The Wide Awakes

I keep a couple of favourite poetry books close to my bedside in case I get what I call, The Wide Awakes. During the worrying time when I was the main carer for Stephen’s mother in her last years, I did become prone to bouts of insomnia. It was a quite dreadful time and I found it all most stressful. Actually, she had lived with us in our present home for well over twenty-five years and lived in the adjoining cottage before we moved here.  While she was well, it wasn’t that difficult, although to be perfectly honest she never did like me. In her last few years when she was so dependent on me, instead of softening her attitude as I increasingly did everything for her, her resentment hardened and she treated me more like a servant than a daughter.

 

A long course of acupressure over the last few years did improve the sleeping pattern enormously, however I do unaccountably get, The Wide Awakes, maybe once or twice a week still. There is no mistaking the difference because I am WIDE AWAKE. I get up and make myself a cup of cocoa and then sit and read some of my favourite poems or maybe write a poem in one of my many notebooks that I have all over the house ready to grab for a spell of scribbling, or I might write out one of the poems I my trying to install in my memory banks to hold forever. When I am learning a poem, I think it essential to practice it aload, but also I like to test myself by writing the current one down and then checking it.

 

I have been having a devil of a time trying to learn Keats lovely poem Bright Star, which is a bit unusual for me, but I think it is that it seems to have several changes. I have now got there with it and my last test was to write it as fast as I could starting with the last line and working my way back to the first line before checking it. It all sounds a little OCD doesn’t it.

Learning that, has been a hundred times harder than Ozymandias by Percy Shelley that I absolutely love and the pattern makes so much more sense to me.

 

One of the books I keep by the bed has a poem for every day of the year and I notice that Ozymandias is there for October 12^th. The one below, I read to my husband after I had read it on 26^th September because it made me smile. It was written by Ade Hall.

 

It is called:

Astrophysics Lesson

 

I took and orange and a plum

To demonstrate the earth and sun;

Held in place by gravity---

Our little planet, you and me.

 

I grabbed some grapes for all the stars

And cast them out so wide and far;

Distant suns and foreign moons

In all four corners of the room.

 

The wonders of the galaxy

Spread out before class 2BT

‘Where did they come from? someone cried;

‘From the fruit bowl’ I replied.

 

Walkies and Talkies

It was clear sign that Steve had had a hard day yesterday, when he, the man who loves to cook something tasty and attractively presented, came home from work with two ready meals. He left me to put them in the oven while he soaked in a hot bath for while.  I added a handful of French beans that I had grown myself in our garden, for a little fresh colour. For dessert I conjured up a masterpiece with vanilla ice cream with hot blackberries and strawberries (also from the freezer) and a dollop of thick cream on the top.

Straight after this sumptuous feast, Steve asked me to get him a hot water bottle for his poor old back. When we climbed into bed (It is a Princess and the Pea height bed), when he said he was not putting the alarm on and I thought, there goes our early run then. It had been a long hard day for him and even if he does not like me saying this…. He is not 21 anymore.

I woke at 5.30 am as usual and crept out of the room as quite as a mouse, and after making myself a nice cup of coffee to take with me, I went upstairs with the cat following me up meowing and trilling warmly. Having put on some clothes on, I got out my recently bought, new ladies shirt pattern and opened it up. Having sorted through the packet of tissue sheets and separated the pattern pieces I needed for my next project and neatly folded up the rest of it and put them back in the packet. I spent the next half hour reading the instructions until I heard Stephen moving about.

 

Soon I had made Steve’s coffee, and another cup for myself and we sat together to see the weather forecast and ten minutes of the news. I did not ask what we were going to do training wise, having taken the very strong hint from last evening.

 

Pretty soon though Stephen asked how it would be if we went for a walk instead of a run, adding that he didn’t think he could run this morning because his back ached but a walk might ease it out.

 

So then, I suggested we walked one lap of the Arundel Triathlon run course which would be 5km and a little hilly, to which he agreed but asked how I felt about doing the route backwards. Settled then. That was what we did and both thoroughly enjoyed the change of schedule. Arundel Park is just so darned beautiful what could possibly be nicer and just ten minutes from our home.

 

Instead of starting out up the High Street hill, then we wandered along Tarrant Street and walked to the top of the town via Mount Pleasant Hill past a couple of houses that we had been talking about. So nice to out walking without being in a hurry all the time.

 

 

 

 

When the Lights Go Out

This is the first summer that I can ever remember, when I have not once, not once mark you, heard the unmistakable call of the Cuckoo. It is not surprising though is it? You only have to look around you at all the building that is going on, where there once was farmland all around. I have lived in this area for nearly sixty years and have always taken walks in the countryside sometimes with a family dog and sometimes on my own for the peace of it all.

 

For the past thirty years since my husband and I took up triathlon we have spent even more time out in the woods and over the farmland onto the South Downs. We live in a road called Toddington Lane and that was, what it was fifty years ago, a lane. There were no pavements, just grass verges. That is still the case but the grass verges have been eroded away with the increase in traffic from the two new estates that have been built all around us since we moved here. Thousands of new homes have been built and are still being thrown up at a scary rate of knots.

 

Our house is right in the middle of a completely blind zig-zag bend.  It was a country lane. The road now often looks and sounds like a race track. Long gone from the area, are the farm animals, that once grazed nearby, cows and sheep.

 

There used to be an abundance of pretty little birds in our back garden feeding from our antique bird table, Blue Tits, Goldfinches, Robins and Wrens. Now we hardly see those delightful little gems; instead we are lucky to see much more than Pigeons and Seagulls and Magpies.

 

The Cuckoo is now on the conservation Red list as are the Lapwings and the Yellow Wagtail. We used to see science fiction films about the end of the world and think how far fetched they were.

 

When I was a young girl, in Worthing when I left my school life on a Friday afternoon and started work on the following Monday morning; there was a man who used to walk around the town centre at the weekend with a placard hung over him that said in large letters, ‘THE END IS NIGH’.

 

It’s about time we stopped laughing before all the lights really do go out.