Sunday 14 July 2013

Four legs good, two legs bad

 Yesterday was the hottest day. It has been so hot that the sweet peas in the poly tunnel have all shrivelled up. The ones outside are flowering now so it doesn't matter too much. The polytunnel sweet peas gave us early flowers for a couple of months when sweet peas aren't normally expected, which is a joy, so they had probably exhausted themselves anyway. The tomatoes are looking pretty crisp though.
It is amazing when it's so hot because it is so quiet. No one is out there strimming. No one is out there slashing and burning just quietly burning up themselves. It's best to lead a dawn and dusk life when it's cooler and actually they are almost the best times of the day. Riding through the woods in the early evening is magical and listening to the dawn chorus with a cool breeze blowing in through the bedroom window is beautiful though may be a little too early. I know this because I had to get up at three o'clock yesterday to take my daughter to the airport.

another of those beautiful fringed lilac poppies



 We live on a bumpy unmade road which I much prefer to tarmac but I've had two punctures in two weeks and driving to the airport when it's vital that nothing happens to you on the way made me paranoid. Convinced we'd get a puncture I turned back to pick up the extra long tool for undoing the wheelnuts just in case. On the way we passed a car on the motorway who had had a blowout and as we sailed past I thought"that could have been us!"We got there in time and after tearful farewells I drove back as I had an urgent deadline at home. Well - I got a puncture on the motorway! A self-fulfilling prophecy, a premonition or what? It was the side nearest the traffic so changing it was a nightmare.Ironically, when I'd gone back for that extra long tool, I'd left the most important part of it {the bit that actually goes onto the nuts}behind.  In spite of that I was pleased that I managed to get the wheel off myself and then the jack slipped and wedged under the car and I couldn't get it out. The AA came quickly having spent about half an hour telling me how dangerous it was being on the hard shoulder. Fortunately I'd made some coffee at three o'clock in the morning and must have been an amusing sight, sitting up on the bank drinking coffee and reading The Guardian as the traffic thundered by.

I've been pleased with the variety of poppies that deemed to flower this year



 I've discovered why the ducks aren't laying. I found a hole in the back of their house and ever since I blocked it up there have been eggs! The pigs are the other side of the fence and with them come the rats. Not like our nice pet rats, these are huge, pit bull rats and obviously had been stealing our eggs.
At the moment all the pigs have gone which is another reason it's so quiet. I feel sorry for those pigs, they are kept in a huge barn and don't see the light of day. It' s doubtful they'd lead a rebellion like in Orwell's Animal Farm, though some of them did get out once. They were rounded up and I'll never forget the sight of them swaggering towards me in the early morning mist, their bollocks swinging, looking like a bunch of sailors coming home after a night on the town.
Pocket too hot to do anything but sleep

Pixie too hot to do anything but sleep
The Australian poet Les Murray sums it up in this poem

Pigs

Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-shit. we ate crisp.
we nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Not the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-aleady feeling
here is no place with our heads on upside down.

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