WRITING INSPIRED BY LANDSCAPE

Autumn rising Berries blushing White tattering Leaves harlequining Butterflies battling Bog oak resting Aliums structuring Iris rhizomes charging   On Sunday October 5th - we gathered in Warboys for an experimental garden words workshop. It was a wonderful day, the weather was cool but gentle and Steve's garden is a layout of small plant rooms, a mini orchard , an abundance of rocks, trees, shrubs and flowers. There was plenty of wildlife about too.  Here's a taste of the writing from Simone - which will along with everyone else's be edited into a whole - a performance for voices which we are calling - a Word Orchestra .  The idea is to harvest the images, sounds, tastes on the wind and smells of the garden to produce a wall of experience.  Kind Eden – An Oasis in the Fens Crunchy acorns underfoot, pop, split, crack Bug hotels , ancient totem poles , stand the test of time Tall, dry grasses bristly whisper Bursts of pink and yellow rose petals Rosehips , big as ap...

  I am Bombus ruderatus , son of a murdered mother, husband to a feisty woman with a sting in her tale, and together with my cousins we are the humble bumble bees, and we will have our revenge in this life.+   You will recognise me as the aerodynamically challenged insect that bounces from flower to flower.   Draw near and I will tell you a tale that began aeons ago but nears its climax in these modern times.   When the world was young, we all lived in harmony. We the pollinators sipped on the nectar that the flowers offered as payment for our insemination services. The fruits of our labours culminated in sweet honey to feed our colonies. The fruit lure that swelled and encased the pollen impregnated seeds attracted the animals which fed upon the life-giving food, and they in turn dispersed the seeds in their dung or as an agent of locomotion, moving them from one place to another. But then the monkeys came. They pillaged the flowers and fruits indiscriminate...

  My head is filled with the deafening roar of shingle being dragged back’n’forth, helpless and willing, in the raging surf slapping and sliding towards my feet. And as the pull of the deep contracts, I could sink into the glistening and dazzling sparkles of the thousand shiny black and opal agates.  But while I’m transfixed on the rolling and crashing, Buster has locked his eyes onto something moving, a dark shadow lurching through the waves, breaking the surface of the water only some thirty feet away. Smooth and proud and powerful.  It disappears and we are left searching the white, greens and turquoise blues of the waves. Buster is barking, noiseless in an even louder chorus of chattering shingle, his eyes have seen it before mine. And there it is. A sheen of grey flashes in the sunlight and then a playful flip of a darker tell-tale tail. A humpback whale. He’s inviting us, teasing us and we are such easy prey. I follow Buster and break into a run along the water’s ed...

  Over the 40 + years I have spent observing insects, this I have learned… It is invidious to judge anything by appearance, but some insects will never look attractive in my eyes. B ristletails, earwigs, cockroaches, and many flies fall into this category, while the beauty of other insects draw me to them like… well, a moth to a flame. Fortunately, I am no longer mottephobic, or afraid of moths, an inconvenient condition my mother unintentionally gave me when I was a child. Neither do I have entomophobia, a more general phobia of insects. Instead, I find them fascinating both to observe and to research.   I have also learned that I am never going to see every species of insect, given that they account for over 90% of creatures on the planet, the most diverse group of living animals and the largest biomass among terrestrial animals. Entomologists estimate there are over 10 quintillion insects (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) or about 200 million insects per human at any give...

By (Anonymous, for Ferrante Imperato) - http://www.ausgepackt.uni-erlangen.de/presse/download/index.shtml, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9172105 In my study there are many favourite items. Books I have treasured since childhood stand cover to cover with brand new editions, some I have still yet to read, for if I have to acknowledge just one vice, (and I have several) I am a self-confessed book junkie. The mere glimpse of a title leads my mind down all sorts of imaginary pathways, new ideas, new journeys, greater understanding of a subject or merely escapist tales of fantasy. The anticipatory thought of opening a new book and inhaling the smell of fresh print, and the touch of pristine pages, as yet unturned, adds a whole new sensory and tactile dimension to the book reading exercise that online text can never convey. Second-hand books also have their own unique persona. Perhaps stored in slightly damp surroundings at the rear of an old book shop racke...

  One of my favourite possessions is a basic utilitarian object: a sixty year-old glazed stoneware rubber tapping cup. When Dad gave it to me a few years ago, I was delighted. Others might see it best used as drainage in plant pots. But to me it is a remarkable object: aesthetically pleasing, a reminder of my childhood, and an object that speaks resoundingly of colonial power and the rise and fall of a lucrative industry that changed an entire country. So much significance for such a modest object!   Dad acquired the cup in Singapore where he was posted by the RAF from 1959 to 1962 to develop aerial reconnaissance photographs towards the end of the Communist insurgency of 1948 to 1961. This was the happiest time in my parents’ marriage. A third daughter and a son were added to our existing family of four, and we enjoyed all that RAF life offered. As often as he could, Dad would take us into the countryside to see wildlife and the local people going about their lives. Fam...

  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 ...