WRITING INSPIRED BY LANDSCAPE

    I stare down at the packet in my hands, turning it over and over. 'I'm not sure I want to eat purple carrots' I say to the man on the other end of the phone. 'Sorry love it's all we have left. Your list said carrots, so we sent you what we had. It's Lockdown, and everyone has become an amateur market gardener' he replies with a laugh in his voice. 'But do they taste purple?' He sighs. 'How does purple taste?' 'Like blueberries or blackberries. Berrylike.' 'No, they taste like carrots, delicious carrots. They're a heritage variety.' 'What about the red ones?' 'Carrots. They taste like carrots.' 'And the yellow ones.' 'Look love they're carrots. They all taste like carrots. If you don't want them, you can bring them back.' 'I can't; I'm self-isolating.' I can hear him moving around as he is talking to me. 'Well, you can bring them b

  On this day 58 years ago the hardest winter in living memory set in and continued until March. Icy blizzards created a complete white out and temperatures barely, if ever, rose above freezing. In those days, blizzards failed to close schools, whereas now the merest flurry of snow grinds the nation to a halt.   To me, it seemed that life carried on as usual, despite artic conditions and deep snow drifts. My dad and mum still went to work at their hairdressing salon in Chesterton, passing other vehicles abandoned for weeks by the side of the road, conked out through engine failures, or stuck in drifts. There was however, one near miss tragedy when my sister and I were traveling with mum and dad along the frozen A10 approaching Milton, and I heard dad say, “Look at that idiot trying to overtake in these conditions.”   Then mum cried out, “He’s going to hit us.” I became aware of a dark transit van skidding broadside from the opposite carriageway across the centre of the road and f

  My most beloved bird, winter in your wings. Storm-driven feathers, ice-gleaming eyes. There is no summer softness in your plumage, Just the barred echo of your nest site pylon.   Scything through clouds discoloured with rain,  Black, slate-blue, the darkness flies. Your beauty calls me with wails on the wind, Ascending high, circling, dissolving in haze.    Nothing temperate in your searing flight, You, a hooded outlaw blazing with intent. Brutal bone-chilling frost in your glacial stare, Wings crisply held, scalpels slicing the air.   Your prey scatter like chaff you have winnowed, A blizzard of panic under your gaze. Slashing rain in your stoop, lance legs extended, Their last sight on earth is your glittering glare. Barbara Grafton  Image copyright Barbara Grafton

The girl was walking the boundary hedgerow, her hands wrapped in the rough cloth of her skirt for warmth and to raise it clear of the mud and leaf litter. Her copper hair, tied at the nape, fell down her back like a fox’s brush and glowed in the autumn morning sun. Occasionally, she stopped, seemed to be listening. The onlookers - her family, the yeoman and his family and workers - were silent, waiting. Crouching, she knew she had found the place. Here was such peace that calmed her, despite her grief. It was not present anywhere else she had walked in the fields. Turning, she gestured to the watchers, her arms spread wide in the shape of a cross.  Leaving the yeoman’s workers to dig the grave, the subdued group returned to the farm where the woman, just twenty-eight, lay shrouded in the bed of the cart. Hair washed, combed and tucked beneath a fresh coif, clothes neat, eyes shut, she held her new-born in her arms. Her seventh child had come too soon. Her husband had been distrau

  There is, for me, no landscape without memory.   Landscape renders the unreal real, a soul in death, intuition curled up in cool caverns, amorphous in pebble, stone, rock, tossed in river, stream, rapid, locked in ice above, below, flounces in flows of meltwater lapping ocean shores, earth’s spheres north, south, east, west, preserve hidden depths.   Landscape without memory is a future of weather-worn days roaming pre-destined routes ancient to modern, tossing skyward people, places.   My childhood landscape was an illusion, a non-place over which I had no right to roam. My home, a concrete bunker with lace curtains to hide the hurt within.   I ran stone pavements in my Cinderella shoes, stubbed my toe, scraped my cheek on gravelled ground barring my way to grassy footpaths out of danger.   No walk in the park my childhood landscape until I climbed the distant dream seen through the broken pane of my bedroom window feet on

  I don’t know that I’ve ever collected anything apart from memories. I used to keep photo/scrapbook journals until I couldn’t see the point of being the only reader. But is that collecting or hanging on to things? I think I struggle to know the difference. My family never instilled in me a sense of keeping things, we never had much to keep. I rather like the Maori outlook that nothing is forever and things have a life of their own. Passing objects onto others is extending their life and if things get lost it just means they are moving on to another new phase and you have let them do that. That thought is very useful when you lose something precious or valuable.   What little my parents did inherit was not really precious or valuable. My mother especially was always looking to throw things out. Including a huge fifteen year old rubber tree that if she’d advertised it probably could have made £40 or £50 quid but instead she took the scissors to it one night and filled three bins f

  Primordial heat surging beneath my feet. A leviathan waiting to roar, with power to create, destroy, transform.   Sulphur polluted air, born of bubbling puddles, carries memories of ancient truths, drifting past ochre-stained cliffs.   Primaeval fear churns. Dusty, hot, frozen under a mindless sun, I wait.   Time stretches, stalls into silence. Behind my eyes, calm, clear, and resolute, I offer my life to the universe. Jaqui Fairfax Photo by Eduardo Santos  

  Mario Mesaglio I stumbled across it high on a hillside shrouded in ivy and forget-me-not the day before my journey home.   The place was marked by an old walnut tree visible from the bottom of the slope, a sentinel under a malicious sky.   Obeying a dark inner urge, I started to   scramble up on all fours to the beat of shuddering trees performing a leafy   war dance.  The climb was arduous, slow; my legs like blasted bone, my ears numbed by the storm surge.                                                                                                   I crawled faster, faster, groping. Grit painted my nails dung-black, my knees, palms gravel-red;   my eyes closed against rose thorns piercing the skin of my cheeks, until I found the green of silvered   grass spread before an ice-cold arch at the entrance. Elbowing the ground, toes bent, pushing hard against the stone   of a foot-worn step, I dragged my body behind me into the di

  Lethal Force by Barbara Grafton 'You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.'  - George Bernard Shaw   It’s always the blank sheet of expensive paper that delays me. Laid out on newspaper alongside my brushes, paints and ink sprays, its scale and emptiness saps my confidence, inhibits me, simultaneously attracts and repels. As it has done to countless artists before me. It’s atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia , the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper, named by an Australian artist called Kat Johnson and her friend Lins in 2008 (shorturl.at/fiyI0). I have a commission for a painting from a Newmarket-based firm, as a retirement gift for one of the partners. I have done the ground work, obtained permission to use a photograph of the 2013 July Cup, won by Lethal Force, and made preliminary sketches from it. It’s a superb photo, full of dynamism and power, eight horses and their jockeys thundering towards the finishing line. Now I just hav