I'm just about recovering from a brilliant laughing fit I experienced just now.

I've just started reading a book I've had on my shelves for ages, I've had it that long I can only guess where it came from, probably one of the local charity shops in the village.  The one where one of the volunteer's is a retired librarian, and they seem to get better, less mangled books.  So.... there I am sipping my illicit coffee in my favourite cup, with the conservatory doors thrown open and the sunshine (what's that? sunshine in Manchester?) streaming in, when I came across this passage and just had to read it out aloud to my long-suffering husband who was playing solitaire against his lying cheating lap-top.  The lap-top it's alive...I swear! It continually tells him he can  'go', when he definitely can't.  Anyway I'm reading out this passage from my book and quite literally I'm laughing that much that my legs are flying in the air, my feet are drumming the laminate planks and tears are streaming down my cheeks!  To set the scene - Peter the protagonist is a writer who's come up against a dreaded block, so, living in New York he decides to go for a skate...like you do.  He dons all his equipment, strapping on matte black safety gear: helmet, elbow pads, wrist protectors with Velcro fasteners and plastic reinforcers, mittens and knee pads with black plastic cups over the joints themselves. I should explain he's been ten years before this, working in London and has recently moved to New York with his wife. He's even been to a blading school at Chelsea Piers NYC!  Where he found himself the only adult male amongst large middle-aged ladies and small children, so back to self-tutoring.  The scene is set:-

'There is one physical barrier that seriously blights my blading enjoyment.  It is the West Side Highway, the eight lane stream of traffic that I am forced to cross to get to the river walk.  Although there is a pedestrian crossing, the flashing green man has been wrongly adjusted by the Traffic Department.  For intermediate bladers like myself, he provides an inadequately fleeting window of opportunity in which to blade across, and the impatient traffic sits on the line revving up for their green, like racing cars waiting for a chequered starting-flag to fall.  Nor i it unknown for them to jump the lights.  I find that under the close scrutiny of eight rows of New York drivers, my blading deteriorates significantly.  I wobble nervously and falter like a beginner.  Once I reach the other side I feel triumphant, liberated.  Until the time approaches to cross again, as it always does.
But today, today is my last crossing of the West Side Highway.  Today I have almost reached the other side when unaccountably, my left skate jams and I fall heavily - just as the lights turn in favour of a grid of trucks.  The Mack truck nearest me releases its brakes with a menacing pneumatic wheeze, kicks into gear and advances.  I look up desperately, but my perspective is too low to allow me to see the driver, too low to fix him with pleading eyes.  The truck looms dangerously and then emits a vast, throaty, customized hoot.  My whole body resonates, right to the fillings in my molars.  I scuttle desperately to the kerb, a spidery, Gothic figure in my matte black safety outfit and the goat's hooves of my black skates.  I felt that I must look like one of those Calcutta pavement cripples, cosmetically enhanced by callous relatives for more proficient begging.  I haul myself up over the concrete lip to safety, where I sit, feeling the laughter of the driver wash over me.  Fast, proficient skaters, the ones I have been trying to emulate, blade gracefully past me.
"Bad blades, man.  You OK?" yells one cheerily, as he whisks past shirtless, and without any safety gear, casually ramping some substantial obstacle.'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-U-S-New-Life-York/dp/0002571021/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1349702936&sr=1-1

Yesterday afternoon.

Our house is on a very narrow, small cul-de-sac.  It's very tight to turn a vehicle around in too.  Partially because some driveways are too narrow to get a car up, necessitating that they be drawn up, half onto the pavement half on the road, but also because all the neighbours drive there are simply too many cars to fit on their drives, so the road is made even narrower by parked cars.  Imagine then my interest when a fire-engine drove up, a ladder-engine.  Hang on, is someone's house on fire?  Look for smoke...signs of panic, shouts, people?  Not a sign.  What a relief - all quiet, just the usual Saturday afternoon in the suburbs of the city, not a soul in sight.  The engine stopped, presumably ruminating on how to get out of the situation without pranging anything.  Two lovely young firemen jump out and go to the rear to direct operations, up a bit, left a bit, forward, back, shunt shunt, eventually the great red engine managed to park up, and sat there.  And sat there... I'm watching through my bedroom window, I could just about see inside the cab they were just chatting.  I suddenly thought of all the dangerous things these young men do for us.  Bright young men doing a job not everyone could contemplate.  Downstairs now, I'm rummaging through my larder.   Do I have chocolate somewhere?  No.. but I have biscuits, completely covered with chocolate.  I fling on a sweater and some shoes and make my way outside into the sunny September afternoon.
As I reached the engine the door swung open and six lovely smiley faces peered down at me.
" I don't know why you're here." I ventured,  "But, I just wanted to give you these." handing up the packet.
" You don't know why we're here? We're here to fit smoke-alarms, do you have them?"
"I do."
"Do they work?"
"They do, yes.  Anyway...... I just wanted to thank you all for what you do.  I think you do a brilliant job! I know you sometimes get abuse and even rocks thrown at you, but the people on this road are all nice people. So...Thank you! I think you're all brilliant!"
Six lovely handsome faces grinned down at me.
"Well.....it's not often we get this kind of treatment, thank you. We're not supposed to accept gifts but seeing as they arr..r..e chocolate! Thank you very much!"
They all waved as they drove off into the afternoon, it was lovely.  Afterwards I felt emotional thinking of the brave job that they do, these ordinary men who do extraordinarily dangerous jobs for us all every day.

It's not often we get a chance to be able to say thank you, I'm so glad that I did!

Photo: Wikipedia

'....But, but -
excuse me now, please; it's morning heavenly bright,
 and irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on
 into the next exquisite moment.'

-'Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn' - Mary Oliver -

It's lovely how the dawn sky is flushed or washed with a pale lemon in a line just above and behind the trees on the golf-links.  As though a water-colour artist were beginning a painting, laying down the first washes, gliding the pale pigment across the paper.
My pen halts sitting across my thumb - listening, waiting for the next movement, to place the letters flowing from brain to paper.   There... as I look up I catch the gold of a tree.  There is one point in the dawning where the sunbeams catch-up one tree alone, clustered about by many yet only this one tree's top most leaves and branches are lit-up with the golden light of the rising morning sun.  I can see it through my window in the mass of branches and leaves of the other trees gathered around it.  It is like the subject of 'This is Your Life' and the others about clustered friends and relatives called to pay homage.
I have a small spray of creamy white freesia on the window-sill and behind there is a shallow line of condensation along the bottom of the window itself, the sun illuminates it so that gleams like sunshine on snow reminding me of a heap of tiny diamonds tipped from a bag.

'Our senses define the edge of consciousness'.  Diane Ackerman

The air and the days suddenly, seeping..ly become autumnal.  It happens overnight practically and in the following dawning of the next day I can feel autumn.  It holds an excitement, a mystery, a dying...yet also an awakening.  Thoughts of cool autumn mornings, walking through mounds of jewel coloured leaves and golden grasses, their damp sodden fragrance disturbed and drifting upwards to reach my nose causing me to lift up my head, left and then right to breathe in the cool wet-feeling air and as a consequence catch sight and sound of a flock of geese, honking, flying in their ragged 'V' formation across the pearl-grey skies.

Snatches of past autumn days burst into my mind - always the overwhelming smell of rotting-down leaves, pungent and earthy and brackish pervading each scene.  Remembering a  particular road in the late afternoon now.  I'm by a run of small grey-black shops to my right, they are set back from the road, a long pavement away from the line of gold and orange leaves gathering in the drain-wells.  That grey ribbon of a roadside running down to meet the main thoroughfare and opposite me as I see the junction ahead another bank of houses and a news-agency shop up a short slight incline.  The lights are on inside and there is a feeling of pleasance, and there is an air of school over for the day, home beckoning.  A day when illness has presented me with a hiatus away from work, I am waiting for a chemist to fulfill a prescription I've been given by the doctor just up the road.  How many times have I been here, in this spot, waiting...?  Long ago when 'S' was small and I used to call here, coming into the chemist's shop to buy tiny elastic toys for her hair,  little elastic bands of bright colours with tiny kittens attached or baubles attached that I used to fasten-up the plaits we put in her long hair each day.  These scenes replay, over and over, taking me to this place, bringing me back, over and over.   

At dawn this morning the light is pale yellow, flushing the leaves of the beech tree with primrose until the sun hides behind a white cloud.  Softly a late summer wind shivers the top most branches so that the boughs sway and the dark shadows reappear deep within the summer foliage.  Something about those top branches in the trees reminds me of a time long past in Florida.  Why?  Why would swaying branches and glittering dancing leaves remind me of a holiday in Florida?   Trembling leaves, fluttering leaves, flickering, gathering dancing leaves.  The branches are so long and leggy making their movement a swaying.  Lowering and rising.  Swimming through the air.  Rustling, struggling leaves soon to be free, to fly free.  Flying- yes! But downwards, their one floating, spiralling flight down...down, freed from their anchor, freed from their tether.

..........Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired

and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that 

which you would escape.

These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.

And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes

shadow to another light.

And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a 

greater freedom.

-Khailil Gibran-

-Claude Monet-  Le Jardin 

Hello everyone........

This is just exquisite, thought you might enjoy watching!

The sound of soft summer rain, somehow poignant reminds me of stately homes and summer leaves, English lawns and a river, its surface gleaming and glancing, with shards of brightness here and there.  A silky dreamy spell, drawn with moving splashes, 'rings of bright water'.  Crystalline raindrops slinkily slide along telephone wires like passing cable-cars coming down a mountain-side.

But the rain we have today is more as though someone in the skies simply pulled the plug-up.  It barrel's down the windows and gushes over the top of the gutters.  Streams in down the inside of the French-windows and floods the conservatory floor.  We hurry to mop up with towels before the wood is soaked through.  There is no wind so the torrent just comes straight down in long silver shards, it's quite scary, there is so much power to it.