My Secret Garden

Our rabbit!
But let me start at the beginning.
My son and I decided to let Fluffy,(look I didn't name him I just inherited him!) have the run around the whole garden as we are likely to be moving soon and wherever we go there won't be as big a field for him stretch his paws in. He sets off across the grass at a canter and then skips in mid air before haring (can rabbits hare?) in a completely different direction. There are two entrances he can wriggle through and we have to herd him away from them but he is very smart and teases us by making little feints towards them before dashing off again. He hasn't had so much fun since we lived in Cardinham and he and his partner in crime Blackjack used to have the run of our garden there terrorising our cats if they ventured near them and 'innocently' escaping to our next door neighbours and their prized flowers and vegetables!

Fluffy makes a rush for the entrance and escape, like a good rugby winger he fixes me before executing a series of sidesteps that Shane Williams would be proud of. I turn swiftly, I will not be beaten by him, but he has planned ahead well as I trip over a grassy bank and fall headfirst into our pond!

So Dear readers do not be deceived by your rabbit, he may be called Fluffy but in reality he is a most cunning beast that knows your measure.

Excuse me must go casserole au lapin to prepare.....

Sorry I have been away for a week and I have checked the visitors numbers and see that some of you have been shinning over the wall while I haven't been here and trespassing!
So where did you play?
Did you climb the trees or skinny dip in the lake? Did you swing above the waterfall and plunge into the pool below? Did you feed the Wild Cats and the Pine Martens?

I hope none of you were in after nightfall as the Garden becomes a strange and frightening place once the sun has set and particularly if I am not there as it craves attention and will attract it through fear if it feels neglected.
If you were in after nightfall did you hear or see anything strange. Were there wild beasts loose or worse phantoms or monsters? Please tell me what you saw or what you would like to have seen if only you were brave enough.

Have left you with a little quiz, as I said I have been away for a short break so can you guess where I have been?

I am naturally contrary, give me something that I ought to like or tell me something that I ought to think and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will take the opposite path. This character trait rarely makes life easy and the expression 'cutting your nose off to spite your face' could have been written specifically for me.

Now partly because of this I can appear a bit of a Luddite, I thought, for example, that mobile phones were the work of the Devil and loathed them with a passion and yet now I text like the best of them, though I still, Contrary Mary that I am, use apostrophes and correct spelling!
So, despite being a bit of a nerd, I have resisted digital cameras and have persevered with my wonderful SLR loaded with fuji velvia slide film but the thing is I stopped taking every day shots because the film is both expensive and easy to make mistakes with.
Therefore, I have bought a digital SLR so that I can begin to record life as it happens again, simple things like my daughter on her first drive with me and my son strumming his acoustic guitar in the front room, and, whisper this quietly, I've really enjoyed myself and it has freed me up to start enjoying my photography again.

However, this has left me feeling a bit of a Judas as I walk by my camera case filled with its olympus lenses and light meters and I hope that I continue to take my landscapes using film and that my old camera does not become like my poor racing bike did when I learned to drive, forlorn, neglected and forgotten.

So while my OM4Ti gently weeps I will upload my first self portrait taken on my new camera.

Now Judas's fate is to be chewed for eternity by Satan but what do you think should happen to us Contrary Mary's?

Ok, I've kept you guessing for a day but now I have to come clean and tell you all the answer,

now the tag was 'impossible quiz' which meant that actually no-one was going to get it though la spice and brokendown angel got very close, and if I had to single out a winner it would be to blog lands very own little spice rack as she saw that it was something to do with people trying to change their destiny so bravo to her and everyone else who took part.

Now the real answer is that I talked about each one in my last therapy session! (Followers of CBT look away now in horror at the digressions that my wise and lovely Sue lets me get away with.)

I acted out the sketch where Ted tells Ralph that he doesn't have to hold him quite so tight when he is on his motorbike and Ralph, after having been in Seventh Heaven clinging to his secret beau now makes every effort, decent man that he is, to not touch Ted at all.

My goodness doesn't Ralph look like David Cameron!

The Monkey's Paw came up in a discussion on, well done Brokendownangel, on being careful what you wish for. So I told her the story as she did not know it, and if you do not know it you can find it here
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/mnkyspaw.htm

And Maria, well I was discussing, pretensious git that I am (how do you spell that bloody word) Herman Hesse's 'Narciss and Goldmund' which I haven't read for many years but centres around two monks within a monastery one austere and well suited to what he does the other a wild spirit who can only be liberated to be his true self by leaving Holy Orders behind and embracing the outside world. Luckily, the austere one recognises what the other needs and allows him to leave......

And I suddenly exclaimed

"That's also the plot of The Sound of Music" and sung a quick rendition of 'Climb every mountain."

Clearly, I am having too much fun in therapy..........

My time has come and gone so I can simply watch now with only the faintest hint of regret and an easily suppressed desire to lace up my boots and be out there again.
The floodlights are switched on and there is a slight buzzing sound as the filaments heat up and during that time the pitch is lit by an unearthly light which casts little shadow and seems to come from the earth itself. It almost feels like moonlight and during that brief moment, I imagine that, amongst the young muddied men out there now bantering and running, booting the ball high into the night sky and jeering at anyone who drops it, there are also the ghosts of those who once graced this pitch. These ghosts leave the faintest of traces in the air as they run and their voices are almost, but not quite completely, lost. Perhaps, they can only be seen and heard by the living ghosts, ghosts such as myself, who can just discern their younger and better selves as they enact the set plays that we once did in order to outwit the opposition, the same set plays that the adults in the top half of the pitch are carrying out and the same set plays that my son's team perform close to where I am stood. The same move probably carried out since rugby began, number 8 picks up at back of scrum, commits opposing scrum half, feeds scrum half who at pace commits opposition winger and the final pass goes out to winger who should, but never is (!), be free to run.

Myself, and two of the coaches watch our sons' play, two of the boys in their father's position and mine thankfully not and with a smile of pride we imagine when the team sheet in the club house will again contain a Daniels, a Mace and a Knight.

We try not to imagine that our sons' time will also come and go and that one day their ghosts will join those of their Fathers illuminated briefly by the moonlit glow of the floodlights.

OK,

What links,

The Fast Show's Ted and Ralph,

With W.W Jacob's 'The Monkey's Paw'

and Maria from The Sound of Music?

Any ideas anyone?

From my archives,

I was listening to Radio 4 on the way into work and there was an interview with Daniel Barenboim who is this year's Reith lecturer. At one point, in what was a fascinating interview, he said that he had a 'compulsion to create with sound'. I thought this expressed a profound idea which is that for some people there is an urgent need to make sense of the world whether that be through sound, light or science. Now not everybody who feels this compulsion is blessed with the same talent but that does not make the urgency to express any less piquant. I remember viewing the film 'Amadeus' and seeing it as a tragedy, not for Mozart, but for Salieri. Both were visited with the same compulsion to create but Mozart was the greater talent yet of all those that appreciated Mozart only Salieri was cursed with appreciating how great Mozart's talent was and how relatively mediocre his own was. And of course in Salieri's eyes how could such beauty be created by such an impure vessel? Nowadays, we share Salieri's horror at someone 'immoral' also being talented but unlike Salieri we feel as if their poor behaviour actually detracts from their talent.

The power of music fascinates me. I am regularly moved to tears by it but it is not the lyrics that have this power but the sheer sound of it. How does it have this affect? Why does it have this effect? Why me and not others? As a student music was so essential to me that it helped me to cope with the pain that I was feeling because it expressed that pain. Or perhaps its power is darker that I was seduced by it and led into a darker view of the world than I would otherwise have had?

I cannot express how I feel through music. I can remember being about twenty two sat down with my guitar, completely frustrated, totally unable to express how I felt with these six strings. I did not want to learn other peoples songs and court favour with others by strumming around the campfire I wanted to say how I felt and I just couldn't do it! Many years later listening to Bjork I saw that it was possible to express how I felt but you needed to be a playful, Icelandic pixie in order to do that.

I have rediscovered photography recently and it tells my story in a way that I cannot achieve through sound. So my compulsion to create will be expressed through light and the alchemy that occurs when this light reaches the film.

I guess all of us have a compulsion to create with words........

Otherwise why would we blog?

When I was a student I roomed with a young man from Sheffield who as a devout Socialist proposed that because the masses were so stupid, the evidence for this being provided that they had voted in Margaret Thatcher, that they had forfeited the right to vote. Decisions should only be made by an intellectual elite who, of course, knew best and therefore what was needed to be done. To enter this elite, and prove your intellectual merit, you had to think like him because he was self evidently right. In order to achieve this logical state of affairs there would need to be a Revolution and stupid people like my father who had voted Conservative would need to be shot. Silly liberals like myself who defended everyones right to vote on the grounds that no one group of people can have full possession of the correct way to govern would also, regrettably, have to join the Fascists up against the wall but then, after all the ends did justify the means and to quote W H Auden sometimes murder was necessary. When argued with he would play his trump card which was to prove that he spoke for the romantic but ignorant masses because he came from up North and was therefore a true member of the Proletariat. This despite the fact that both parents were teachers and his Dad actually a Head Teacher. I clearly had no right to comment as I was from the South and therefore a leach on Britains industrial heartlands which made me a member of the Middle Classes despite my Mum being a lolly pop lady and my Dad being a wages clerk.

As an avid reader of George Orwell I had come across the great man's denunciation of this rancid totaltarian tosh before when it had been widespread in the Thirties and I guess in the early eighties it was entering its last and I hoped dying phase so it saddens me to see, again, such views being advanced on blogs.

Now democracy is far from perfect, of course some people are ignorant and sometimes the media can be deceptive but as a system it is so much better than any of the alternatives> Those that think that we would be better governed by a self appointed elite should maybe check what the likes of Vaclav Havel thought about being ruled by that particular system. Democracies make mistakes but they also don't tend to have gulags either.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a sunlit room with a large window that overlooked a beautiful garden.
I jumped through the glass of the window and then ran across the garden, laughing with the sheer joy of being able to run so fast and then I took off and flew! Higher and higher I flew closer and closer to the sun and then, for a brief moment, I was full of its warm and golden light and my body became, for once, completely relaxed and it was the most wonderful of experiences and then I simply atomised and briefly lit up the heavens. There was no pain in this and again it felt wonderful.

I was walking through a local churchyard when I saw carved on one of the tombstones the simple refrain

"He Lived."

My first thought was that I hoped that the stone's carver had got his tenses right,

And the second was that, hand on heart, I don't think anyone could say that about me.