I Reap What I've Sown / Not Sown

Finding a garden unexpectedly on the flat roof at the back of my home has been a gift from lockdown, slow down, sit down, hunker down … down the stairs I go each morning, doing my yoga moves as I climb out of the window at around 10am. This is the time when the sun comes round the rooftops, or rather the rooftops tilt further, letting the sunshine through. From that point, on a fine morning, I have about two and a half hours before the earth tilts me back into shade.

I've adjusted my working habits to suit, and I'm reading more books - Rights and Wrongs in Social Work by Mark Doel works even better in fresh air. I can't see my laptop screen outside, so it has to be paper, and it has to be one of twenty books I hustled from my office when I knew it was likely I'd be away from the campus for a while.

I've adjusted my horizons to suit, have explored the 12 metre length, 1.5m width of space, finding more pleasures - in particular the luck of a pot bound hydrangea with newly sprouting flowerheads.  My friend, G K Anarchist, socially distanced a bag of compost for me, and I cycled over to pick it up from outside his home. On the way back, I pushed my way up Wyle Cop, my bike tripled in weight. I quarantined the bag for a couple of days, before opening it up, digging my hands into its dark richness, then liberating the hydrangea into wider, deeper soil.

I've adjusted my cooking to suit the herbs in the garden. I'd always considered coriander exotic because of its association with spicy dishes, but it turns out to be surprisingly easy to grow from seed. The leaves I've harvested so far taste miraculously like coriander, so I made a celebratory meal of butternut squash curry, homemade naan,  rice, mango chutney and yoghurt - then garnished the lot with a first sprig from the largest coriander plant.

I've adjusted my choices to suit,  aligning myself with my son Jonty's vegetarianism, his decision based on thoughtful consideration. I've slipped into it, and to the excitement of my weekly veg box from Pomona - a Shrewsbury grocery store which also delivers, if requested, maple syrup and lavender plants.

I've adjusted my swims to the size of my bath, easing myself under water as each day ends, into the comfort of warmth and lemon soap, into the sensation of almost floating: a nod in the direction of weightlessness.

I Find a Garden

At the top of the first flight of stairs to get to my flat from the front door is a window. Beyond the window, a forbidden flat roof. When I say forbidden, it's a roof on which a couple of years ago a decorator planted his ladder. So it's not exactly forbidden, and it's safe enough.

Since the benches have been taped off, I've been longing for somewhere to sit in fresh air. All week, my mind's been wandering to the flat roof. And yesterday, I was in conversation with an on-line community of people who seek greater connection with nature and themselves by paying close attention.

The inspiration of that community had me climbing out of the window, onto the roof. Having a reduced allocation of physical courage, I took many safety precautions, including a sturdy box on which to stand to make getting back through the window easier.

I sat in the courtyardbehind my flat, one floor up. A bee buzzed overhead, a blackbird sang. The still-bare trees (invisible to me from my home until now) stood still. The scent of  hyacinths in my window box filled the air.

Growing in confidence, I began to explore the space. It's about 2 metres wide, and 6-7 metres long, edged with a low brick lip, capped in stone. The roof surface is gravelly, mossy, and there are four raised skylights which must illuminate the shop storage rooms below. I found a potted Hosta - its leaves perfect from a lack of slugs.

Two black rubbish bags looked untidy in one corner. Thinking I'd dispose of them, I looked inside - they contained old compost, plastic pots, two long, shallow plastic trays, the tangled rootballs of forgotten plants, leaf mould. A gift. All I need, with the seeds I've been germinating for my summer window boxes, to make a garden.

I Count to B

B is for Brothers. I think of them every day. B is for Boys - my two sons: brilliant, bold, kind, funny, optimistic. B is for the Buns I am baking for breakfast (it's Good Friday, so they're Hot Cross, not Belgian) - kneading dough when there's no particular rush. B is for bulbs, for the hyacinths and daffodils blooming in two window boxes which Mike installed for me. I have compost with which I can work and plan, seeds germinating and growing on. B is for Board Games. B is for Bathroom and my new blue tiles. B is for Book - of course. For the one I'm working on, and the ones I'm reading. B is for Banoffee pie. For Beethoven. And B is for Bob, and Bill, blue tits I have anthropomorphised, who might also be Bert and Brian on some days. They visit my bird feeder, and if I sit in my blue chair, and am very still, I can watch them cracking seeds on the side of the feeder's perches. B is for Best Friend,  a London GP and isolating with the virus. She has described all the symptoms, they include annoyance. B is for brave. B is for better. B is for fit and well, hale and hearty, in the pink, tip top, fine fettle. B is for the camping we will be doing later this year, for risotto, Trangia stoves, Sauvignon Blanc, swims, and our Bicycles.  B is for Boudicca, and for Cleopatra.

I Admire My Brothers

I have three big brothers, and I admire them all in the way that a younger sister often does - with deep appreciation of their qualities and talents, and a determination to keep up with them somehow. Former MP, Doctor, Vicar. You couldn't make it up. No wonder I had to become a Poet.

Here we are, lined up with our parents on the bench in the garden of our Highbury vicarage. Families don't seem to look like this any more. I'm on my mother, Sally's, knee, David's just behind with what looks like a home-made fringe. The privet hedge looks equally trimmed, and my mother is in a blouse - this could be early autumn so I think I'm about 3, making Matthew 5, David 7 and Jeremy 9. Or maybe we're 4, 6, 8, 10. As far as age facts go, I always appreciated the half of the year when we were evenly spaced, 2 years apart, as opposed to the half when we were 3568 or 4679. My father, John, has his left-hand mittened because his left arm didn't work properly, the result of hemiplegia caused by encephalitis in 1959.  He nearly died when Jeremy was just 6 weeks old.

The little boy David came as a blessing after the catastrophe of my father's illness, and he is now Consultant Cardiologist at the Hammersmith Hospital, London. I've always been proud of this fact and have to try not to mention it too often, whilst he's unassuming about his talents, and talks about his work as if it were ordinary to perform life-saving procedures week by week.  As brothers go, he is top of the admiration list at the moment, and I'm sure Jeremy and Matthew would agree.

He phoned me yesterday to explain his role in the front-line of patient care in London during the pandemic. He will be heading a team, working with acutely ill patients in a hospital which was cleared last week in readiness for a sharp rise in complex corona virus admissions. He told me that everyone in the NHS - doctors, cleaners, porters, nurses, midwives, physios, cooks, administrators - everyone who so much as sets foot in a hospital in the coming weeks is a hero, before s/he even does anything. The courage being required of them is hard to imagine. They are feeling fear, and carrying on, organising themselves for the tsunami, the battle, the overwhelm.

David and I said more than we usually do (and not nearly enough) about our appreciation of each other, just in case. I asked if he'd forgiven me for writing a poem about a previous telephone conversation (Running Advice, below). He replied, "There's no such thing as bad publicity" - this absolution is a relief.

My big brother and I concluded by agreeing on the luck of being born into our particular family - flawed and odd and wonderful as it was and is, and will continue to be. Nothing, not even the new expressions of fear we are all experiencing, can take away that moment of the photograph, this conversation we had, the deep love I feel for my brothers, who I've known from the beginning of my life, who've been with me and seen me through all the rough and tumble since then.

Running Advice

On hearing I’ve taken up running, my brother mentions fish oil

like it’s the next most logical thing in the conversation.

We’re on the telephone because he’s one of the few people

I talk to on the phone any more, and it’s a Saturday morning.

I’d just got back from my run when it rang, and it was him.

It’s on account of us not being young any more, he says.

We need to take care of our joints. I reply that I was always

four years younger than him, which he acknowledges.

Younger is how I feel after completing circuits of the park

in the early light, with the air clear and cool and my blood moving.

I tease him, ask whether I’m to apply the oil externally.

Of course not, he states, sounding on the verge being a doctor.

Which he is - he’s a cardiologist, and a good one at that,

and I can tell that on this matter he expects to be taken seriously.

While we’re talking, I’m looking out of my upstairs window

at the people going about their business in the street below.

The sun is showing up the dirt on the glass and I notice

that after my run I have the energy to consider cleaning windows.

This is what I am thinking about when he asks about footwear.

I look at my old trainers. I’d got in from my run

and only just put on the kettle and not yet had time to mix

the pancake batter or squeeze oranges when the phone rang.

For goodness sake, my brother says, when he hears my silence,

buy some decent trainers. You need to take care of your knees –

and try not to run on hard surfaces.  I decide not to tell him

about the tarmac path by the river through the avenue of lime trees.

The orange sun was still low in the sky at half-past eight,

and it was hard to look directly at the swans taking off midstream.

I can hear him thinking, because the line is clear as a bell,

and he’s working out how much to write on the cheque

that he will send me for my birthday in three weeks’ time.

I’ve got to go in a minute because I haven’t showered yet, I say,

and I’m getting fragrant. There’s nothing like a shower followed by

breakfast after an early run, he says. And on this we agree.

Well, good to talk and thanks for the advice, I say.

Just one more thing, he says. Never look down.

When you’re running, look up, and always look ahead.

Other poems about running are also available (with this poem in this book):

I have ordered this anthology for David - the poems are written by those who, like him, know what the inside of a hospital is really like:

All Profits donated to “NHS Charities Together” – CORVID 19 EMERGENCY FUND

I Distract Myself

I'm listening to my vinyl LPs one by one, taking them from the end of the shelf, however they present themselves. Today I've listened to Stravinsky's Firebird, Debussy's Nocturnes, the Oscar Peterson Trio's Canadiana Suite, and Luke Wright's 20. There are benefits to a non-alphabetically kept collection.

Speaking of alphabets, I have been creating a folder in Word of all my poems, A-Z. I have rediscovered a few in the process which I had forgotten. Some of these are not embarrassing.

My attempts at yoga might be embarrassing if anyone could see me do them, but they can't. I need to do yoga as I can't go swimming, and in normal times, swimming is my primary form of back care. My new bedroom carpet is soft, and spending time close up to its wooliness in plank, downward dog or child pose is more comforting than I expected.

An apple crumble is comfortably warming up in the oven. The vanilla ice cream is out, softening. In a moment, I will fill the kettle with water.

What Hokusai's famous woodblock print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, shows us about water is that great waves are made up of individual, tiny waves. Those waves in turn are made up from molecules. They are drawn together, build to a climax, a high point, a breaking.

Jonty Lefroy Watt's latest composition Apogee explores the nature of water, shows the orchestra, a whole made up of individuals, how to express the wave, the tension of accumulation, the power, the culmination, before a return can begin.

https://jontylefroywatt.bandcamp.com/track/apogee-2020

I Grout My Tiles

I've added 'grouting' to my list of DIY practices, which now includes: changing washers, decorating bedrooms, and putting up sloping shelves. On International Women's Day, I feel it's important to make a point. I'll add 'making points' to my list too.

As a result of this latest act of independence, my bathroom looks more like a swimming pool than it did before - in a good way.  I didn't notice this till I went swimming again last week - storm Dennis had closed the Shrewsbury pool for a couple of weeks with his random acts of windy vandalism.  The tiles I chose are brick-shaped and coloured blue with a hint of green - Maybe they're called  'aqua'.  Steve put them on the wall, but said that I could save money by doing the grouting myself.

I've done minor grouting before, but this bathroom's major. I've been carefully scraping grout, this way and that, across the gaps between tiles to fill them. These gaps seem hungry, eager to eat the grout, and today I had to cycle to B and Q to get an extra tub. I appeared, from the lonely state of the bike rack, to be the only person who had arrived in this way.

It strikes me that grouting is more the work of a novelist than a poet. The gaps between the words are pretty much the point and attraction of poetry. So filling in gaps, making sense of the whole, making things watertight, seems, judging by my aching right hand, prosaic.

On the plus side, I reckon this venture into prose-style DIY justifies me eating the last of the 'For when you're writing your novel, Mum' biscuits that my son gave me at Christmas, even though the novel still has plenty of gaps in it. Yum.

I Contemplate Mortality

Of the dissertations I have supervised this year, three have been about death, or aspects of death: palliative care, child bereavement, assisted dying. I have learnt a lot, not least that I am still alive. In the midst of the menopause, I have not always been sure of that.

And when it became apparent that a new acquaintance must have Googled me for publicity purposes, I checked out my on-line life, saw that my website spoke in future terms of things past, updated it for the coming year https://lizlefroy.wixsite.com/liz-lefroy including information about when and where I'll be performing my poetry (the next time is Monday 17th Feb, Gladstone's Library).

In my internet rummaging, I also found a website which had harvested this information, some of which is true:

Chatting with a friend yesterday about trying to change the world for the better in relation to social justice and the rights of marginalised individuals, I was reminded that I've been alive for quite a long time now. We spoke of the latest change in language - from 'Black and Asian' to 'People of Colour' in some contexts. We talked about how the word 'colour' had been a pejorative not long ago.

Sometimes, I find it hard to keep up, and I see the generation below (my children, park runners, poets, activists) streaming ahead of me. My energy flags, and I see that change is mostly circular. I long for days of solitude with books in a quiet room nearer to the sea.

One of the reasons I can have this dream is that my primary source of income is not Poet.  The above website also fails to mention my bike. Tut.

Yesterday's friendly conversation also turned to Raymond Carver, and his poem, Gravy. If you look Raymond Carver up on the internet you will find that lived ten 'gravy' years before he died aged 50. He had a second second chance at life when he gave up drinking aged 40. It's one of my favourite poems - Carver does what poetry needs to do: achieves a clear truthfulness which eases life, which eases thoughts of death:

"he said to his friends, I'm a lucky man.

I've had ten years longer than I or anyone

expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."