BurnedThumb

 El Duende
Grief lives in my house
like dry rot infesting the timbers.
It has taken up residence
in the cellar, where I do not go.
I pretend there is no such space.
But he sits there, smoking coltsfoot tobacco,
and brewing a bitter tisane of rue
and wormwood, hyssop and dill.
Too much indulgence, he says, in sweet things
like joy and kindness, all the fruit
of sunlight and fresh rain, have done me harm.
It is time to take my medicine,
time for a purge, a cleansing.
Hell mend ye, he says. And hope.

Oh, the news, the news. It looks as if we have hit the point of no return in so many ways.I have been in despair, over politics, race, feminism, the climate, the state of poetry (don’t even ask), and I know I’m not the only one. And yet.

I came across this site https://www.lowimpact.org/ . It was a very cheering read, full not only of good ideas (those are ten a penny) but accounts of people and groups actually doing good things, making real changes, getting real results. It reinforces experiences I’ve had before, that there are plenty of people in the world who are better than the stories we see in social media. People who protested in their thousands when the Windrush scandal happened, demonstrating that the government cannot simply rely on us being as racist as the newspaper headlines. People who save their local green spaces. People who are creating new ways to work, teaching people new skills, adapting our houses and technologies to be less destructive. Scottish people who responded to the Westminster ban on our parliament paying the settlement fees for EU residents by volunteering to crowdfund it themselves. Housing associations who responded to Serco’s treatment of asylum seekers by withdrawing their licenses to manage those properties. New online magazines to give platforms for groups who find themselves marginalised in mainstream publications.

There is good stuff happening all around us, but we don’t hear it so much, and there are some good reasons why not. One is that anxiety is important for survival, so bad stories always need to make more impact. But there are two others more substantial. One is that none of this is enough. We are close to irreversable on many bad fronts, and the trends are really not encouraging overall. We need to do more, all of us collectively and individually, and we can’t afford to let ourselves off the hook.

But here’s the killer. The stories all focus on individual responses, whereas the big problems are structural. You can’t reduce car use if you can’t afford to live near your workplace. You can’t use public transport if there isn’t any, or if flexible working and childcare arrangements don’t fit in with what services there are. You can’t reduce your plastic use if manufacturers won’t make things without plastic. You can’t reduce your heating use if your landlord won’t put in an efficient heating system or double glazing. And there are vested interests in keeping us guilty and apathetic, rather than informed and proactive. If they believe we don’t know or care, they will be able to avoid making the large-scale changes we need, and lay off the blame on us. And we’ll be able to tell ourselves we can’t make any difference anyway. 

But here’s what we can do. We can become better informed. We can seek out local initiatives that are making things better, and support them with time, money or votes as we are able. We can spread the news and refuse to back off. And we can hope.

And in this spirit, here are my tributes to some of the people and groups who have given me hope this year

•  @seraphima who has tweeted the whole of the Grenfell enquiry, reminding me that this iniquity might so easily be swept under the carpet, and won’t because of people like her
• @CaptainKim  who alerted Scotland to Serco threatening to lock asylum seekers out of their homes with seven days notice
• https://noserialnumber.org/ who are making a genuine attempt to tackle the anomaly that artisan-produced sustainable products have to be priced out of the reach of ordinary people
• https://www.thewillowherbreview.com/ providing a platform for diversity in nature writing  
• https://theselkie.co.uk/ a  magazine for those excluded by gender, disability or mental health issues

And on that note, we can go into the longest night, shortest day and holiday celebrations of all sorts, with a glimmer of hope that maybe next year some of this will bear fruit. Have a very happy Christmas and New Year!

I have been taking photographs of the garden now that the season has come to an end, with a view to planning for next year. In some ways it has been a lovely year, from the first flowers in spring

to the hot summer, which turned out to be so good for the bees and butterflies.

But in other ways frustrating. Much as I loved our holidays, I hate to be away when the garden is at its most demanding, and I struggled to keep up with the watering. Also, the harvest mite (known around here as the beery bug) had a very good year, which seriously limited my ability to be outside from july to the middle of September.

The results weren’t too bad, on the whole. The tomatoes did very well, although Moneymaker rates very low on the flavour front, and I shall go back to Harbinger or Ailsa Craig next year. The first lot of cuttings I took thrived, but the later ones failed completely, and I’ll need to have a better strategy for keeping them cool and damp until the first roots form.

I will need to take more care with sowing seeds, too. I’m used to having crops fail as the seeds are eaten by birds, and the young shoots by slugs, but it didn’t happen this time, and things needed thinning out badly. The new rose disappeared behind over-enthusiastic borage, evening primrose and extremely vigorous marigolds. There were even some volunteer nasturtiums self-seeded from last year – it was a jungle for weeks.

Most of my intentions are to keep doing what I’m doing, only more carefully, but there is one new project in mind. Early in the year I planted a bog myrtle,which seems to have settled well, in spite of the rampaging borage around it, and I’m hoping to use the leaves for dyes next year – they make a yellow that used to be regarded as iconic by Highlanders. But I’m also hoping to sow some seeds of heather and blaeberries – the bilberries or whortleberries of down south – to grow round it, with yellow flag and meadowsweet in the wetter ground by the pond. It will mean doing battle with the crocosmia already in residence, though, and I can see that being a problem.

I’m also planning to encourage the chickweed that turned up for the first time, and to move the rogue dandelions that turn up in the lawn to an overlooked bit of garden behind the shed. If anyone saw the weed colonies I am nurturing here they would probably wonder what I was doing, but they are so useful as herbs, I can’t get enough of them. There will be more plants for colour and scent, and for drying in the winter, but most importantly, more time and attention, and more room for everything to give its best.

This is a picture from some time last year. I’ve been a bit preoccupied this week with three family members in hospital – though fortunately two of them are home and thriving now. But I didn’t want to miss a week.

I’ve been looking again at Old English healing texts, and I hope there will be a post about them before too long. In particular, I’m translating the  charm for taking a swarm of bees. The literal translation for a queen bee is apparently ‘battle-wifie’. Let me tell you, I’m feeling like a battle wifie myself this week.

And a quick reminder – Charlie Gracie is launching his first novel To Live With What You Are at Stirling Library Corn Exchange Place Stirling next wednesday at 6.30. I’m halfway through it, and the writing is beautiful. There’s a nightmare sequence about ‘the witch-mammies’ that I remember him bringing to a Stirling Writers workshop years ago – it’s even more creepy in context!

I will also be reading from Haggards. You can get (free) tickets here.

Do come. It’s going to be a great night!

I don’t know what you do, but I clean. I clean everything I can get my hands on, the things that have been bugging me for months, but I haven’t got round to it, the piles of accumulating clutter that only takes a minute, but I never seemed to have time for. I used up every duster in the house, and then washed them and started again.

When somebody dies, it is never not sad. As a person you love becomes older and frailer, and there are only hard, heartbreaking decisions before you, you can tell yourself that it is a good thing you don’t have to make them. And it is. But that’s because they’re dead. And that realisation catches you out, when you are trying to tell everyone it’s fine.

Grief is something heavy and uncomfortable that you carry everywhere with you. It doesn’t slow you down, or get in your way, and you carry on with your life, but there’s a load hanging about you somewhere, and it makes you tired. It distracts you when you want to get on with the incredible amount of routine admin you suddenly have to do, and you lose your place and have to start all over again.

It changes your focus. You have to protect everybody else you love. You have to cook and light fires and wrap them all up in whatever it takes to make them feel that life is okay and you love them. You hate to sit still, but you’re so tired.

This is how it takes me, anyway. My mother-in-law, Leonie Rimmer died on the 9th of September. She was ninety-three, and managed to live in the home she’d been in for almost sixty years. She was among friends when she fell, and her family was with her when she died, so it was as good as it could be. But it’s never not sad.

Hellebores, primroses and wind anemones. Finally the wind changed and everything burst into life. I have spent the weekend clearing a ton of ground elder and Spanish bluebells from the borders, replacing the lavender plants that were killed by the frost, and potting on tomatoes and chillis in the greenhouse. The lemon verbena bush has come into leaf, and I heard the first chiffchaff last Thursday, and saw the first housemartin yesterday. The black-backed gulls are back in force, but they are more widely scattered than they used to be, before their warehouse roof was demolished. And the smaller birds are nesting and feeding young as if the cold weather had never happened. There are at least three wren nests, a lot of sparrows, chaffinches, blue tits and great tits, blackbirds thrushes and robins all singing their heads off, and the sky over the fields is full of skylark song. The sky is full of thick grey clouds, but there are enough breaks for the sun to burst through, and the grass and violet leaves are full of that rich luminous green that is the colour of spring:

The Colour of Growing

The red glow of nasturtium petals comes
from a golden layer within. Green leaves
which mark deep stains on hands and clothes
shine with their cache of bottled sun.
Steep them in water, simmer gently
for long hours and the bright hue will fade.
Your wool will take its disappointing colour
from chlorophyll, which isn’t ‘yellow’,
but ‘bright’, ‘fresh’, ‘glowing’, ‘alive’.

I have been working on colour poems again lately, and I’m interested that the Greeks seemed to think that ‘chloros’, which is usually translated as green to yellow, is a lively word, while the Old English ‘fealu’ which is the original of our word ‘yellow’, means pale, faded, or withered. And is related to the word ‘fallow’ – a resting time between crops.

I have been lying fallow myself for the last few months, reading a wide selection of interesting books, being distracted from the selection I pictured a few posts back by Border by Kapka Kassabovanew poetry from AC Clarke (I hope to write a review next week) and Nat Hall, and short stories by Tom Kelly (a fellow squirrel, published by Red Squirrel Press) Solitude and Intimacy by Stephanie Dowrick, and the music of Declan O’Rourke, and a lot of family events. I started on The Making of the British Landscape by Nicholas Crane, and realised that there is a lot of territory walking left in me. Thanks to my friend Mairi McFadyen, there are are books by Neil Gunn, Katharine Stewart and Oliver Rackham to investigate, and histories and folk tales to discover. But most of all, new writing – colours and textiles, women’s history, and the history of the earth, some deepening of my critiquing skills, and some reflective writing on art, learning, resilience and the environment. I think the fallow season might be coming to an end.