After a visit to the quirky independent hardware store up London Rd, home to a thousand types of nails and all manner of other oddments, I traipsed up Tower Rd West clutching bamboo poles for my fast-growing potted peas. This morning their tendrils were flailing about blindly seeking something to wrap themselves around. I had thought I’d just eat the pea shoots but they’d already gone beyond the miscarriage stage and were sporting little white flowers. Maybe I will actually witness the birth of a pea pod or two! I am very new at growing veg, and flail about equally.
How everything changes in every moment. Yet there is the illusion of stasis. We don’t catch Nature growing. No sudden movements; just an edging in slow time towards a full expression of itself. Like a graceful dancer in slow motion, arms extending up until there is no more stretch, then the same steady descent. Like the pink roses I passed in a scruffy garden: just on the turn.
I hear people saying they can’t wait to get back to how things were, as if there was such a thing to go back to. We too, like Nature, morph imperceptibly from child to young adult and all the ages that follow until suddenly we are old. As the poet Pablo Neruda observed so eloquently: “All old people carry in their eyes a child and children at times observe us with the eyes of wise ancients.”
Whatever we “go back to”, it won’t ever be the same as it was. A lot of grief would disappear if we could accept this.
On my way to the hardware shop, I crossed over the bridge at Warrior Square station where I paused for a moment to look along the empty platform. A shaft of sun fell down at the entrance to the tunnel. I leant out looking for the nose of a train but there was only a pin head of empty light in the dark
Along Southwater Rd I was amused by two cars boasting look-at-me colours. Earlier I’d seen a pink one on my morning walk. Things came in threes today. As I walked back home via the seafront three people sat on the socially acceptable seats waiting for a bus. I pretended to take a photo of the sea… but captured them!
I was struck again by the jolly junk garage below the terrace where I live. My living room window with the stunning sea views is the middle one on the top floor.
How lucky I am!
