Category Archives: Spring

A Spring Postcard From Exbury Gardens: Breathtaking Beauty pic.twitter.com/1tODNEQdUJ @exburygardens

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Lucky I had a camera because when I got home I couldn’t believe what I’d seen
The house – a noble perspective of lawn

Exbury Gardens is a visitor attraction set in the New Forest of Hampshire UK. The grounds run down to the Beaulieu River. Wild ponies wander the roads as you approach. The Isle of Wight and the Solent are visible as you wander along the river path. I had the fortune to go there yesterday. It’s a job to write about the place without sounding like an OTT tourist brochure. It is just SO beautiful that really you just have to see the photos. The beauty has a quality of unreality which I suppose is to be expected in a created garden.  I wish I knew more about plants. Certainly there are 

From the dressing room palette of Madame Butterfly

azaleas and rhododendrons. I also spotted some king cups which have always been a favourite with me. They seem to cry out the joy of the sun and lush meadow land with their open faces. I had not seen any for years and suddenly I spotted them. My mind raced back decades to a John Clare poem.   

Green lush and beaming out vibrant joy

A Bank Holiday weekend lies ahead. If you get the chance give yourself a real overdose of beauty and get down to Exbury. Be sure to take your camera. My final shot is a close up of a Rhododendron. To me it represents an abstraction beyond reality. Maybe this is the way we are supposed to see things – as if everything is something more than itself. I guess this is what great gardeners seek to achieve – a transcendence beyond the truth of itself – a fiction of beauty – like a once dreamed kiss that suddenly is on your living lips.

Maybe dancers, maybe a melody – always beyond this world.

PS. Keep an eye out for Her Majesty. Seemingly she’s a fan

Emma thinx:  We tolerate beliefs because no one knows the truth.

If you go down to the woods today – #Bluebells #poetry #video pic.twitter.com/kq9vFPaOJP

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/RLFb15nKmgo?feature=player_embedded

Oh to be in England
Now that April’s there…..

So begins the famous poem Home Thoughts, From Abroad  by Robert Browning, written in 1845 when he was feeling homesick in Italy. It is a lovely poem and I have always taken pleasure from poems of Nature. One of the few “arty” things I learned at school was the poem “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth.  In later life as a wannabee poet I discovered the words of John Clare and wept with frustration at my dullness. These days what poetry I have I secrete in my novels like a pinch of mono-sodium glutamate among the stir fried bean sprouts of new love. (Guess what I’ve been cooking for dinner?)

It was a release to get away from the office and go to the Bluebell woods at Mottisfont in Hampshire. I took my camera and tried to capture the crushing fragility of such beauty. All I could think of was the poem by Oscar Sparrow entitled simply “Bluebells”.  So much of our longing as humans comes down to a need to hold on and endure. Humble flowers with their immense beauty and perfume fade before our eyes and we cannot hold them any more than we can hold ourselves on the shingle shores of Time. And yet in poetry we can pass on a few moments that in the act itself of sharing, flower over and over as seeds, roll over and over as waves, kiss over and over as innocent lovers: as if no bloom before had offered such beauty or no lips before had ever known the joy of the kiss.

These were my feelings when I first read Oscar Sparrow’s poem. Putting away all the bawdy splash and dash of selling the stuff and beating the drum which is a novelist’s/publisher’s life, I was in those woods – trying to hold back Time, trying to breathe in the blue. 

Emma thinx: Memory is your portrait. Select your poses to paint you. 

Crows’ Feet And Pasta – a menu for #Spring pic.twitter.com/2bhpJQYJ6n

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Prima Rosa – yes the first rose. It is indeed the Spring and where there was nothing, suddenly there are primroses. Suddenly I draw them in through my senses and into my pagan soul. The crows fight savagely over sticks with which to build their nests. I get up at dawn to boil pasta to provide my noble scavengers with a romantic novelist’s breakfast. I love these birds. I think I worship them. In my children’s story Alf The Workshop Dog, all the wisdom of the world is stored in the crows. They are the default battery  on the motherboard of consciousness. (Did you ever wonder if digital language just has to reflect inescapable symmetries by way of metaphor and semi conductor?)

My friend H.B.

They have watched our futile struggles from the high trees since the dawn of conscious time. They have the DNA of dinosaurs, the politics of parliaments, the sheen of pimps, the stab of spike and claw, the stamp of merciless truth. Regular readers will recognise the photo of HB, my court favourite. Last week he showed up for breakfast bedraggled and desperate with hunger, only able to half hop on one leg. The others crows attacked him – such is the nature of the universe. I moved in close and for a moment he looked me in the eye. The other birds retreated or flapped off. He held my gaze and ate on. I circled keeping the others at bay. Finally he had eaten his fill. He took off back to his nest and fed some food to his mate. 

For the next two days he came, limping but stronger. He flew close by me before landing almost at my feet. Rivals moved in and he seemed to check me out for complicity. The others stayed away while he ate his Walmart fusilli and dog meat mash. Oooh, I’m a right cordon bleu you know!

Stark, stark. My kind has watched your species and bared your bones

Yesterday and today he has stayed up in his nest. He seems to be feeding on some agricultural land to the south of me. He has always been one to avoid the crush and shemozzle.  I watch him. He sat on my TV aerial while I hung out some washing. He watches me. He is still a bit lame but coping. He seems to have eggs in the nest. This universe has no mercy but it does support intelligence and the will to survive. Maybe just this once I have made a tiny tiny difference. Just maybe, beyond all the falseness of words and the dynamics of physics, some glue of friendship has some moral gravity or some value.

Emma Thinx: Friendship is an island. Ditch the swimming lesson.







A Little Birdhouse In My Soul pic.twitter.com/XDLpb7RkGd

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A ball of fluff against the cruel cuts of Nature

A couple of years ago I posted a blog here entitled “Are my tits out of proportion to my hole?” You cannot imagine the torrent of criticism that drowned my sensitive soul. The feature, which concerned the frustration of my empty nesting box, was reviled and despised by right minded people. Old friends and supporters turned away in disgust. I was forced to crawl away like the ugly duckling. The post went on to collect my biggest ever readership and topped the poll every day. Can you believe that pervy hornythologists search for such words on line? In the end I took it down out of shame and promised myself and the Devil that I would never ever use the T word again. Faust may have succumbed to an offer of knowledge and worldly pleasure but I am a chastened harlot. I am not the sort of big mamma mammal who would ever give suck to such conduct.

So it is that I can report that the smallest of the T word species has arrived in my box. Better known as Periparus ater by you academic Latin speakers, the little soul has moved in to claim his home. At dusk he pops in and immediately fluffs up his feathers to conserve heat. He/she is a miracle of beauty and of life. I cannot find the words to tell you how blessed I feel that this vulnerable little creature is in some way in my care. Folk I pass in the street have hopes, loves, losses and regrets that I cannot touch or share. Yet – a wisp of a bird, that demanding weightless heaviness of life itself – that flight and gravity of the universal soul, has come at last. Fragile bird – you carry the burden of my kisses and hopes. 

Emma Thinx: Only love gives you the weight to fly.