Wandering in Wonderland

Imagine! Big brown hares running wild across the fields, leaping, racing, twisting, turning, lolloping and then up on hind legs, boxing – another of nature’s amazing spectacles! March hares! Why March? Why not! After a long, cold winter, the sap is rising, the sun is shining and it’s mating time again in the Hare Hareem. ‘Mad as a March hare’! Their apparent sense of fun is infectious, as they race across the grass. Their energy and sheer physical strength is something to be envied. I watch, fascinated, as they stand tall on strong back legs and inflict powerful front-paw blows on their boxing partners. Masterful! Not a game for wimps. However, research seems to show that the sparring is actually about unwilling females fending off passionate males, not, as might be supposed, rival males keen to show off their sexual prowess and win their mate. There’s a touch of spring madness in the air and hares seem to be first in line to catch it.

‘Mad as a March hare’? ‘Mad as a Hatter’! There’s another puzzling saying. Have hat makers always had a reputation for madness? Does a hat designer need a little craziness to succeed? Is it something inherent in the artistic temperament? Or is it only Lewis Carroll who envisaged madness in hatters? Were hatters as sane and sensible as the rest of us before Alice? And why do they go to tea parties? Maybe for a spot of networking – to drum up extra business? Top hats, party hats, fancy dress, hats for dormice…? This March madness really seems to be catching…

‘Daft as a brush’! Does anyone really say that? Well, yes they do! I’ve thought and thought about this one. Whilst I can see an argument or two for hares exhibiting a touch of craziness in their springtime behaviour and it’s a possibility that Lewis Carroll may have had some inside information on the psychological make-up of hatters, I find it hard to attribute either sanity or insanity, silliness or common sense to an inanimate object. What kind of a brush might be daft? A hair (hare?) brush? A broom? Perhaps a toothbrush or a toilet brush? A hat brush! What about a paint brush? Perhaps the one that painted the roses red for the Queen of Hearts? That was pretty daft. Even Alice thought so. No, this one defeats me. Any ideas?

First Day of Spring

Spring is such a lovely word. It has so many connotations. Somehow, mixed up in my thinking, is an idea of new things, green shoots, yellow flowers, the first buds of forsythia showing on the bare wood – my mother used to bring the dead sticks into the warm house in January and we would wait for the first tiny little buds of yellow to burst out on the twigs.

Spring …………. It’s about bursting out, springing up, lambs bounding along, tadpoles wriggling, frogs hopping, everything moving. It’s about waking up from the long winter’s sleep, about life breaking out, so it must be good! It happens every year, whatever the weather has been – a dull, muggy winter or a crisp, bright one with branches laden with snow and bulbs having to force their way up through a thick white blanket. It happens whether you feel bright, happy and expectant or whether you are weighed down with depression – the long, dull winter blues … no matter what, spring has sprung, as they say. What an amazing life force!

If we could just tap into some of this energy – this life force – especially when winter, or sadness, or depression kicks in and squashes out the life, the hope, the passion in our lives. Then we need our own spring, our own new thoughts, new hopes to emerge like fresh blades of grass, or tiny bulbs …

I’ve run out! I’ve exhausted my train of thought. The burst of energy and creativity has dwindled. My spring is over and now I need to wait, to crawl into my cave to recharge and recuperate, like a bear in hibernation, waiting for another spring of creative thought to dawn.

More of a bleat than a tweet!

I saw lambs today! Frolicking, frisking, twisting, turning, gambolling, snowy white lambs! They were sandwiched, on a small strip of land, between the main road and the glasshouses. I felt sorry for them in their polluted, noisy, restricted and unattractive environment. It was a far cry from the romantic idyll of country living where I thought they belonged.

Then I looked at them. They were totally absorbed in their gambolling and frisking, leaping about on the green grass and running, at intervals, for comfort and sustenance from their mother, buffeting her mercilessly in their greedy attempts to feed. Theirs would be a short life anyway, no doubt, but it seemed to be a happy one. They knew no other, more privileged environment and, as far as I could see, yearned for nothing more than the company of their fun-loving brothers and sisters and the warmth and nutrition of their mother’s warm fleece and ever-ready milk. The strip of grass seemed to provide all that was needed by the sheep too.

Nothing to worry about – everything provided for. Who was I to complain that they were needy and neglected? Just indulging in a spot of naive anthropormorphism and projecting my own needs and wants on a bunch of contented, well-fed creatures. Nothing to bleat about after all!

Escape to the Country

I asked a friend the other day “What would you do if you could start another career now – all over again – without any of the limitations you feel would stand in your way if you were really to try and do that?” We discussed the way doing that might mean abandoning restrictions like age, training, qualifications, mindset, but not the real essence of personality that is non-negotiable, the character and temperament that makes a person who he is. He thought for a long while and then said, to my great surprise, “I would probably be a TV or radio presenter or a chat show host!” It was such a complete change from what he does now that it took me a while to take it in. But, strangely, when I pushed aside pre-conceived ideas, I realised that it was a brilliant choice – one which was not at all unreasonable, but which would use many of his talents and free him from some of the incompatible elements of his present job. Why not?

Imagination is a wonderful thing. It frees us from our present reality, the humdrum routine of our everyday lives, and sets us on another course, even if just for a short while. In our early married life, living in a London suburb, we spent a lot of time imagining. We would imagine where we might live one day when we had the opportunity to move somewhere more to our taste – our ‘escape to the country’. After a few years we achieved the house move of our dreams. It was doubtless not what everyone would want but, to us, it was the fulfilment of a lot of planning and dreaming. The prize? – a three bedroom semi on the Isle of Wight, with a beautiful garden and a ‘sea glimpse’ from the back bedroom. In our terms we had ‘made it’!

On the island we quickly settled in, started a family, acquired a cat and made friends. The nature of the island and the lack of employment opportunities there meant that the population contained a higher percentage than normal of dreamers and ‘entrepreneurs’. Self-employed businessmen and women abounded, setting up tea rooms, guest houses and sailing centres, fishing or painting and decorating. Seasonal employment in the tourist trade was the only form of career for many. We will never forget one particular couple of idealistic schemers with whom we spent many hilarious hours, inventing crazy money-making ventures like motorised prams and coffin-shaped wardrobes (‘lasts a lifetime and never wasted’)! None of us had the practical know-how or business sense to turn any of our imaginings into reality but we had a lot of fun.

Nowadays I do most of my dreaming on holiday. Holidays are the times when I can indulge my romantic ideas of being someone else ‘just for a while’. Like the participants on TV shows who try out other people’s dream houses in the countryside, experience what it is like to be a ballroom dance champion or a master chef, or try out the lifestyle ‘down under’, my holidays give me the chance to try out life in another setting. I can be wined and dined on a balmy Mediterranean hotel terrace, as the sun sets over the bay, I can experience life in a tiny country cottage with oak beams and no dishwasher, I can try out a narrow boat on the waterways and drift lazily through locks, or imagine what it might be like to live in another country way outside my comfort zone.

Usually when we dream we look forward to it with great anticipation, throw ourselves into it for a few days or weeks and then go home, breathing a sigh of relief that home in fact means a comfy bed, a dishwasher and no crocodiles. However, occasionally, maybe once in a lifetime, we dream ourselves into reality! Coming home, we have a revelation and decide that what we tried out for fun suited us better than what we have back home! Our move from London to the Isle of Wight had its source in one of those ‘imaginings’, which quickly turned from a holiday dream to reality, with no regrets. Who knows, maybe my friend will end up presenting the BBC Breakfast Show after all!

Meditations on a Sunny Day

The sunlight pours in through my freshly cleaned windows… yes, I am showing off!! It happens so rarely that I need to boast about it. I worked hard on them yesterday and I need to revel in the fact that I won’t need to do it again for a long time! I need to bask (just this once) in the knowledge that my windows are cleaner than yours! Aside from the fact that the bright sunshine now shows up smears on the windows that I missed yesterday, I am happy! I can see through the windows now, instead of having my attention always arrested by the ugly spatters of dust, mud and other unidentified flying objects that have appeared on them over time (quite a lot of time). Living in a busy city with a major building project just down the road is a recipe for disaster. All day long the diggers and trucks come and go, churning up the mud and spraying grit and sand as they go. Living in a country that is built on sand makes for an awful lot of dust.

The sunshine shows up the dust that has dared to return to the polished surfaces I cleaned yesterday (yes, I’m boasting again!). Actually I hate cleaning. Like many people, I find it mind-numbingly boring, infinitely tedious, and everything in me rebels against the sheer pointlessness of doing something so time-consuming and unfulfilling when, in just a couple of days, it will have returned to its natural state, despite all my best efforts. So my only reward is the warm glow that I get from the sense of achievement (short-lived, it’s true, but good at the time) and the chance to boast.

Already today, the sunshine is showing up the places where, in one day alone, dust has gathered once again, just fallen out of the atmosphere onto our poor old house that we paint and patch up, propping it up with endless renovations so that it will keep on going for another few decades. I can see the motes of dust now, suspended in the shafts of sunshine. There they hang, taunting me with their invincibility and their never-to-be-conquered presence. Some lucky mortals actually revel in these futile domestic tasks, enjoying their skirmishes with the enemy, crowing over their achievements: their temporary triumph over the army of dust mites, oblivious to the steady, ongoing decay of their environment. For decaying it is. From ‘dust to dust’ and from ‘ashes to ashes’ we go and we can do little to stop the rot, no matter how hard we try.

In the church-going days of my youth I understood that this miserable process was all, in some mysterious way, part of ‘The Fall’ – a choice that was made one fateful day in history that set us on our way towards sin and sickness, death and decay - and dust! Modern technology seems to have done little to rescue us from the last of these ills, as well as from life’s ultimate conclusion. Apparently, just to add insult to injury, a large number of these annoying grains of dust are made up of my own (and your) decaying body cells! We ourselves help to make up the wretched dust that surrounds us and are daily cleaning up the consequences of our own mortality! There’s food for thought on a sunny day!

It’s time to go out to play! Enough of these morbid thoughts! I will leave my decaying house behind, in the knowledge that, for better or worse, my chores are done. With a clear conscience and lightness of heart, I can take my decaying body on a well-earned jaunt, going in search of warm sunshine and more pleasurable pursuits!

H2O

A baby is 78% water. A man’s body is about 60% water and a woman’s about 55% - more fatty tissue! A fat man has a smaller percentage of water in his body than a thin man. About 83% of our blood is water. 70% of our brains are water! Every day human beings must replace around 2.4 litres of water. Water is crucial to the human race. We’re full of it. We need it to live.

We never seem to have the right quantity of water. Half the world suffers from a shortage of it. On the other hand, many places in the world suffer from a terrifying surfeit: floods, tidal waves, avalanches. Either way, problems with water bring disaster in their wake. The rest of us, unthreatened by disaster and more blessed than the rest, just complain anyway!

“It’s raining (again)” we moan. That grey, dreary, inconvenient wet stuff keeps on pouring down out of a dark, cloud-filled sky that looks as if it will never clear. Water features strongly in my life. It always has. One of my earliest childhood memories concerns being bored on a rainy day. (I still have a very low threshold for boredom!) I remember as a small child, standing on the red tiled floor in our kitchen, aimlessly staring out of the window. While my mother busied herself with the household chores, I watched the raindrops settling on the windowpane, dripping down and down, collecting in little rivulets, joining and dividing and forming intricate patterns on the glass. It seemed like time stood still and it would carry on raining forever. I just wanted to go out to play. The weather still affects me strongly and I am at the mercy of conflicting emotions, dependent on the sunshine or the rain, the azure blue skies or the depressing grey.

I love to live near the sea. Growing up in London, I never dreamed that the sea could be for every day. The excitement of the approach to the seaside, the first glorious view of the distant sea, the taste of salt on my lips was, for me, reserved for those special holiday times. When, soon after our marriage, we first moved to the seaside to live high on a hill above Brighton, I was captivated. When I hung out the washing in the little yard at the back of our terraced house, sniffed the salty air and listened to the raucous seagulls screaming overhead I was hooked. Never again could I live far from the sea. It was a part of me and a part of my ‘everyday’. I had fallen in love.

Ever since, in all my travels, I have stayed close to the sea. Ten years on the Isle of Wight, that tiny diamond-shaped isle off the south coast of England, sealed my fate as a seaside addict. Years later, living on the mainland of Europe, I have stayed close to my beloved seaside. Whether it sparkles blue with gentle, cream-tinged wavelets, or boils ferociously with storm-driven grey/green rollers, I love it and am a prisoner to its charms.

If I can’t have the sea, give me a broad, deep river. Let me sit by the Rhine and watch the heavy barges pounding up and down the waterways. Or let me stroll beside a bubbling brook, a meandering stream, a muddy estuary, full of the sounds of curlews and oyster catchers. But give me water!

Without waterways to charm me, seaside to lift my spirits or a brook to cheer me I dwindle and fade. I pine. I shed a few salty tears when I left the island all those years ago. I shed a few more nowadays when I think of the quaint country villages and windswept seashores I have left in order to take up residence in a strange city in a foreign land. My city home is still close to the sea, but this seaside is lined with concrete, Casinos and commerce. The seaside I crave is one of cliffs, rock pools, sea pinks and the cries of gulls. My tears remind me once more of the watery element that plays such an important role in my life and in all our lives. We all cry our share of tears. It makes us human. It binds us together in our common humanity and reminds us of what is important to us.

Water makes me cry. Water makes me smile. Water brings disaster. Water keeps me alive. As important as the air we breathe, water is a crucial element of our lives. Another rainy day comes and goes. Like it or not (and I don’t!), we cannot live without it. H2O – simple, yet profound.