I Parcel Up

My memories of Australia are coming ashore in small groups, and often at dusk when the day's work has been done. I'm waiting for them as patiently as we waited for penguins in Tasmania. I haven't written much about Australia here because I want my memories to stay afloat, swim around where they are most fluent for as long as possible, until they land themselves as poems.

Our guide in Bicheno on the east coast of Tasmania told us, as I waited to see penguins in their natural habitat for the first time, that a group of penguins can be called a waddle (on land) and a raft (in the water). They can also be called a parcel. Parcel's the word he used most often as we watched them come ashore after a long day's fishing out on the reef several kilometres away. They took their time coming up the beach, stopping to clean their feathers, to chatter to each other, and to regain energy before reaching their main aim: feeding their hungry young chicks.

I travelled around Australia for a month, and I've been back home for a month, but the month in Australia feels much brighter, probably because it was. I'm making this feeling of brightness into a parcel of daylight, blue skies and wide horizons full of warmth and t-shirts. I'm writing my way into poems which I may be able to share with you one day.

And while I'm waiting for whatever's coming to shore, I offer to you some of the light - as best I can:

Green Pools, WA

Melbourne, VIC

Blue Mountains, NSW

Nr Hobart, TAS

Harbour Bridge, Sydney, NSW

A parcel of Little Blue Penguins - Happy Christmas xx

I Find Myself

Questions of meaning and existence have been circling in my thoughts all my conscious life. Who am I? Why, how, if, what, and where? If I added up all the time I’d spent pondering, I could’ve made several more dishes of macaroni cheese, and possibly finished my novel. 

It’s come as something of a surprise to me, therefore, to find that I’m located on an intersection in Hobart, Tasmania. In the end, finding myself has turned out to be as simple as looking at a map.

I’m not saying that therapy, writing poetry, making risotto, and camping haven’t had their parts to play in me finding myself. It was in a therapy session, after all, that I made the decision to travel to Australia in 2023, something I’d been pondering since Miss Smith’s feedback on my geography project in 1976. And it was by choosing to camp in Wales with my longest serving friend for years that I saved enough holiday money to afford the airfare.

When planning the Hobart part of the holiday that I’m taking with my younger son, I was browsing a list of restaurants. Up popped the suggestion of ‘Lizzie & Lefroy’. I gasped and stretched my eyes, consulted TripAdvisor. 

At this point, for clarity, I should say that my family and friends called me Lizzy/Lizzie when I was younger. Some of them still do. The spelling fluctuates - y (my parents’ choice) ie (nearly everyone else’s). I dealt with this inconsistency by simplifying things to Liz back in the 1980s.

Lizzie & Lefroy sits on the corner of Elizabeth and Lefroy in north Hobart. It has the most extensive gnocchi menu I’ve ever seen. 

We found it easily this evening and were welcomed by very warm and friendly staff. The walls were lined with Australian wines. The beers from local breweries. There was a log fire in a central glass-sided stove. 

Noticing my name on the booking, the waiter shook my hand, said: “You’re royalty here!” 

Eating delicious beetroot gnocchi and zucchini on a Tuesday in November with my son in my namesake restaurant was a special moment. Eating their sophisticated version of macaroni cheese  (Mushroom mac & cheese croquettes : Pyengana 12-month aged cheddar, garlic crisps, fresh thyme and parsnip cream) was a perfect in-body experience. 

It was all delicious and lovely. All my questions have been answered. I am, it would seem, where I eat.

I Exhale Deeply

Since learning that yoga is not, in fact, a sinister cult but a really useful way of caring for my back, I regularly breathe out deeply. This is something I've done both in classes, and in front of 'Yoga with Adrienne' and her free YouTube videos. 

When younger, I did breathing exercises for wellbeing by default when playing the flute. A lot of my lessons were spent with my teacher encouraging me to develop breath and diaphragm control. I had no idea how useful a life skill this was as I channelled a column of air into a top C. 

More recently, I exhaled deeply on opening a box of copies of Festival in a Book - A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival. I had been holding my breath for two weeks: between the moment of pressing send on the final proofs and lifting out the first book. I breathed even more freely when Anna Dreda, Festival Founder, said she loves the anthology created in honour of her Festival and its legacy. 

It has struck me since that the publication of a book of poetry is, in some ways, an exhalation, a letting go. A breathing out of thought and word and music into the world. Breath and word. The word made paper. It can't be taken back now. And it will become part of other people's breathing, internal and external, when read. 

And so, here she is: the editor, not the book, breathing out, relaxing on the festival's famous knitted poem of Carol Ann Duffy's "The Bees" knitted a decade ago by a large number of volunteers and still as vivid as it was then (photo by Emily Wilkinson, poem now resident at the Poetry Pharmacy, Bishops Castle). 

The poem makes a wonderful yoga mat. 

To buy a copy of Festival in a Book, a Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival edited by Liz Lefroy, please email 904press@gmail.com  Cost £15 plus p&p (2nd class UK = £2.40) 

Here's the line up you can enjoy:

I Draw A Comparison

 Back in the days when I was known as Elizabeth by my school teachers, I compiled a project called 'Western Australia'. I was in Lower IV 26. 26 was the room number, Lower IV was year 8. In her feedback, written on a pale orange card, my Geography Teacher, the lovely Miss Smith, wrote: ELIZABETH: mainly WESTERN AUSTRALIA. In the corner of that card, she drew a fairy penguin. I've had a soft spot for penguins ever since.

On the other side of the small card, Miss Smith wrote this: "Your nice grassy folder had some original and interesting ideas in it, with good illustrations. The range of relevant information was wide, from Continental drift to Camels, and even though you veered from your subject by discussing the Barrier Reef, it was still a good effort. A(-)". 

Not much has changed in my approach to projects since 1976-7. The anthology I've been working on, Festival in a Book, A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival, also has some original and interesting ideas in it, most of them not my own. The illustrations (by Emily Wilkinson) and design (by Gabriel Watt) are a bonus. The range of relevant poetry is wide in terms of the Festival itself, and the poets also veer (as you'd expect them to do) towards love, childhood, loss, celebration of nature, and death. 

A brackets minus. What a mark. Thank you Miss Smith. In old school terms, A was for near as damn excellent considering your age and stage, and minus was for not quite. The brackets? They were for but nearly. My project was: not quite near as damn excellent considering your age and stage, but nearly. I was very happy with this grade. If the anthology is judged by contributors and readers as: not quite near as damn excellent considering her age and stage, but nearly, I'll be delighted.

Maybe it was that carefully-wrought mark and Miss Smith's recognition of the effort I'd made that set in my 11 year-old head the bouncy thought that one day I would visit Western Australia, and the other parts of that country-continent that aren't WA but are closer to it than South Hampstead High School, 3 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3. It's certainly been a thought leaping kangaroo-like around my head for a few years: a thought I put into action back in the spring when I booked tickets to Perth, via Singapore. I leave in 5 weeks, once I've completed the distribution and launch of the anthology. 

And now that I've made the analogy between these two projects 46 years or so apart, I'm wondering if there's an equivalent of the Barrier Reef in Festival in a Book - a whole section that's crept in because, well - who wouldn't want to put the Barrier Reef (and Tasmanian Devils and Koalas) into a project on Western Australia to liven things up from a baseline of sheep farming, wild flowers, mining, endless sunshine, and salt lakes? 

My 'Western Australia' project has maps of the places I'm going to visit soon: Perth, Denmark, Margaret River. It has useful advice about the climate. I'll be able to identify the common wax-flower if it's still common and found over areas of coastal sand heaths, usually growing from four to eight feet in height with a mass of white to pink or rose-red flowers. I've shaded in areas of one map of the whole of Australia with 'areas with more than 15 people per square mile' - so I'll know where to look for night-life, and in which direction I need to face to make it to Melbourne, Sydney, Katoomba, Hobart, and Launceston. And all the time, I'll be on the look out for penguins. 

I Mark Time

This past year, I have been working on a book - an anthology of poems which includes many of the UK's leading poets and many of us who are less leading, but no less keen. It's a farewell to the Wenlock Poetry Festival, to be published on 1st September 2023, and it's proving to be a form of closure for that vibrant and popular annual event. In order to facilitate this publication, I have set up a new venture named 904 Press. This is because when I was chatting to my eldest son in a cafe in Hereford about the idea, he asked me how many publishers there are in the UK, and at that moment of Googling, there were 903. "I'll be the 904th," I said. When I searched the question again earlier today, I discovered I'd helped the answer grow to 906. 

Ross Donlon who set up Mark Time Press thought more deeply about the name for his imprint, but we nevertheless arrived at similar places, I think. Mark Time publishes books that mark a place in time, just as 904 Press marks a very specific moment which, were it to be created today, would be 907 Press. 

Publishing: it's all about the moments of decision, dear reader. My friend, Jen Hawkins, makes her moments of decision public on Wednesday 23rd August in the Poetry Pharmacy, Bishop's Castle, when she launches her pamphlet, Moth: Mark Time's latest arrival. Jen has been writing and performing her poetry in Shropshire for several years, and we have enjoyed hearing her read at events. Her friends have encouraged her to set them down more permanently. What publication of her pamphlet /chapbook /collection does is make these poems into a tangible decision, and that decision is to print them now, in a precisely chosen word order, and with details of punctuation, weight of paper, cover image, and price - what price poetry? - finalised.

Committing to commas, semi-colons, and cover layouts is an act of courage not demanded of us in the day-to-day virtual or verbal worlds where mistakes can (usually) be corrected at the touch of a few buttons, or with a cough and repetition of a line. It may not feel like it if you haven't done it yet, but be assured that the process by which Moth, The Bone Seeker (Thirza Clout), Body of Water (Emily Wilkinson), Lucidity (Ross Donlon), and I Buy A New Washer (Yours Truly) (all published by Mark Time) came to be in print form is a matter of precise, finite, and often late-at-night-squeezed-into-the-rest-of-life decision making. It's also a matter of kind discussion with our editor, Ross, of benefitting from his poetry wisdom and skills.

It's the finite, deadline bit that's so difficult: a form of existential angst, made manifest. Never mind that saying, the one about 'abandoning poems'; when you publish them on paper you have to release them carefully, tenderly, precisely, and, it may surprise some, soberly, and after lengthy and serious thought. This is because you release them to the possibility of changes of mind, misunderstandings, and (oh horror!) typos, as well as joy, understanding, and connection.

In the end, to be published is to allow oneself to be vulnerable. Jen Hawkins has taken this on board generously, letting her readers in to see her words and emotions, dancing 'like moths / around dying embered love / drawing ever closer'. She unpacks her 'pixelated patchwork / jigsaw of a heart' for us: a heart which includes sorrow and grief, as well as birdsong and a deep appreciation for ice cream... 

Congratulations, Jen, for marking this place in your time. Graham Attenborough, GKA, whose friendship you celebrate in what I am very partially going to call my favourite poem in Moth, would have loved to have been here, and he would be so proud of you. 

And congratulations to all of us, Mark Time authors and beyond, who commit ourselves to be known a little more fully, a little more deeply: to marking our time on paper. 

I Fall Short of a Food Mile

Potato season is opening, just as raspberry season is closing. That's what's happening locally, at least. When I say locally, I mean within a third of a mile of my kitchen work surfaces. According to my parkrun experiences, a mile is around 2,000 of my paces. 

I harvested the first of my roof garden potatoes (20 paces there, 20 back = 40 paces) this morning. I am growing them in the tubs that my longest-serving friend gave me even though I've been letting the rest of the roof do its own thing. 

Harvesting this year's first portion of potatoes made me think about tonight's supper, though it was only 9.30am. I felt a little dejected, in view of the potato triumph and the fact that I was getting my hair done this afternoon, that I wasn't going to be cooking for anyone else this evening. I decided, notwithstanding, to gather some mint and chives from my window box (8 paces there, 7 back = 55 paces).

As the day went on, a plan started growing in my imagination which was this: to make my supper for one an occasion by cooking a meal for the first time in my life entirely from ingredients I'd grown and gathered myself. 

I wasn't dependent only on my window box and rooftop garden for supper as I've been helping Pete with his garden since last autumn (600 paces there, 600 back, or thereabouts). I offered to help him out boosted by my onion success last year. I've been enjoying planting and tending to runner beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, courgettes, aubergines all through the cold spring, hot June, wet July. 

After having my hair done, I went round to Pete's (+ 600 = 655 paces) and picked tomatoes,  rhubarb, four remaining raspberries, a courgette, quantities of sage and thyme. I dug up a couple of onions and located the first runner bean. (Thank goodness no one else was expecting supper - I wasn't prepared to share that bean or those raspberries).  

On the way back (+ 600 = 1,255 paces), I picked blackberries from the hedgerows by the River Severn (+ 0 paces as I was going that way anyway). I tipped these ingredients out of my bag onto my work surface to join the potatoes, mint and chives. 

potatoes + red onions + runner bean + tomatoes (green and yellowy-orange) + garlic + courgette + rhubarb + blackberries + raspberries + rosemary + sage + thyme + chives + lemon verbena + mint

Here's what I did with them and my Duolingo French lessons (plus olive oil and salt, and butter, of course):

CHEZ LIZ

 Menu 20th July 2023

Plat Principal

Pommes de terres, trois facons

Tomates vertes frites, avec oignon rouge, ail, haricot vert, thym

Feuilles de sauges sautée à l'huile d'olive 

Petite courgette au four 

Dessert

Rhubarbe braisée au coulis de mûres et baies de saison

A Boire

L'eau Salopian avec feuilles de menthe

Thé à la verveine citronée

I made an occasion of a meal for one, all in well under a food mile and with my hair sleek and tidy. The runner bean came into its own among the fried green tomatoes, baked courgette, deliciously sweet onion, and crispy sage leaves. I cooked and sieved the majority of the blackberries to make an intense coulis to accompany the braised rhubarb and a few whole berries. 

After it had all been translated, there was nothing leftover from today's supper. Judging by the number of red flowers on the runner bean plants, I can look forward to haricots verts plural suppers very soon. 

I Come 100th in my 100th

There’s no such thing, not any more at least, as a free parkrun t-shirt. I’m glad I didn’t find this out until after my 100th parkrun yesterday. Here I am, sweating my way to the finish in many degrees of heat in London’s Brockwell Park. My longest-serving friend was on the finish line camera in hand, having cleared the course and recovered her breath before I rocked up.

And here’s the t-shirt I was expecting to get to mark the occasion. When I reached 50 runs, I received the red one: an incentive gift from parkrun. 

It’s taken me a long time to get from 50 to 100. In-between the two milestones, a bad back and lockdowns meant I missed many parkruns and many were cancelled. I've been quipping that my motivation has been the free t-shirt. It's been a means of self-deprecation, of saying that I'm not serious about running, not really. 

Checking the parkrun website today, I've discovered that by 2021 the cost of sending out free t-shirts had become unsustainable due to its popularity and the numbers of people reaching milestones. I’d missed this news item, and I appreciate the development as a very good thing. UK parkrun statistics are impressive: there are 790 event locations in the UK If you'd attended the Norwich Christmas Day parkrun in 2019, you'd have been in a crowd of 1360 runners. The record number at my regular course, Shrewsbury, is 733. Running in a community helps me to keep going, and I suspect it helps the millions of park runners worldwide too. 

So, I have to admit, the free t-shirt banter has been a decoy. I parkrun because it makes me feel great: alive and thankful that I can move my body. The run itself can be hard to get into some weeks, but I’ve learnt to give myself a better chance of enjoying it by having a regular Friday night bedtime, stretching before and after runs, and by drinking plenty of water. Parkrun has been the means by which I’ve started to listen to my body more closely and to notice what it needs.

And parkrun, with its way of looking on the bright side, has been good for my mind too. My younger son encouraged me to get a personal best for my 100th run. Not a chance, I said, mindful of the heat and Brockwell Park's hills. But then I did. I ran this particular course faster than the other time I ran it, meaning my results email said: "Congratulations on setting a new Personal Best at this event!" It also turns out I was the 100th female finisher on my 100th run. I managed that statistic without even trying. Parkrun - it's a glass half-full event.

What I’m noticing right now is that my body needs a new t-shirt, and so for that matter does my soul.  I’m going to get onto the website and order one just as soon as I've finished this blog, and what's more, I'll pay up more than willingly. 

I Inflate My Pyjamas

Disclaimer:

The first thing to say is that I got it wrong. Now that I'm back on-grid, I've been able search inflating pyjamas for life-saving. I came across this video from the US Navy which I strongly recommend you watch rather than following any of what follows (if at any point you think I must try this at home.)

I Inflate My Pyjamas

But you too may be of an age to have inflated your pyjama bottoms while engaged in Bronze / Silver / Gold awards in school swimming lessons. 

I walked with my schoolfriends to the Swiss Cottage baths. This memory came up for me while holidaying with my Longest-Serving Friend in North Wales. 

Did you wrestle with your pyjamas while treading water and fifty years later wonder why, if it was even possible? My Longest-Serving Friend said she did.

We were eco camping to stave off the world for a while, so standards plummeted, and Tuesday was sticky with heat, risotto, sun cream, and fly repellent.

We made a plan, took our pyjamas to change into after swimming. Here's the lake - the water a warm-cool blue: more France than Snowdonia.

We walked in without gasping, swam about, cooled off. The paddle boarders were few and distant. The mountains looked on, thirstily. 

Dressing pragmatically (straight into pyjamas) we talked about swimming and long-ago pyjamas: fly-sewn-up, patched at the knee, handed down from brothers. 

We returned to the lake and working from memory, I submerged my pyjamas, then tied a knot at the end of each leg. I blew in through the waist.

My Longest-Serving Friend took on the drowning. She splashed about, trod water, swam what would've been lengths, said, help. 

I knotted and blew. We laughed and I blew. I tied  more knots. She said, I'd be dead by now. We giggled; but it's no laughing matter, drowning.

They were right to teach us to aid each others' survival. Two to a cubicle, we learned to wriggle out of wet costumes. We sat together through Maths in damp cardigans.

I tried to remember. My pyjamas inflated for seconds, a tartan balloon, before sinking. There's no way I'd have saved myself with these half-memories.  

That day was perfect - the lake calm and warm. It was total immersion, a cleansing joy. We swam about, came out pure and new, soothed and happy. 

We came out saved, buoyant. 

I Scrap My Car

Last week saw the end for me, for the foreseeable future, of car ownership. I've been saying for a while that I wouldn't replace my car when she finally became uneconomic to repair and, now that she's gone to the scrapyard to be recycled, I'm following through on that commitment. I like bikes and trains, and I dislike traffic jams, so it makes sense personally, as well as environmentally. But that sense isn't quite adding up for me yet. 

In the seventeen years I drove her, Volva became for me that thing that psychologists call a transitional object: the sight of her parked up was an emotional comfort. She's been a reliable ally in many of my life's adventures: camping and other holidays, getting to work and other necessities. She's helped with nesting and de-nesting, moving my sons' stuff during their school days to and from guitar and cello lessons, sports days and parties. We've driven to and from Falmouth, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Oxford, and London as they've journeyed around their early adult lives. She's carried me twice to the Outer Hebrides and hundreds of times to Wrexham and Newport. She contained the only functional cassette tape player I owned. Two weeks ago, cruising down the M5 to Dorset, I listened again to the tapes of 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' that have been in the glove compartment for years, and chuckled to the jokes for the nth time. Volva clocked up around 250,000 miles since arriving in our family - a trusty stead.

Then on Thursday, as I was on the brink of one more London stuff-moving trip, the journeys ended. It's thrown me off-course, this change, and for a few days I've not quite known how to organise myself. Kind friends have offered to help out and I've signed up to a community car share scheme which I'll soon get the hang of. 

I've questioned the validity of my feelings of disconcertion about this change, and the decisions that led to it. There's so much that's so very much more important to be sad about - of course there is. But it's not the chunk of metal I'm missing, but the loss of connection with what has been a consistent and reliable space for so many mundane and exceptional adventures. 

It takes six weeks to embed a new habit, I've heard. Maybe by the end of June, I'll have got the hang of this. 

I Seal the Now

I wake up, ask Alexa the time, and think: "I feel a sense of loss for having slept till 9.13am on a Sunday morning." There's a danger of this day running behind the now before it's even started.

I reach for my glass of water. It's cool and refreshing. I feel the cotton sheets and the weight of the bedcovers. I bat away a thought about the sales pitch which persuaded me to buy this alpaca duvet on the basis that it would work with my internal thermostat. That's in the past. The sales pitch, not the duvet. The duvet is comfortingly present, though in the night I got too hot. But that's in the past too. I let it go.

Another thought, this time about what I'll do today, and about not having anyone around to ask to re-seal the bath for me. I'm distracted from the present and, as I've been listening to Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, I understand that I must not attach myself to the thought that 9.13am is half the morning wasted, nor look for fulfilment in anyone else's silicone sealant skills, past or future.

So, I accept that re-sealing the gap between the bath and the tiles is a moderate act of independence that is part of my now. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed.

I drink tea and eat cereal. I climb into my attic where I keep my DIY kit. I assemble silicone, sealant gun, masking tape, and a Stanley knife (shut). I climb down. 

In the bathroom, I begin scraping away the old sealant with the knife. I stay focused on the now, so as not to cut my fingers. I do this by both imagining a future spent in A&E and a past spent listening to advice about pushing the knife blade away from my fingers. I'm pretty sure that this way of achieving focus on the now is not mindfulness. Remembering the person who advised me is annoying, and reveals I still have an ego attachment to that person, or at least an attachment to him redoing the seal for me. I remember too that I have a detachment issue - specifically the detachment of the tiniest bit of the tip of the middle finger of my left hand. It went missing, amid a lot of blood, when I was chopping an onion three years ago. 

I call to mind Eckhart Tolle's thoughts about the power of now. Now. I refocus, prepare the join between bath edge and tiles, cleaning away old sealant and establishing a boundary with masking tape. Boundaries are important to the now.  

I set up the sealant gun with the new tube of silicone, then squeeze. The silicone takes a while to emerge, so I squeeze again, hard, with both hands. A white worm of silicone emerges and I trail it along the bath/tile border, smoothing it with my finger. The silicone keeps coming, and I am utterly absorbed in the moment, without thought, just squeezing and smoothing, squeezing, smoothing to the end of the bath ... 

The now doesn't end, and neither, it turns out, does the sealant, which, unlike the masking tape, is not within my control. At the end of the bath, it keeps coming. The white worm grows from the end of the nozzle: now. And now again. And now. And yes, still coming. Now. A concentration of the present, focussed, and unattached. I can't do anything about it, but wipe the end of the nozzle, then watch as the now re-emerges time and again. Like my Sunday, it flows and curls, dangles and spirals. 

I Chant And We Cheer

I know the more sophisticated of my readers may be disappointed to hear this, but I have been to the football and I have been chanting, but not like a nun. I understand that some imagine me as a well-behaved lady poet, sitting behind my typewriter and waiting for poems to come to the rescue, but after the events of last weekend, I feel compelled to reveal the darker side to my character. 

What happened was this. My brother, the middle one, the one who has Arsenal written through him like ... well, a stick of rock, organised for me to go with my sons to Arsenal vs Bournemouth on Saturday 4th March, 2023, kick off 3pm. It's worth being precise about the date  and time because history was made. I've supported Arsenal since I was a kid growing up in Highbury, but that support has come to life again recently, as my eldest son has become as keen a fan as his uncle. 

The goal Bournemouth scored in the first few seconds of the game felt like a kick in the stomach. The familiar feelings of resigned defeat, learned on the netball courts in 1976, washed over me. "It's only a game," I lied to myself. I felt tense. Responsible. As if me being there was bad luck for this game that Arsenal, top of the league, should win easily. I remembered this feeling of old. I wanted something different, something for my boys to remember. 

The crowd was silenced by the shock of the early goal for a few beats, and then the chanting began. Ars-e-nal, Ars-e-nal, Ars-e-nal. I joined in - the words weren't hard to learn. It was a relief to sing. I breathed deeply. 

I'm not a football expert but I did notice that for most of the game Arsenal players had the ball at their feet. But this majority possession didn't result in goals. It felt unfair, as if luck was against us.

After half-time, Bournemouth scored again from a corner. 2-0. The mood was brooding in the stands, but the regulars knew what to do. Ohhhh Martinelli ... We've got super Mik Arteta ... We're the north bank ... Somehow, Arsenal scored. "We'll get another," said my eldest, with a football confidence which I've never managed for myself, but which I have learned to trust in him. We did. 2-2.

Feeling success within reach, it became increasingly unlikely as the minutes of the match ticked away. "It's only a game," I said to myself again, and this time I believed it. I embraced the truth of it. It being a game doesn't make it not matter. Games are important, I reasoned, because they're an opportunity to release our inner children. Hadn't Michael Rosen said this, in his book Play?

Freed up by this thought, I starting jeering when the Bournemouth goalie got a yellow card for time-wasting. It's only a game, I thought, so I can let go. "Send him off!" I heard myself shout. "Lo-ser! Give him a red card! Red ca-ard!" I looked across at my sons - they were roaring at the goalie too, shaking their fists. It was wonderful.  

I was enjoying the game, but time was running out. Some fans  started pushing along the row to get out of the stadium to beat the rush to the tube. One older man, let's call him Thierry, stood next to me in the gangway. There were only a few minutes left, injury time. I felt a mix of emotions, was clinging to a thread of hope, was building myself up to be brave.

Like a reprieve from a sentence of disappointment, like compensation for the netball defeats of old, like an acknowledgement that this day was special, my lads at the Emirates for the first time, all of us in Arsenal shirts, Arsenal did it. They scored again. 

The moment had a poetry and drama I've never experienced watching sport before - with uncanny timing, the goal mirrored Bournemouth's at the start of the game. We looked at the scoreboard, hoping it was true. 3-2. It was.

I found myself being hugged by Thierry, who was transformed from grumpy to ecstatic. Then we were hugging and being hugged by fans of all ages as the stadium was split by a grin and a roar as wide as north London and as long as 30 minutes. 

3-2 to the Ars-e-nal, 3-2 to the Ars-e-nal! 

I'm so grateful we were there and that I learned, at last, to the ends of my red and white scarf, that football is a game. 

Dedicated to David, Jess, Gabriel, Jonty, Jeremy, Paul and Roy - crazy Arsenal fans

I Valentine This Day

I have it on good authority that “there ain’t no noun that can’t be verbed” so I’m valentining today. Why? Because I’ve found that waiting for a noun to drop through the letterbox is a poor way to approach love. 

The way I’m going to valentine my day is to go to work by train, and to notice all that’s beautiful and wondrous: a frosty sunrise, a conversation with a colleague who’s full of enthusiasm, the repairs to the keys ‘O’ and ‘R’ carried out on my laptop, new sheets of card. I will reflect on the many blessings of love I have in my life, one of which is for mushroom risotto which I’ll cook for myself this evening when I get back to my warm home. As I stir the onions in oil, I’ll remember the times I’ve done this on a stove each evening of the brilliant camping trips I’ve shared with my longest-serving friend. Our next adventure begins in 3 months, 13 days, 15 hours and 57 minutes’ time.

Later, I’ll take this picture down from my wall. It’s a work of art that moves me each day of the year. It was brought home from school by my eldest son one February 14th long ago, He showed he is good at valentining from an early age. I relish the way his work shows a free, creative, colourful and open expression of affection for his younger brother. I’ll sit with it next to me while I eat the chocolate hearts given to me by my amazing goddaughter yesterday. We spent the afternoon painting pottery and chatting about this and that. My bowl expresses my love of flowers; hers, her love of animals. Both express our love of play. In her farmyard scene, among the chickens and pigs, lurks a T-Rex. If you look very carefully (and with your imagination) among my flowers, a chameleon is hiding.

❤️

I Rewild My Garden

In the height of the first lockdown, I discovered I had a garden (I Find A Garden). It was something of a surprise, given that at the time I found it, I'd lived in my current home for several years. Part of the explanation is that access to the garden is through a window, and climbing out of it reminds me of why I practise Warrior 1 and Child Pose. There was always the feeling, in doing so, of what the British Board of Film Classification calls 'mild peril'. But to everything a season and a risk assessment, and, sensing opportunity and necessity, I became proficient at folding myself in and out.

The rooftop garden meant freedom and fresh air at a time when living in a flat seemed like a poor choice to have made. I climbed out sometime between 11 and 1 each day of that first beautiful and strangely silent lockdown spring to drink coffee and watch the leaves on the nearby plane tree unfurl. These were the hours I learned that the sun passed by before hiding behind surrounding buildings. This was the time by which I needed a break from my laptop screen.

I pottered about clearing leaves and moss from the flat roof, reclaiming some abandoned plants. I made do with what I could find, enjoyed the inventiveness and limits of it all. I wrote poems, painted canvases, phoned friends, read books, hung out my washing. In the long hot evenings of that strange summer, I took my glass of wine outside, chatted to my shirtless young neighbour who was sat in the courtyard below, keeping cool. I think I reminded him of his mum whom he couldn't visit. Once, he sent a gift of a pizza delivery for me and my younger son. 

In the second year of lockdowns, growing in garden confidence, I planted seed potatoes in tubs given to me by my Longest-Serving Friend, with socially distanced compost borrowed from a friend's garden. I grew lobelia from seed on my windowsills, then transplanted the seedlings outside. 

With the return to greater freedom in 2022, my visits to the rooftop began to decrease. In the spring, I tidied the space again, but by summer, when restrictions lifted, it started to feel like an eccentricity. It was harder to explain why I was climbing out of a window to meet the sun in a few square metres of space, when there's a huge park, long cycle rides and friends' gardens nearby. When the restaurant next door became busy again, I began to feel conspicuous sitting above the chattering guests in the courtyard, with my underwear out on the drier. None of them mentioned pizza. 

I haven't given the garden much thought in the past few months, but today, when the fresh young sun beckoned, I decided to go out, to tidy up and think about this year's planting. Looking through the window, I stopped myself before opening it up wide, noticing a blackbird gathering flat-roof moss. It was so bright-eyed, so glossy, so busy collecting what it needs for its new nest and brood that it came to me, there and then, that I will let my garden grow by itself this year. I'll leave the moss and the leaves and the twigs of last autumn for the birds, the brave ones who visit the town centre, and their young. 

For everything, there is a season. A time to garden, and a time to refrain from gardening. The rooftop was loaned to me, for a while: an open secret. For the time that I needed it, I made of it a sanctuary.