Lockdown Daze

My trips to New York echoed my run on Babylon where different facets of my life converged in London for a while and then moved on. My first visit was less than six months ago. Four visits later and I wonder if I will ever return. It certainly seems that my prediction of an early return to Brooklyn were premature as that benighted city groans under the weight of Mother Nature aroused. I have acquired a lot of free time in these strange days and the Night Planted Orchard has never looked finer as a consequence. Working at home has saved me ninety minutes of spring daylight, every day. I have never been more productive at work. Outside of work I've upcycled a bedside cabinet, restored an old turned bowl, written a half-decent short story. I broke Lady Snoutingdingles favourite glass and mosaiced the stub into a viking style drinking vessel. I've even weeded the orchard, which is now in a state of shock. As are we all. The bees squatting in the owl box in The Old Laughing Lady are bemused at my constant presence. Even the Old Hunter is delighted to have us both at home all day, every day. Yet he is strangely discomfited by our distance. He knows that something is amiss from the World. 

Upon Unearthing a Piece of Pottery

Precious pots break. The pieces become crocks in the bottom of a plant pot. After a span of time they fall into the compost heap and from there into the ground. The cycles of the Earth sleep them deep and then return them for a moment to the sun. Such moments bring memories, some no more than a hook to an earlier time, some are joyful, some bittersweet. Listening to an old song in the car, a shard of the same kind came to mind. This most precious of all vessels was lost a quarter of a century ago. My grief was a smashed and shattered thing not handled neatly and entire. Not easily swept up and tidied away. It exploded like thrown china. The shrapnel buried deep. The peices emerged without warning over years, like fish-bones, or the limescale in a cup of coffee, or a small stone among the oat-flakes. Their edges preserved like scalpels by soft and cunning wrappings in their hiding places. Their colours fresh, crimson and vermillion and whatever the colours of broken hearts or early-fallen fathers is.

On reaching my destination I had to sit and listen to the radio until my good order was restored. It wouldn't do to go into Costa in a state, now would in.

The Pearls of Brooklyn

On 76th Street between 4th and 5th Avenue, there are two runs of old trees. They brace the street and the old houses brace the trees, making the road seem narrow and solid, you know like a cavern in the heart of the city. Brooklyn, if it stood alone, would be one of the great cities of America but it threw in its lot with New York at the end of the nineteenth century and has been looking back ever since. At five on a February afternoon the street is calm. I have a strange feeling that I will walk this street again in July, when the leaves are on the trees and the sun is fierce and, it seems to me, this will once again be a cave of shadows. The old brownstones here mix with the new, fake brownstones with their bright mortar and too-neat stoops. The moulded iron railings that the wrought-iron gave way to back in the day, are now giving way to brushed runs of stainless steel which billow even in the gloom. The sky isn't even grey, it's New York Brown. But it is what it is. There is deep structure here which a little sun will kindle.

Fourth, here, is sedate. All churches and tired hotels, doctors offices, dentists and places offering lasik on easy terms, whatever that is - my glasses were elsewhere and I couldn't read the signage. But Fifth, and as it happens, Third on the other side closer to the water, are all aglow. There are New York pizzarias and souvlaki palaces. There are Irish bars and steakhouses. Drugstists, candy shops and liquor stores which I have curiously mixed up in the same category, who can say why. But every few shop-fronts along this street, in the drizzly half dark, half neon volcano, there is a grocery store. These shop fronts open into rows on rows of fruit and vegetables. They are fed from basements with weak doors up to the street which you don't step on if you know what's good for you.  A few displays are protected from the rain by plastic sheets, but the best are open to the elements. What's a little rain on a pear, or an orange, or a proper apple, or a drooping mouli? Did rain never fall on them while they ripened in Florida and California? They glow in the lights, like precious fountains of jewels. They are glorious and make my heart sing with delight and that, my friend, is a precious thing among the sprawl of New York City. There are pearls here.

A curious state of affairs

Yesterday there was a full moon on the horizon, just as dawn broke, sitting on top of the long wall of the levees - not that we call them that here. Driving along, if I could have stopped, I could have placed any one of a dozen shapely bushes against its bright white face. Closer to work, stuck in traffic, the moon placed itself in perfect composition with a distant copse. By contrast, the previous morning, I had driven into the face of an angry sky. The clouds had been ripped into a crowd of small, black, ragged faces, all shouting down at the world. Behind the sky was changing from black to a strong but pale blue. Once, it occured to me, I would have described the colours in the sky in angry terms. Today I saw a grain of blues which reminded me of an old doorway, where layers of different blues had all worn away in runs and lines and blisters of paint. It called to mind, in the oddest way, a memory of a page in a school journal, with ink of one shade of blue fading, to be replaced suddenly by a richer, deeper, but different shade of blue, and a teachers words in blue biro against the margin. It called to mind the changing, rippling shades of blue on a boat in a remote fjiord as the sky faded, just as this one was coming to life.

Where did it come from, this shift in the source of words for colour.

January

A still day in mid January between two storms. It is the late afternoon and the sun is low. The trees have been brushed clean by rain and wind. They are illuminated by yellow light but by some trick of the day, it is the contrast which shines. Perhaps it's the dark clouds in layers on the northern horizon, grey and blue, with all shades of blue down to the horizon. The trees look like pen and ink drawings, every branch stark. Every building on the low hills rolling up to the clouds are outlinked in black ink against the glow. Not golden, not buttery, but yellow like a pale sun, or sere, or gentle the colour of fawns, which is no surprise. Every hedge is outlined and there, hiding low, there are some greens. Between the bands of clouds there are white clouds which are turning from the colour of wool scraps on a barbed wire fence, to textured warm yellows and tints of rose as the sun dies. At home we have watercolours, gifts from a relative, which capture exactly this.

Even in midwinter, England can be beautiful.