Richness on the world
A lovely summer image of blueness infusing the landscape. The hills Lullingford way were blue as a summer sky, a deep promising blue, and there was a richness on the world. Wishing you richness on the world, wherever you are. Source: Mary Webb, Precious Bane...
A day in the woods
A moment when the two main characters of Bronte’s less well known novel get to know each other. Shirley, newly arrived, proposes a day in the woods to Caroline, who knows the land and the calendar of its changes in minute detail, a mental map she is happy to...
Dancing summer days
They are still with us, although we’re far from that beautifully named, white-spumed ‘maned Aegean’. Eke them out, enjoy each and every one and then bask through the winter months in recollection of them…. memories of this pure sunlight, these...
Of perfect summer mornings
Being a madrugadista, I love descriptions of the magic hours of daylight before the world is up and about. It sets me up for the day if I wake by dawn in summer, around five in June but by now, mid-August, already slipping well into six o’clock. As I see the...
A dream summer scene
One of the charms of Miklos Banffy’s superb Transylvanian Trilogy is the evocative and tapestried description of landscapes by a man who knew and loved them in their detail, and who, when he was writing, knew that many of them were no longer accessible to him....
Sunlight time
Time pouring down with the sunlight while diaphanous drakeflies dance on the water. A perfect summer scene and one to share at the cusp of summer. I am still sorting drakeflies from damsel- and dragonflies. It appears that what I have been joyously calling out as...
The lilt of desire
What an eloquent depiction of a perfect moment, suspended in the lilt of its desire. Think of similar moments you have experienced, or places which can induce them in you. Then fly there in your mind for a moment. Or an hour. For me such places are always either...
Green power
No, not wind turbines, nor solar panels. This is the green power that raises ‘purple spires to the midsummer sky’. Foxglove power or, quoting Dylan Thomas, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. I planted a few foxgloves...
The bees’ feet
Two zooming micro-miracles singing the arrival of summer – bees’ feet shaking heather bells and the ‘sap-stealing dodder’ twining around furze spikes. ‘When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings...
Blue-bells in spring
Blue-bells, more even than roses, are the flower I associate with England. There is magic in walking under a woodland canopy among the delicate blue bobbing bells as they carpet the ground for weeks. When I grew up, holidays were spent with my grandmother at her...
An ideal summer evening
All that wine-tasters’ lingo about bouquet and tasting of tires or leather, not a patch on Keats’ description of the effects of good wine sipped in an arbour on a summer evening. Keats is at least as good a letter-writer as he is a poet, and his...
Lolling on a lawn
The English poet John Keats is my next candidate for a nuannaarpoq award. I am building a dossier of his nuannaarpoqian behaviour and inclinations to parade before you, before creating a nuannaarpoq award-winners page where I can bring these life-loving exemplars...
The advent of May
There was a time when I could half read poetry in various ancient forms of French, provençal or Occitan, at least enough to have the sense of their meaning and loveliness. This is one I noted decades ago, which is no time at all if you consider that it dates from the...
In an English country garden…
Spending a summer’s day at a fancy-dress luncheon party. We sit in an English country garden, gathered around a table laden with food and drink. Women shimmer in silk brocade and flapper dresses, men are dapper in blazers and cricket whites. Endless chatter,...Yes, sign me up!
