A Small Stone Number 31 -- the last

TO A GRANDDAUGHTER

With tight fists and mewing cry

You demand attention

With apricot down on cushion cheeks

And eyes like smoky Lapis Lazuli

You demand attention

With soft burps and semi permanent hiccups

And a look that seems as old as granite

You hold us as we hold you

and we’re together forever.

A Small Stone Number 30

The City Creats New Landscapes After Dark

A Small Stone Number 29

Three blushing lilies in a red glass vase fill the air with pink scent.

A Small Stone Number 28 (and 300th post! Hurrah!)

Marble arms slicing through water, the sound of Ritchie Valens bouncing off the swimming pool walls, ten bodies following orders, arching and splashing and making clumsy unlikely movements to order. And afterwards feeling virtuous, as though we'd been to church or watched a re-run of The Waltons...

A Small Stone Number 27

In a hospital waiting room where the wait is weighed in hours, I pick up a paperback and smell the pepper of old ink on its lightly braised pages. It's Maigret's first case M.Gallet decede translated to Stonewalled in this green Penguin printed the year I was learning to read.  
Patients are complaining to each other, chairs grind out a protest on the linoleum, but here, in these tired pages, It's a hot summer in 1931 and there is a bullet in a body in the Hotel de la Loire.
I am twenty miles from Paris. I am walking the mile long boulevard of dust with the Chief Inspector. He is sweating. So I am. We are both overweight.
The nurse calls my name.  

A Small Stone Number 26

A last minute meeting at home. Ok so I hadn't found the time to hoover. I'm a working woman and my lounge sometimes turns into my office. Ok so I hadn't managed to shift all the clean washing from downstairs to upstairs. I thought about it at 2pm but an urgent email got in the way. And a deadline. And another deadline.
Good meeting. Great meeting with a woman I had never met before. A meeting of minds. As I said goodbye, mentally timetabling all the things we'd agree, I noticed the pile of clean clothes on the chair that would have been in her direct eye line. And that's when I saw the pair of knickers sitting on top.
Oh God
Oh God
Oh God 

A Small Stone Number 25

A mirror from last summer 
still reflecting in our August memories

A Small Stone Number 24

Morning: I reached for the mug of tea on my bedside table. It was early and all I could taste was hot.
In the shower I used the still-almost-full bottle of Apple Mint gel bought in a Norfolk pound shop last summer. There's a reason it's been relegated to the back of the shelf: it smells of factories rather than orchards or herb gardens, of plastic rather than sharp bubbles of cider. To make matters worse, it's the colour of an abrasive mouthwash or a wake-up stripe in toothpaste.
And it clashes with the pretend limestone of the tiled walls.

A Small Stone Number 23

A winter mirror

A Small Stone Number 22

A perfect moment with my youngest son in a quiet flat. In another room Classic FM is playing, but in this one all we can hear is hiccups as his week old daughter gazes into his eyes and smiles. We both know it is wind: neither of us believes it.

A Small Stone Number 21

Taking a short cut through a small cemetery, where it always seems to be autumn, I noticed for the first time a weathered headstone to a grandfather called Fred Friend. The alliteration, a furry blur on the tongue, encourages smiling and I think I would have liked this man whose family knew that he wouldn't have wanted the formality of Frederick.

A Small Stone Number 20

Head full of history and the danger of adverbs
Arms full off registers and hand outs
A shy smile from a new student who
is not certain she's in the right place.
A lazy grin from a two semester old timer who
knows he is.

It's the start of a new term

A Small Stone Number 19

It's a cold night without the comfort of clouds

A Small Stone Number 18

Woke up with a head full of things to do: a house to clean and a wash to be put on; emails to send and an accountant to ring; a last look at a class handout. Does it do the job?
And then I remember that I've left a small stone unwritten. And I knew what I was going to write about too.

I had made notes in my very beautiful William Morris notebook about city streets at night when the puddles on the pavement dance with the lights from the queues of cars driving out of town. I was going to write about the darkness hiding last summer's fly blown dirt clinging to the windows of the pub at the corner and the feeble wreath of Christmas lights that still straddle the windows. And I was going to find a metaphor to somehow convey how I felt looking through the window and seeing that, although all the lights were on and there was an empty glass on the bar, no one was inside and it looked as though no one was coming...

And it would have been good too. If I had found that metaphor and if I had remembered to write it down.

A Small Stone Number 17

A writer's lot...
...I have a sudden burning itch to write in the voice of an onion, a mushroom, a whole salad drawer of characters. I'm inspired by Sylvia Plath:

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

And by Suji Kwock Kim

I don't mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer, 
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.

What does a potato sound like or a Brussel sprout?
Drat! I can't find out -  I have a tax form to fill out.

A Small Stone Number 16

Whenever I cook roast potatoes and I do often, two or  three times a month, I think of my mother's Sunday dinners...lamb a soft lavender grey with fat the colour of cream, the rich nearly-burnt brown of the beef joint and the pallid chicken, served up in chunky slices with a watery gravy that tasted of disappointment. But it is my mother's potatoes that I remember most vividly. They really should have been crisper: they failed every acceptable culinary standard, but oh, how they tasted. Cooked in fat from roasting the Sunday's  joint, under my mother's gaze the par boiled King Edward's would turn a gentle butterscotch in an oven that wasn't quite hot enough. She would turn them out and shrug: not much good again while I would try to steal a golden mouthful when she wasn't looking.

A Small Stone Number 15

Just met for the first time the word mizzle, Cornish for what we Irish call soft rain. Its not falling from the sky rain so much as floating water, mixing with the air to leave seeds of silver in hair and on the gentle down of wool jumpers. Its soft, seditious rain soaking layers of clothes without the owner noticing until they are wet through...

A Small Stone Number 14

The sea mists have melted away
leaving
a grey day
you can see through

A Small Stone Number 13

I'm late creating this small stone...for reasons that will become clear...


This evening at 7.26 a bonnie little girl was born with black hair and midnight eyes: Aylah. Our granddaughter. 

A Small Stone Number 12

Random Thoughts

A word picked at random from a book picked at random – third shelf from the bottom, fifth book from the left, flip to page 101 and first noun or adjective (no adverbs) 

The Book

I pick up Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography and it's a pleasure to hold it again. I haven’t touched these pages in a couple of years.

The word 

Centuries

It's a good word to spring from a history book, stretching back to the centuria, the Roman soldiers who marched across the world. But the group of 100 weren’t all military men, the Romans took their administrators with them, knowing that   control needs more than the point of a sword. 

They also took something else. I remember a half heard radio programme  explaining the importance of foot care to a Roman soldier. It’s an uncomfortable truth but the centuria wore socks.
With sandals.