Blimey!

Blimey! Who'da thunkit! from a sunny but cold clear blue sky everything changed. The snow came pelting down, took a long time to decide to settle and then suddenly those great big flakes came and it all turned white. Mr Man brings water from the well, I'm stoking away inside - in the morning it was 4 degrees C in the bedroom when I woke up, so we'll get this chimney really warm this evening and sleep up in the loft where it was 15 degrees C at the same time this morning. A new loft ladder has opened up new vistas for me, since I was never quite able to shinny up the ladder and throw myself over the hurdles to get up there before. Now, I wouldn't say it's a doddle but it works and I have been able to stash my multitude of sins up there. This in turn has freed up the space just about everywhere else to great relief for both of us. Not only that but I've discovered the trick of placing the logs at the right angle in our small wood-burning stove so that when the time comes for the next log it is quite possible to get it in and not all blocked up. There is now a big pan of water permanently on the top and lo! we now have instant hot water. Not enough for a bath but at least one can wash one's hands and face and unmentionables.

dawn chorus

Stone lace and a beach picture from Gotland.

Woke up this morning as dawn cracked with the chorus.

Thrush, with his double toot, sounds a little less melancholy in the morning, perkier.
Ravens calling.

The house smells of mothballs from a million opened plastic boxes of wool and ancient projects. These boxes have been open now for two days and still the smell is abominable. I've put the lid back on some, but the condensation must out of the rest first.

Yesterdays terrible battle lies heavy over the house - needs also to be aired out from old damp and then lids put on. I carry on as normal in the emotional rubble. Is anything irreparable or reparable?

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Afternoon. All is calm though the stench is still difficult. We have bought a loft ladder so I can get up there and store all of these boxes. That'll be a load off.

On the way up the hill I picked some wood anemones.

 

back at the shack

we've been back at the shack for a couple of days and although it usually takes a week to unpack everything from storage and put it in place after cleaning up the mouseshit, we have now decided to do some more moving around of enormous quantities of stuff, from the one little house to the other and sorting through it all. This is major, but I suppose if one makes oneself sort through everything every year, then one will naturally whittle things down a bit.........?.......

The sun is blazing amazing. There are crocuses, snowdrops and a christmas rose and the daffs are budding a month early. I am told that this is the warmest spring noted here since spring noting began sometime in the middle of the 1800's. The first morning here after we came back, there was only one degree or so above freezing inside and condensation was running down the window panes. I froze and we couldn't light a fire because a vital piece had fallen off the wood stove and needed fixing. Got it going later though. The place is gradually drying out.

Today, a person was spotted in the garden. It doesn't happen very often and this time it was a redheaded cousin who normally lives in Copenhagen. We had a casserole with ecobeef in red wne and coconut milk, with some ginger, garlic, celeriac and carrots, all served on basmati rice. It was quite ok. Cousin E is allergic to gluten and dairy so that worked out ok too.

Birds are going a bit mad, nuthatches, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, magpies, an array of woodpeckers, all building like maniacs everywhere around us. At night owls are heard, the more owls the less voles we think hopefully. I love the song of the thrush. Its melancholy evening tootle, always by the edge of the forest and always saying everything twice. I love its slender shape, the most elegant of birds. They leave snails shells on our granite doorstep, where they have come at dawn to crack open the shells. I wish they ate the big slugs too, but hardly anyone eats them.

interior from church on gotland, around 1200

daily noose

You've been aggressive and condescending all morning
Me? me? What about you then? It's all my fault is it? You're perfect are you?
pause
pause
Well, actually yes, I am perfect.
Right, I'm off to the shops.
Good riddance
To bad rubbish eh? Is there anything you want from the shop?
A noose. But I haven't decided yet if it's for me or for you.

birch

When I was fourteen, I was very shy, painfully shy, for reasons that I can tell about another time.
I found it hard to speak when anyone was near me and even in the family home I had a long period of not saying very much, though I did write a lot. I wrote letters to an old school friend who had moved to America and she wrote to me. Sometimes I wrote 4 or 5 letters a day.
I admired my older brother and his friends and knew that these friends were the people that I wanted to be with. Jazz was the thing in those days, although there was rhythm and blues and bluebeat which was later to turn into ska and rocksteady and later still, reggae. When I was eleven years old I put some money on the Grand National and took home both first place with a horse called Team Spirit and fourth with Nicholas Silver. I spent the money, an absolute fortune, on records - blues and soul although the word soul hadn't really been minted yet as far as I knew. It was tamla motown and chess, otis redding, sam cooke and the lovely, lovely Marvin Gaye. I still feel that singing was never the same again after Marvin Gaye - or after Billie Holiday or Bob Dylan for that matter, the way the guitar was never the same after Hendrix.

As I gradually tried to silently infiltrate my way into this group of my brother's much older male friends, I got to hear snippets of music and ideas of music, but in those days the concept of cool and uncool were the current values more than anything else. There was a pub down the road from my house, the railway hotel, that had a jazz and blues club called Klook's Kleek on the second floor once a week and I took great pains to appear older than my tender age in order to go there. Being a pub the age limit was 18, but I was never asked how old I was. I don't remember much about any of the other guests, I think I was so terrified I probably never looked at any of them. I saw so many great musicians there, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone walker, Alexis Korner, Zoot Money and loads more. The most memorable was a little lady called Sugar-Pie Desanto, famous for Soulful Dress, a wonderful song. She appeared in a tight black top and a shiny, red, pencil- slim skirt with a slit up to the thigh and while she sang the grittiest of songs in the throatiest of voices, which was astounding enough, she did free somersaults in the air at the same time! Sometimes I wonder if this is a fantasy or if I have expanded her act with time and constructive memory, but I have the song on a cd and it is still terrific. I did manage to string along with the boys to see Thelonious Monk at the Albert Hall and that has managed to remain in my sieve memory.

During this time, I met a an american friend of friends who had come to London with his family and who was a complete expert in jazz. He was only 19 and he wrote for some american jazz magazine and he had the most amazing collection of jazz record imaginable. It lined his room - meter after meter of vinyl. His name was Dave Rosenthal and he was on heroin as were others of the group. Dave was known to be rather stingy and difficult socially at that age, but he was very nice to me and I used to go round to visit him and he would play me records. He must have given me a real jazz educaton because somehow I seem to know about 60s jazz for free, it got into my blood without ever having to make any kind of effort to find things out. Dave used to live on something that was called Individual fruit pies made by Lyons. I don't think that they exist any more. You got them with different fruit fillings and they were ok but really really sweet. Dave had a pile of these in his room - perhaps ten or more, always piled up in a column in their little individual boxes ready for when he needed to eat. I made the grave mistake of asking him for one once and he got really pissed off so Iknew never to ask again.

One day, he pulled out a record with a blue and black cover and said - this is new, you've got to hear this. It was Ghosts by Albert Ayler and I fell in love with it immediately. It became a seminal piece of music for me (as for so many others) and I asked my parents for it as my christmas present that year. I loved that record so much and I also knew I was part of some secret society of Albert Ayler fans; not only part of, but probably the youngest member.

Many years later, playing in a band, I was always trying to get us to play Ghosts in reggae beat, but the others weren't part of the Albert Ayler society so it never came off. One evening when we had played at a one day festival, the last band played their last number at four in the morning and I was one of the last people around to listen. They played Ghosts in reggae beat and I tried to get the leader to marry me but sadly, he didn't notice. By then I had lost the record; I had lived with a bass player called Nicky for a year and when he left he took it with him and sometimes I wonder if he still has it.

Ayler died so young, drowning in the water around Manhattan but I think the saxophone was never the same after Albert Ayler.