Drifting...

The Flintshire coastline in winter is lovely, there's a castle, a lighthouse, an old ship and wide,wide skies.  I love ambling along the shore picking up driftwood, stones, shells, listening to the 'kleep,kleep' of oystercatchers and the soft 'tew' of redshanks, watching rafts of common scoters bobbing like bath toys on the calm blue sea.


I stuffed my pockets with enough flotsam to make these things for the village Xmas Fair.

 

Remembering...

The church bell chimed 100 times then the bugler played the last post as the Red Dragon fluttered in the soft breeze and a couple of gulls wheeled in the clear blue sky. 100 years since the start of WW1, 70 years since D-Day.  We go to a Remembrance service every year, this year it was noticeable how few veterans from WW2 were present. 
 
When Charlie's Dad died aged 86, we were clearing out his things from the old coal shed where he used to keep his fishing tackle and work boots. His cap hung on a nail on the back of the immaculately painted door and on the top shelf, amongst neatly labelled tins of drill bits and washers, I found this little pot of sand...

I struggle to imagine him landing on that beach in June 1944 and stopping to scoop up some sand.    Back home in Liverpool, his wife was pregnant with their third child (my husband, Charlie).  Had he taken a bullet that day, as many of his comrades did, my Charlie would never have known his Dad.
 Thanks Pop xx

And Today...

                                                                                                     
... I've been a Guinea Pig, for the Health and Beauty Department of my local college.  For £10 I had a muscle melting Swedish Massage.  Ceri spent an hour loosening the knots between my shoulder blades, formed after helping to construct a giant storytelling chair on Wednesday.  I've booked in for two more sessions and put my name down for a course of Reflexology treatments in January. 

Explore your nearest college and see what they have to offer, hairdressing, beauty treatments, holistic therapies, all at a fraction of the cost of a salon. 

I floated home like a cloud

Thursdays are good...

Yoga with Birds

Pose of a tree

For an hour every Thursday
I’m a cat, a dog, a mountain, a child.
While I breathe wide and watch the sky
through the space between my knees,
goldfinch, robin, wagtail and gull,
wrap me in a rainbow of song.

 

 

Senses

 

The sky was the colour of a blue tit's wings.  Hawthorn berries glistened like rubies. Goldfinches tinkled overhead, reeds rustled in the soft breeze and the damp earth smelled like wild mushroom soup and crusty bread.  My senses tingled.  But what if my senses were impaired in some way? 

I tried to imagine not hearing the soft whistle of a bullfinch, the mewing of a buzzard, not being able to see berries and gold autumn leaves...

 

These were my thoughts as I helped in the construction of a sensory garden in my local nature reserve.  Today we made a giant story telling chair and raised beds to be filled with plants to touch and smell.  There'll be lots more features when funding allows.

 

 

 

And when I came home at 4.30pm, the moon was already glowing behind my favourite birch tree so I went for a walk up the lane, with my moonshadow and a tawny owl for company.



 

 





Snow - or is it?

Today the first snow fell in the mountains of Snowdonia, not far from where I live.  The white capped hills reminded me of another white-capped rock I saw back in the summer...

It’s hard to describe but imagine the sound of 1000 people gargling; the smell of old spilt milk, the taste of wind-blown salt on your lips, the warm feel of varnished wood under your fingers and the sight of 100,000 gannets swarming like white flies over a huge iced bun.  

That was a boat trip to Bass Rock, thirty minutes from Edinburgh and one of the best wildlife spectacles in the world according to David Attenborough, and me.