Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

The coffee pot was washed, but it is so much a pot for coffee, the caffeine tang resisted. There are four teapots that could have been utilised. Only the whim was, to watch the rosebuds float and brew, and the coffee pot is made of glass. When you have grown, picked and dried the buds yourself, sealed them in a glass jar and smiled at them on the larder shelf everyday for nearly half a year, it makes for an amiable balance of work and indulgence. The pot goes on the oak secretaire, light pours through it, filtered pink. It brings rest to my busy eyes. In the cup, it brings warmth to my hands. Warm fragrance assimilated by steam, by quick liquid sips. A core of heat flickers like a candle flame. Slight sour aftertaste of years of layers of coffee. I do not regret the coffee, not even the day of the espresso overdose when I ended up trembling in a corner with an a-rhythmical heart. But I feel the calm flame, and I think: coffee to sustain me, tea to restore me.

Dog wanted to roll in it. She was not permitted. I didn't know what it was and I didn't have a camera on me and it isn't easy to explain. Whatever it was (this is not fiction, incidentally, this is me on Widemouth Beach finding a sea monster) had a fleece skin and the S-bend body shape of a seven-foot slinky fish. Flesh seemed mammalian. Obvious explanation is that a sheep has tumbled from a cliff edged field and been remodelled by the sea. Can't work out how that sharky shape can be made of sheep. Mysterious: strange. Shook my head and went for a stride in the waves, which were messy and cold. Drove home my favourite way: with bare sandy feet. Later when my feet were dry and zipped in boots I decided to get some mussels for tea, and on the way to the fish counter met one of my junior students. She has a twin brother, who looks much like her but is autistic and does not speak. I smiled at him and he reached out for a hug. This is a rare event, decidedly no

Here I am, at the beginning of a new project. It has been in discussion for a few weeks and now the practical stuff must be applied. It's a challenge I'm confident with, but this means nothing. The gap between talking of doing something and actually doing something is a place in which other things grow in interest, and you aren't sure if it's disproportionate or not, so one had better have a good distracting think about it. I like a project to simmer in my mind for a while (a very apt soup metaphor. Exactly as I make soup, in fact, I have to get a sense of a flavour and then the herbs and spices work.) But how easy it would be to wander away in this pitch of fascination, wander completely off subject… In the clear day sky, a broken eggshell moon is left. An oversight, or act of defiance? A chair is rediscovered under the washing pile. Old sketchbooks consulted: remember the series of prints done with plasticine and ink? Mixed media abstracts with glitt

Sky the colour of wet slate, clouds like smudged chalk, up to the demarcation of a double rainbow. Beyond this: perfect edged white, cyanine stillness. Other words, immaterial: other frescos, outshone. Nature flummoxes with a magnitude we can only faintly sketch. I attempt to describe a feeling of symbiotic absorption. Cross out notes, words are too clumsy. Allude to a space behind words, a silent resonance. Rain gathers, confers; at the right density, it drops.  

Hail fell, just the size of rough-cut rock salt, bouncing over the lane all pretty and fleeting. It melts on the ground, joins a rain stream undercutting the edge of the new tarmac. Dog looks up and then ignores it. She has pheasants to put to flight. Mr is outside pressing juice from blackberries. He says he thought of fetching the car to us when the hail struck, then he had remembered how I love a change of weather. He's right, it was delightful: just that slight difference, it puts crystals at my feet. I needed that, today: a boost, a sign, a few crystals at my feet. Dared to spend money on three cinema tickets. It is Bond's fiftieth birthday, and we don't go out much. Sneak a look at the faces of Mr and Boy by the light of the title credits. Rapt and joyful; I liked the film immensely, but this was my favourite scene. On the way home, Mr buys a Millionaire's Cheesecake. 

I have been blog-tagged. A writerly sort of tag, in which one drags out an old story snippet. Most of mine aren't on any useful USB, but are actual paper copies, unbound sheets of tatty A4 paper. I considered saying 'No thank you, this looks too difficult,' but then curiosity kicked me firmly in the pants. Paper all over the office now. Reading stuff, avidly, blanching. It is like seeing photographs of yourself with painful teenage hair. Embarrassing, but something to be secretly proud of: proof that you dared to have a go at life. In this story, I have attempted to describe the artist's outsider status using a mythological fish. It went through many titles, including Luna's Beast; this snippet is from the version named 'St. Pariah.' Formative stuff! ' The water was very dark. It looked so deep. I thought that was why I felt so isolated, because the sea was enormous. I swam out to the boat. The waves were behaving strangely; I noticed this,

Last night I tripped over one of our house spiders and as a result of this it became deceased. I thought to have stumbled on a small stone and shook its curled body from my sock with a remorseful 'Oh.' It was the one with six and a half legs. I laid the husk out overnight in case it was merely bluffing. This morning I consigned it to the Rayburn flames, with a little All Souls prayer that it be delivered back to the bosom of the universe. I couldn't help thinking it had been trying to tug at my trouser leg, to whisper me a secret. I shan't know it now. Mr and me took Dog walking in the secretive woods, along the literal road less travelled, through bramble cover and over fallen branches, under the strange filtered light. The woods don't quite seem real, which is why it doesn't seem odd to walk past the holes of the Border Trolls (creatures that drag their fat knuckles through the pine needles at night, patrolling old boundaries, from here to t