Hibernation

Two weeks of this, two weeks of bliss and it’s hard to get up and do something about it. The plates are piling up in the corner of the room scenario. The washing needs folding not just moving onto another clear surface situation.

The squirrels are going nuts for nuts right now. They have pouches in their faces full of foliage, and they slither along the ground scouting for yet more nuts to store somewhere they won’t remember. Rains come and go, plump off-white clouds are ensconced in the skyscape and morph in to night time with its hazy pollutant glow.

We are in uncharted seas, bobbing along between summer and festivities that involve baubles and time is sort of sloshing about and I feel quite tired and complacent. There was a play I saw, where the protagonist turned out to be a slug or a caterpillar of sorts, and he described his home fondly as being the underside of a cool dank rock. I get it now. He was living under a rock. That’s what people use as an excuse for not keeping up to date with television or the Kardashians or Cameron; I’ve been living under a rock for the past year.

Hibernation is a want, isn’t it. If only because daylight is getting scarcer and layers of clothing are growing thicker; we could all just snooze a little longer, and move less and eat more and sleep deep. But alas, we aren’t bears or caterpillars or squirrels, and we have timepieces and electricity and appointments. Oh to be a bundle! I said, Oh to be a bundle.

Back and Forward

Birdsong rushes in through the open windows. The weekend has been and gone. A new day has started.

One would think being back where you went to school is a bit of a regression. Intimate knowledge of a wall you used to hide behind to smoke cigarettes at lunch break, or the school gates that you passed through a decade ago daily would be somehow a reminder of things you left behind. But in fact, they are memorabilia now, like nuggets of memory to fold-up and place into your left breast-side pocket to be patted down every now and then. For reassurance and nostalgia. I was that. Now I’m this.

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Books on philosophy – the names of modern political theorists adorn my wall – a book shelf absolutely teeming with all the knowledge and know-how that I don’t possess. The dormant army sit there offering up a quiet challenge to be better. Get smarter. Come on, read me if you can. I can’t imagine anything more enticing to return home to and it fills me with gladness that I’m going to be able to live in this house that’s a home.

We get milk delivered to our doorstep in clear glass bottles.

The window of my room faces east, so sunlight pours in whenever I can manage to open the curtains like I did this morning. Big yellow trees are splodges on my sightline, a townhouse garden extends forwards in to thickets, I see some allotment patches, one small misted-up greenhouse and a shiny spider’s web that glints once or twice before it disappears. Nothing is dramatic nor apparent and it’s bliss waking up to the niceness of this.

A few marauding cats get shooed off the grass and the leaves blaze leaving a trail of summer behind before falling in to autumn.