‘Big Knob and the Three Boob Feet’… almost worth starting a band in honour of this charming, very vernacular vulgar Seaford Rock Graffiti… we’d be what? swamp stomp boogie? me, Nina Simone, Dr John on keyboards and Scaramanga on… errmm peruvian nose flute?… yeah that’d make Thom Yorke jealous! yah boo sucks tom with an h! Rhadiohead… look there you are in the rocks! Faces, all human art is seemingly about faces, the human vis-a-gog, that and a lust for preposterously engorged genitalia? yep we are hard wired to see them (faces!), from responding to smiles from but a couple of months old, whether they be imagined midst the leaves in the jungle, else looming large out of Rocks on the pedal tho i was thinking of none of this, rather about rhythm and cycles… day and night, the pulse of the moon, the turn of the year… dum de dum .. as above so below… the twin entwined serpents, the dna double spiral, rhythmic, gulp of breath, pound of blood looking out across the rocks at low, low tide, our ancestors, come down to forage… gathering muscles, shellfish from the rich pickings of the rocks placing them in woven nettle fibre bags… these the deep rhythms of countless generations fascinatingly they wouldn’t have had the neanderthal heavy brows, apparently the broad richly expressive human face is much older!… anyway ponderings on cave art, the ancient human consciousness explosion driven by psychotropic plants (ala mckenna and hancock)? to turn… and find, here scrawled and grooved into the rocks… faces, ghouls and goolies, thom yorke… we are, happily, mostly, absolutely but the same!
oh … and anyone called kathryn getting spliced? ‘a nice day for a white wedding’
eat nettles. drink kombuccha. sit in sunshine. listen to old, old Reggae…. and just occasionally, get on with work yes nettle season is upon us! similar post every year, i know, but gadzillions of them flourishing in the nature reserve up by the cliffs let the chomping frenzy begin! ha! delicious nettle and walnut pesto for dinner… daughter, as ever, tolerant yet somewhat aghast oh and collander helmet will protect me from both nettle hairy green stings … and bad vibezz xx
Kirst: yes!!! did you know that the anglo-saxon word for thge stinging nettle is wagaloo? im trying to get this back into circulation! such a good word, such an amazing plant!! x
wowsers, if i sat in a clump tho, my exclamation may well be somewhat more colourful than a ‘waaaghhhaloo!’and indeed most good for circulation too… brought over by the Romans, sacred to the god Mars, beautiful, astonishing bountiful nettles! xx
Joe R: We’re having the same day
glad i’m not the only one with a collander on me bonce x
Tallula: Yesss nettles! looking forward to a stroll and a chat about nettle appreciation very soon
hurrah hop on a plane toot sweet… i’ve nearly finished weaving the pantaloons from spider skein xx
dapple daub, yellow sunshine smudge of daffodils, choir clustered along the verge of each and every roadside frivolity of pink cherry blossom, volupt of magnolia… for what your flower-full gush? harsh bruising loss within the heart of winter, ‘soon, spring, soon’ a hushed promise, all there was to sustain us away from the suburbs, deep in the woods, high spring too has begun. pomp. swagger. froth of white blackthorn, the soft whisper fresh green of willow the crown of each silver birch, blush feathered purple a world happily befuddled neath catkin fluff the buds on each tree, fit to burst invocation to the equinox preposterous song of the heart! again, again, impossible not to be in love ………….
hmm, so rather, a tale of a single tree, robust, powerful… living embodiment of myth… ladling it on, natch! far too meander long for irksome facebook, no matter… pic is lush! back in the early 90’s, i would return from many a travelling roam, to mum and dads house in surrey gentle tedium, working as a postie, nowt to do but read shakespeare, juggle… and walk the dog, Scruffy, aka Donald McCloud we’d half heartedly saunter over the golf course, frogger dash across the busy road… then duck, beneath the trees into the magical realm of ashstead common surrey, all gated communities, huge posh footballers mansions?… yes… but away from the arteries of the main roads, huge swathes of heath and woodland ashtead common, one such, happily neglected and seldom visited an almost eerie place, where dinosaurs roam? like an apache burial ground? It’s defining feature, immense groves of ancient oak trees ten years previously there had been a devastating fire, half the common burnt, many of the old trees fallen and charred, others dead yet still standing The common, in summer swathed with chest high bracken, the unfurl of spiral fern… in winter dead, broken, brackish brown always the sense that you were being watched? ha, and sometimes, just maybe you were, donald and i once found one of those curious camouflaged survivalist folk! we walked up to him, from 2 yards, i hollered a hearty hello, ‘nice day to be out in the woods mister’, but playing possum he neither acknowledged, nor flinched. all gods creatures? an occasional shy Roe deer, the White flecked Red Fairy Toadstools of fly agaric. Gentle dancing maidens of silver birch sigh in the breeze The woods, like every landscape on this isle profoundly modulated by the influence of man. ancestors no pristine wild wood, somewhere midst the heathland was hidden a Roman Villa The mighty oaks themselves, what 500 years old? In late medieval times, they had been pollarded for generations, continually cropped for firewood then been used to shelter animals, an acorn harvest for the swine? pannage the surrounding trees were thinned out, allowing the oaks to channel those immense earthy energies into girth, grown paunch swollen, huge and broad the oak tree, tree of the thunderer, of zeus, of thor, of all the sky gods, in a wood, always the most likely to be struck by lightening open crowned, baggy, loose, generous trees, quirky quercus, a vast teeming eco system, each a galaxy unto themselves since those years of pollarding, their boughs had grown out, and up This tree? why i never quite knew how to find it? seldom where i imagined it to be, yet in our ramblings frequently blundered upon. ever welcome Leviathan… Immense, rooted in time and myth… to hug it? why would take 3 of us (maiden, mother, crone) arms outstretched, a finger tip touch to merely encircle. heart pressed, tender against bark and such bark, quizzical, deep grooved, rutted… the trees arms flung out, then up to the sky. majestic. YES. yet it had been damaged by the fire, janus faced, half burnt, one side, pale, bleached, bare stripped bough, death and winter, the other, joyful, vibrant, lobed leaf abundance but there, from within it’s magnificence, growing from the bole, the depth, the heart of the trunk, a holly tree! It’s base some 10 feet above the ground! not an insubstantial tree itself, 12 feet high? all dark green leaves, hedgehog prickled over the centuries the center of the oak had rotted down, fertile ground for when a bird dropped a berry the holly …and the oak after Robert Graves and the White Goddess, the battle of the holly and the oak kings, each supplanting the other at every solstice, turn then turn about the oak shall rule over the expansive waxing half of the year, Jovial force of abundance the holly over the contracting waning half, Saturnine realm of scarcity ah yes! but beyond stories, a precarious existence, the holly would continue to grow, it’s roots pushing downwards one day, the oak would be riven, split asunder… yet, no matter for now, twinned harmony, equinox balance, the burbled luscious life of beginning thank you. salute staunch beauty brute colossus. oak
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hey kate second half was one of the tree yarns i never got around to sending for ya woodsy thing xx
kate: you can come and tell it at the event I’m planning, how about that xxx
send me the deets and i shall most certainly try and get along, hope we’re all perched aloft in a huge old tree telling each other tales by candlelight! xxx
kate: Ooo you should be organising the event hehe!! that sounds dreamy…please send me your email i will send you the info xxx
