Newsletter

The hawthorn blossom along Skimmingdish Lane is so fulsome at the moment, hedgerows with branches darting out in every direction, laden with white flowers like a head of mad, old white hair in need of a good cut. We have a few barbershops in town and on Monday they’ll be busy cutting their way through three months of growth, rooms full of chatter and the snip snip of scissors and sweep sweep of brushes – there is work to be done in those chairs and we wish them, and all our fellow shopkeepers in town, the best of luck in what is sure to be the strangest of days. The last thirteen or so months have taught all of us who have had to close our shops that fortitude and resilience are attributes which can see us through the darkest of times, for some those times have been, and have just become, some of the saddest and darkest ever experienced – but those times pass, the stone rolls on, it’s time to get back in the chair.

We’re under a flight-path at the moment, it’s qute noisy – the geese are the loudest, you can hear them from a way off, the rhythmic honking building to a chaotic crescendo as they clatter across the sky above. The ducks appear to have more energy, or is it that when in flight the small wings just need to work a little harder – the quacks more sporadic, an afterthought to staying aloft, whereas the occasional pair of swans has a grace which belies their size – the beat of their wings moving the air with a thud, thud, thud. All these returning tourists, about to touch down and make their way to the arrivals hall of Spring are a welcome sight and sound. This soundtrack of the changing season doesn’t just come from the sky, the gentle bleat of this year’s lambs as soft as the softest wool, the cow in the nearby barn mooing loudly as she prepares to calve – how lucky we are that mother nature is focused on the job in hand – the world still turns.

The enthusiasm and passion were infectious (perhaps the wrong word!), each and every member of the team seemed to demonstrate the same attributes, from the moment of arrival to realisation it was all over and you were back in the car park. It was like being swept along on a gentle tide of joy and comfort, delicate fronds nudging you along the conveyor towards the needle of liberation. And everyone else I’ve spoken to who has had their first injection seemed to feel the same, that universal feeling of emotion and pride when people come together to do good things – it bodes well that when liberation finally does return, we won’t have forgotten that we are a Society, that selflessness always trumps selfishness in the card game of life, that with a dose of enthusiasm, mixed with a spoonful of passion, we still know how to make a total which is far greater than the sum of the parts – it’s time we got our skates back on!

Days like this one only happen twice a year – today is the Vernal Equinox, that moment in the calendar when the night and the day are of equal length. From this day forward all the way to the Summer Solstice the evenings will be getting lighter, the days getting longer – Spring has arrived. This is the time when the daffodils make their welcome appearance, the bright yellow of their heads adding a splash of colour helping to banish the greys of the Winter. How do those little clumps of flowers appear on the grass verges in the middle of nowhere? has some benevolent soul been out and about planting bulbs knowing the resulting joy these flowers bring? I hope so, what a wonderful thought.

‘March comes in like a lion and (hopefully) goes out like a lamb’ – these last few days have been more than blustery in this part of the world, the strong winds a reminder that although the Spring is almost here, Winter still has a few words to share. The weather being a uncanny parallel for the optimism of a country looking forward to coming out of lockdown, but troubles of the last year are still very much an influence.

Like a gaggle of children excitedly bouncing back to school (hurrah!) the clouds skate and tumble across the morning sky, a solitary needle-like vapour trail, piercing the blue, trying in vain to stitch the white back together – the phrase herding cats springs to mind. The skylight perfectly framing the constantly changing shapes – as the images slowly morph from one to another, the sense of calm they instill is immediate – no wonder there is a Cloud Appreciation Society – with gentle beauty like this unfolding beyond the window pane, we should all be members.