This year I sat on the grass in the local park and wrote in my book with a pink pen. walking home I found a pond. Could only see blue sky behind me. Ah well, there's always next year......
Midsummer's day travelled up to York in Yorkshire. Had spent time there when I did my first job which was at a theatre in Scarborough on the Yorkshire Coast. Walked along the old walls, looked into the gardens of the Dean of the York Minster at the trees that my friend's grandfather had planted when he was the gardener there for thirty years. Walked round cobbled streets and a bit of an old roman road ( which at this point just means it is straight) . Went to a tiny church where the pews were still like box seats. Not a Hollywood Bowl pic-nic to be had, however
Late afternoon glass in the garden of some country hotel. With an strange carved tree. Realized it was Titania and Bottom, so it's ugliness was forgiven.
A quick word about school uniforms. I know that after seventeen years of wearing navy blue, I was done with the color for about a decade. But seeing children on buses in boaters and blue striped dresses. Boys in maroon blazers with matching tiny peaked caps on their scooters heading down the hill. Families walking together, mothers in Hijabs and kaftan like gowns and their children in pleated skirts and long shorts with shirts and ties and knee socks. It does my heart good.
Uniform means " of one form." and " distinctive clothes worn by one group."
Me and my friend took a tiny train the following day. Laughingly called the "Trans Pennine Express".
I couldn't love trains more if I was married to an engine driver.
We were off to make a return visit to that parsonage on the edge of the moors where those extraordinary sisters wrote of things they could not have known anything about.
On the way we chose to climb a hill that almost killed us both from Hebden Bridge to Heptonstall where Ted Hughes buried his American wife.
There were two men and a dog mowing the lawn in the grave yard. Couldn't find the grave so thinking they were groundsmen of sorts, asked them if they knew where it was.
" Ay, no help to you. Just doing a bit of a tidy. For my sister. She'll give us tea later."
His two nephews, Liam and Samuel, both dead in their twenties.
 |
| "Even amid fierce flames, the golden Lotus can be planted." His last name shows signs of angry scratching and plastic pens lie amongst the wild flowers. |
Haworth parsonage was awash with blue walls and reproduced wallpapers. Charlotte's desk and Mr Brontes glasses. A tiny blue flower patterned dress and tiny shoes and her wedding veil.
She almost got to be happy. But died, the last of her siblings. Just married and pregnant with a child.
Makes losing your umbrella seems bit weak.
 |
| The parsonage where all those people died and all those people wrote stories |
Then homeward in comfortable shoes with tea and eccles cakes to look forward to. Down " Hovis" streets on the bus back through the hills to Hebden bridge and the tiny train back to a warm house with electric kettles and an Indian Take-away.
 |
| Haworth Main street |
 |
| The canal at Hebden Bridge |
 |
| sometimes, waiting for a train can be a pleasure As for the next two days, it reminded me of when George Bush stole, and I mean stole, the election from Al Gore. I remembered a headline in a British newspaper when George Bush was elected for a second time . It had a photograph of his back and below it was written" HOW CAN 59,054,087 PEOPLE BE SO DUMB?" Many of us woke up to what seemed like a madness. It felt grey and airless. After being unable to press a rewind button I took myself off to the Theatre and saw a production of " THE TAMING OF THE SHREW." Set in Ireland in 1916. With slapstick and dancing and feminism and an irish band of fiddle and pipes. |
And then I walked home along the river.
So it is good bye once again, from me in London.
