Glad All Over

Thousands of thunderous claps

About a recent graduation day I’ve got little to say. Neither has Sally. Those who know us, know how profoundly proud we are of both our daughters. But this day… oh, on this graduation day… there was such a realisation… oh my… And I’m feeling Glad All Over.

Don’t mention the….

And the Vice-chancellor mentioned the pandemic and used Hashtag Hero Tropes (LOL). But she did avoid mentioning the (historically unprecedented) forthcoming strikes by health professional (and many other hard-working groups of people.) Wasn’t it funny how the government helped settle the lawyers’ strike in October with very little press attention? (Look it up if you don’t believe me.) Wasn’t it funny how MPs received a no-dispute, guaranteed 2.7% increase? Wasn’t it funny how big industries paid bonuses to their shareholders? Wasn’t it funny how PPE contracts were awarded to…. Oh, shut up. What's most important?

Looking the other way

There are people who spend countless hours gnashing teeth because of some royal nonsense (and I’m a royalist, don’t forget) because the newspapers want us to focus our rage on celebrities and not on government decisions (or lack of decisions.) The government (and the majority of the newspapers) want us to focus on Meghan and Harry. So we will forget food banks, child poverty, the rotting fruit and vegetable fields of England and the understaffed, underfunded social care system and understaffed, underfunded NHS. Look the other way, everybody. We’re in this together. But just because it’s my blog, please see below:

• the Brexit bus promise (lest we forget) (LOL)
• UK hospital beds compared to Germany, France, Italy, Spain (2005 – 2019)
• a right-wing newspaper doing my statistical work for me
• UK Food Bank use (just Trussell, not independent) (2009 – 2022)
• MP’s salaries (2010 – 2022)

I’m Glad All Over for my Echo Chamber, but Distinctly Unglad for our (Potentially) Great (Diminishing) Nation.

Graphs: hospital beds, food bank use in UK, MP's salaries over time

Tale of Two Teeth

Happiness is being boosted, lovely food, reading for pleasure....

Oh I wish I’d looked after me teeth

So recited Pam Ayres MBE in her famous poem I wish I’d looked after me teeth with her cavalcade of witty rhymes: chewed/food, willin’/fillin’, gobstoppers/choppers, licked/picked, careless/hairless. For someone like me who could be described as a gastronome, an epicurist, a gourmand (look them up – they all amount to the same thing – a greedy gobbler) – I can concur – I wish I’d looked after me teeth. But my cheerful dentist spotted that, during my years of teaching, I’d been using my teeth as tools and, for example, ripping out stuck staplers with my incisors so my jaggedy gnashers were in danger of breaking. She spent an hour doing some wizardry and made them look better (I think.) So, fully boosted, I will continue to enjoy tasty oral pleasures as Autumn approaches Winter. And floss!

Autumn is in full swing and the home made curry dinners (courtesy of Prashad) are here to warm the heart....

Wells-next-the-Sea

Wells-next-the-Sea, a dramatic setting for a long delayed celebration

Journey of a Covid Survivor

And so, we went East on the M62 and South on the A1(M) and then East and Easter and Further East along tunnel-like Autumnal lanes, going nowhere but to the edge of the island nation and the impossibly bronze and blue  horizons of the north Norfolk coast. It was what I call “getting away from it all” with precious friends.

Me, Michael, Sally, Janet

Wells-next-the-Sea

To Quay View Cottage, a three-storey, perfectly situated, beautifully clean, well-equipped holiday let which had everything we needed to hunker down at Halloween, catch up and put the world to rights. As W H Hudson (author, naturalist and ornithologist) described it:

There are few places in England where you can get so much wildness and desolation of sea and sandhills, woods, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk.

View from our bedroom at Quay View Cottage

Celebrations Assemble

Reasons to gather:

• two postponed 60th birthday weekends
• an imminent 65th birthday
• the awarding of an OBE
• the recent Empty Nesting and the happiness/success of All Our Daughters
• the recovery of Yours Truly from Ghastly Nasty Covid

Wells-next-the-Sea with, top left, the "old" lifeboat station

Gulls and Geese

The purple evening light (a bit like the “blue hour” of twilight in Scandinavia) bathed the tail end of half term holidaymakers, the younglings squealing as the seagulls and geese swooped and squabbled for territory on the harbour walls and local soccer field.

Sea Wall Defences

In such a flat, expansive landscape, a little elevation goes a long way. It was therefore memorable to walk the length of the Flood Defence Wall under dramatic skies.

Dangerous maze-like coast

The marshes, scrubland, sea, sandbanks and horizons intermingled in ever-changing arrangements, connecting and disconnecting in disorientating maze-like channels. And over us all, the massive skies, moody, broody, threatening, and glorious.

Yes, I Know I used the bottom left snap already, but it just sums up my memory of the weekend!

Holkham Bay

Our destination at the end of the Flood Defence Wall was the two-mile stretch of Holkham Beach, bleeding into dunes which sheltered us from the wind for our picnic.

There's that same pic again, along with Holkham beach, a basking seal and colourful beach huts

Offshore wind farms

Behind us was the desolation of nature and in front of us, bending the mind, were limitless skies merging into the horizon-stretching sea. Could that be a mirage or an offshore wind farm?

Wells Crab House

We self-catered apart from one evening spent in the intimate and informal Wells Crab House where you can identify the name of the fisherman who caught the food on your plate. As the website (justifiably) boasts “Nothing better than getting our deliveries so fresh with wellies still dripping with the sea.” So, there was Curry Battered Prawns, Mackerel Terrine, Haddock Pot and Salmon Noodles followed by Scallop Crumble, Crab Platter, Lobster and Fresh Cod.

Sandbanks and quicksands

Travel writer, Peter Sager, wrote of north Norfolk:

What a coast this is, with its salt marshes and lavender, its channels, dunes, bays and crumbling Ice Age cliffs, lonelier and wilder than its Suffolk neighbour, Arctic, melancholic, beautiful, treacherous, with sandbanks and quicksands, storms and floods, and never-ending erosion.

Sadly the East Coast is the likeliest bit of England to be lost to the sea if the impending climate catastrophe is not averted. Now I have spent time on this watery land, clinging to the island flats, I feel that losing north Norfolk (and, for that matter, parts of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and north Wales) to the sea would be a tragedy.

Worse b4 Better

61st Birthday One Week Later Than Planned.....

Birthday Redux

And so, dear reader, my previous blog explained that I contracted 

SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2)

aka Covid-19

and that I hijacked a Craig David song to explain the Week 1 journey which largely involved coughing and a sore throat. Well, Week 2 has not been the same and involved silent hypoxia (ie low oxygen levels without realising) and a feverish temperature. Floppy boneless limbs applied to both weeks. Covid is a peculiar disease:

• Some, like me, have an “OK” first week, a shocking second week and then recover
• Some people are asymptomatic and hardly know they’ve had it
• Some people deteriorate rapidly and die
• Some people become very ill for a long time
• Some people, like me, develop silent hypoxia from which you can recover (as I did) but which can alternatively lead to a sudden plummeting of health, becoming desperately breathless and hospitalisation 
• And there are many variations and gradations between.

I’m in the recovery stage now, building up stamina, breathing consciously and deeply, increasing the walking distance each day, resting between exertions….

Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif

It is written…. Nothing is written….

A highlight of sofa-flopping has been indulging in long movies – like the widescreen version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a still astonishing feat of cinematography, editing and design with pitch-perfect performances, overwhelming music, and iconographic moments like the above entrance of Omar Sharif in the far distance, like a shimmering mirage; and the jump cut below between a burning match and the rising sun. Lawrence’s epic journey(s) through the burning deserts were a good match for how I felt dredging through my body’s responses to Covid-19. When William Potter burns himself extinguishing a match between his thumb and forefinger, he challenges Lawrence to explain “What’s the trick, then?” Lawrence answers: “The trick….is not minding that it hurts.”

Silenzio, Bruno

An altogether jolliier experience was the film that capped my delayed birthday – the Disney-Pixar film Luca, ravishingly animated and charmingly told. The themes were clear as an Italian blue sky: helicopter-parenting, family – both blood and constructed, unconventional-friendships, deceit, bullying, outsiders, prejudice, escape/freedom….

Self-Isolation Birthday

Of Mice and Men

Wise poet Robbie Burns observed in 1785 that it is a shame when little mice construct their shelters, carefully, lovingly – but unwittingly – in the path of the plough. And so I, dear reader, had planned for my 61st birthday to be at Castle Garden in Sissinghurst staying in the Priest’s House with the family. (If I’m still blogging and you’re still reading in the Spring of 2023, pop back to hear all about it.) Any road up, last year, I was condemned by government regulations to spend my 60th birthday outside and this year I have mostly been having Covid….

Faint line (top left) day one and not so faint (top right) day two

With fevered apologies to Craig David

Was it for real? Damn sure

What was the deal? Let me update

Sunday a tickle or two

Then got a lottta hotter on Monday

A faint line – so fine – real deal so hit me with a PCR

Results by Tuesday – possessed by heat and coughs

Smooth talker Covid they told me

They’d love to unfold me all night long

Cheesegrater throat and hacking hawking

From back to front I flipped it back

And breathed it big

Wednesday was a hell but

Thursday felt more me
Friday was my birthday and love came down the line
And stood at the end of my garden table
We chilled on Saturday and hope to do the same through Sunday

Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Until isolation ends on Thursday....

Last supper with taste and smell for a while....

Unlucky for some
Having been the most cautious person I know since March 2020, I feel as if the Tories’ confusing and contradictory strategy was designed – specifically and personally – to smite me just when I was about to relax. I’m double vaccinated (thanks, NHS) so have been fortunate and I hope I’ll have some natural immunity for a time at least. And I have a loving support system so had a smashing birthday anyway. Smell and taste seem to have departed (hopefully for a short time) but thankfully not before I enjoyed delicious stuff on the day of my nativity. I was also allowed to control the remote so resorted to an old comfort watch with the (to me) magnetic Vanessa Redgrave. The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry, but as Robbie Burns points out, mice have it easier than men because they don’t know their ultimate destination…. Here’s to a few more birthdays, wee, timorous beastie!

Coral

Garden Cottage at Nun Monkton

Garden Cottage

For our (Coral) wedding anniversary we returned to a tiny AirBnB where we stayed in 2019 (when visiting the Yorkshire Heart Vineyard). The oasis “Garden Cottage” is not far from York along a road going only to a remote village where cows graze freely on the village green, a green skewered by the fattest, tallest maypole I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few, madam. Nun Monkton is the name of the village. The garden hummed with insects and wrapped us in its verdant peace. The dawn chorus was full of beauty.

Alice Hawthorne Inn

Alice Hawthorne

Nun Monkton is also home to the Alice Hawthorne Inn where we ate two nights in a row, the first with long-while friends, Sue and Brian. Stoked by delicious food (Crab Mayo, Roast Beetroot, Popcorn Prawns, Yorkshire Dales Lamb, Waterford Farm Steak, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Crème Catalan, Mini Sundae), the venue felt safe and welcoming.

Beningbrough Hall Estate

In The Moment

Our anniversary hike was around the nearby Beningbrough Hall Estate, alongside the River Ouse for much of the time, picking over gnarly roots and picnicking on tree stumps. Cooling forest sections on the walk provided welcome shelter. The house had an indoor exhibition (In The Moment: the art of wellbeing) aimed at reminding viewers to stand and stare, to pause, to slow down, to reflect, to be in the moment. Some of the pieces achieved that (for me) more than others but, on a hot day, it certainly slowed down the old heart rate.

Food and Nature

Amidst medical/political uncertainty and the competing noises of the media, some constants Remain True. The sights, sounds, smells and colours of nature continue to enchant. And eating, drinking and being merry all continue to drown out the stresses of the age. The messages about the “roadmap” towards “Freedom Day” Remain Confusing: Be Free/Be Cautious, Be Released/Continue Shielding, Do/Don’t/Maybe Wear Masks, Do/Don’t/Maybe Socially Distance, Go on holiday to a Red/Amber/AmberPlus/Green/GreenPlus Country/Staycation in the UK but Don’t Go to A Crowded Place (unless it’s a nightclub), Go Anywhere/Go Certain Places Sometimes/But Don’t Go There (small print = we might change the rules overnight and we’ll bury our heads in the sands about the understaffed, underpaid, overwhelmed NHS until we “beg” private companies to swoop in with greedy shareholders….)  But Nature and Food Remain True. And so do New Arrivals.

New Kid(s) On The Block

Welcome Earnest, my latest great nephew. Welcome Gertrude Jekyll, our climbing rose. Welcome Gabriel Oak, our potted rose. New things happen. Children grow. Roses bloom. Another day begins.

Return to Maggie's Bar

Emily, Amy, Benji, Sally, Maggie, a May evening, a starry starry night

Inclusively Injected with love

Last Summer, we were invited to Maggie’s Bar (click here for reminder). Yesterday evening we returned to enjoy the additional gazebo which warded off the meterological uncertainties of Spring 2021. Benji sat on Sally’s knee (as in collage above.) Nibbles were nibbled. Discussions roamed around the past and our present lives, hopes, dreams and lockdown experiences, the prophetic Corona cushion, WhoGivesACrapRecycledToiletRoll, TV, cinema, theatre, the future….  On our return to the bar, we could toast the gospel that the entire Shipley branch of the Harry Potter Film Club have now been Covid-Vaccinated, Double-Jabbed, Inclusively-Injected…. There was also a Birthday Bonus present for Sally. Not only does Maggie run a very popular bar, but her eyes, hands and talents can craft lovingly produced Cross Stitch works of art. As Shakespeare truly muses:

I count myself in nothing else so happy

As in a soul remembering my good friends

A Cross Stitched gift, more signs of Spring, ecological toilet rolls....

Learning to dance in the rain

GQ’s Men of the Year

Lists of “Top Ten” or “Best Of” regularly appear in many places in the media to spark debate and highlight trends. I’d have to endorse Mr William Shakespeare as a Man of the Year in every one of my lists, as he was “not of an age, but for all time” (© Ben Jonson) and he inhabits my soul every day. But I’m also happy to concur with some of GQ’s Men of the Year:

• Russell T Davies (thanks for your TV series It’s A Sin and past creativity)
• Captain Tom Moore (thanks for your past service and current inspiration)
• Marcus Rashford (thanks for your tenacity and courage)
• Josh O’Connor and Riz Ahmed (thanks for all your performances, in particular recently in Romeo and Juliet and Sound of Metal, but formerly in God's Own Country and Nightcrawler)
• And Prince Phillip, HM Queen Elizabeth II’s “constant strength and guide” and “strength and stay.” 

Falling within a bell curve

Prince Phillip’s recent death (9th April) produced much broadcast material and many column inches about whether he was the last of a particular kind of man. Such dogmatic reasoning always falls flat in my head, maybe because I’m a Libran and can usually see an alternative argument for everything. Prince Phillip was not unique despite his context and background; stastical probability (given the planet’s billions of people) suggests there will be other Prince Phillip types in decades to come. The one we’ve recently lost was remarkable, I agree, and I liked his daughter, Princess Anne’s, quotation about him – “a life well lived and service freely given.” Shakespeare has Hamlet say, of his late father, “I shall not look upon his like again” but he idolises the memory of the late king and is in a profound state of grief. More empirically truthful, I think, is Tim Minchin’s lyric in If I didn’t have you (somebody else would do):

I mean, I think you’re special

But you fall within a bell curve

Outlaw’s Cave

Robin Hood, now there’s a man! Steals from the rich and distributes to the poor…. possibly? Any road up, on the day Prince Phillip died, we met Michael and Janet to complete an undulating walk in the secluded woodland of Conjure Alders in the twin valley of the Rivers Maun and Meden, at the edge of Sherwood Forest. We walked across fields with huge horizons, through woods filled with birch and alder trees, picked over tangled roots by the river and marvelled at the sandstone cliff outcrop concealing Robin Hood’s Cave. No sign of Maid Marian or the merry men (or a reduction of income inequality) in early April 2021…. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him the most?

Waiting for the storm to pass

Spring continues to springeth and daffodils to bloometh. No-one knows exactly how Covid-19’s infection rate will spread, nor how severely, so time and tide wait for no man…. so now seems a good time to hook up (safely) with other Men (and Women) of the Year…. Thank you, Brian and Sue, for the fish finger butties and chips under your verandah in Tollerton and the inspirational message:

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass,

It’s about learning to dance in the rain

Once the pandemic is endemic and (hopefully) as ubiquitous and controlled as ‘flu, I imagine many people will continue to value nature and lobby decision-makers to tackle the global climate crisis and the over-exploitation of precious resources. Thank you, Nick and Graeme, for giving us a glimpse into the future with our proxy experiences of an electric car.

Sites opening up again

So if we live long enough to be in the market for a new car, electric will be the way to go. In the meantime, the pleasures of bread-making, flower arranging, table setting and dining at home are not to be abandoned lightly when the economy “opens up.” Buy locally? Travel locally? Save the planet? It’s been a pleasure to return to the (local-ish) Bolton Abbey Estate, and re-adding it to our repertoire of beauty spots, alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the River Aire. A Man of the Year from the early 19th Century, Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” expressed my feelings about walks and nature perfectly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more….

River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey, River Aire near Saltaire and Leeds-Liverpool canal

 

The Peace of Wild Things

A path diverging from the familiar....

Everything Old Is New Again

At President Joe Biden’s inauguration, the young poet, Amanda Gorman, speaking to “Americans, and The World,” expressed poetically how humans strive and thrive with passion and compassion (to borrow a phrase from another of my favourite poets, Maya Angelou):

   Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

   That even as we grieved, we grew,

   That even as we hurt, we hoped,

   That even as we tired, we tried.

I have to hope that the post-Covid world (when the disease is endemic rather than ripping across the globe without fear nor favour) will be a better world, where we can see things freshly and anew. Despite trudging many local byways over the years that I have lived in Saltaire, occasionally a new route presents itself and, on a familiar trail around the Bolton Abbey estate recently, we followed a signpost to Coney Warren and trod a path that was new to us.

Intrepid Exploration

Posforth Gill and Posforth Force

Negotating steep slopes, stiles, heathery fields, and walls by woods, it was reasonably easy to reach the Valley of Desolation where two falls, slightly tucked away but worth the find, thunder over drops. The higher falls, reached by a cul-de-sac path, is at Posforth Gill and the lower falls, the longer drops, are named Posforth Force. A perfect place for a picnic.

Reflecting back, projecting forward

Nature by day, TV by night! It’s notable that our TV-watching during this second or third Covid-lockdown (depending on whether you count local lockdowns) has mixed stressful police or medical dramas (Line of Duty, Unforgotten, ER) with gentler fare (Schitt’s Creek, Greyson’s Art Club, The Great Pottery Throw Down). It’s almost as if we need the distress to stay alert to issues and problems outside the pandemic and the beneficial stress (the eustress) to help us sleep. Whatever gets you through the night. I’ve found the poem The Peace of Wild Things a useful go-to poem during the last year. It was written by Wendell Berry (born 1934), a poet-philospher, essayist and novelist who is also a farmer and environmental activist.

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It is interesting that this poem was included in a collection, Tools of the trade: Poems for new doctors, given to all graduating doctors in Scotland between 2014 and 2018. By doing so, the medical organisations were acknowledging that poetry (or lyrics in general or more broadly the Arts) can play a vital role in contributing to the well being of all (both patients and health practitioners.) I have always believed this to be self-evident which is why the Tory party’s suggestion that ballerinas (and by implication all arts workers) should retrain to work in IT (Fatima’s next job could be in cyber – she just doesn’t know it yet) was so unenlightened and counter to the true “wealth of the nation” - the peace of wild things and the people who grew, hoped and tried.

Couple of Swells

Return to Top Withins

We're a couple of swells

We stop at the best hotels

But we prefer the country far away from the city smells

So we'll walk up the Avenue

Yes, we'll walk up the Avenue

And we’ll walk up to Top Withins is what we’ll do…

It’s been a while, but as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted, a picnic on the moors above Haworth is a great place to blow away the cobwebs and drink in the Yorkshire air.

Rolling Away The Metaphorical Stone

And because we can gather in gardens again, Sally’s birthday was resurrected, this time with a sit-down meal beneath a canopy, under fairy lights, wrapped up warm, with nearest and dearest…. And communing in real life is so much better than cyberchatting. Pixels don’t do justice to the breathing souls of human beings. Online meetups are all very well, but my understanding of the art and science of communication is that pauses, interruptions, false starts, ellisions, facial expressions and eyebrow twitches are all essential to comprehension. Software doesn’t allow simultaneous argument or overlap so bring on LIVING people in REAL LIFE…

With all the frills upon it

The screen is certainly good, though, for treats like Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller and Peter Lawford walking down that Avenue with their Easter bonnets, watching out for that fella with his umbrella, shaking the blues away, being drum crazy, loving a piano and stepping out with my baby…. A further significant movie experience during the week building up to Easter included Scorsese’s exquisite film of The Age of Innocence with Daniel Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder and Miriam Margolyes

“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

Spring Fighting With Winter

Blossoms are appearing, tulips are opening, daffodils are fluttering as they should. But the nights are still frosty and the weather is unpredictable. But I’ve been feeling the unexpected budding buds of a scintilla of desire to get back to some creative writing. Whether or not I will write creatively again feels a bit immaterial at the moment, given the efforts needed to “get through” the tail end of the pandemic crisis. I hope the world isn’t exactly the same as it was before. I expect to continue hiking through the trees, beside the streams, under the skies and planning…. planning for the next stages of the endemic-Covid world…

Vaccinated Diamond Birthday

Six Months Later

So, six months after I was born in Wakefield, Sally Anne Allard was born on St Patrick’s Day in Bradford. March 2021 marked Sally’s Diamond Birthday. It wasn’t “normal” in that there was no meal out and no trip to the cinema or theatre…. But it was normal in keeping up the tradition of getting together with our daughters (even if we were walking two by two) and eating and drinking (a picnic in the open air, socially distanced.) Last March we began locking down before the government asked us to and this year we look forward to restrictions being lifted. So in the weeks and months to come I hope we’ll have a series of further birthday-style events….

St Patrick’s Day over the previous five years

• 2016 – Anomaleesa at The Everyman Cinema in Leeds
• 2017 – Gardening course and the live action Beauty and the Beast at The Everyman
• 2018 – Icy walk, wintry views and meal at home with (Sally’s choice of) Minority Report on the TV
• 2019 – The RSC touring production of Matilda at Bradford Alhambra and Green Book at Showcase
• 2020 – Almost UK-wide Lockdown, hikes (on different days) to the Druid’s Altar and Top Withins

No cinema, no theatre, but plenty still to enjoy

In the bullet-points above, I’ve mentioned cultural events that made 2016-19 distinctive, but all years have still included cards, a cake and presents revolving around themes of gardening, glamour, reading, flowers, food and drink. This year a parade of visitors passed by the garden gate to wish Many Happy Returns and delivery folk turned up at a steady pace…. Unusual gifts this year included a phone call from Australia, a home-knitted cardigan and a kit from Dishoom to make Naan-Bacon-Rolls. (After nearly 35 years of marriage we are learning to be cooperative in the kitchen!)

Birthday Talents

It’s easy to celebrate birthdays with Sally (or spend Christmas, or go on holiday, or do Bonfire Night, or do anything really….) All that’s needed are messages of love from family and friends and some time together making human connections. All the Lockdowns in the world can’t squash Sally’s talents for being generous and open-hearted to whatever can be achieved with whatever resources are at hand….

Spring in the air

The birds are nest-building, the daffodils are out, the buds are budding, the daylight hours are longer – these are all signifiers of Sally’s birthday every year – the Spring of the year. And in 2021, the Covid vaccine rollout continues apace…. A Spring-like birthday present from the scientific and medical community. What will St Patrick’s Day in March 2022 bring? We’ll be a year older. Will we still be socially distancing? Wearing masks? Time will tell.

A Birthday

by Christina Rossetti

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me. 

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.