Primavera

 O spring has set off her green fuses....

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly

And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry

And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be.

Breathe (In the Air)

Pink Floyd

David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Roger Waters

The Dark Side of the Moon

What's not to like? The world still turns. The tyrant is dead (OK that is wishful thinking, but it will happen.....) The Streets [sic] of Hormuz are opening to traffic, and oil is well.....

Apparently you can see the canals of Ken Hill from the dark side of the moon, though you might need a Hasselblad (and a mirror).....  But I am so happy there is a dark side - I was beginning to think it was just a flat cheese plate.  My only worry is that the space portal-loo doesn't seem to work....

Anyway, I have been out in my tractor - a harrowing experience [Stoppit!  Ed]....

Anyway again, I am glad that someone is ploughing the fields and scattering the good seed on the land. [Wir pflügen und wir streuen - Matthias Claudius, 1782 - Ed]....  Someone's got to do it, or the good Burghers of McDonald won't have the ultra-processed Fleurs du mal that Charlie Baudelaire so enjoyed.....

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,

N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins

Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,

C'est que notre âme, hélas ! n'est pas assez hardie.

Au lecteur

Les Fleurs du mal

Charles Baudelaire

(Who wrote in French, as Europeans do)

Anyway, yet again, to shut a strong lorry cort, I have been springing to my feets and wandering the pleasant lands around me, breathing the air, and not afraid to care.

I love the spring, largely because of the resurgence of life after the darkness and death of winter [Thank you Jesus - Ed], but also because of the physical warmth of sunshine and the uplifting light that brings us Vitamin D [An essential fat-soluble nutrient that regulates calcium and phosphate in the body, crucial for maintaining healthy bones, teeth, and muscles - Ed].

I love to see nature coming to life.  I love to walk where we have made our homes, and I am so grateful that, so far, at least, we have not been subjected to the extreme violence that is the daily and nightly diet of the citizens of Ukraine and much of the Middle East. I shudder in horror at the indiscriminate killing of ordinary people, the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, bridges, power plants etc.  But, we are fortunate - by chance.  It is a privilege, but that is by chance.  It has not always been so - there are plenty of reminders around us of the Second World War in the shape of concrete gun emplacements, bombing ranges and air bases. 

Say what you like, but this recent vortex of violence was unnecessary.  Forgive me for this quotation, but today's leader in The Guardian was a powerful statement of just how wrong things can be:  The US has squandered tens of billions of dollars, burned through its interceptors and torched relations with allies.  That may not bother Mr Trump, who had premised victory on the conditional reopening of a waterway that was not closed prior to the conflict.  But the war has also spooked markets, raised prices at home and showed signs of fracturing his Maga base.

Mr Trump chose to believe Benjamin Netanyahu's assurance that this would be a short and easy war, but soon found himself seeking an exit......  The war has destabilised the region and normalised talk of war crimes, further trashing the idea of a rules-based order..... 

The tide is out. The earth is scorched. But seven avocets can stand on one leg while Artemis [The ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness  and wild animals et al, sometimes called Cynthia - Ed].... while Artemis spins through space, leaving us breathless....

Near here the clouds add to the reflected beauty of beach scenes:

The wind blows fresh and cool, disturbing little but the dust and what's left of my hair.....

Sea lavender (limonium vulgare) brings colour to the dun and grey of winter:

Alexanders (smyrnium olusatrum), possibly the gift of the invading Roman legions, burst into life by the waysides:

Ramsons, or wild garlic (allium ursinum) fill the air with an unmistakable scent by the Ingol river [for which in 2018 Anglian Water funded the creation of a natural treatment wetland - instead of a traditional chemical upgrade - which now acts as a giant, living water purifier - Ed].

At Dersingham Bog National Nature Reserve [which merges with the now infamous refuge of Wolferton Fen - Ed] birch trees stand guard over rare and diverse species of plants such as bog asphodels, round-leaved sundew, white beaked sedge and cranberry....

We walk at Courtyard Farm, Ringstead, and admire the budding trees, as the sap rises and leaves unfurl. I am reminded of Charles Causley's Spring 1818, which commemorates John Keats's departure from this land, When spring fired her fusilladoes, and then we come across a Taiwan (or Formosan) cherry (prunus campanulata), which is another beautiful reminder of international disharmony and threat....

And then, as the sun slips away to add another layer of yellow to the sickening POTUS, we enter a field of cowslips (primula veris) which brings us back to the natural glory of spring in our part of the world, where delicate shoots go untrampled, and the cycle of life goes on.  In Look! We have come through! D H Lawrence wrote: 

We shall not look before and after.

We shall be, now.

We shall know in full.

We, the mystic NOW.

[NB, He also wrote:

Oh, America,

The sun sets in you.

Are you the grave of our day?

Ed.]

And there we have it.  A row of oaks march down towards the wash in the early morning light:

While our village church stands proud upon the hill, catching the farewell glance of the evening sun, a symbol, even to the unfaithful, that there is a place for differences of belief and practice.  If there is a god, then surely it is the same god that envelops Hegseth and Netanyahu and Khamenei?  

But then in truth the god that really matters is surely Apollo [The god of divine distance - the god who made mortals aware of their own guilt and purified them of it - Ed]? 

Well yes, but Apollo is also the god of light, music, prophecy, and healing, and, perhaps, above all, the god of the sun, without whom/which there would be no life, no spring, no resurrection....

Arrest my case.....

For one who has nothing to worry about:

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.....

Winterreise

 A sad tale's best for winter....

These are the last words spoken

Soon I’ll be out of sight

A simple farewell message

Good night, my love, good night

I am sure there are those who know about these things, but I still find it fascinating that Black-headed gulls simply do not have black heads in winter......

Also, it may be perverse of me.  But the fact that Common gulls are not that common perks me up, just a little......

However.....  Here we are.  Life is not necessarily what we expected, or wished for, and winter conditions exacerbate that dull numbing feeling that swimming from the Titanic tends to excite....

There are clouds on the horizon.  They may not eventually blow our way, but they instil in us a sense of boding that exceeds the usual fore.....

Dark clouds are drifting

Across the bright blue sky

Soft breezes gently sigh

In the dark forest

But then the sky can suddenly be filled with the blare and honk of passing V signs, v signs to cold, to coronas, to contrariness.  We should go with the flock.....

Lynn (does it need the King's?) is cold and empty - of life, or trade, of laughter, as is to be expected in these ghastly days.

In 'my' village (how presumptuous can you get after three weeks?) no one knows what to do with themselves....  It could be worse.  It may well be colder, or wetter, or darker, or more infected, tomorrow, but we will worry about that..... tomorrow.

At least the Herdwicks don't grumble....

And on the coast there's Dunlin in good numbers to remind us that the essential is food.....

Not far away Castle Rising stands clear of the snowy carpet.  It's a hulking lump of masonry with some of the most splendid earthworks for sledging anywhere in these troubled isles. 

I photographed this keep one summer long ago for Treccani, the Italian Encyclopaedia of Medieval Architecture, and, for some reason I thought at the time that this had been the last home of Henry VIII's surviving wife, Catherine Parr, to whom I can claim a link. 

Funny how time plays tricks?  Catherine never lived here.  She died, aged 36, at Sudeley Castle, from complications following the birth of a daughter.  We are still related, but not quite as I remembered!

Not far away, close by another well defended castle, is Castle Acre Priory.  A Cluniac foundation that dates from 1049, and which was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII in 1537.

These 'romantic' ruins stand empty in the winter snows.  We are finding our way around this corner of England, exploring as far as we dare, without the excesses of a Cummings. Our daily exercises are not distant from our new home, but we go just far enough to call it a winter journey. 

Schubert's song cycle Winterreise is painfully beautiful and perfectly fits my current mood. I listen to Ian Bostridge's interpretation, and read something he wrote about it in The Guardian....

Winter Journey – a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, was composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. He died in Vienna in 1828 aged only 31. Piano-accompanied song is no longer part of everyday domestic life and has lost its one-time primacy in the concert hall. What Germans know as Lieder – is a niche product, even within the niche that is classical music; but Winter Journey is an indispensable work of art that should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust.

The 24 songs are forerunners, in a sense, of all those songs of love and loss that have been the soundtrack of generation on generation of teenagers. But the loss of love, which is only sketched ambiguously in the first song, “Goodnight”, is just the beginning of it. Schubert’s wanderer embarks on a journey through a winter landscape that leads him to question his identity, the conditions of his existence – social, political and metaphysical – and the meaning of life.

Schubert himself wrote the following, in a manuscript of July 3rd 1822 entitled My Dream: With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I ... wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

There are no trains at Wolferton Station.  The snow lies untouched across the rails.  No Queen steps from the royal carriage.  No fat controller punches my ticket.  There is no journey here.

Is this nothing?

Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing:

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,

My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,

If this be nothing.

The Winter's Tale

(Leontes, Act 1 Scene 2)