As I walked out to the Morning Star
The Cathedral cast its mark,
Its lowering shadows enveloped the pub
And the sky grew unusually dark.
The Church, the beacon, was not yet lit
Too soon to call it night,
Though its luminous power would later shine forth
By the trick of electric light.
Little children come out to play,
In the meadow as bright as day.
The stream runs by all the while,
It’s Chipping Norton’s River Nile.
Derek the duck swims along,
Whilst the blackbird sings his joyful song.
Derek is an agile swimmer,
Then a farmer shoots him for his dinner.
He takes him back to Mrs Farmer,
Who looks distinctly like a llama.
She puts it in the boiling pot,
The sun is shining, she’s really hot.
She openeth the window and looks at the grass,
Whilst Farmer Giles slaps her ass.
Who works the field pulling carts by day,
And sleepeth at night, betwixt horse and hay.
Walking through the alleyway on the way home from my photography class last night I heard someone coming up behind me suddenly bursting into song.
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature’s recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life
Whereupon I felt it incumbent on me to add “You better believe it”. He replied “Yeah” and trotted off into the darkness.
The red van’s been parked there for as long as I can remember. It’s brand new – in the ‘never-been-used’ sense. The once-deep-red colour has faded over the years and is now approaching a dirty pink. All this time, through wind and rain, and the odd blizzard, the red van’s been left unattended. It’s supposed to be the emergency vehicle and has a load of medical equipment in it. At least, so I’m told. I’m sure the battery must be dead by now. Is anyone emergency testing the emergency vehicle ??
It was nine o’clock monday night
and thinking about getting dark.
There they were, tottering outside the station,
dressed to the nines and heels so high
leading to instability in light winds.
A token bloke in tow,
what was he thinking of?
I couldn’t make out
if they were on their way out
or on their way in
or what indeed they were doing there.
Tom alighted from the train and
we left them to their evening.
A big thank you to everyone who turned up for the Burton Road Strip event yesterday. I think everyone enjoyed themselves and all concerned felt that the event had been a success.
Can we stop off
On the way home
From school for sweets?
We can stop off
On the way
To the pub for fags!
(If takeaways aren’t on
Tonight’s menu)
Load up on the way home
From a libation
@ the Strugs or the Vic.
Hi is that Rafi? This is Marcel here. Marcel Sartre from ballroom dancing. I’m just ringing to make sure that you got Dorothy’s message about ballroom dancing being cancelled. Oh you did, good. I’m going to run an additional class the week after next. Thank you. Bye.
When I was small my dad had to do jury service in the village of Dolgellau in North Wales. The last case on the Friday was a small time poacher who everyone on the jury knew and who they all knew was almost certainly guilty.
The judge informed the jury that if he was found guilty then they would have to all return the next day, Saturday, for sentencing (we are talking 45 years ago here).
Dad was refereeing a school rugby match the next day, someone else had a hairdressers appointment etc etc.
Funnily enough the decision was “not guilty”.
If you don’t want the jury service to go on longer than necessary…
8.00 take tom to kayaking 8.40 take hannah to help out with baby ballet 11.15 pick hannah up from ballet – go to newark to pick up car left after beer festival 13.00 take john to tennis lesson 14.00 pick john up from tennis 14.15 take hannah to dance class 16.00 pick tom up from kayaking 17.00 pick hannah up from dancing 18.00 take tom to party in Normanby by Spital 19.00 take hannah 2 babysit drink wine
The strong summer breeze cracks the flags on the two flagpoles above the cricket pavilion. It is cold as we wait for the others to turn up. The building is locked and there are few people around. This is real summer weather as opposed to the artist’s impression.
Later the rain comes and the wind drops. A vertical soaking in prospect. A downpour of the sort that characterises the typical British summer. It is still cold but out and about and dressed in shorts and waterproof coats we stand underneath the large umbrella being fairly relaxed. We buy two bunches of asparagus fresh cut this morning before the weather hit.
At 4pm the boys arrive and we head for the Morning Star for a luxurious late afternoon beer. The pub is surprisingly full of refugees from the rain. One rare hour of liquid hedonism.
The noise on the conservatory roof is deafening and we have abandoned our ambitions to have a barbecue. We cook on the stove in the kitchen and move into the conservatory to eat. The children are a credit and impress our visitors. We should have dinner guests more often.
Later still the cacophony of birds in the back garden is loud enough to compete with any of the noises we have heard today. Mostly blackbirds I think and I wonder if I am hearing this year’s brood.
Finally, sometime towards the end of the day, the heavy, random drips of the water from the trees onto the glass roof. I recline on the sofa pondering the days climatics.
There are eight lovely little blackbirds enjoying themselves in the sun on my small patch of meadow. It’s a very safe place for them. No one goes out there, and the landscape contractors are not due back for a while. They fly off every now and then towards the trees in the car park. They’re great, big trees; eleven of them, in a strip of grass left untarmacked. Someone once told me that the trees represent the eleven players of a cricket team, and that at one time the factory car park was the first cricket pitch in Wales. I think that’ll be a factory myth. A cursory google proves nothing. Looking through the trees I can see there’s not much activity across the road in the SPAR distribution centre; it’s all quiet. It’s quiet here too as most people have been bussed up to London for a company Barbeque to celebrate its centenary. So I’m having a quiet afternoon watching life go by outside. And I was right about the buttercups, they’re all starting to emerge again.
It’s a beautiful, still, sunny day outside. The hot air is trying to move the branches of the trees, but without much success. It’s the sort of day that when you’re indoors you want to be outside in the sun, and when you’re outside, you want to be indoors because it’s too hot.
The landscape contractors are back, and have obligingly parked their white van by the ‘Contractors Parking’ sign. There’s a man driving a lawn mower around my patch of meadow. He’s sporting a yellow, sleeve-less, high-viz top. I feel like asking him whether he’s got any suntan lotion on. We used to make it here, and there’s plenty in the staff shop. But I won’t disturb him. He doesn’t look particularly friendly. The daisies and the buttercups are gone, which is a shame as I was enjoying them. But they’ll be back very soon – the irrepressible force of nature will keep the contractors in employment all summer.
There’s a growing mound of freshly-mown grass in the back of the van. There are probably thousands of landscape contractors all around the country, right now, contributing to the nation’s freshly-mown grass mountain. Where does it all go ?
“How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence?”
Benjamin Disraeli
Throughout history there have been countless examples of man flexing his technological muscle. Yet, despite all our progress we are still to become the planet’s dominant force. The fact, which the human race seems incapable of comprehending, is that man can never conquer nature, and it is this what we have tried to portray in our work.
The apple is a gift to man from nature and fruit is a core part of our existence. Without his five a day, man would suffer from not having a balanced diet. This said, it is typical of him to wantonly disregard it. When the nail is driven through the fruit it begins to decompose, typifying the destruction of ‘our’ natural world. The fruit becomes inedible and sustenance must be sought elsewhere. If left long enough, the apple will rot to the extent that it completely disappears. Though nailed to the board, the fact remains that it cannot remain there forever. Mankind will never pin down nature.
OR
We wanted to nail an apple to a bit of wood and see if it would win the House Arts and Craft competition at school.
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