Hymn

Rise and Shine

Why is it that when you’re most tired, most in need of a good night’s sleep, most desperate to rest, your eyes spring open at 4am?  And it wasn’t even Baby.  Me.  In the dark.  Eyes wide open.  Apparently full of life.  But I know, oh, I know, that getting up at this ungodly hour would be fatal; that my energy is just phantom, that within moments life would seep out of my body and trickle away between the floorboards.  So, I close my eyes and wrestle myself back to sleep (always fighting the urge to see just how much time I’d wasted so far). 

Two hours later and at the instant, the very instant, that it was my turn to make a shrieking bird impression in my dream, the alarm wakes me.  Do I feel better for the extra hundred and twenty minutes?  Do I Balls.  Now, I feel like a long dead corpse reluctantly reanimated but mostly decomposed. 

Hair Line

I am, some might say, follicly-challenged. In fact last year when I ‘grew’ my hair for more than two months no one, not a single soul, noticed.  So how is it that today I wake up with a single strand, some two centimetres long, protruding from the middle of my forehead?  Where in God’s name did that come from?  Right in the middle of my forehead.  Half way between my eyebrows and my ‘hairline.’  And how?  Overnight?  Ridiculous. 

Crossing

I saw a girl cross the road as a swan swims a river.  Perfectly motionless above the waist, running like fury below.  I think she was attempting elegance.

Out for the Count

I embarrassed myself today.  I inadvertently recalled how many seconds there are in a solar year.  Just to the nearest hundred, you understand.  I thought it might be important once.  You just never know.  And there are some things that you just shouldn’t know.

Promenade

I walked this afternoon through throngs of students from the local public school.  Despite the sunshine, they seemed so pleased to be in their pristine uniforms.  The raffish ones rebelled with consciously unkempt hair or ribbons.  And they smiled at me.  And my sleeping baby.  And my pram.

Spoon fed

“I’ve always hated tomato soup.  My brother used to eat it with a horrible spoon.”  Uh huh.  Psycho. 

Stop

It might be nothing.  It almost certainly isn’t anything.  I'd finished my sheep book on the way home and then listened to some young squaddies discuss music.  I waited for the train to pull into the station.  I had to look twice but I’m sure that the reflection of the adjacent track was moving more slowly than the view out of the window.  I checked again.  Definitely and impossibly slower. 

As I stepped off the train at 6.34, something somewhere stopped.  Don’t know what or where.  Not a premature or painful finish, but an end just the same.  I felt a moment of loss but in the quiet evening sunlight of a Spring day, it felt okay.

Colour Code

There’s a stretch of the railway that runs close to the M1.  You have quite a good view of the traffic travelling in the same direction; vehicles going the other way are generally just a blur.  This morning cruising south along the similarly-bound carriageway I noticed a yellow lorry being driven by a man in a yellow tee-shirt, then a white van with a man in a white shirt, then a red car with the driver in red and then a blue pick-up with the driver in blue.  And then zipping in the opposite direction, a black and yellow 2CV.  Like a bumble bee.  It broke the spell and from that point on, everything was higgledy-piggledy again.  Damn 2CVs. 

Mumbo Jumbo

I think it’s all nonsense of course.  We, friends from holiday, sitting in a Teashop, with Afternoon Tea, idly talking about our favourite animals from safari.  Kenyan tea leaves left in the bottom of English China.  We joke and swill them about.  The passing proprietor offers Her Gift.  “That’s very clear,” she says, “it’s a horse.  Is a horse important to you?  It does have rather a long neck though.”  It wasn’t a horse, it was a giraffe.

Survivors

Last night Nicole Kidman and her two friends were plunged into a 300 mile crevasse that rent open the Earth.  She awoke with, dressed as a fairy godmother serving a Queen but with strange recollections of her aboriginal friend.