News

Jo arrives to get my mother washed and dressed and- as always- finds her going through the morning paper. "Is there anything interesting in the news?" she asks- as always- and my mother- as always- having no memory of what she's been reading- says, "Nothing in particular..."

Sitting In The Sun

The sky- three quarters full of lumpy cloud like the stuffing of a mattress- is letting the sunlight through in patches- and one of those moving patches has reached me here, where I'm sitting on the chopped down spruce, looking out across the Weald to the blue-grey line of the Downs.  The seeding grass is a buff colour rising to pink, the birds are singing, and I think,"All this beauty is mine as long as I don't grab at it- as long as I don't assert ownership". And all the while I have an image in my head- a kind of a sketch, an icon- of a ball of fire- and it's throwing out golden arms at the end of which instead of hands are living beings- birds, animals, men and women, trees.