Jane Metcalfe

A strange juxtaposition of light is often present on the sea and in the sky these days: panoply of ever-changing patterns. It reflects how it is for us. As we move from Lockdown back to the landscape of the known, the flux of change within is inevitable. 

The clouds are like the cities we made of them as children. Sandcastles in the sky I called them. Fantasies of other worlds reflect our wishes. We want it all to be perfect. In our dreams everything lives in harmony. But when those dreams translate into acquiring more and more materially, we become displaced; discontented, until a wakeup call appears. 

And this was it! 

It is clear to me we can’t just go back to the old ways. We wear the dull cloth of habit because it’s safe. Now we need a real dream of a better world. The clouds and colours, the startling blue on slate grey, the soft paintings of finger clouds; the translucent wash of mauve on a silver sea: they remind us of what beauty there is in the un-acquired. 

Nature has shown us how much she improved when we stopped. Birds sang louder, the light seemed brighter, certain animals appeared in spaces we had vacated: Innocents that have no hidden agenda but to live in their natural habitude. 

Can we dream a better dream?

I like to think we can…

 

I am off to visit my elderly friend near Summerfield Woods who enjoys a good old natter from the kitchen door. On the passageway leading to London Rd, I hadn’t noticed the sign before: “Please stop stealing our plants. The garden centres are now open… Buy your own!” There has always been a congregation of flowering and edible plants growing in varying pot sizes along here, just as there has always been a smattering of opportunists who don’t think of anybody else’s needs but their own. Sad but true.

Kings Rd has more shops open: the refill store; a bric a brac shop or two, but few people are out. It is more like a traditional Sunday when a day of rest was the norm. Or perhaps they’ve migrated up to London for the peaceful protests. 

The courtyard in front of Warrior Square station is deserted. I love the signs that have no current purpose: OUT when nothing actually went in. Like those Spaghetti Western towns where dried bush rattles in the wind across an empty square and a sense of unease is in the air.

Lockdown may be easing but maybe people are not easy. Not yet. 

Across the bridge and two chairs sit as if at a tea party close up to the litter bin, who speaks rubbish at them through his big mouth. Up Southwater Rd household rubbish has taken on a new meaning: mattresses, bed frames, old computer desk, bags of garden waste spilling out of thin black bin bags jumbled up against walls. A sudden overwhelming thought hits me: all the families and individuals in their private burrows, in their private heads with their own opinions.

How can we ever agree?

I look up and a tree like a giant totem pole rises above it all.

Along the way there are always new things to wonder at. A flaming bush spilling over the wall, the top of the church gateway, like a pyramid hinting at wisdom and solidarity; and a meadow, the same meadow as before, but now with foxgloves and thicker grass. In the wood the trees watch warily as I pass on dusty paths.

 

There’s something easy about chatting to strangers. You feel close to them in a way that you don’t always in longer term relationships. There is no baggage, no history. You chat about dogs; the wonders of living in St Leonard’s. Many are DFLs (down from Londoners) who have a born-again texture to their joy. I remember that same sense of wonder 35 years ago which has been rekindled in this time of apparent deprivation. They talk about the sea, the clean air; but most of all about their dogs and the things dogs get up to; all shared communality. This morning a man with two border collies was being dragged forward by the young one and back by the old one. “Gilbert sit or stay whichever command you like!” he shouted jovially. Gilbert did neither. Later I saw him again and asked if the old one was called Sullivan. “No” he said, ‘but he should be.”

I didn’t get photos of them. I like to snap when nobody is looking. This is all so innocent. And yet… in the other world, the one I collectively inhabit, untold horrors unfold.

In the plant world you see what we call garden flowers standing next to wildflowers and what we call weeds. In truth they all flower so are part of the tribe of that which grows out of the earth. There is no sense of I’m better than you. 

Words give meanings to things that were born wordless. We separate them with our definitions. We learn from the cradle. Mummy says, as you stuff mud into your mouth cos it looks like the mashed up food you eat, “Uh uh. Dirty. Mustn’t eat that.” You talk to a stranger. Mummy runs out and drags you away. You don’t understand but you learn to avoid these things.

They say weeds multiply and their roots kill off the more worthy plants. A poppy is a kind of weed, an interloper. Each year in my tiny garden a poppy or two or more grow in a different spot, or out of the cracks between the well-worn slabs on my walkway, their random seeds impregnating the earth without a by your leave. And I love it. Can’t wait to see what will appear each spring and where. But disharmony injustice, marginalisation of animals, plants trees humans, has at its root cause the idea of one being better than the other. Celebrating difference rather than fearing it is our greatest fear. We’ve learnt to stamp out the different: I’m a flower you’re a weed. No. I live and you live and we are equal. 

What horrors are committed in the name if individuation.

In the park there is a sense of harmony. It is hard to be aggressive surrounded by the all-inclusive sheltering arms of this aspect of Nature. In the jungle I would be afraid. There is savagery there. Fight or fly. But “Man” is supposed to be superior. Man developed reason. 

Some reason..! 

Yet here I am, my senses fed with every step I take; newly born beauties leaning their heads towards me as I pass. 

It is important we keep the balance between that which transports us and the bitter pill of the human story. Removed from an actual event, rather than disempowering ourselves with justifiable anger, we may be of more help by remaining sane, by examining where our own aggression towards those we meet daily lies. The raising of our own awareness and consciousness leaves its energetic imprint on the world. 

As I see it..

 

There’s a kind of surreal quality to living by the sea today. From my window I watch people wander along the prom: couples, groups, family units in gaudy summer gear; they sit on the beach or stand in the sea cooling off on the Costa del Hastings. Today, Spring has come to full term and given birth to Summer. 

So what’s surreal about it? Apparently we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Not here though. Today Lockdown is out sunning its pasty face. To the South there’s not a mask to be seen. Go North up London Rd and it’s a different day. People in wide berth, some masked, queue up for bread, or fruit and veg. In Boots a perspex-headed guard indicates the one way system with an Elizabethan flourish, doing the same as I leave, like a bit-part actor trying to make his mark.

Down Kings Rd I stop to buy a vegan sausage roll in the deli and avoid engaging with a tongue-tutting woman who wants to rant about the two metre rule. She persists. I tell her firmly: It’s just the way it is and swerve off up the street.

Well, it is the way it is. 

I was enroute to visit an older friend who isn’t feeling well. She loves people. She just needed to see someone; to laugh a bit. On the way I met a yellow rose nodding over a wall and then a tree with brazen yellow hair.

My friend embroiders stories in colourful threads, not only with words but on actual canvas. She is a wizard at weaving whatever is in her life at the time. In the past weeks she has woven the Corona story. As it unfolds she adds to it, looping the panels together in one piece. 

When I leave I cut back through Summerfield woods out into a small meadow, past the quiet law courts and the police station where two police cars idle under the trees; on down Magdalen Rd, pausing by the church courtyard to admire a view of another church; then home down the little alley where a not-so-famous-as-Banksy graffiti artist has done a statement portrait of the Queen circa 1965.

Later, a quick walk through the park where families sit on the grass in perfectly-spaced clumps. The tutting woman would have had something to say!

As I write this it is as though I have been wandering through a vast film set, somewhat like The Truman Show, and at any moment I might turn a corner and bump up against the flats. 

Life is surreal.

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”

William Shakespeare

As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7