‘Yesterday blue fought through the cloud and the sun came out. In the walled garden, the birds sang, a hundred tiny voices making a chorus of good news.’
‘In the last week of March the blackthorn flowered. Rosettes as white as snowburied fields burst from stems black with witchcraft, from between the thorns of fairy tale and folklore; thorns whose vicious stab cast Sleeping Beauty into a hundred year sleep.’
Striding across the meadow looking as if he’s stepped out of Hardy’s fictional Wessex landscape, Steven McCulloch is wearing a wide-brimmed white hat, a billowing
I begin to find that the observations I have heard my mothers and mothers-in-law make over the years are now my own – I too have had enough of cooking and Christmases.
“Sorry,” the woman says to her invisible friend, murmuring hello to the dog as he lifts his head to her in greeting, “it’s just someone holding the gate for me.” Together apart. Together, together again. Sort of.