Spaces In Betweeen

 Dear reader,

 

Perhaps some of you missed the most ridiculous story I have ever heard in the news last week.  For those of you who might not have read about it or heard of it on the news here it is. Two school girls aged 13, pupils at a school in the south of England argued with a fellow pupil, in the same class and the same age, as this pupil now identifies as a cat.  She is a cat, she says.  The two pupils said that this was nonsense but the teacher didn't agree, and she  then gave them a severe telling off.  If this girl said she was a cat then that is what she was and make no mistake, she said. 

Apparently there are other pupils all over the UK identifying as cats, dinosaurs, and even the moon.  The dinosaur is given strips of meat to eat at lunch time.  The whole gender debate is beyond me.  Surely a woman with a vagina and a man with a penis are a woman and a man, and that is that.  But no I am wrong apparently.  There are lots of different genders, so anyone could be anything they chose including all sorts of animals.  Whatever next?,  I ask myself.  In fact I ask myself whatever next very often these days.

 

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From William Cowper, 1782, July 3rd, in Buckinghamshire

'I shiver with cold on this present third of July....Last Saturday night the cold was so severe that it  pinched off many of the young shoots of peach-trees....The very walnuts, which are now no bigger than small hazelnuts drop to the ground; and the flowers, though they blow, seem to have lost their odours.  I walked with your mother yesterday in the garden, wrapped up in a winter surcoat, and found myself not at all encumbered by it.'

From Dorothy Wordsworth, 1802, July 5th, in Westmorland

'A very sweet morning.   William stayed some time in the orchard....It came on a heavy rain, and we would not go to Dove Nest as we had intended.....The roses in the garden are fretted and battered and quite spoiled, the honey suckle, though in its glory, is sadly teazed.  The peas are beaten down.  The scarlet beans want sticking. The garden is overrun with weeds.'

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Spaces In Between

Always full of uplifting music
Mozart, Chopin, or Vivaldi,
soothing sounds amongst
the shelves of books
resting in every cranny,
gentle voices talking quietly
discussing perhaps Jane Austen
or Philip Larkin.
A small white jug full of daisies
roses or sweet peas.

Now the space is taken
with other folk, other types.
Madonna or Guns and Roses
belt out noisy music,
croissant and pain au chocolat
are served with lattes,
eggs are fried, burgers eaten,
talk is of themselves,
their lives,
and no flowers in a small white jug.

Same space, different time.

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With best wishes, Patricia