Dear Reader,
Four snowdrops came out in the garden this week but nevertheless the garden is looking a bit dreary and sad. I wish I knew more about gardens. As I understand it, lots of people get enormous pleasure from tending their plots and seem to think about them almost as children who need feeding, caring and love. I tried last year to make a place on a small piece of lawn for wild flowers so that bees and butterflies would be pleased but unfortunately having thrown a quantity of seeds on the grass nothing whatsoever grew there, so I feel that I haven't got green fingers. My two daughters, Tiffany and Jessica, are very able in the garden and flowers and plants seem to do their bidding.
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I was asked this week to read out some of my poems at a June Festival in Charlbury, which is where I live. I do feel very nervous about this and haven't yet decided to perform. In the two years since I stood on a stage I have become very reclusive and the thought of an audience terrifies me. Francis and I go out very little, just to the Co-op down the street, or occasionally venture out to Witney, seven miles away. And that's it. Coronavirus has certainly changed my habits, but I am not sure whether it is for the good or the bad. Time will tell I suppose.
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From Jane Austen, January 25th 1801 in Hampshire
'How do you like this cold weather? I hope you have all been earnestly praying for it as a salutary relief from the dreadfully mild and unhealthy season preceding it, fancying yourself half putrefied from the want of it, and that you will now draw into the fire, complain that you never felt such bitterness of cold before, that you are half starved, quite frozen, and wish the mild weather back again with all your hearts.'
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Viking Footsteps
There it is: a windswept empty beach,
great fields of white sand dressed
in drift wood, seaweed, plastic bottles,
flotsam, pebbles, shells, stones, and kelp skeins.
It stretches away to the horizon.
Seagulls, gannets, terns, twist and fly
make their repetitive cries, peck in the ground.
Small pools of seawater form
as the tide goes out, sea creatures swimming there.
But is that a long boat, red sails fluttering, I see?
And are those uncovered Viking footsteps in the sand?
And do I smell spitted meat, mead and honey
drifting past me on the salt-scented air?
The sand dunes hug their secrets silently,
letting the quiet southerly wind
rustle through the marram grasses.
I ask them, do Viking voices, whisper on the wind,
sometimes, on an icy night under a starlit sky?
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Very best wishes, Patricia
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