Day 250 - Natural Order

deadr4t

Of the many themes that have emerged from this series of blogs, perhaps the most disturbing and familiar is...death.

A somewhat grim subject I suppose - I'll resist employing my usual tactic of linking to all earlier related posts...there's just so much of it!

I wonder whether there's an age factor - is it just a time of my life where I'm more likely to encounter the reaper?

Certainly living a country life is a factor, as these photo's (and many earlier ones) so graphically illustrate...today's specific theme is deconstruction or decomposition or decay (or maybe some other word starting with de-)...

The photo above is a rat in a fairly late stage of decomposition.  It must have lain there for quite a while to have decayed so, although I suspect the local carrion have had a good go at it....made a bit of a meal of it, you might say. 

On the other hand, this poor little vole has been summarily squidged to death on the road...

deadvol3

Whilst grisly and unpleasant, I can, in the main, handle these constant little reminders of the fundamental brutality of mammalian life...it's all the other stuff that's a bit trickier.

In the last twelve months, I've lost my two most loyal and constant companions - first Bluez last Autumn, then Jazz this Summer...both of these were hard to bear (albeit in very different ways), and I still miss them like crazy. 

The tenth anniversary of my sister's death passed by a few weeks ago, and that led to much bitter-sweet reminiscence, with a side order of subdued pondering, and all served on a bed of subtle melancholy.

My dad's not been well either, I understand, although that's a very long story that I'm not proposing to go into.

Maybe 50 is simply that age where you become increasingly aware of your own mortality...I don't know.

My life is pretty damn great (see the rest of this blog for details), so I don't wish to come across as being unduly morbid...I love my life, and I love my little pack (primarily my alpha packette Anna, natch), even if I seem to be going through a (bizarrely literal) rocky patch with our home and garden just lately.

And yet along with all that proverbial love, death is also in the air...

But it's all part of the natural order of things, so I can live (and eventually die) with that.

:-)

Bonus PS...I just remembered spotting this little fella sitting stride his own personal, custom built death trap late last night...I took this photo from sitting in my chair...thank goodness for zoom lenses!

deathtr4p

Day 181 - Friday Night Light

me tree

I think I've spotted a bit of a Friday night trend...my blog posts are a little, shall we say, light...

Not in tone, but in content and quality.  By Friday evening, I'm often tired, especially mentally...my brain can feel so woolly and vacant I find it hard to put a coherent sentence on the digital page.   More often than not, I've had to go food shopping after work, or maybe mowed the lawns...or maybe both...and walked the dog and looked for a photo, of course...

As in the case of this evening, when I've done all of the above, I've sometimes just run out of steam.

It's just as well that very few read Friday nights blog post!

Earlier, whilst mowing the lawns, I realised that I'm in something of a blue funk tonight.   A fog of melancholy seems to be following me round like a little black cloud...I seem to be surrounded by reminders of the fragility of life.

...someone I used to know, my age, died suddenly earlier this week...

...in the six months since my boy Bluez left us, his brother Jazz has aged markedly, and seems increasingly frail...he's had a difficult day today...

...a colleague is anxiously watching over a poorly spouse in Myton Hospice...my thoughts are with her...

...we are a few short weeks away from the tenth anniversary of the time when I stepped out of the world for a while (also at Myton), to walk with my sister Debs to the very edge of this life, to try to see her safely on her way to the next...it was a tragic, profound, wonderful experience, that suddenly seems closer than it has for years...


I've been meaning to get a photo of this tree for a while now, and tonight seemed like the night...

For some reason it reminds me of me...perhaps it's that it's tall and gangly, a bit ragged around the edges, and looks as though it's seen a few things in its time, and is sometimes weary as a result...

The evening was grey and overcast, so the light was poor, but it seemed to suit my mood.

Turning around, I was struck by the rays of pale sunlight filtering through the grey, troubled sky...it felt like a metaphor for something, although I'm not quite sure what...and I'm not trying too hard to work it out, as I'm wary of allowing my sombre vibes to twist more gloom into a brightening scene.

It seems far more likely to mean something spiritual and uplifting, so I will try to get back to it when I'm less tired, and a little less emotionally raw...

Actually no, I'm going to deal with it now...it's just hit me - it's the bright, warm light of the next world, tearing through the veil of this world, to welcome those that we call the departed, but they'll call new arrivals...

It's where I last saw Debs...

:'(

Day 101 - Restless Tides

purple with shiny bits

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun.
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides.
That it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth reclaims your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Kahlil Gibran


This small jar of nail varnish belonged to my big sister, Debs. 

Debs died of (complications arising from) breast cancer 10 years ago, give or take a couple of months.  It wasn't a sudden death, and Debs had time to plan a little, and to make some final requests.  

One such request was that people should not wear black to her funeral.  Debs was a little flamboyant in her dress sense, and often dressed from head to foot in a single bright colour...orange and blue (with sequins and shiny stuff, natch) seemed to be common favourites. 

For her funeral, then, it must have seemed a wonderful opportunity to pull everyone else into the game, and so she insisted that everyone must wear something pink!

Being well known and much loved, Debs funeral was indeed very well attended by several hundred "mourners", and the packed-to-overflowing church was a sea of pink hats and shoes, pink scarves and socks, pink flowers, wreaths, bouquets and blouses...

For my part, I had nothing pink to wear(!), so I went and found Debs big box of nail varnish, always full of a whole rainbow of colours, and requisitioned a couple of jars. 

This purple jar for some reason reminded me of her at the time. 

I also took a jar of bright electric pink, and painted a single dot on the little finger nail of my left hand, as a symbol of my love and respect for her.

At the funeral, I (somehow) read the beautiful words above.   I'm not religious, but I do have strong spiritual tendencies.   I find these words immensely spiritual - they have a profound depth that makes me dizzy and brings tears to my eyes.

Struggling to hold myself together enough to cope with not only the intense grief of my loss, but also the raw, piercing beauty of these words was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do...and yet I remember being so happy and honoured to have the opportunity to read this aloud, at that time, to that audience.  

And equally, I remember being angry and upset when the Minister followed the reading with, "Well, of course, he didn't really mean that your soul goes straight to God, because as we know, the only way to God is through Jesus Christ, our saviour...".

I wanted to get up and shout, "No, has it occurred to you that he said what he meant, and meant what he said?!   We are free to commune directly with God, no intermediary is required!"...

But of course, it was Debs funeral, and otherwise much more pink and upbeat than you'd generally expect...so, I bit my tongue, and swallowed my pride, and let it go, as I felt Debs would prefer. 

Anyway, for several years afterwards, on the anniversary of her death, or on her birthday, I wore the same bright pink dot on my pinky finger nail. 

Sadly I eventually lost the jar (I think it's in a box or a drawer somewhere), but the purple jar sits on my desk to this day.

This morning, reading a sad obituary of a climbing legend who has just died, I came across these words again, and it all came flooding back.

So Debs is on my mind again...10 years...where did it go?  I can't believe it's ten years since I last spoke to her...since that conversation, a couple of days before she died, when she needed me to tell her that it was ok for her to let go now...

So much has happened that I wish Debs could have seen, that I'd love to tell her about. 

Perhaps I will tell her myself, one day, when I melt into the sun, and truly dance...


For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun.
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides.

That it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth reclaims your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Kahlil Gibran

Day 93 - Daffodils in the Dark

life or death

Another little experiment today...

As I'd arrived home from work some 40 minutes earlier, I'd noticed that the stand of daffodils that bloom every Spring on the verge outside our garden are really opening up now.  

We live at the edge of the foothill that runs along the North of Red Horse Vale, with Edge hill running parallel, a couple of miles to the South...I suppose if we lived those couple of miles south, we'd live at the foot of the Edgehill!  

(aythengyew, I'm here all week...all year, in fact!)

Fun fact...the opening battle of the English Civil War was fought across the plain we live on the northern slopes of, in 1642.   The centre of the battle was a couple of miles away over the fields, but by all accounts it was a bit of a disorganised brawl, with 1,000 soldiers killed and 3,000 more injured - there must have been a few of those up this way!

Bonus fun fact...up on the ridge above us was the old RAF Gaydon, whose airstrip, which runs for 2-3 miles from Gaydon to Kineton, was used at one time as a base for some of Britain's nuclear capable V-Bomber planes in the 50's and 60's...it's now a test-track used by Jaguar/Landrover and Aston Martin. 

Anyway, the point is that the cold air seems to fall down the hill from up near the test track, and sits on the two little cottages in the corner of the arable field where we live...it's always a degree or two colder here.

This is borne out by the temperature gauges in our cars, which often show the temperature start to tick up by 0.5C within 100m or so of our little lane, in either direction, and as much as 2C by the time you get to Gaydon. 

It's also borne out by the late flowering of our daffodils, which are spread liberally around our garden, and up and down the verge outside our garden too.   I've seen daffodils flowering all over the place for a couple of weeks or more, around the rest of Warwickshire, but it's only in the last few days that they've really started to bloom here. 

Of course, having noticed them and thought what a nice photo op they'd make, I promptly forgot all about it until getting home from walking Jazz, by which time it was nearly 7pm, and fully dark. 

So I thought I'd see how the flowers responded to flash photography, and whether it might make an interesting and unusual shot.  This is only about 15-20% of the daffodils that make up this stand, but it is the section that's flowering the most densely.

I like the effect of the colourful flowers against the dark night...I think it looks bright and lively.

Anna, on the other hand, thinks it looks like a cemetery!

This might seem somewhat bleak, on first glance...but this seems entirely a propos, today of all days...

An hour before this photo was taken, I was on the phone to my lil' bro' Jools.   Our Big Sister Debs died in 2004, after battling the Big C for a couple of years.  Today was her birthday, and she would have been 52. 

Jools told me he was just picking up some flowers from both of us, and taking a trip to Debs' grave, in a natural meadow cemetery near Coventry.  

So it was very much with Debs and cemetery in mind that I took the photo!

And Anna reads me so eerily well that she managed to glean cemetery from the resulting image, despite the fact that I'd uttered not a single word about any of that to her...spooky!

Still love you and miss you, Debs...

:*-(

Day 57 - Two Mad Ladies

Zombie Apocalypse?!

Honestly, people don't make it easy, do they?

Today, as the day was kind of busy, one way or another, I thought I'd try the single-shot tactic again.

My mum had been down to the south coast for a few days to stay with a friend, and I'd arranged to meet up at Gordano Services on the M5 south of Bristol. When I was a few minutes away, my phone rang.

The phone was clasped in a holder on the dashboard, so I couldn't easily pick up.  It was raining heavily, windy, and dark.   I was in the fast lane of the motorway focussing on picking my way through the glare of myriad lights in the darkness, so I just swiped to answer and hit speakerphone.

Of course, I then couldn't hear anything really, as we both repeated hello loudly at each other a few times.  I'm not even sure whether it was Carol or mum that I was talking to.   As far as I could tell, they were there already, and would wait for me in the cafe.

Now, I'm trying to avoid posed shots for my blog, so I cunningly hatched a plot to sneak up and take a snap before they'd really realised I was there.

Within minutes I arrived, and fired up my camera app as I walked into the Services building.  A quick walk once around the facility failed to locate them, so I went all the way round again, checking more closely this time.

No sign...

I called the number they'd called me from just minutes earlier.

No answer...

My mind began to churn, analysing the options, calculating the odds (and hoping I hadn't completely misunderstood and was supposed to be meeting them in Seaton), when the phone immediately rang back.

It's funny how many different and complex trains of thought your mind can make in a second or two...

Anyway it turned out they were still in the car in the car park, as Carol was trying to teach my 77 year old mum how to use email on her phone.  You have to admire the optimism, if not the pragmatism...

I went outside, reenabled my camera, and raised it as they approached, trying to catch them unawares...

Fail!

As soon as they realised I was using my camera, they rushed to pose.  I say they, it was Carol with the lightning reflexes, I'm not sure my mum was even aware I took a photo!

I showed her the picture when I dropped her off at home in Coventry, and she said, "Oh, that'll do, two mad ladies!".

So there you are, two mad ladies.

Sometimes I think Mad Ladies is the story of my life...my mum has always been a bit mad, and Carol (surrogate sister, of sorts) certainly is.    When I tell you that my sister, Debs, was known to have dressed entirely in orange, out of choice (and with no known affiliation with Hare Krishna), then you will begin to see an emerging theme.

Maybe mad is a little harsh...let's say weird, perhaps, or eccentric.

Don't get me wrong, these are all admirable attributes...infinitely more interesting than normal, or average, or conventional.  Bleurgh....

I'm secretly hoping that my daughter Kim will turn out to be similarly weird and/or eccentric...she's got the genes for it, certainly.

I've every faith in her, I think she's got what it takes to pull it off convincingly - and authenticity is a key characteristic of the most interesting weird people...

Anyway, the signs are pretty good so far...so come on Pin Snot, make me proud - you can do it!*

;-)

* You always do...