March Ramblings

Dear Diary,

It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

J. Krishnamurti

It has been too long since my last posting so I can only offer many apologies. I have been suffering from a berludy virus that is doing the rounds.  I am still not fully better so bear with me, I am a wee bit fragile.  I had a break of fever in the night and felt so much better, so much so that I got up for an hour and checked emails etc while supping on ginger tea.

What am I doing now? Very little, keeping warm having dosed myself with strong analgesics, cough mixture and herbal teas.  I am trying to avoid going t o the GP and going down the antibiotic route.

Blessings?

Radio 4.  How could I live without it?

The  book programme at 6.30 pm on BBC2 every evening with Anne Robinson (don’t worry, she  has softened and is excellent in this, she has also apologised to the Welsh!).  She and Chris Evans also made a fantastic case against closing libraries on TV recently so both have gone up in my estimation.

A ‘comforter’ which I bought in a lovely craft shop in a  local market town recently.  It is Fairtrade, made in Nepal and just the thing for my sore throat.  It is knitted in multicolour; turquoise, rusty red, burgundy, greens and  dark pinks.   I am a firm believier in colour healing. It is also very soft and soothing to my neck and throat., if I had the energy I would photograph it for you.

The weather is also comforting me, it is bright and blue. cloudless and sunny (!), as it was yesterday for St David’s Day.  The sky was a mass of blue then too which made the day special.  I spotted several children in national costume which was sweet.   The yellow sun here in Wales made up for the lack of daffodils in my garden  which  are nowhere near out yet.  I have instead bought some wee pots of the lovely dwarf varieties and they are very cheering.  Yellow is the perfect colour to lift us from winter blues.

A new magazine to get lost in.

Some new books ordered from the library:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog., Muriel Barbery
Life in a Cottage Garden, Carol Klein
Stranger in the Mirror, Jane Shilling.
Life Alignment, Philippa Lubbock
A Discovery of Witches, Deborah E Harkness
Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx
21 golden rules for cosmic ordering, Barbel Mohr
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

A no-work today day luckily.

A poem is brewing in me, a line came to me during the night.

I made a breakthrough in my husband’s genealogy trail yesterday when I  found  a relative in France, thanks to the Ancestry website.

The birds in my garden, better than TV sometimes, I could watch them for hours.

My daphne is flowering, its colour is a perfect mauve.

I am soon going to make a big pot of spicy and  hopefully curing, vegetable soup.   I had a very tasty bowl of spiced parsnip soup in the aforementioned craft shop last week, very spicy indeed, just how I like it.  And along with most delicious home-made bread it was delicious.

March is underway, thank God.  A friend and I have come to an agreement, we would like to abolish two months from the calendar and they are December (my number one hate it is so stressful, pressured and I hate it!) and also February as most folk are a tad depressed, exhausted, or are suffering from some virus or possibly all three.

But now the only way  is up and

(wait for it a cliché  is coming)

Spring is just around the corner……………………..


But just before I go here is  a newly discovered poem by Elizabeth Bishop.

The End Of March

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. The sky was darker than the water --it was the color of mutton-fat jade. Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed a track of big dog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost... A kite string?--But no kite. I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of--are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I'd like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a l'américaine. I'd blaze it with a kitchen match and lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window. There must be a stove; there is a chimney, askew, but braced with wires, and electricity, possibly --at least, at the back another wire limply leashes the whole affair to something off behind the dunes. A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible. And that day the wind was much too cold even to get that far, and of course the house was boarded up. On the way back our faces froze on the other side. The sun came out for just a minute. For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand, the drab, damp, scattered stones were multi-colored, and all those high enough threw out long shadows, individual shadows, then pulled them in again. They could have been teasing the lion sun, except that now he was behind them --a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide, making those big, majestic paw-prints, who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.