Dragonfly and Tarset burn

The burn is swollen with rainwater and capturing the sunlight making it look like a silver snake in the valley.
A large dragonfly, no not large it was huge, flew by me in the garden at Sheep Cottage. The first one I have ever seen here in the valley where I now live.
It means a great deal to me. Dragonflies are my insect, my totem if you like. They are souls of the recent dead.
Trollslaenda in Swedish and Oeyenstikker in Norwegian, libellula and libelle...
That day when it flew by sounding like it had a wee motor was the very same day Bill visited with his two sons Tom and Joe.
They were on their way to Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast for a weeks holiday. The coast is a hidden treasure in the UK. Long golden yellow sandy beaches for miles and miles, castles, ruins, puffins on the Farne islands, Lindisfarne, etc. It is well worth a visit.

The silver snake reminds me that change is inevitable and to welcome it.

Bill I knew in the early 80's at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. He is a poet and followed the trail of John Clare. He now lives in the Lake District with his family. Then he worked for an MIT professor and I also worked at MIT. A very kind and humourful man.
The boys were wonderful and ate with hearty appetites. I hope to see them soon again, before they grow up in any case!
We discovered later that we had a very strong bond to the Cape in common. He had spent many years there a few decades ago.
The silver snake of poetry and life.

The Glorious Twelfth!

Was yesterday.
It refers to Grouse Season shooting beginning around here. That is the day/date when they can begin shooting the pheasants and grouse that have happily lived on these fields and hills since last year. They are such colourful birds and we enjoy seeing them as they come into the garden to eat the goodies left out for them all through winter and spring. They breed on the fells and some of the big landowners around here employ Gamekeepers to make sure the birds of prey and animals of prey are "controlled" so that the more survive for shooting season. Makes sense does it not?!
The pubs start serving pheasant on their menus shortly perhaps even today!
Most of the birds are sent straight to London and to the fancy restaurants there.
I did not want to write about it yesterday, needed a bit of distance to the whole thing.
It has been a tradition in these parts for ages. This is a land of hunts, big estates with suitable open landscape, horses can charge across the fells and fast and furious hounds can bound.
Big parties go out with hunters on foot and the thrashers that scare the birds out of their hiding places!
People pay big money to come to these shoots, mainly from other areas and countries however.
We looked at the stars last night and feared for our beloved birds of beauty.
Gamekeepers have been known to shoot cats and dogs to protect the "wild" birds that they own!
Yesterday becomes yesteryear in one fell swoop.

List references

The last posts have been catch-up ones refering back to The List I made July 28th 2009 on here.
As I look at it now I can not imagine trying to catch up anymore so much is happening every day as it is!

Tonight is the night of the shooting stars - meteor showers galore. Outside is clear and we shall look to the skies.

Planting in the garden today big time! A lovely day with sun and breeze, cats running about the garden, Milo in his birdhouse, the Jacobs grazing next door...
A fragrant double white peony found its home at the cottage corner just under a rambling rose I think called Ballerina. A Mexican daisy along the path to the door where it can self-seed and fall over the path. I like the path huggers that cascade onto the stones.
New grasses, one a zebra grass with striking foliage, another a green clump which turns golden and Ben found places for the lady's mantles and euphorbias along the wild lane and in the shade by the cottage as well.
We checked on Pauls Himalayan Musk a climbing rose we just planted about a month ago and it is thriving! Lovely! Next year I may even see some roses.
The Dark night/knight buddleia is just opening its arching dark purple blooms and monkshood stand erect about to open also.
So all the pots have been planted-great! I set Ben this task called "Spot the Pot" and he smiles...
Coffee, tea and short bread at the garden table/potting surface with a red checked table cloth on-very posh indeed.
I do enjoy the garden mornings on Wednesdays I really do and so did Myles today because he made friends with Ben big time!
The preparations are now almost complete before going away. I just have to re-pot a couple of indoor thrivers and water everything and place it strategically so that they are sheltered yet receive rain water too.

Paul's Birthday

During my last trip to London for the Kenneth Martin mobile hanging at London Zoo it was also Pauls birthday the very same day, so the champagne bubbly reception was absolutely spot on! Beautiful big bunches of flowers, lilies and roses, were also handed out.
Afterwards we went to a gastro pub called the Engineer nearby for a celebratory meal with Paul. Absolutely gorgeous! Delicious food and wonderful company. It was just the right amount of people around the table so that you could get to converse with everyone and there could be two discussions going on at once as well. Paul looked radiant. It had really been a pretty good day.
I enjoyed meeting Renee his assistant and her husband Jack, as well as seeing Pauls dear old friends again.
Thank you Paul for inviting me!

FYI The Engineer is a really nice place, good food, and a colourful ambience, great staff,...we even had a small room in wild carmine coloured wall paper more or less to our selves. It was around in the old days of the Filmmakers Co-Op. Well actually it has been around for ages and ages and was used by railway folk I should think.

Purple rain purple rain...

Twice I crossed the border to Scotland today, once in the fog/mist and once in the rain. You could still see the outlines of the volcanic hills dotted over the landscape in Scotland but in England there was the purple of the heather over the fells like a purple rain all around. Gorgeous.
Will go out filming!

Life is Immense visiting Samuel Menashe at Ledbury

The film showing went well, and it was the first time I saw it on the big screen!
There were about 30 people there. I wished for more mainly for Samuel's sake really, but it was a Tuesday so it was a week night.
The people who were there had either met and /or seen Samuel last year at the festival and loved him or they had missed him and wanted to see him! A second chance as it were.
It was excruciating to see the footage in the beginning of the film because of the poor light and sound due to the bad weather and traffic in NYC. However Samuel himself is so engaging that you quickly just go with him on the journey.
All in all I enjoyed the showing and many otehrs did too. They felt they were in the presence yet again and loved it.
I felt such gratitude for having been able to film him and visit him in the first place. Thank you Samuel.
The film is 66 mins long and it was a struggle to decide what to cut out from the hours of footage. He is so wonderful and intense and magical all the time!
The film is part and parcel of his book of poems with Bloodaxe Books and is glued in as a DVD in the back cover. As I can recall the price seemed reasonable to me so if you are interested look it up on Amazon.uk or Bloodaxe or whatever works for you.
It was such a special treat tosee a film on the big screen. It happens rarely now with my work since the dvd's are often screened in smaller spaces to ever smaller audiences.
Thank you Chloe Garner at Ledbury Poetry Festival!

Family visit from Sweden

A week or so ago I had a family visit from Sweden or Sverige. My sister Penny came with my nephew Gabriel who is six.
Ryan Air had cheap air fares from Nykoeping to Edinburgh so she took advantage of that and came for 4-5 days. It was not a long visit but longer than a weekend which would have been far too short. In the end it was a good length because of its intensity.

I had not seen my sister for 13-14 years, since the winter of 1995-96, and I had never met my nephew. Last time was when I visited Sweden for Christmas and New Year and to see my son who was staying with my sister at the time.

So many years had passed and I was really looking forward to this visit, also I was to meet her son and to see her as a mother!
It was a wonderful time together! We talked so much and in Swedish and had endless pots of tea. For me it was wondrous to be "Swedish" again. It is my mother tongue and English is my father tongue. I love to speak it and apparently I dream in it and talk in my sleep in Swedish. It is fun and very elastic as a language, the sounds are gorgeous in the mouth and to the ear. You can quite freely change the words like plasticine and it is still easy to understand. Especially perhaps when you are sisters with a similar feeling for the language, a playfulness that we share also with my brother.
We had halcyon days together visiting Noah and playing games like Connect Four, lego, and roulette! Gabriel bought a game at a boot fair in Hexham that we went to on the Sunday, none of us knew the rules, but Neil actually did and so we all played together on the floor. I was the bank!

On another day we went to Kielder and to the Birds of Prey centre there. I brought a picnic in a basket so that we could have it by the lake side. It was amazing, we all got to hold birds on a glove as they had their flying/feeding time. The Owls made the biggest impression on us. There was a beauty called Whisper a barn owl. They fly silently. We also got to stroke a baby owl of six weeks and other small owls. Gabriel loved it and bought a tiny little cuddly one to take home whom he called Ugglis. Uggla means owl in Swedish. It started to rain so we drove home and had the picnic on a blanket on the floor in the living room!

Gabriel learned how to be gentle with the cats and they let him stroke them. He gave Myles/Milo little tiny saucers of milk.
When we visited Noah he also got to meet Sofie the sister of Myles and Fergus. She was far less interested in a little person!
Noah cooked us a gorgeous meal of a leg of lamb in a Schlemmertopf with vegetables. Mmm...yummy!
Penny was a also a very good mother. To see my sister with her son and that she was not only grown-up and responsible but she was still the fun younger sister I knew. That was what was so cool. She almost talked us into visiting Sweden again!

I really hope they come and visit again! Gabriel can even come on his own when he gets older and he could use some holiday time away and to practise English which he will be learning at school in the next few years. He does not know English yet.
I would love it if my brother visited too!