple of weeks, we’ll be able to take our son out in his wheelchair for little “escapes” – so we’ll go looking for the spring in the city’s parks and wild spaces; spending healing time watching the squirrels and birds – looking out for frog spawn and the local peregrines – and just generally keeping our sense that the outside world does still exist!

Playing Poohsticks. Illustration by Ernest H Shepard

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who follows/ comments on/ reads this blog. Your support is much appreciated. I’ll be keeping an eye on the blog, so please continue to leave comments here if you’d like to – I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You might see me about from time to time, if I get the chance to visit your blogs (which I’m sure will provide some much needed distraction from frazzled nerves!) I might even end up adding one or two very brief posts here - for the same reason! If not, Bookish Nature will return to full flow as soon as we’ve got ourselves back on an even keel…

Eeyore – Illustration by Ernest H Shepard

“See” you then! Take care…

Melanie

Berlie Doherty’s newsletter, a glacier & some ghosts!

It was a really lovely surprise to see Bookish Nature mentioned in Berlie Doherty’s latest (Feb. 2013) newsletter this week! Many thanks, Berlie – your kind words are much appreciated!

It was also exciting to learn that Berlie’s new novel, The Company of Ghosts (due out in September) is now available for pre-order. She describes it as being set on a Scottish island – and as ‘very spooky.’ Having loved Daughter of the Sea, I’m looking forward to exploring more of her writing – and this new addition sounds so enticing…

You can read the whole newsletter at Berlie’s lovely website, which is a fantastic port of call for anyone who loves voyages of discovery through the vitality and depths of truly good literature for children…

Lately, Fate seems to keep stepping in and causing all sorts of serendipitous events – and Friday evening was no exception. After tea, I was scrolling through the options on the BBC Radio iPlayer, looking for some distraction to lighten the task of washing the dishes, when amongst the programme listings, Berlie Doherty’s name caught my eye. Clicking the link through to Radio 4 Extra, I discovered it was a reading of one of Berlie’s short stories – a perfect invitation to catch up with more of her work! Minutes later, and I was transfixed, hands suspended in soap suds, caught by the fascination of the story’s setting - and so moved by the perceptive clarity and truth of its telling.

No longer scouring saucepans, but clinging to the raw majesty of a mountain glacier, I was there with the story’s characters; two women - strangers to each other – each, and together, confronting their own frozen dams of emotion. I won’t say any more. When entering a short story, you need to be in the moment; to arrive where it begins – its invitation glittering in the distance - and your expectations of where it will take you completely open…

If you have access to BBC iPlayer, you can listen to Crossing the Glacier here (now just a few days left to listen).

Ode to a Fieldfare

(Composed during the snow-thaw of last month…)

As I sit here, goldfinches glance across the skies outside the window, their ‘charms’ like the bounce of iambic pentameter written with wings. They turn towards our garden, and immediately, their syntax becomes jumbled by a shift and gather of chaffinches - with an adjunct of sparrows tumbling in like a hurried conclusion.

The sparrows twitch their claim to the topmost branches of our damson trees, whilst the goldfinches jolt another stanza back to the skies – or trickle, with a falling cadence, through the branches to our seed feeders.

The chaffinches land halfway up the trees - ponder their way, like careful prose, towards the food in small, turn-taking manoeuvres. The sparrows wait, suss things out, goad each other forward, land on the seed feeders and attack the fat-cakes, all the time saying what they think – blunt performance poets, braving out the day in their bold, sparrow way.

The previous week’s heavy snowfall continues to melt, leaving green edges and a white interior to the garden. A collared dove balances like an erratic metronome, following the perplexity of bird-rhythms now spilling into improvised jazz.

On Friday January 18th, as the garden hunkered down under the weight of the snow’s first arrival, I turned from the window (and a similar bird-scene) to shuffle some new books amongst the old faithfuls on our shelves, when my daughter – at home due to school closures – called out from the landing, “Are those redwings or fieldfares?”

Her words shook me out of my dismay at the increasingly decrepit state of an old university text book I was holding in my hands. Battered even in its youth by unceremonious travels in my overstuffed, seam-ripped student bag – now it was gradually giving up a little more of the ghost, shedding small piles of age-desiccated glue all over the bookshelf. When opened, its paperback cover gaped to reveal a crumbling spine…

I’m very fond of that book – The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Romantic Poetry and Prose, edited by the aptly named Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling. Just to read its title brings back happy days spent studying odes to skylarks and nightingales…

If there isn’t an ode to redwings and fieldfares, there should be – they deserve that celebration. Mist-revealed spirits of winter - the chance of experiencing their sudden, soft manifestation again, galvanised me into action.

“Are there some in the garden, then?” I called back.

By this time, my daughter had reached the dining room – and I had dashed to the window, grabbing the binoculars.

“There are millions of them!” she exclaimed, “All across the tops of the damson trees!”

We counted them, taking turns with the binoculars. Not quite millions. Nineteen.

“They’re fieldfares.” I declared

“Yep!” confirmed my daughter, taking another look through the bins, “Definitely fieldfares.”

There they were, spread across the tree-sky like a sudden flowering. A winter gift from Scandinavia.

The heavy, white cloud-sag seemed to plump up at the points they touched; each bird a downy planet orbiting into a sudden, glowing constellation strung out across the branches. Smudged with ash and a splash of sunset spillage, they puffed out their chests; all facing the same way to watch the north-east, like compass needles pointing home.

Here, in the anchorage of our own home, the presence of these shifting migrants prised open the lid of the day; made the transformation of snow complete. Last time the snow brought the fieldfares from the wider land into our garden, it tipped only one or two individuals onto our lawn. That was magic enough – but this snow-globe flurry of birds, shaken out into our winter space, seemed to tip us instead into the centre of a whirling calm.

My husband phoned a while after they had swooped away, grey billows gathered into the white folds of sky. Early that morning, the snow-bound state of our car, and the buses stuck on hills, had sent him walking the several miles into the city. Some ‘lovely, kindly people’ he said had given him a lift in their 4 X 4, thoughtfully stopping to offer transport to as many trudging pavement backpackers and hopeful bus waiters as they could fit into their vehicle. His day’s experience of community spirit shone in his voice. Now, he’d finished at work, and was going to walk home.

“And how was your day?”

“We’ve had nineteen fieldfares in the garden!” I excitedly announced.

“Yeah…right!” he laughed.

“No, we have! Honestly!”

“I want photographic evidence!” he joked.

“Already done!”

“Oh – why aren’t I at home?”

“I expect some will still be flying around here by the time you get back.” I consoled him.

And sure enough, a couple of fieldfares did oblige. And I was able to get a better photo – still from a distance and with an unsophisticated zoom on my camera and through a window – but at least it gives a glimpse of that gorgeous colouring – the russet blush on the bird’s chest, the grey dusk hovering at its back, its snowball underside – and its thinking eye.

Fieldfare, Turdus polaris – January 2013

Since then, I have checked in The Poetry of Birds to see if it contains a poem about this magical snow-bird…

The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. Published by Viking

There isn’t a section devoted to the species (the book is arranged according to taxonomy) but in the fragment included from The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer tips his hat to ‘the frosty feldefare.’

Then I checked the ever reliable close-chronicler of birds and nature, John Clare

John Clare, Selected Poetry, published by Penguin

- and sure enough, he mentions them (of course he does, I should have known – what in the natural shiftings of his Northamptonshire homeland did he ever miss?) but fieldfares are not the main focus of the poems in which they make an appearance.

In Emmonsails Heath in Winter, he writes:

Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread
The fieldfare chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again

‘Bumbarrels’ is a lovely and earthy colloquial name for long-tailed tits – and here Clare deftly snags with words their busy, fidgety ways – and arrests us with that audio-visual image of ‘the whistling thorn’ and its close, orchestral collaboration with the fieldfares, for whose movements ‘rove’ is the perfect description. John Clare also mentions fieldfares in Schoolboys in Winter, when the boys on their ‘morning ramble’ pass by the hedgerows, ‘plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed.’ And also in The Shepherd’s Calendar – March:

And flocking field fares speckld like the thrush
Picking the red awe from the sweeing bush
That come and go on winters chilling wing
And seem to share no sympathy wi spring

Migrating around the internet, I alighted on a poem by Ada Cambridge which, though perched at the ‘mawkish not hawkish’ end of the scale (to approximate a phrase from Tim Dee’s Foreword to The Poetry of Birds) - overbalancing, for me, on its melodramatic symbolism and sentiment – does contain some caught essences - and provides a great handle for the birds in its title, The Winged Mariners. It begins:

Through the wild night, the silence and the dark,
    Through league on league of the unchartered sky,
Lonelier than dove of fable from its ark,
     The fieldfares fly

For a while, I paused beside Fieldfares by F.W. Moorman – in which the poem’s voice addresses the ‘Fieldfares, bonny fieldfares’ from a sick bed, finding melancholy reflection in their presence; a bittersweet reminder of the universally ever-turning (and personally ever-diminishing) cycles of time:

Noisy, chackin’ fieldfares, weel I ken your cry,
When i’ flocks you’re sweepin’ ower the hills sae high:
       Oft on trees you gethers,
       Preenin’ out your feathers,
An’ I’m fain to see your coats as blue as t’summer sky.

And then I found enriching food along the way, courtesy of Fieldfare by Polish poet Julian Kornhauser, translated by Piotr Florczyk, which captures a mood of intrigued admiration heading into memory – and a freeze-frame beyond grasping – when ‘like a newcomer from the underworld’ a fieldfare arrives, and its identity is only discovered after it has flown away, not to return:

‘Its hollow name, a title to glory,
hung on a branch like a snowflake.’

Simon Armitage, in his Afterword to The Poetry of Birds, muses about why poets ‘have written about birds from the very beginning’:

‘Perhaps at some subconscious, secular level [birds] are also our souls. Or more likely, they are our poems. What we find in them we would hope for our work – that sense of soaring otherness. Maybe that’s how poets think of birds: as poems.’

In his Foreword, Tim Dee points to how, in our own time:

‘Close attention to the seen world and putting such looking into words remain as necessary as ever.’

He ponders the finest contemporary bird poetry written in English by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Michael Longley and Peter Reading – and describes their work as:

‘Open-eyed meetings that are crammed with ornithological acuity and capture the direct experience of looking at birds today, giving us comparable quickening to that which leaps up around any encounter we have with the real things.’

If I were a poet, I would try to write an ode to fieldfares; to these birds of our nights and winter cloud. I would attempt to pay my own full dues to the poem-that-they-are. But, as it is, this post will have to be my offering…

- Not as a good as an ode; but, as far as my own words are able to stretch to evoke the spell the fieldfares cast over our winter garden, it will have to do…

The Tree House

Signs of spring are already burgeoning…

Lords and Ladies (Cuckoo Pint) – January 2013

…and it’s quite a while now since this “dragon-tree” filtered the fire of the sun through branch and shadow, to melt the snowman….

…which had become its companion, very briefly, during this most recent and unfolding phase of its long life:

Nearby, new buds are reaching out to the light…

And over the past few weeks, I’ve been so inspired by a fantastic new venture which, very appropriately for this time of year, has also been coming into bud…

The Tree House is a proposed new community bookshop which, as I write this, is unfurling ever more towards bursting into leaf. Victoria (aka Evie) – the inspiring force behind the project – is an online friend (and fellow bookish tree hugger) from the earliest days of my first venturing onto the internet.

To explain the project a bit before you head over there to take a look for yourself, I can do no better than quote Victoria’s own impassioned words:

‘Books are not just a means of passing the time, they are lifechanging experiences – the good ones, anyway! They tell us more about what it is to be human, they feed our inner lives and our imaginations (another aspect of humanity that often seems a little underrated!), and make us more creative in our engagement with the world.

The tree is therefore a wonderful image for me of the heart of a reading community – deeply rooted, creating a sheltering and nurturing space, pushing us out into a richer existence as individuals and as a community. Reading can do this! And coming together around books and literary adventures is like planting a forest.

The government wants to sell off our forests. Our libraries are under threat. I see these two things as related – the very things that give life to our planet and our community are seen as superfluous when what is needed, supposedly, is to generate more wealth and get rid of spaces that do not do this. We need trees; we need a sense of community. We can all sit in our homes ordering books over the internet, or downloading them to our Kindles and Kobos and iPads, or we can protect our libraries and bookshops and share this fabulous experience of enjoying books and learning from each other.’

- From The Tree House blog

Please do take a visit over to The Tree House site; there are inspiring posts about the project and about books and reading; fabulous links to some amazing bibliophile-heaven bookshops - all of which sprang from the same soil of passionate motivation that Victoria is now cultivating - and there are also trees!

The Domesday Oak (thought to be 700 years old) Ashton Court Estate, Bristol

It’s a fabulous project, growing in all the right directions – and with a vision that is exactly the sort of seed our society needs to plant and nurture. It’s like the old saying goes… ‘mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow…’ - a cliche phrase maybe… but, like most cliches, loaded with truth!

Between a Rock and a Red Squirrel

Something made me stop, look and take a picture of this rock:

Undoubtedly the oldest thing within sight; the most ancient and venerable presence gracing this particular patch of Thrunton Wood in Northumberland, it emanated a strong sense of look-at-me… be aware. Its solidity was a grounding of Time. An anchor, of sorts, for the ephemeral.

That was back in the summer of 2006. Now - gradually, gradually through more recent days - I’ve been treading my way through David Abrams’ visceral and deeply grounding book Becoming Animal - An Earthly Cosmology.

Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram (hardback edition – published by Pantheon Books)

Reading it is like placing your feet on the earth, following the tracery of the words through the landscape, tracking the signs and signals of the senses.

In Wood and Stone, the third chapter of Becoming Animal, David Abram describes the feeling ancient rock evokes. Of how cleaved folds of stone speak to something primal in ourselves:

‘A solitary rock or a clear-cut stump is utterly inanimate only as long as “being” itself is taken to be static and inert. Our animal senses, however, know no such passive reality………. To my animal body, the rock is first and foremost another body engaged in the world: as I turn my gaze toward it, I encounter not a defined and inanimate chunk of matter but an upturned surface basking in the sun’s warmth, or a pink and sharp-edged structure protruding from the ground like the shattered bone of the hillside, or an old and watchful guardian of this land – a resolute and sheltering presence inviting me now to crouch and lean my spine against it.

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons………. Things “catch our eye” and sometimes refuse to let go; they “grab our focus” and “capture our attention,” and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world. Whether ecstatic or morose, exuberant or exhausted, everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.’

…And look who “grabbed our focus,” emerging from the knotty, silent moment when the rock made us stand still:

Roe doe – out from the undergrowth… Thrunton Wood, Northumberland, 2006

A glimpse of red – and of wary tolerance. A recognition and appreciation of stillness. Rock-steady watching; a pact of grace:

Roe doe – “capturing attention”

And, beyond that; another still, cautious moment of red – a blur of red squirrel. The first any of us had ever seen in the wild:

Red squirrel, Thrunton Wood, Northumberland, 2006

My daughter was nine years old at the time. Standing beneath that tree - delight and concentration rooted in her small, slight frame - she thought of all the times she’d seen red squirrels in books or on TV. All the wishes she had made. All those “what-ifs” that had seeded in her mind.

“Oooh!” she exclaimed moments later, as the woods released us from our still, silent encounters. “Dreams do sometimes come true!”

And quietly, quietly, her pleased astonishment at this small, red, earthy revelation - a gift from the ‘capricious terrain’ - sealed the moment rock solid in her memory.

‘A bird out of Merlin’s ear’

Since my children went back to school last week, there’s been a lot of catching up to do. Lots of gathering together of the self, much realigning – some careful stepping onto newly laid paths, pausing to wander and to really look. Lots of strengthening, preparing; allowing things to resurface and settle.

Some days, I’ve spent long slices of time sitting at the dinner table in our back room, working and thinking and shaping some kind of order and readiness into the previously swirling confusion of ideas and writing projects – and into the general ‘stuff that has to be done’ which often threatens to topple it all.

I’ve been working my way back to the heart of things. That quiet kernel of space so easily lost in the rush of demands and ‘things to be done.’ Over past months, I’ve been tripped up by too many instances of my mind jumping ahead of itself; not allowing itself to settle between leaps. Old, familiar footholds became all too easily muddied by that swirling mix, confusing my way across last year’s stepping stones.

But reading Witch Light through into the New Year definitely helped to recover my balance.

Witch Light by Susan Fletcher, published by Fourth Estate

It is a book filled to the brim with the heart of things; with ‘the heart’s voice.’ Choose almost any page at random, and the prose overflows with it. During the hours in which I allowed myself to sink into Susan Fletcher’s beautiful, lyrical novel, I lived in its world completely – in Corrag’s world. Her first person narrative enchanted me with its beauty; kept me in clear water; slowed me down to watch the light play; helped me to regain calmer focus:

‘Still. There was magick in that place – I promise it.

I felt it everywhere. I felt it in each tiny thing I saw – each stone which shifted under my heels, or each raindrop. I had time, now. Time, until now, had been as thin and as scarce as a wind-blown web – fluttering by, very brief. My second life had been go! Go! And when had I had the time to lie on my belly and watch a snail make its way across a leaf, leaving its moonshine mark? Never. I was running too much. I was galloping over mud and wild land, with the mare snorting hard, and any slow times were spent with her – picking the nettles out of her tail. No snails. No hour upon hour in the rain, watching a leaf’s middle become a rain-bright pool.

I had never liked witch, and still don’t. But if ever I deserved the name at all, it was then, I reckon. It was having my hair fly in the wind as I stood on the tops, and how I crawled through the woods where the mushrooms grew. It was cloud-watching and stag-seeing, and spending long hours – full afternoons – by the waterfall that I’d bathed in, watching the autumn leaves fall down and make their way seaward. They bobbed and swirled. I said magick, one day. In the gully that led to my valley, I stopped. The wind was in the birches, and it felt they were speaking. If they were speaking, it was magick they said. Magick. Here.’

From Witch Light (previously published as Corrag) by Susan Fletcher – published by Fourth Estate.

I felt sad to break away from Corrag’s company when the last page was turned – but, she has lived on in my mind long since – and echoes of her voice curl around the days and the small and the luminous; in moments of starlight and moon shadows…

Christmas moon – dusk, 25th December 2012

…in the times when our damson trees have been greenly on fire in the mid-day rise of winter sun…

…And in the birds who visit the garden continuously, and punctuate my hours as I sit here at the table. Goldfinches, blue and great tits, a song thrush; small fluid ripples of long-tailed tits taking the fat-balls hostage in a clasp of criss-crossed tails, before rushing off into insistent dusks; chaffinches, starlings, a handful of sparrows; our resident robin and dunnock; the chirring magpies; the blackbirds posing and hopping, staring down worms. They fill the edges of awareness with light and colour and movement, until there is nothing for it but to sit and gaze and absorb their rhythms to a slower heartbeat and a resettled frame of mind.

When I turn my eyes back to my task, the birds still fill spaces between thoughts like cushioned areas of dreaming, unconsciously wandering and enlivening the workings of the mind. Their calls and year-turning notes wake me up a little more – and a little more – to the new-beginning months and the strengthening light.

When 2013 was still in its very first days, my husband – putting out the milk bottles in the late afternoon – called me to the hallway. He flung open the front door; let the dusk declare itself a visitor. Invited in, it hovered tentatively on the threshold, clasping its traveller’s cloak of soft grey light – half in concealment, half ready to reveal; a gentle crumpling of birdsong shaken out through its folds.

“Listen…” my husband said, standing under the sky in last year’s broken down slippers, delight awake in his voice. “It’s five o’clock – and the birds are all singing. It’s five o’clock and it’s still light.”

I stepped outside and stood with him in the brim-full glimmer – a scooped cup of light not yet spilt from the evening.

And the birds floated its surface with their light-drunken notes, like Keatsian ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ – a slow drift of mostly blackbird and robin song; birds who often tease out their territorial notes through the night – and through winter. But the tone was different to that robin song you hear in pre-solstice winter nights. It felt richer, more languid, more primed with a weight of promise – an outward-going rather than an enclosing intention; filled with the possibilities of light.

Last week, as I walked around our little bit of the city’s edge – once a village, still edged with woods and fields – this change in the birdsong was palpable, growing day by day. The trees seemed to flex with it. The woods, glimpsed between the houses, loomed closer, declaring themselves stirring from sleep, cradling the streets once more in a busy sense of living. The weather was mild, soft; spring with grey edges. But then it turned cold again. Fog shrouded the woods in a whispered plan of concealed waiting, and frost crunched under my feet as I re-filled the bird feeders. But, all around me, the birdsong persisted – and the next day, it seemed to raise the tree tops higher to the sky – the hidden buds tipped with fiery winter sun, simmering the cold, clear blue slowly towards spring. Gradually since, the air has drained of warmth, growing colder and deep chill (and, by the time I publish this post, deep snows will have blanketed most of Britain) – but the cup of light has kept filling and re-filling to a rising brim, steeping a new flavour into the days. And at night, Jupiter has sparked bright above our damson trees. Showing the way. To somewhere.

As I sit here at the table, a wren has crept and flitted across the patio immediately outside the glass doors. It has dashed and tail-tipped its way amongst the moss beneath the buddleia bush – like Time passed on in small, overlapping relays; a ticking pendulum of thought receiving a change of rhythm – a signal for the seeding of a new idea; creeping, as the wren in Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘out of Merlin’s ear.’

When the thicket’s drifted, a shrouded corpse,
He’s in under there, ticking,
Not as a last pulse, but a new life waiting.

Lonely keeper of the gold
In the tumbled cleave.
A bird out of Merlin’s ear.

(From Wren by Ted Hughes)

Detail from RSPB Christmas card – Design by Kate Green.

Fresh green shoots are adjusting their positions in our flowerbeds, following the light, feeling for familiar strung-out patterns of change, squeezing through corridors of the spectrum, skyward. My husband planted a whole host of bulbs in the autumn – scattering them in random fashion. “It’ll be a complete surprise where and what comes up,” he said.

Unknown, unguessed, waiting.

Like new days, new months, a new year.

We all know that along with the hope of a new year – like the hope flung ‘Upon the growing gloom,’ and amongst ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate,’ by the ‘ecstatic sound’ of Hardy’s ‘aged’ and ‘frail’ Darkling Thrush (and like the hope of bulbs flung on autumn soil) – shadows and darker realities still remain. But the darkling thrush also reminds us of something fundamental – deeper in our consciousness – as we too respond to the signals of a year’s propulsion towards the light, however slight, however overlaid with the sheen of cold – or a chilling surface of difficult odds:

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

(From The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy).

As my long-time hero Richard Mabey wrote in his monthly column A Brush with Nature back in the March 2010 issue of BBC Wildlife magazine, penning his words out of ‘the depths of the hardest winter for 30 years’ and in the wake of climate change talks in Copenhagen which ‘ended in abject, shameful failure’ – and in the face of all sorts of official apathy and disregard for natural habitat and wildlife protection:

‘I can’t do despair. I know intellectually the depths of the crisis we are in, but I’ve only to poke my head out of the door and emotionally I’m healed. Today, I can see the first hazel catkins, ready to hatch from their hoar-frost shells…’

He goes on to talk about George Orwell’s essay, Some Thoughts On The Common Toad, written in 1946 ‘in a Britain exhausted by war and racked by six hard winters in a row.’ He quotes this small section:

‘Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens, and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.’

Richard Mabey adds that, if Orwell were alive today, ‘I suspect he would insist that it’s down to us’ – that Orwell ‘…saw the enjoyment of nature as a kind of revolutionary act, a challenge to the political machine.’

He quotes Orwell’s essay again:

‘I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.’

Mabey goes on to write: ‘Now may be the moment to take the dictum ‘Think globally but act locally’ very literally………. Conservation works. Down in the parish, we can make a difference.’

‘Nearly 70 years ago,’ Mabey continues, ‘Orwell closed his piece with a tremendous call to arms that still resonates in every detail’:

‘So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the Earth is still going round the Sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply though they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

Today, I was reading the farewell article from the National Trust’s former Director-General, Dame Fiona Reynolds, in the charity’s magazine – and the words she cites from Octavia Hill, one of the Trust’s most inspiring founders, sprang out at me as another appropriate link in this New Year chain of thought:

‘What we care most to leave is not any tangible thing, however great; not any memory, however good; but the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, greater hope, and the patience to realise both.’

And my mind returns to more bright beads to add to this chain of hope – to more quotes from Susan Fletcher’s Witch Light; to Corrag’s voice again:

‘What was dark will always be dark, I know that……

……But also, there is light. It is everywhere. It floods this world – the world brims with it. Once I sat by the Coe and watched a shaft of light come down through the trees, through leaves, and I wondered if there was a greater beauty, or a simpler one. There are many great beauties. But all of them – from the snow, to his fern-red hair, to my mare’s eye reflecting the sky as she smelt the air of Rannoch Moor – have light in them, and are worth it. They are worth the darker parts.’

And to Corrag’s faith that:

‘It is the small moments, sir, which change a world.’

A belated Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a 2013 in which all our hope and creativity – all our contributions to the heart of things (however small or overwhelmed they might sometimes seem) - can add up to something bigger – reaching for, and growing stronger in, the brim-filled light.

Sunset, New Year’s Day 2013, Bristol Harbour

Wishing you all much fulfilment and flourishing in the year ahead!

(With thanks to the excellent Cornflower Books blog, for the inspiring introductions to Witch Light / Corrag and to Susan Fletcher’s writing which prompted me to seek it out - and also to Karen at her magical Moonlight and Hares blog for a special moment of Witch Light serendipity!)

Dickens, Christmas – and a merry festive season to all!

As a further Christmas nugget to toast by the fireside of winter-dreaming, I love the touching story of the barrow-girl overheard by Theodore Watts-Dunton as he walked down Drury lane in 1870. “Dickens dead?” the barrow-girl exclaimed. “Then will Father Christmas die too?”

For so many people, Dickens is synonymous with the festive season; Mr Christmas himself…

Of course, what springs to mind first is his wonderful seasonal fairy tale A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol Folio Society edition. Cover illustration by Michael Foreman.

For me, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without it; both the book – and the various sparkles of its magic conveyed through film (from The Muppets’ wonderfully rumbustious but lovingly nuanced version, to Albert Finney’s musical) or occasionally through theatre – as in the year we saw a stage production at the Bristol Hippodrome, complete with spellbinding special effects and illusions. Or the time we experienced the arresting, pared down immediacy of a Tobacco Factory Theatre production, filled with inspiration, invention and ingenuity. I see from the Radio Times listings that the version starring Patrick Stewart as Scrooge will be on TV again this weekend. Our family will gather round and watch it together for the umpteenth time, never tiring of the magic and significance of Dickens’s fable; loving the ritual of its well-known journey through Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come…

A Christmas Carol Folio Society edition – frontis illustration by Michael Foreman – ‘The people who were shovelling away on the house-tops were jovial and full of glee.’

…But perhaps less well known, hidden away in Dickens’s last and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, gleams this beautiful bauble of words, catching both the light and the shadows of the season – and, indeed, of life:

‘Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time. To such as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together.

Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and Chapter. Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin – such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake – to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one shilling per member. Public amusements are not wanting. The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying ‘How do you do to-morrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as miserably. In short, Cloisterham is up and doing: though from this description the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded. From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every one of them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the windows of the latter. It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.’

From The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Chapter XIV – When shall these Three meet again?) by Charles Dickens.

Endpaper illustration by Michael Foreman, Folio Society edition of A Christmas Carol

Wherever you will be during this festive season – have a happy, peaceful, magical time. A big thank you to all Bookish Nature readers for your support; for visiting/ commenting/ following this blog during the past year – and for helping to inspire my poor old brain to toast more nuggets of thought over imagination’s fire, during the coming New Year…

Season’s greetings to all! May all good things come your way in 2013…

See you back here in January…

…And in the meantime, I leave you with some words from A Christmas Carol – and a beautiful (and haunting - in a Susanna Clarke’s ‘gentleman with the thistle-down hair,’ tingly, silvery, fairy-tale kind of way) – performance of Carol of the Bells by Libera (from their 2011 Christmas Album) – which, to continue the Dickens connection, also happens to be the music the BBC chose to play during the trailers for their TV adaptation of Great Expectations last Christmas…

‘He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!

“What’s today?” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.

“EH?” returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s today, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge.

“Today!” replied the boy. “Why, CHRISTMAS DAY.”

- From A Christmas Carol (Stave V – The End of It) by Charles Dickens