Ropes Let Down to the Lost

I went down to the sea late this afternoon. The sun was setting in pools of pink gold behind me, but as I walked around the headland, the sky was a wash of early evening blues and greys and lavender, hazed with clouds, and with a vast moon rising: luminous, silver-gilt, almost full. The mountains behind the bay just lightly sketched - mist on mist.
The sea itself was pale, the way it goes at dusk, strangely colourless, but magical.

I needed some air.
I needed to clear away the weekend's cobwebs, and the dogs were only too happy to keep me company. We went in silence, just the rush of the high tide chasing itself into the bay, the clatter of dragging stones as the big waves receded. Nothing else.
It was cold, but we didn't hurry, it was too beautiful to leave.
I wished I'd taken a camera. Even my phone with its cracked screen.

The crisp breeze soon cleared the tangles in my head. Tangles, mostly, of other peoples' problems - as if my own weren't enough! Cold air is very cleansing. 

And then, into the stillness slipped Mary Oliver.
As she so often does - her words slip in so easily.
She died this week, that wonderful poet.
I hope she is even now considering her eternity 'as another possibility'.

Perhaps standing on the prow of the headland, staring into the darkening, busy waves brought her back to me:

'I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.'

Or perhaps she was in my mind anyway, having just left us.

With Model Dog leaning her comforting weight against my legs in the long, rough grass, the second thought came swiftly on the heels of the first - how could it not, while I was standing there in the gloaming, with that mauve-brindled sky and the childishly perfect moon.

'Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.'

As I put the dogs back into the car, it was inevitable that, having brought her to mind, her most poignant lines of all echoed through my head, as they often do - so very often, many a time with more than a hint of reproach:

'Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?'   

What indeed?

With time spooling out behind me and all.
But while I try to puzzle that one out, I can only be grateful for what you did with yours, Mary.


'...poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.'


 

The rooks were going to bed by moonlight as I got home

 

A Gold Medal at Bloom for WB Yeats

BLOOM - The Final!


When you get behind with something, it becomes ever harder to spur yourself into catching up.
I seem to be suffering quite badly this year with un-catch-up-ability.
My garden has gone to rack and ruin, my house looks like Miss Haversham's, and my blog feels largely abandoned.

But recently I had an email from Bloom, asking if I'd like to submit a design for next year's Show. All this year's designers will have received one. I don't think I would, but it made me realise I've never even got as far as posting that my garden won a Gold Medal at this year's Show.
I was thrilled. Stunned, but thrilled.
And to think I nearly wasn't present for the awards!
It was only because Niall, whose garden bordered mine, said, as we downed tools on the last day: 'So - that's it then! See you at 8am on Wednesday!'
In my naievity, I'd been thinking: 'At last, the garden's finished! A lie-in before Press Day arrives!'
Hah!
But thanks to Niall, I was on parade bright and early, and present to receive my award.

My Gold Medal, still sitting on the dresser amidst the dusty china

And I even made it onto the national news, and TV, and radio, and newspapers, and magazines...

A few of the newspaper and magazine cuttings, inc Sligo Now, The Irish Independent, The Irish Times and The Weekender

It was a lovely few days, the Show itself.
Not least because my brother, the Mad Cyclist from Edinburgh, and my sister from Suffolk came over to see it for themselves, which involved both of them getting on planes - and planes, as we all know, mean hassle and expense. (Wonder Brother was, alas, in Portugal - thoughtless boy!)
The In-Charge and Surfer Son came too. It didn't involve a plane ride, but proved far more problematic than either of my siblings' journeys. The treacherous Silver Beast decided that not enough attention was being paid to her, plus she had not been invited to accompany me to Dublin, so she trashed her alternator and broke down before they reached the county border. The poor menfolk had to re-group, borrow a car from dear DodoWoman and start their journey all over again.
Not amusing.
But it was lovely to see them all, and they all loved the garden.

The Irish President and Sabina, his wife, visited on Opening Day, and I presented them with a WB Yeats rose. Mrs Higgins told me how delighted they were with it, she said Michael D has planted a rose garden and this will be its centre-piece. As he is a Yeats scholar, I can believe that it will be.

The Irish President, Michael D, and Sabina visit my garden. In his speech to open Bloom 2015 (of which he is Patron), the President said that my garden had inspired him the most. Praise indeed!

Various other dignitaries came to visit - including the British Ambassador to Ireland and his wife who turned out to be old friends from London from another lifetime. Goodness, what a bubble I live in these days! I had no idea they were living in Dublin, and are so important!
Maud Gonne and WB Yeats himself were fleetingly spotted in the garden at one point, and over the days of the Show, other people came and sang, or recited poetry, and it was all very beatifully done.

Maud Gonne and Yeats. Poor Yeats, the most casual observer could have told him that his suit was in vain

The Orpheus Choir sang for us - their recital included The Lake Isle of Innisfree

More singers in the garden

Famous Irish poet Pat Boran recites The Lake Isle of Innisfree to the President and Mrs Higgins. Michael D could easily have recited it to us, no one would know Yeats better.

 

Gary Graham brings Leo Varadkar, Irish Minister for Health, to visit my garden

 
I remembered to ask the President to sign my garden visitor's book, but I totally forgot to ask Jane and Dominic, the British Ambassador, or Leo Varadkar, the Irish Minister for Health, or anyone of the others.
Ah well...

Happy memories.
Looking back, I think I was so engrossed in building the garden, I hadn't taken the actual Show end of things on board really. And truth to tell, I was pretty tired by the time it opened.

Too busy building the garden to think about the Show. Seamus was mad enough to let me loose on the digger...

I certainly hadn't thought about the medals, or not until Seamus said something about the judges one day.
I was appalled. How could I have overlooked something as fundamental as judges?  I've been to Chelsea and Bloom often enough...
By the week before the Show, the atmosphere in the show gardens was taughtening every day. Everyone except muggins was focused.
To be fair, I'd been asked to do the garden because of Yeats 2015, I hadn't set out to win a medal. But by the end of May, everyone around me was starting to get a touch of exam-fever, which is very contagious, whether you like it or not.
On the last day of the build, the Bear called me over.
He pointed a finger into my face and I knew he had something serious to say. I felt like a school kid caught on the hop. He didn't beat about the bush.
'Are you happy with your garden?' he asked.
I thought about it for a moment.
'Yes,' I said. It was the truth. The garden was, I suddenly realised, exactly as I'd planned it in my head.
'Then f**k everything else,' he said.
It was the best advice he could have given me. I went back to my B&B, climbed into bed and slept like a baby.

Opening Day started early with a Gold Medal

So winning a Gold Medal was like some huge bonus, and even better was the judges' return visit. Several of them had just flown over from the Chelsea Flower Show in London, which runs the week before Bloom. On their initial visit (when I had two minutes to explain any aspect of my design I wanted to), they told me they'd been asked not to patronise Bloom by marking any differently from how they'd have marked the gardens at Chelsea.
At the time, it made the palms of my hands clammy and my stomach go into spasm. Not having considered the goal posts at all, it didn't really help to have them suddenly illuminated in neon.

When they came back for the follow-up visit after the medals (a less nerve-racking affair), one of them was kind enough to say: 'We haven't really got anything to say to you. Your attention to detail is incredible. You've created a piece of theatre. It's wonderful.'
And, as they were leaving, another one turned back. 'I just wanted you to know,' she said, 'that the judges decision was unanimous.'

To me, their comments were even better than the Gold Medal itself.
And so was the response from the public. My garden had been in the media in the run up to Bloom, and had received lots of good publicity, but I hadn't expected to look out from my 'lair' - the pagoda tent Bloom provides next to your plot - and see crowds standing 5-deep trying to see into the garden, with, every now and again, a friend or acquaintance pushing through to come and say hello.
It was amazing to receive such a warm and wonderful reception.
I think it was the only thing that kept me upright.
I was so tired, I could have crawled into Yeats' little cabin and slept for the entire 5 days.

Yeats' cabin with the Mary Cronin's Cloths of Heaven forming a sun-shield outside the front door, his 9 bean rows and bee hive hidden on the right and his wild 'lawn' and apple tree hidden on the left. My pagoda in the background

An overview of the garden from the front corner

Martha Quinn's fabulous sculpture 'The Waters and the Wild' - forming a 21st century window into Yeats' imagination

Looking towards the little path leading down to the lake. On the table the In-Charge's lovely drawing of Lissadell

The path down to the Lough Gill, Nik Purdey's mural forms the backdrop

Colin Scott's amazing White Birds - ceramic sculptures 'flying' amongst the trees on the lake shore

But by mid-June I was totally exhausted.
The decision was taken, around the time of the Show, to move my Yeats Garden back to Sligo.
It was great to know that, after just 5 days on show, the garden wasn't going to be 'binned', so I was delighted, but it wasn't so brilliant having to start from scratch, re-work the design and build it all over again. It was like having to re-do a maths exam.
But by some miracle we managed it and had it ready for Yeats' 150th birthday, 13 June, when - joy of joys! - Joanna Lumley came to open it.

The garden re-designed for Sligo. It now lives beside the Model Arts Centre on The Mall

Joanna Lumley opening my garden in Sligo. What a star she is!  Pic courtesy of Val Robus

What more can you say about someone who is already adored the world over?
Only one thing springs to mind, really.
She was Absolutely Fabulous.
She loved my garden. And I did remember to ask her to sign my Bloom Visitor's Book!
Of course, I gave her a WB Yeats rose as well.

Joanna's lovely message in the visitor's book, underneath the signature of Yeats' grand daughter.

A Yeatsian Twist

BLOOM 3


I'm probably the only person around who hasn't got a picture of the eclipse.
I was in the woods with the Models at the time. It was mizzling and then it went dark - ish.
The dark didn't last as long as the mizzle actually.
Squinting up at the sky, I managed to blind myself with a fingernail, a crescent moon of white-hot sunlight.

Not that it shows in this photo.

Last time there was an eclipse, we were in the south of France and it was all much more dramatic.
The sky really did darken, birds rose screeching from the trees and the world seemed to go out of sync for several minutes, an untimely wind whipping out of nowhere to whirl briefly around the market square and cathedral tower in the town where we were shopping.

Today's event wasn't quite so cinematic, although the official pictures from elsewhere are rather amazing.
Watching them, a snatch of Yeats twisted in my head, describing the photos perfectly:
'The golden aura of the moon, the silver crescent of the sun...'

I daresay Yeats is groaning in his grave, but there you go.
As it happens, my son has the original, correct version of those lovely lines tattooed on his body.
I wonder if that would make yer one groan even more loudly, or would he be quite pleased?

Blooming Gardens

BLOOM 1

I can understand why teenagers are constantly tired.
They are in the novitiate of life, and it's all exhausting.
I know, because I'm a novice at the moment.

This year is Yeats2015 - it's the 150th anniversary of the great poet's birth and there are events going on all over the place. You might have spotted one near you - Harp Concerts every full moon, Yeats on the London Underground, poetry readings at 1pm every day in Hargadons in Sligo, Yeats at the NLI in Dublin - and tomorrow he might pop up in Paddy's Day celebrations anywhere in the world, who knows!

I seem to have been living and breathing Yeats and I haven't even been to a concert or a reading yet. I haven't had time.
I was asked - last year - to design a Yeats Garden for Bloom 2015 and, knock me down  with a feather, it's been accepted and now I have to make it happen!
That's where the novice bit comes in.
Much as I love all things to do with gardens and garden festivals, I've never been involved in building a show garden before.

I've had plans, lists, phone numbers, websites and emails coming out of my ears.
I dream in square metres and my heart beats to the rhythm of plant names in Latin.
I am no longer seeing landscapes and backyards - everywhere I go, I am eyeing up possibilities and potential specimens.
And discovering how incredibly generous people are - with their time, their support, the contents of their flower beds...

Today, stomach muscles clenching in case I was making a mistake - I appointed a contractor. I wanted to appoint two - well, three actually. All of the ones I'd approached.
I think they'd all do a fantastic job, and each had something special to bring to the (potting) table. But of course it doesn't work like that, so I had to choose. I wish they knew how hard it was to make the decision - I'd much rather we all mucked in together, but life isn't like that unfortunately.
I hope I've chosen the right one. Time - as in all things - will be the judge of that.

And meanwhile, my own garden is abandoned and neglected.
It will forgive me, I daresay. In fact, in my absence, it will party its way through Spring and early summer, inviting in all the less salubrious types to dance through my borders and stay for indeterminate sleep-overs - you know, the docks and dandelions, the goosegrass - oops, sorry, the rumex obtusifolius, taraxacum officinale and galium aparine, I ought to say...

It'll be nice when I get past the tired and stomach-clenching bit.
Maybe that should be 'if' - 
My contractor said: 'It'll get worse before it gets better', and he ought to know.
Yikes!
But there again, by his own admission, he does go back and do it all over again year after year...   
Hmmm.
I'll keep you posted.

Farewell, Seamus Heaney

Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Peter Edwards c 1987

I was fortunate enough to hear Seamus Heaney reading his poetry some years ago.
Many, many poets should be prevented at all costs from reading their own work.
Perhaps it is a fear of being overcome by emotion that makes so many writers assume a toneless, deadpan voice when reading, or perhaps they take their work too seriously, but whatever the reason, the results can be dire.


It was not like that with Seamus Heaney.
He sat easily on a stool and talked about growing up in Northern Ireland.
I was just one of an audience, but it felt as if there was no one else in the room, as if his words were in response to some question I had asked.
The images of his home, of relatives and neighbours, of life in Derry during the 40s and 50s, were painted swiftly and vividly and economically, but they were real and three-dimensional and made me feel as if I had known them, or at the very least, visited them for myself.  And he spoke poignantly of his father, and of rural traditions in his local area, and of the Troubles.

Perhaps in consequence of that, his poems, when he read them, seemed to speak of things I was familiar with. They sprang off the page and took life and form in my mind's eye, and even all these years later I remember clearly the pictures conjured by his soft understatement, the emotions that his words never actually stated.

This is one of the poems he read that day:

Mid-Term Break 

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

And here is another:

Thatcher

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow
Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they'd snap.
It seemed he spent the morning warming up:

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

I met him later, at a garden party.

He was affable and friendly, easy to talk to. I remember thinking What do you say to someone who has at his fingertips the words that are only on the tip of your tongue?

I remember him looking at me as if waiting for a question he thought I was about to ask

Meaningful words eluded my fingertips and my tongue.

But we had a pleasant conversation and aside from our chitchat, I did ask him something.

'Of your own books, which is your favourite?'

He looked surprised and after a few moments, he said: 'I suppose I'd have to say Death of a Naturalist.'

I don't know if that was his favourite, but I can understand any writer having an umbilical link to their first book, their first-born.

I have read many of his books since then, and long ago also bought The Rattle Bag which Heaney edited alongside Ted Hughes. I had to buy it, for the simple reason that I was once lucky enough to meet Ted Hughes too.

If a poem is an image, written on the heart with words, then Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes were both truly poets.

It is a sad day when the Earth loses one of her poets, and if a poem is an image, written on the heart with words, then Seamus Heaney - and Ted Hughes - were truly poets. And how badly the Earth needs poets,  someone who speaks for her and of her without guile or sleight of wit, someone who sees beyond what others see, and who, in touching on her truths, adds something, rather than depleting, constantly depleting.

Dermot Blackburn's portrait of Seamus Heaney, 2010

Poems: Mid-Term Break and Thatcher by Seamus Heaney

Desert Island Women

Today is International Women's Day.
There are so many 'days' that you could make following them the sole focus of your life.
We have - apparently - just had 'National Cereal Day' and I even heard something about Pyjamas.
Don't even ask - I am as mystified as you are.
But International (maybe the Inter national is a clue here) Women's Day is something else.

Last year my CyberFriend, Isobel, marked the day on her blog, by paying tribute to some of the women who had influenced her life, and I have often thought of it since.
This year I would like to do the same.

Truthfully, I think they are too numerous to mention, but you have to start somewhere, and it is not far-fetched to say that these women's hands have helped shape the helix of my DNA. For that, I would like to thank them.

Rumer Godden with one of her beloved Pekingese

Perhaps I would have been a writer, no matter what. But it was being immersed in the magicical world of books when I was young that made me want to perpetually recreate that magic, and amongst others Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden, Louisa May Alcott, Kathleen Wendy Peyton, Edith Nesbit, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Mary Noel Streatfeild, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Bronte sisters, Georgette Heyer, Daphne du Maurier, Monica Dickens and Barbara Timewell were amongst my formative fairy godmothers. Later the influences ballooned and it would be hard to isolate a few names (though I'm sure I will do so, after this has been posted).

When you are a child, pictures can lead you into another world as surely as words, though they are not always necessary if your imagination is constantly straining at the bit. But, like most people, I have loved some books purely for their illustrations and discovered others through my son's eyes; and the images they have created in my head will be there forever. Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, Shirley Hughes, Jane Ray, Nicola Bayley, Cicely Mary Barker, Sheila Moxley and Margaret Tarrant are just some of the illustrators who have hugely enriched my life.

The Young King by Anne Grahame Johnstone - 'borrowed' from My Christmas Book of Stories & Carols pub by Award

And then of course, there is the poetry. Where to begin with poetry? Well why not with Carol Ann Duffy or Elizabeth Jennings, with Mary Oliver or Dorothy Parker, Carole Satyamurti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, HD, Kathleen Coates, Jenny Joseph, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti - Ruth Fainlight, Diane Wakoski, Maura Dooley, I could go on and on...

Next it would have to be images. I couldn't exist without beautiful images. But if I was lost with the poet-list, I'm really sunk now, there are just too many, so perhaps I should keep this even more personal. Some of the images that make my life special every day have been created by Annabel Langrish, Hilda van Stockum, Heidi Wickham, Sarah Brecht and Sylvia Ripon. 

My treasured portrait of Top Dog by Sarah Brecht

And so far I haven't even included the women who make me laugh, like Sue Perkins, Jo Brand and Victoria Wood; the ones whose gardens have inspired me - Beth Chatto, Vita Sackville West and the Empress Josephine who bred so many roses; the ones who have filled life with small inspirations, like Francine Lawrence and Susy Smith - both editors of Country Living Magazine; the Hildegardes, Dame Julians and (again) Elizabeth Goudges who open up avenues into inspirations of other kinds; the Sandi Toksvigs, WTFs and Kirsty Warks for their ascerbic commentaries; the Audrey Hepburns, Yasmin le Bons and Sandra Bullocks of this world who are just hopelessly beautiful; the Candace Bahouths, Laura Ashleys and Tricia Guilds for exploding me into colour and pattern way back when; the Ella Fitzgeralds, Lesley Garrets and Rebecca Fergusons who make me wish I could sing; or the Svetlana Beriosovas, Marie Ramberts and Darcy Bussells who make me wish I could dance.

And then, of course, there is my mother, who taught me the joy of the little things in life.

My mother - from whom I also learned to love animals

I don't think Kirsty Young would let me take this amazing crowd to my desert island, but - in a way - I'd be taking them all anyway.
Thank you, wonderful women.

Lost Season

A winter's day

I am missing winter.
There - I've said it and you can pelt me with rotten apples if you want.

Today is cloudless, the sun is warm and the snowdrops are rushing out as if they'd missed the early train.
But I see daffodil leaves and bluebell shoots poking up too.
It is the 12th of January for heaven's sake.
What happened to 'due season'?

Winter river

In place of winter we have monsoon and everything squelches beneath my feet, while new and unwelcome leaks have appeared in our house as tired old fabric gives way to the merciless onslaught of water.

For just one morning this week, we woke to the still silence of frost, a gentle shroud of thick winter mist. Our lovely, meagre trees were cocooned in soft white cloud, and a pearlescent ivory glow replaced the light of day.
But one morning is not enough.

Moody river

I want the moody river, the intransigent earth and the sleeping garden. I want the sharp, cold knife of frost, and the forgiveness of snow.
I want winter.

I have posted this poem before, but, as I haven't been writing any poetry recently, here it is again.
After all, nothing has changed.

Paper Rooks

Give me a winter's day, all knuckle-

bare, with nothing left to lose,

a day you couldn't choose in summer

when froth lies on the daydream.

But give me a winter's day: the lean

picked bones of trees gaunt on the 

purple air, a sigh of wood smoke

drifting on the breeze. These are my

thin, spare pleasures, my treasures 

rare - all fair and square my own.

Not summer's careless bounty do I

swear by, but these certain measures:

the clean, warm snuffle-breath

of cows, soft by the flung farm sheds,

the sparrows there at dawn to share

my breakfast bread. This is my wealth

when life pares to the quick: a half-

fledged, squeamish day, with sifting rain

on fields all blanched and slick, a cold

low sky uncertain when to lift,

the late grey dawn a sudden, unexpected

gift of pooling gold peeling back the east;

this heartbeat rush of wind-torn paper

rooks across bleak skies, the emptiness

that hurts the wide horizon of my eyes,

a feast of snowdrops caught beneath

the hedge - give me a winter's day.

LF

 

                             

 

Sonnets for Saints and Scribes

To celebrate both St George's Day and the birth and death of William Shakespeare, Julia - in her wisdom - has decided to make them both turn in their graves by setting a sonnet as this week's 100 Word Challenge!

There are 3 rules to sonnet writing
1  It must be 14 lines
2  It should be 10 syllables per line
3  It should rhyme a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g

Julia has made rules 2 and 3 optional.
She has also allowed us to overrun the 100 words - and I have to say, that's lucky!

For those who live beyond Shakespeare's 'sceptred isle', St George is probably less well known than good old Will. Suffice it to say he slayed the dragon, no doubt wresting a maiden from its fiery jaws at the eleventh hour in the process.

Alas, I must leave it to everyone else to tell both heroes' tales.
Here is my entry:

Would I could pen some literary rhyme

That heralded the works of saint and scribe,

To make you sigh – despite yourself – ‘Sublime!’

Not run amok to flee my diatribe.

Instead, ‘You are not Will!’ I hear you cry,

‘For pity’s sake, leave verse to better men,

‘Ere George abandon all damsels to fry,

Lest tarrying invoke your words again!

The bard will feel his grave untimely chill

With parodies of sonnets best forgot,

For as your lines are hollow, brash and shrill,

‘Twere better if this page were one vast blot!

When you can write of courage, beauty, love

Then let your verse arise to those above.’

Perhaps Julia should have had a 4th rule.
Something about content...!

Pussy-Footing Round the Problem

Coco and McCosker, the first two kittens we found in the garden, so tiny we put a hot water bottle beneath them, and a cuddly toy beside them for company.

I was reading Isobel's blog last week, in which she quoted a Seamus Heaney poem, and threw the subject of unwanted kittens and puppies into the arena. It was done with her usual light touch, and left many unspoken questions hovering in the air.

It also reawakened a memory that has haunted me all my life.
Of finding a bucket of drowned kittens, their bodies, not as Heaney describes them 'sluiced out on the dunghill, glossy and dead,' but rather drifting in a kind of dream world, their fur fluffed out in the water, their paws stilled, their faces closed.
I still see them now.

I wouldn't be able to drown a kitten.

McCosker tried to drown himself. He learnt how to drink by bathing in it

But drowned kittens aside, it never ceases to startle and appal me how some people try to dispose of animals
How some people treat animals.
It makes me want to reach for a gun.
(And it's not the animals I want to shoot.)

Someone once rescued a puppy that had been thrown into the river here in a sack. They saw it being dumped and rushed in after it. And I was brought a kitten by a sobbing tourist, many years ago. Driving along a road not far from here, they had witnessed with horror someone hurling the small, inoffensive creature out the window of the car in front, presumably to perish beneath their wheels. The woman - her entire family - were, not surprisingly, distraught, not least because, on a touring holiday, there was nothing long term they could do to help.

We called the poor little mite Tattoo, for the scar her ordeal left above one eye.
She was, incredibly, only superficially hurt, and never looked back.

Tattoo enveloped by her new family

On another occasion my small son came rushing home from school, fierce, angry tears streaming down his face. He was clutching a tiny kitten to his chest in one hand, his school bag in the other.
A parent, collecting their child, had dumped three kittens underneath a bush outside the school gate. My son's fury was only equalled by his grief. The other two had scattered in fright and he'd been unable to catch either. They were long gone when I returned to the school with him.

For years and years, when we first moved here, we would find unwanted kittens dumped in our garden, or inside the gate. Coco and McCosker were the first - who we found two days apart, and who clung to each other when re-united. There were four once, in a sack left outside my henhouse door where I'd be certain to find them. One tiny black tarantula of a creature was shut into a box made of field stones outside the back gate. It was the day of Prince Edward's wedding to Sophie I happen to remember. It rained all day, and every time I went outside I heard this plaintive crying. We called him Pink, because the aforementioned Tattoo took him under her wing like a mother.
('Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A little black nothing of feet and fur,
And by and by, when his eyes came through,
He saw his mother, the big Tattoo...'
A A Milne)

Inky black Pink with Top Dog and Dottie

On another occasion three little boys came to the front door one summer's day carrying yet another tiny kitten. 'We found her on the bridge,' they said. The bridge is old and narrow and bears all the traffic passing through the village.
I asked whether they had tried this house, that house - everyone I could think of who liked cats. 'We've tried all of them,' they replied. I didn't think their kind impulse would stretch much further.
So Pushkin arrived. She is now Senior Cat and is sitting on my lap purring as I write.

I could go on and on. There have been so many.


When I was a child in the West Indies, it was common practice to put unwanted puppies in dustbins. One in each dustbin down the street - or probably down someone else's street. It was seen as giving the hapless creatures a 'chance of life'. They weren't wheelie bins, remember and there would have been food scraps. Maybe whoever dumped kittens in my garden thought the same.

Would it have been better if they had drowned their 'litter' in a bucket?
It would have been better if they had prevented the litter in the first place.
Not difficult to do, these days. And there are plenty of charities to help with the cost for those who aren't financially able.

To my mind it's about taking responsibility. Which brings me back to Isobel's post.

Life was tough in years gone by, but I don't think I would have been inundated with unwanted felines during the deep watches of the night back then. I don't know whether country people had a more 'robust and practical' approach to their animals then or not. I suspect they did. I suspect they needed to have. My mother spent her summer holidays on a farm as a young child. She remembers seeing the matriarch of the farm knocking new-born kittens' heads against the wall. The idea fills me - and filled her - with horror, but rather like pulling chickens necks, I suppose it was quick and clean, when you knew what you were doing. She was a kind, good woman. All her family and her animals were loved, well fed and cared for. She was, I suppose, taking responsibility, at a time when that was the only option to prevent over-breeding, in-breeding and uncontrollable proliferation.


Now, conversely, when it's so much easier to take responsibility, so many don't, and now that none of us need get our hands dirty, need even contemplate having to drown kittens in a bucket or dash their brains against a wall, we have become increasingly squeamish.

Pushkin was delivered to the front door.

And woolly in our thinking.
Sentimental.


I don't know about you, but personally I rate quality far higher than quantity. I would rather put an animal down than see it suffer. Like my poor little Empress last week. Like my first dog Alfie, who developed severe epilepsy. Like Pink who developed HIV when he was only a few years old.

It's always heartbreaking, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the one thing we can do for an animal that we love but cannot mend, or an animal that no one wants. I really don't buy into animal charities - who in all other respects I wholeheartedly support - putting animals through endless treatments for illnesses or accidents when it would be kinder and better to put them to sleep and spend those much needed and hard-earned resources on the endless queue of fit and well animals needing help and a home. And what about the innumerable puppies and kittens they receive?

Ireland ships untold numbers of unwanted dogs to the UK and Sweden. Surely the UK and Sweden have enough unwanted dogs of their own? Can the organisations that ship these animals out of Ireland guarantee that each and every one goes to a loving, domestic home? I don't believe all of them can, in which case they cannot know what potential suffering those animals might yet endure. As far as I know, cats aren't shipped anywhere, but the cat rescue services are overrun with cats that no one seems to want.

If people won't neuter their animals, then dealing with the endless litters will become a greater problem than ever - an unsustainable problem. Perhaps it's kinder to be robust and practical. And we're lucky enough to live in an age when that doesn't have to entail brutality.

I guess kindness is the key.  The third essential qualifier to the robust and practical approach.
Together those three make for something stronger than sentimentality.
They make for love that puts the animal's best and long-term interests first.
Tough love, if necessary.

Swans Sing Before They Die

These are the kind of days that make me think I've died and gone to heaven.
Or France.
Perfect blue mornings, the sky rinsed and pale, the air still and cool as water, the sun a red-gold blossom bursting on the horizon.

The dogs can't wait to be off, and neither can I.

The lush, green riverbank, dotted with daisies and anemones

In the woods, the morning is clotted with birdsong and new leaves, the river a myriad rippling rings with fish rising or drunken insects falling in. Yesterday I stumbled on an empty eggshell on the riverbank, perhaps a heron's egg. They nest in the fir trees nearby and circle patiently overhead while I trespass on their hunting grounds. Sometimes they settle on the far bank and watch until we have gone, and I hear them clear as a bell: 'Hurry up! We've more important things to do than wait for you. Second breakfast is escaping.'

The heron caught fishing. Caught in the glare anyway!

The dogs generally ignore the herons. But if the cormorant is there, they will chase him to kingdom come.
They are convinced that the cormorant will become their breakfast, one of these fine days.
They are blissfully unaware that the cormorant plays games with them. He leaps into the water and flies low along it's surface, his trailing feet kicking up photogenic spray. The dogs race alongside on the bank, determined that today will be the day. Sometimes he flies away, but often he lights down onto the water and then they plunge in, doggy-paddling dementedly while he swims this way and that, luring them on.
But it is to no avail. Just as they approach he dives and they are left, staring suddenly at each other, heads turning like seals, wondering where he's gone.Only I - left on the higher bank, see him surface twenty yards downstream, and fly away.

They fall for it every time.

And I?
I fall too, but not for the antics of the cormorant.
The heron gliding overhead does it for me, or if I am lucky enough to see her, the falcon who also nests in the fir trees. And then Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry dances in my head, his words rippling through my soul like the fish in the river.

'I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,   As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!...'

This morning  was even more special.

A sudden noise made me run from under the cover of the trees, and when I looked up, a skein of swans was flying east above my head, a ribbon of white light undulating against the pearl blue sky.


I don't know when I have seen anything more beautiful. I stood, watching until all twenty-three had disappeared from sight, feeling blessed beyond belief.


I felt an absurd longing to take to the sky and follow them.
But left behind, feet firmly planted on the lush, green riverbank, I found an optimism blooming in my heart.
Swans sing before they die.

I too shall sing.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge notwithstanding.)

Walking home, I felt as if I'd been enchanted.
And I remembered, the children of Lir were turned into swans.
Not such a terrible fate, in the scheme of things.

It's too early for cygnets yet. I took these pictures on the Garavogue River a while ago.