Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

In the way that a wedding cake, or cheese if you prefer, is a whole, of which one has a slice, this is my version, my slice of wedding. It starts well before the day, with making syrups and painting signs, but this writing will begin the night before, with Mr and me and three little granddaughters. The littlest, Grandchild 5, is teething. Grandad is sent to the sofa, so one of us will be alert enough to drive to the venue. In-between her gnashing of bumpy gums comes adorable cuddles, like she is saying thank you, and admirable wind. At 3:30am magic exhaustion kicks in.  At 6:27am Grandchildren 2 and 3 appear, complaining that they cannot sleep. Granma says: ‘Go jump on Grandad.’ 6:35am Grandchild 2 returns to complain that Grandchild 3 has snotted on the carpet, closely followed by Grandchild 3: ‘But I’ve cleaned it up, Granma!’ Granma says: ‘Go jump on Grandad.’ Grandchild 5 opens her sparkly fresh eyes. Granma says: ‘Coffee.’ Bless her, she can’t remember wh...

Paws and claws to the door, breathing storms In it roars, the third month of this year Daffodils bow bright manes to the King of Spring. Each unfurling - leaf, petal, tadpole - belies the windchill Warmth is washing in. What is left of our snowdrops - dotted foam of an ebbed wave By night a waxing moon was pulling up tides, and we dreamt Our feet, unshod, pressing across tawny sand

The moon is a frozen pond. It is The Snow Moon. The Hunter’s Moon. Someone says a lunar eclipse will happen this night. And a comet! We are like children with torches forecasting midnight feasts… But we slumber deep, lungs with cold air replete, minds a-wander. An early start. Wake to the sparsest spaced flakes - ten to a cubic furlong, perhaps. (Perhaps we dreamt this precise detail?) Blearish eyes are rubbed. Ahead, a deer, in no danger from ice-wary driving, springs across tarmac. From a canopy’s winter bones, an owl swoops, parallel. In a blink, a hedge bird breaks our reveries. Clips the car, sends feathers a-puff.

Without the dead ash looming, we had lost our sense of where our drive is. Each time we missed, reversed, reminded ourselves to find a stump and a grand wood pile: that’s where we live. The altered reference. We are getting used to it. Yesterday Storm Doris broke the legs of Lily Scare-the-Crow. Literally weather beaten! Was this venting frustration, now storms cannot break branches from the chopped tree? When Lily was our new scarecrow, we would reverse under precarious boughs, be startled by the  person in the rear view mirror, the flat wooden figure with the child-drawn face. Now, after remembering where we live, we are startled to not find a face. Lily has never scared a crow, nor lost her smile. She is, rakishly, propped in the lea of the lean-to. ‘What new times are these, Lily?’ I ask. ‘How will we know where we are?’ Ask your heart, she says (it’s what I hear). And I think, that’s rich, when you don’t have one: but she’s never scared a crow, nor lost...

Christmas or November - 2015 - a phone call came. The casual branch dropping of our dead ash tree had been acknowledged as a danger; it was scheduled for demolition. Storms came, the tree surgeon was busy. We become accustomed to vigilance at the garden’s end. No one loiters in the road there. We drag the droppage to the hedge, to rot down into good soil. January 2017 - another phone call. Tree surgeon and crane are booked, the landlord says. Uh-huh. It may storm yet, we say, we’ll see. But we park the car out by a field gate - you never can be sure. The crane is amazing. It straddles the road, reaches to the sky. Up goes the man in the yellow mesh box. Chainsaw whirs. Bit by bit, down drops our dissected tree. Dear Fat Trunked Ash, we have loved your silhouette. We have loved to run and startle off a coat of starlings. Loved to see Old Crow sat, stark black on bare branch. We witnessed the last of your leaves falling, looked for buds that didn’t bloom, changed your...

On the fourth day of Christmas her true love gives to her: ‘Four German Men Three Finch Hens Toowoo Twurtle Doves And A Part Of A Pear Tree’ But to the dearth of our amusement Grandchild 2 finds a book detailing the traditional 12 gifts and begins to teach herself the proper form. Not so proper she can’t slink off with all the cherry tomatoes. If questioned, we know it was not Grandad. She says it anyway, laughing. Grandchild 5 can follow the others with her eyes, she wants to be up to mischief like the others say they are not.  Grandchild 1 kicks a football onto the grass he is not supposed to run on because… something about mud… if he asks Grandchild 3 to fetch for him he has contravened no carpet law!  It’s not his fault we were all listening. And where’s Grandchild 4? Not hitting anyone with a stick of course - that was Dog, he says. It’s not his fault we were all watching. Grandchild 3 casually drops a stick behind her back. B...

A Slightly Parallel Cinderella Once upon a time and place, in a slightly parallel universe (for further reading on slightly parallel universe theory please refer to Dr Cod’s excellent Physics For Storytellers ) all children were hatched and raised for adoption.  They were named in themes, and Cinderella was hatched during a craze for old fashioned, gender orientated, Disney character names.  She was adopted by a spacious mansion full of fabulous toys. She ate fabulous food. She took fabulous pictures of it all and posted them on her social media. From that she made her two bestest-ever-friends-forever, Lady and Tramp. They each lived in toy packed mansions, maybe if anything a little bit more fabulous than Cinderella’s lavish life but they were good enough to apologise and repeatedly tell her that it was okay not to have the biggest and best all of the time, they would still like her pictures and she mustn’t feel bad about herself, she wasn’t unlov...