New Decade

It's not the end of the world to be away from one's blog for so long. The cycle of the years means that I can reread it according to the season. I started it with fox cubs barking three years ago and I continue it here with my memory of last night's midnight, the start of the new decade.

Going out to my lean-to, I suddenly saw that the moonlight was like a halogen lamp, so I went out to see the blue moon. It was so beautiful, a rainbow halo round it. Why ruin its peace and beauty with stupid fireworks? There she was, sailing radiantly above us, as she's done for centuries. And then a vixen barked: my first one of the year.



Then the decade started in earnest here in Wiltshire with the most beautiful sunshine. What a gift. I started as I mean to go on: with a really brisk walk (ha ha, my version of a jog which is me trotting down the lane for ten yards and breaking into an amble) in which I was pleased to see a water hen. We used to have loads in every ditch and pond till the neighbours' cats decimated them -- just as they decimated my great population of water voles. I also admired a stubble field from the autumn's sweetcorn, totally iced, the stubble in wonderful rows. I might take my new camera tomorrow.

But, hello again blog. I had a year so marked by deaths (including that of my best ever girlfriend which knocked me out for months) that it seemed part of life's rich pattern and that funerals were the regular thing.


In the summer I had wanted to blog about Wootton Bassett and what we do here, but it's a bit gratuitous. We just do what any sentient people would do. Enough to say that one day in the summer I came out from the launderette onto the pavement to stand to attention to the union-jack-covered coffin of an EIGHTEEN-year-old. This is so very very very wrong. For years I have watched the planes come down over Lynham. There is a particular type of plane (an RAF C-17 Globemaster) that comes down over my garden in the late mornings, and it is agonising to think of the feelings of the loved ones waiting.

None of the pictures in the press can show the kind of silence that falls on the town when the police outriders come through, emptying the street, or the abysmal wrongness of the slow arrival of the funeral car.