Friday 13

It’s Friday today. It’s also the 13^th day of the month. Traditionally speaking, in my culture, this is a day of potential bad luck! However, today, as it happens, is also the last day of the school year and, consequentially, the beginning of those glorious school holidays. Surely, a day of wonderful possibilities! An interesting conflict…

“Friday the 13^th – unlucky for some!” the saying goes. What a lot of superstitions we modern, 21^st century people still hang on to! A black cat crossing my path, a ‘money’ spider landing on my head, walking under a ladder left out on the pavement – these all have their place in the jumbled thoughts in our heads concerning the advent of good or bad ‘luck’. Our thoughts are still full of these apparently outdated cautions even today: “it must have been meant” we say, vaguely or “it seems that it wasn’t to be”. What do we mean by these vague assertions? Who meant it – or didn’t? Why wasn’t it ‘to be’? Why do some of us erect mini-shrines to Buddha and other deities in our living rooms and gardens, despite the lack of any formal affiliation to any religion at all?

Ex-Calvinists, ex-Catholics, ex-Muslims, liberated fundamentalists – many of us are desperate to be free of our outworn straight-jackets of thought and belief. But are we simply enmeshed in an alternative system of limitations and superstition? “Trust in the process” advises a friend. “Don’t fret” says another – “Something better is round the corner. You’ll see.” “God never closes a door, but he opens a window” jokes Terry Wogan, that veteran of broadcasting and humour. In Switzerland scientists are spending billions searching for that elusive ‘god particle’ that gives shape and form to living organisms. Now they think they have found it. How will that affect our lives? What will it do to life and faith?

These are interesting times. Caught between old and new, discarded religions and a burgeoning fascination in yoga, meditation and peace-enhancing forms of interior decoration, we stumble on through the maze, looking for something, but not sure what. So Friday, the 13^th – what will you bring? Are you part of the outworn tradition or do you still have power to intimidate? I’ll tell you tomorrow!

There's Thunder in the Air...

Temperatures are rising. Humidity is soaring. There is thunder in the air. The long range forecast for Britain is for ‘a bit of everything’ – a traditional British summer! So we are used to it. We are promised periods of warm, dry, settled weather, punctuated by yet more changeability. It’s a lottery! But so far in this strange season, we have been plagued first by drought and then by floods. The forecast seems somewhat optimistic.

Here in the Netherlands it is a similar story, but not so extreme. Nevertheless summer is finally here. After all the weeks of waiting and the frustrating, changeable weather, it is finally warm. OK, it is wet too. The atmosphere is charged with moisture and soon a thunderstorm will be the result. The only predictable thing about the weather has been that it is changeable. But it is summer.

I remember so well those heavy, humid, threatening summer days of my childhood in London. Humidity and pollution joined together to create sultry days, with dark clouds looming overhead, threatening rain. I remember dragging my school bag home up the long steep hill, sucking an ice lolly and complaining of the heat. I remember arriving home, peeling off my sweaty school uniform and begging to be allowed to play under the garden hose or get the paddling pool out. It was summer but it was far from idyllic.

But I remember too those glorious days when summer lived up to its promise – those days when the sun shone out of a bright blue sky, with fluffy white clouds that promised only happiness and not rain. A soft breeze would spring up to create the perfect temperature, the trees provided a perfect mix of dappled sun and shade and it seemed as if summer happiness would go on forever. These things belong to my childhood. But they also belong to my adult life today.

Summer comes in a variety of ways. I love it!

I can’t resist a bit of poetry! It is so much easier to express mood in poetry. Manorbier belongs to that first kind of summer:

Manorbier

Tortuous trail

Over dusty red rock.

Wearying,

I pull myself up

The yellow-fringed path.

Yellow petals drop

Onto damp red earth.

Tall brown grasses

Barely stirring

In sultry air.

Red-brown rocks

Fall away beneath me

To waves, breaking below,

Edged with white lace.

Solitary gull

Drifts overhead.

We gather energy

For the long climb.

At the cliff edge

We pause, silent,

Draw breath.

Lonely headland

Between two bays.

Relentless,

The sun beats down.

Time stands still;

The dusty trail

Winds on.

There is Hope belongs to the second. Here is an extract:

There is hope

I wandered on the pine-fringed shore,

The sky was blue as blue;

The soft white ripples of the sea

Brought memories so clear to me.

I dreamed of days when, as a child,

In carefree mood I’d laughed and played,

Exploring life with you, my friend,

In times we thought would never end.

We found a starfish by a pool,

A pebble on the shore,

Adventure, life, discovery

Brought pure delight to you and me!

This summer there seems to be a whole new manifestation of the season. Britain is plagued by flood warnings - amber warnings and red, where danger to human life is a possibility. In the Netherlands we have had a share too. More rain in a short space of time than we could have dreamed. 'Summer is a-flooding in...' I have no poetry as yet for this kind of summer.

So is the idyllic summer's day a thing of the past? Is it just an idle dream? Has life moved on to a more threatening phase? I hope not. It is only July. There is still time for the optimism of the long range forecast, still time for those periods of warm, dry, settled weather. Isn't there?