Letter to an Unknown Reader

This is the last entry in the Spring Journal for 2008. Tomorrow it is June and June is not a spring month, no matter how cold. Many blogs seem written by surfers or students and are loud and noisy and trendy; I hope that this one has been slow and meditative and calm. And today it feels strange to finish this, to end these observations, these letters to you, the unknown reader.

I have kept a seasonal journal for three years now. The idea is to record the passing of a season, the three months day by day, as well as the cultural associations and events; Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Midsummer etc. The Spring Journal is the third season I have written about; two Autumns and two Winters, with mixed results. This Journal is different from the hand-written ones; less personal, or rather less about my family but no less intimate. Next year I will write a Summer Journal, and I will take what I have learned from this Journal and apply it; how many photos? What sort of text? How poetic, how creative, how family-based?

So if you have read this Journal and enjoyed it - or even if you haven't - and if you have any comments/suggestions please let me know. I can be contacted at stonesandwater@gmail.com

In the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

David x

Hills and Fields

To Titley and Kington this morning, ways over the hill not used for some time and the ditches and hedges are much thicker than they were with cow parsley and wild flowers. The hedges too are thickening up, the views through them lost until October. Warm, slightly stuffy weather, threatening rain, promising sunshine, and neither appears. We found a new walk at Kington, along a short stretch of the Offa's Dyke path, a narrow river track still a little muddy from the rain a few days ago. The river full from rain in the hills, noisy and strong. The path went round a large field of buttercups, quiet, perhaps an unused paddock, thick and seemingly flooded with gold, surrounded by trees heavily leaved. It no longer feels like spring.

Home over the hills for the change, and we stopped up on the tops near the Observatory. A clear afternoon with a suggestion of haze, the hilltop silent apart from a skylark, the sheep and a warm breeze. We stood on the roadside and had a 360 degree view of hills, woods, fields of sheep, distant hills fading to silhouettes, empty of people and almost no houses in sight. And no traffic, so a peaceful and quiet five minutes away from the world.

And tomorrow it is June, the start of summer. Presteigne is becoming a summer town, garden events and outdoor parties starting to be advertised, the occasional groups of walkers or cyclists, holidaymakers. The ditch spring flowers have faded and only in the deep woods are there still any bluebells. The trees are fully leaved and the hedges are thick. It may be occasionally cold, but spring is over here.

Leaves and Falling Rain

A quiet day, warm and a little stuffy, as it has been these last few days. Waiting-for-a-storm weather, misting the hills like a Japanese painting, with the sort of light that intensifies the Green Man darkness under or inside the trees. We drove across the border to Bleddfa, a tiny village on the edge of the Radnor Forest, the foothills of the Radnor hills; a long long straight road, up and up, winding along the valley in swoops and hairpins; pine forest and fields knee-deep in buttercups and brown cows; it could be the foothills of the Alps. Bleddfa is famous for its artists' community and the old schoolhouse is now an exhibition space, with an exhibition of charcoal drawings by an artist called Celia Read. Strong, powerful work, intense, unsettling, but also strangely calming. She had hand-written quotations from Rilke and a book called The Poetics of Space, quiet deep thoughts about inner landscapes and domestic vastness, a beautiful idea which illuminated the dark drawings. The church next door was also part of the artists group but was seven hundred years old, a plain simple space, deep windows and a fantastic wooden roof. The huge wooden door alone - studded with nails, repaired and patched, bone-dry and bone-coloured, as if made of massive driftwood timbers - was worth the drive. And in the Lugg valley as we neared the house, a red kite being mobbed by swifts and swallows; a bird made of blades, a bird raggedy-sharp, razor-edged, being swooped over at by birds like black scythes.

And now it rains and in green darkness and wet gloom the month draws to an end. At the beginning of the Journal my time-sense looked backwards, as the days lengthened I remembered the dark months just behind me; now I look forward to warm summer nights and have lost the sense of the days lengthening. Tomorrow it all ends...

Wapley Hill Again

A lot of heavy rain recently, warm, stuffy days and cool nights, cool enough for a small fire. Everything has grown tenfold, and walking up Wapley Hill this afternoon the nettles and dock and ragged robin alongside the path seemed three feet higher than a week ago. From the top path a brief glimpse of distant hills, layered in shades of grey like tissue paper, the spikey horizons of misty pine woods. As soon as we got into the woods we could smell the pines, a dark Germanic smell, rich and resinous, the smell of vast untamed Northern forests. And yet it is a small forest in Herefordshire; one landscape conjuring another, the way a classical building in soft evening light can remind us of Italy. I do not want to describe landscape in terms of allusion or reference but this shorthand, these visual guides, are a starting point. In terms of the buildings, perhaps the aim would be to suggest Italy without recourse to columns and porches; suggest a mood, an emotion, that different people will interpret in different ways according to experience and personality. But then every allusion does this...!

Meadowland

This house is part of Coombes Moor, a hamlet of small, largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cottages in the Lugg valley, above the flood plain - the Moor itself - and before the steep hillside. Largely unproductive ground set aside for estate cottages. But looking at old maps I realised that the cottages themselves have shifted over time, been extended and demolished, joined with others, cleared completely. The hamlet used to be bigger and has a 'shrunken village' at its heart, the stone rubble in Michael's fields. Local people still remember the cottage in such a field, or near the Moor, or on the road. These cottages all have gardens which would have been productive kitchen gardens at one point.

The paddocks behind the house are divided into four equal smaller paddocks, knee deep in buttercups and daisies. On the old maps they are marked as gardens, perhaps even ornamental gardens, and I have wondered if anything of this garden archaeology has survived. With the longer grass an oval of moss has appeared in the paddock, perhaps an old horse pond or fish pond; and the trees there are apple trees, festooned (the only word) with mistletoe, and now apple blossom. The grass here needs cutting again, but I love the longer grass and would happily let it grow into meadow again. It is full of dandelions and clover and perhaps buttercups, and looks shaggy and natural, somehow sleepy. But if I leave it then the landlord will come round and strim it mercilessly, as he does with the top grass near the hedge.

Presteigne Moods

A walk from the river to the centre of town and back again, a gentle pace, a warm sunny afternoon; local boys jumping in and out of the shallow water, skateboard boys, cutoff jeans, baggy hair and long t-shirts but friendly and a little shy. A day for sitting, slowing down, the sort of day men in Presteigne take to the streets and play chess on the pavement, the sort of day the antique shop owners sit on their wares outside and talk to passers by. The sky over the town full of swallows and house martins, the occasional swift. The sunlight was cool but warm enough, the light gentle - if it was September it would be regretful - on the classical facade of the Judge's Lodgings and the whimsical Italianate clock tower of the Assembly Rooms.

And then today, a damp day of mists like smoke drifting through the pine woods on the hill, threatening heavier rains, warm, almost stuffy. The town was envigorated by a lick of rain, the plants on Broad St fresh and green; yellow poppies, rosemary, pom-pom hydrangea. The same walk, from river to town to river, past higgledy-piggledy houses scruffy and pristine. Strange names here, old history; Ave Maria Lane, Canon Lane. Muddy tractors heading out to the fields, hippie mums in Indian fabrics, faded jeans and heavy boots. The river fierce and swollen after a day or so of rain.

Presteigne is a sleepy town, an old town, not so much untouched by the modern world as unscarred by it. There are supermarkets but they are small, local, almost independent. The town centre roads are narrow and slow and lined with medieval houses and shops given a new face in the late eighteenth century. The pace of town life has been saved by the by-pass, which used the footprint of the railway to curve through the town and on into mid-Wales. Yet there is a ring of modern houses around the centre, a leisure centre, a well-respected secondary school and a good junior school; it is a lively place, a healthy place for all its sleepiness.

A Cap of Dublin Tweed

Times can overlap, events become everyday. Every Sunday morning reminds me of being in Dublin with my brother, a day or so before I got married. He had come all the way from Vancouver for the wedding and we were able to steal a day or so away as a sort of stag party, although it was just me and my brother in Dublin, and anyone less likely to enjoy a stag do would be difficult to imagine. One of the best holidays I have ever had. Dublin on the Saturday morning, city walking and shops, the Book of Kells again, the long gallery and ancient books of the library afterwards. Lunch in an old haunt, O'Neill's, where the Trinity staff used to drink. Wanderings and occasional pints and old discoveries, back streets and cobbles and rooftops and an evening pub crawl through Martin's wish list of Dublin boozers; etched glass, shiny gas lamps and worn wooden tables and conversation, conversation, conversation. Guinness and talking and Dublin at midnight, walking home through musicians and crowds and rain for more Guinness in the Octagon bar before bed. And bright and early on the Sunday morning, the city deserted, the train to Blackrock half empty of people going home, best frocks, crumpled suits. Blackrock was town-grey and misty, a place of sea and rocks and dog-walkers alongside the waves. I came away with a battered copy of John Ackermann's 'Welsh Dylan', about Dylan Thomas's relationship with Wales; overpriced at three euros but worth it for the title page used as a bookmark - Shelley in Dublin, poems by Brendan Kenneally, signed by the author. Endless time in Irish souvenir shops, the leprechaun key rings, the Famine laments, but time spent with my brother was invaluable, a gentle, funny, kind man. A swirl of a journey home to the airport past churches and washing and Sunday afternoons the world over. So I thought an Irish ballad should be written but I am not the person for it; all that survives is the last two lines 'and all I have/ is a pint-potful of memories/and a cap of Dublin tweed.'