Disproportionate response To the boulderer I met in the wood, I said I’m sorry my dog startled you, and I know some people find animals scary. What more could I say? I wasn’t ignoring you when I walked away – the opposite – I’d heard every word and when you got to the bit where […]
To-do list items – 100 words
To-do list items Friday and ‘what have you got planned today?’ Did you ask in the hope of surprise? Instead: ‘Oh, you know, the usual. All the jobs.’ Jobs that bookend my week – cleaning, tidying, dull administration tending the health of animals and people, houses and machines. When did this dreary dutiful to-doing take […]
Lost and found – 100 words
Lost and found Around 50 babies are abandoned every year in the UK – left in hospitals, doorways, bins, bushes and shopping bags. It’s criminal. Not just because a human will grow up rootless, believing mum didn’t want them, but because abandoning an infant is against the law – usually resulting in a custodial sentence. […]
March – 100 words
March A yellow month daffodils, dandelion, gorse and the eyes of new-born daisies little lambkins, blossom gutters and premature chocolate eggs holly and Rudolph slip over the horizon behind and it’s spring forward into long shadows and the smell of burning meat in next door’s garden the buzz of distant mowers but we aren’t there […]
Wishing – 100 words
Wishing I saw the first lamb of the year trotting, cute in the field. It makes me want to gambol too. And daffodils poking yellow noses past half-dead weeds from last year. I scan the scrubby edges for evidence that my civilising bulbs are growing to paint grubby verges with vermillion and a deep ecclesiastical […]