2015 in 15: Nothing Remarkable

Looking back at 2015 I decided I’d done nothing.

While this was not strictly true I thought it would be interesting to attempt to capture the sense of nothingness in a retrospective piece. Sorry if this seems a little wallowing and indulgent, but it’s January, I’m allowed to wallow. So following the format I used for 2014 and 2013 here’s this year’s shot at a little recap of 2015 in 15 sentences with 15 photos I’ve taken* during the course of the year. If you click on the first image you can read the text alongside the pictures as you scroll through if you prefer.

I began 2015 with a wintery stomp on an unseasonably warm but predictably dull day where the river below Trelissick was a swampy teal under a pewter sky: nothing remarkable, a fitting start, I suppose, for a year in which looking back I thought I did nothing.

Then, coming out of the supermarket in the morning one day before work I caught a sound which cast my glance skyward as I filtered from the sounds of the everyday something to make me look up: two ravens cronking high high up above Mabe.

The extraordinary above the mundane, the something in the nothing.

Whilst reading The Neverending Story in my lunchbreaks I remembered how of all the movie villains of childhood – the witches, the bad kings, the Emperor, the skeksis – none was more to be feared than The Nothing; even as a child I knew who the real enemy was.

We had summer in spring.

I saw deer with new antlers still in velveteen, in the dappled shade of trees hemmed with the green of April’s bud.

I saw the floating ghosts of two barn owls hunting back and forth over a field on a summer’s night, near invisible but for the moonlight reflecting off their wings.

You can see ‘nothing’ at night for the dark, after all.

I saw damsels and dragons in the September sun: living jewellery whose fragile aerial lives last days, weeks.

I saw a heron at the beach like he was on holiday for the day.

I saw goldfinches fiddling in the undergrowth opposite the railway platform whilst I’m doing nothing waiting for a train.

And I saw black headed gulls in winter plumage squealing on Holy Brook, a City Centre sound misplaced from a winter’s low tide back home.

A thinnest sickle moon in the morning sky of the new year; the next night its notable absence another remarkable nothing.

The sun sets.

And the sun rises.

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Dear Bracknell: Valentine to a Place I Love to Hate

It’s easy to write about a place you dislike. It’s easy to like writing badly about a place to which you attribute little value. My college tutor once suggested that a good way to write about somewhere you don’t like is to write it a love letter. So here’s a challenge for Valentine’s Day: find the place you care about least, and write about that.

—

Dear Bracknell…

Who could fail to appreciate your roads and your railings; your bedding plants and billboards; and best of all the fountains and the sculptures so mismatched and out-of-place as the buildings they were stuck between that they become fitting and perfect. The Granite Ball – hailed as the highlight of the town, with its own website described by its founder as ‘probably the dullest thing on the internet’.

The Snowmen and other stories

Last Monday it snowed. I thought that might happen if I specifically posted an article about it snowing everywhere else in the UK apart from where I was. I’d like to claim that’s why I did it, but in truth I was so delighted with the sunshine I couldn’t have wished for any other weather there and then. It didn’t snow much, just an inch or two stuck on the roofs, fences and our garden table. A quick walk proved the landscape to be underwhelmingly under-snowed-under, with no frost to rime the trees and little more than a sugar sprinkling left on the fields and farms of the surrounding hills. I came back home and scraped up all the snow in the garden to make the biggest snowman that I possibly could. Ten minutes later he developed a lean and his hat fell off. Before half an hour had gone by he’d broken in the middle.

Effigy of a Country Churchyard

 

 

 

A vignette from the archives on theme of churches.

As it was set in early January I could only connect church with Christmas.

So I wrote about cake, as you do.

 

Two days until Christmas and the snow is just the icing on the cake.  Literally.  Outside the snow has mostly melted away or compacted to a slippery brown fudge, much less festive than the sugar and egg-white idyll of the traditional family Christmas cake.  The scene is set with a plaster polar bear peeping out from frosty model trees at the foot of a marzipan hill.  The hill is crowned with a two-inch plaster effigy of a church with a red brick square tower and bright stained glass windows in a creamy rendered nave.

A couple of miles away stands the real thing, postcard perfect on its hill-on-a-hill, though thankfully without any bears in the woods. 

Tree Time

Continuing with National Tree Week here’s something from the archives about a memorable tree from the garden of the house where I grew up.

Thanks to Blacktop Rain for reminding me of it  (the article that is, I couldn’t forget the tree).

A long garden, defined by trees.  The forked apple tree at the centre is the focal point that pulls the eye, the point to which all garden-doings seem to gravitate.  Birds make it their stopover on route from hedge to hedge, like children touching base in a game of tag.

It marks the time, this tree, standing like a sundial in the centre of the lawn, its shadow marking out the hours, its changing appearance marking out the seasons.  In winter it’s a bare framework, mushroom coloured and silvery, smooth on the newer branches, patched on the older trunk with flakes like burnt bark pastry.  An ancient scar is filled with cement. 

Henley Pre-gatta

Aston Ferry – Hambleden Lock – Remenham – Henley-on-Thames (where?)

25th June 2012 (the Regatta took place between 27th June and 1st July)

Aston Ferry is ferry-less. There is a puddle through the whole middle of the wishing gate. A heron lifts off from the near bank of the Thames. Greylag geese have two goslings, grey and lagging behind. Canada geese, four: strangely green-looking things like they’ve been rolled in lichen. Ducks are free-riding the fast flowing stream, or paddling sideways to the quieter eddies at the sides. Something garden bird-shaped makes a straight flight across from the water meadow to the tree-line on my left. Unremarkable in size and flight I catch a glimpse of its blue and orange. I haven’t seen a kingfisher for years.

Here the river is wide. Boats are forced to navigate through Hambleden Lock, which controls the flow through the gap between the west bank and one of three small islands in the curve of the river. Reaching out from the other side of this island and stretching diagonally downstream and across the river to Hambleden Mill on the opposing bank is the weir. The metal access bridge feels fragile and temporary – though I know it is both strong and relatively permanent – a utilitarian scaffold frame with narrow walkway, steel railings and gaps underfoot between the metal treads through which the river can be seen. It is a strange feeling to stand over the middle of the river, watching it, hearing it, smelling it, feeling it, all round you: through those railings and below that framework. I feel slightly detached, standing still above the full force of one of the wettest June’s on record gushing through beneath.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Wordsworth

The Valley Garden, Virginia Water, Surrey (c) Craig & Jane Friesema

15th April 1802, Ullswater, Cumbria

Dorothy and William Wordsworth set out for a lakeside walk after lunch. It was very windy, and they sheltered behind various props manmade and natural, spotting, among other things, a field being ploughed, some primroses and anemones, some cows. Oh and some daffodils. Dorothy writes it in her diary. Her brother uses this as a resource for a poem. The rest is history.

15th April 2012, Virginia Water, Surrey

I set out for a lakeside walk with my mum. It was very windy. Coming upon a division in the prescribed pathways we were undecided as to which to follow. We plumped for the middle way and found that the temporary sign To The Daffodils does not deceive: we soon espied them

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
fluttering and dancing in the breeze.