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To celebrate the launch of Startling, Kate Sweeney has made one of her wonderful animated mixed-media films in response to some extracts from the book. It’s available now and you can take a look at it here.
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Kate and I have worked together on a number of projects, including – for Writing the Climate – the collective filmpoem Murmuration.
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If our film of Startling touches you in any way at all, please share it wherever you can.
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All of us in this time machine are startlings.
This year’s theme is ‘The Environment’ so here’s a poem from my new book Startling.
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Tree of Knowledge
Unseasonable damp heat seeds spores,
a contagious grey pallor curls the tips of leaves
into fists. I cut off the mouldy shoots. We are
writing this poem together. Stray trusses stay
out of reach without tilting a shaky wooden ladder
against the snaking trunk to clamber into uncertainty.
A woman, no scholar of gravity, who planted a sapling
(Saturn, Tree of Knowledge) bought by post
from the British Library, I want the poem and its tree
to last longer, survive. The fruit’s just starting to set,
downy thumbs of sweetness, apples-to-be, mildew
and artless balance willing. Inside the poem,
unrunged, inside nature, might we catch sight
of love and know where we live?
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Before the launch next week at Durham Book Festival, I’ll be hosting a workshop looking at how we might turn our concerns about ‘the environment’ into writing that catches the attention and has the potential to change minds and spur action.
You can find more information here. Look forward to seeing those of you who can make it at Clayport Library on Friday 14th October 4 – 5.30 and later at 7 in Collected bookshop. Lx
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P.S.
The poem is actually in couplets but once again I am confounded by WordPress’s blunt formatting – or my own lack of technical know-how. And so I surrender to digital wabi sabi and bow.
It’s very strange having a new book come out so soon in the wake of The Knucklebone Floor being in the spotlight – in fact it’s startling! But that is the anachronistic world of publishing, all loops and flashbacks. Time and the way we travel through it is one of the themes of the new book so maybe it’s a case of whatever you look at is looking back at you too.
So, as Writing the Climate is coming to a close, after three rollercoaster years on the stage of the world and its weather, a selection of my writing from that time is published in Startling, a joint venture between New Writing North and Faber. It will be officially launched at Durham Book Festival on Friday 14th October at 7pm in the new Collected bookshop. Tickets include a glass of wine and a copy of the book – but space is limited so if you’d like to come along, you’ll need to book very soon. I’m looking forward to marking the end of the residency in this way and letting Startling loose in the world.
Writing it has been a more documentary process than usual. The nature of the residency and the context of world events – the pandemic and accelerating climate urgency, alongside political and global upheaval – seemed to ask for a quite transparent bearing of witness and an honest recording of my own response, filtered through all the various collective and collaborative activities that the residency made possible. It’s been an immensely rich time, challenging and profound, and I hope I have done justice to it and there’s something in the book that will touch and resonate with readers. I still have notebooks full of research and reflections that I intend to revisit at some point in what will be yet another version of time travel.
Even though Startling interrogates endings and beginnings, charting the cycles of deep time, the writing itself will continue. At this stage I’m not sure where I’ll go next but there are some seeds of ideas that may or may not germinate. Mostly I’m looking forward to more open space and a less functional, more intentional dynamic in my writing process. We’ll see where that leads – and I hope that I can bring some of you along with me as I go – here or elsewhere (more on that later no doubt).
Other ‘endings’ are the final couple of sessions of our Listening to the Climate discussion space. The next one, on Tuesday 11th October 6 – 7.30 pm BST, will be looking at Episode 9: Consciousness. You can listen again here and book a free space here. The final gathering will be on 8th November, when we’ll be discussing the last episode, Regeneration. I really appreciate the way people have been able to share their deepest concerns and their imaginative responses to the podcasts and connect with each other around this subject of such importance for us as individuals and for our world.
The last last is the very last Writing Hour on Tuesday 25th October 1 – 2pm BST. This is where we come together to write in silence, encouraged by each other’s presence and shared focus, following (or not) a couple of prompts dropped in like pebbles in a pool. Again, I’ve been so inspired by people’s willingness to show up and have the courage to face the blank page with the state of the world in mind and track the movements of their imagination and memory, in community and solidarity with others. It’s a low impact, DIY, start-where-you-are kind of process that I hope has helped everyone who’s come along to find and nurture the seeds of their own unfolding time. Here in Autumn, the season that embodies both beginnings and endings, is an excellent spell for marking transitions, letting cause and effect be more congruent and aligned, and setting our compasses in the direction of love and wonder.
As journalist and yogi Mark Morford writes:
‘Stop thinking the global crisis is all there is and realize that for every ongoing war or religious outrage or environmental devastation, there are a thousand counterbalancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world right now on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral. Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel. Realize this is the perfect moment to envision a reenchantment of the world, to change the energy, to step right up and crank up your personal volume. Right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious, there is your opening. Remember mystery. And, finally, believe in the seeds you plant. Believe you are part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending transformation, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable.’
So, I’ve been riding the waves of the past few weeks in the little ark that is this year’s Laurel Prize. Down to Birmingham for Contains Strong Language and The Verb, where I was able to catch the PoliNations landscape in Victoria Square. Good to see the centre of the city colonised by plants and poetry, rain-catching trees and resting places.
You can listen to this episode of The Verb on catch-up here.
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Then on to Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a day of readings and workshops. One of my favourite places, it was wonderful to be there on a day of sunshine, lighting up Robert Indiana’s powerful sculptures – the world of words and numbers re-imagined in his colourful configurations.
You can watch the prize ceremony, hosted by Simon Armitage, here and listen to us all read poems from the winning collections. Absolutely delighted that The Knucklebone Floor has been honoured in this way that highlights the past year’s poetry books entangling themselves with nature and the land. Chair of the judges, Glyn Maxwell, said:
‘Linda France’s The Knucklebone Floor leaves one with a sense of being guided through an infinite afternoon, green thoughts in green shades. The distant past and the dimly arriving future seem balanced in the hands of the blessèd guide who leads the reader through, a deep feminine spirit here to reclaim what can be reclaimed from the wreck of where we are, here to suggest myriad paths out of the wilderness. A work of deep music and wisdom, an enchanted garden of a book.’
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Everyone’s been so kind and warm in offering their congratulations – I’m very grateful – thank you thank you thank you!
I’ll be reading from it, alongside Helen Mort (whose latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize) at the Leper Chapel, Ripon, on Sunday 25th September 7.30pm – the closing event of Ripon Poetry Festival.
If you’d like to buy a copy of The Knucklebone Floor, please visit the Smokestack website or order it from your local bookshop.
Thrilled that The Knucklebone Floor has been shortlisted for this year’s Laurel Prize. You can learn more about the shortlist and details of the Prize here. If you’re in the vicinity of Birmingham or Yorkshire Sculpture Park on 9th or 16th September, do come along and join in the celebrations.
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I dug out a postcard from a few years ago of an earlier version of one of the poems in the collection.
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And looking up recently, I discovered a wasp’s nest in the roof of my little shed’s porch – a small beautiful construction – apparently what taught the Chinese how to make paper. Paper – the magical element that so binds and absorbs us.
I used to live on the edge of woodland but now I live in the middle of agricultural land, pasture for sheep, sometimes cattle, and increasingly used by pheasant shooters. A little house not on the prairie, but a wind-blasted field. An ideal spot for a poet, who needs solitude and spaciousness to think and write. It is by both accident and design that the trees have disappeared: a wholesale felling in 2018, that felt like an invasion of absence, an amputation; and successive storm damage, particularly evident ever since Storm Desmond in 2015/16 and, at the end of 2021, Arwen’s devastation, which left me, like many others, without power or water for seven days.
Fortunately, there are still trees marking the garden’s loose, uncertain perimeter – holly, yew, rowan, laburnum, cypress, birch. I couldn’t live here without them. They are my companions, kinfolk, fellow conspirators in the arts of living on a damaged planet. Their assembled company softens the sense of bare exposure and the force of the wind. They also act as its instruments, roaring like the sea on more days than not, a leafy ocean, audible on the other side of my thick stone walls. The chimney is the wind’s chanter, funnelling great breaths into the room where I sit and listen, half-listen, try not to listen. It sounds like sobbing, the heave and fall of someone’s heart breaking. I pretend it isn’t mine.
Who am I kidding? Why would I rather not admit it? This pain and loss that shakes the ground under my feet and slams doors shut, always a cold draught at the back of my neck. It’s hard to find the words, stand upright, walk around with all that grief inside.
On this high ground where I live we have lost many trees since Arwen and Malik – conifers, hardwoods, immature and venerable. Their limbs have been torn off, root plates up-ended, forced out of the soil by the trees’ crashing descent. All the roadsides and hedgerows are scattered with their broken branches. On my daily walks I bring some home for firewood, carrying them in my arms like a loved one I must prepare for consignment to the flames.
And it’s not only single trees that have left an empty space behind them – although I’ll sorely miss the Scots pine behind my house and the two enormous oaks I’d pass by the farm gate – the whole landscape is affected: the old horizons, contours and pathways, their special character, the habitat for wildlife, the shelter they provide. It’ll take many years before we regain a sense of lushness and canopy and can experience the benefits of the mature trees’ capacity for carbon capture, the development of their complex interspecies relationships, above and below ground. In mourning for the trees, we also mourn for the loss of everything in the trees’ ecosystem – which is our own. Whenever we lose anything or anyone, we lose part of ourselves.
Imbolc or Candlemas is associated with the slow stirrings, still mostly beneath the ground, of Spring. It’ll stay cold, and probably get even colder, until we reach the Equinox later in March. Some days it requires a leap of the imagination to believe in sap rising and the earth greening. This ancient fire festival has always been a pivot point between life and death – a tender and powerful threshold between the fierce Cailleach and sweet Brigid, mother Demeter and daughter Persephone.
Our tears show we care, that we suffer with the world. We water the earth with our tears and, beyond the scope of our understanding, it will do what it will in its own good time. This Imbolc, it is raining here and the sky is heavy and full while we collect our seeds, actual and intentional, and prepare for sowing. What will you plant?
As we give our attention to the old-growth forest and the beloved backyard shade tree, we recognise that paying attention to trees is only the beginning. Attention generates wonder, which generates more attention and more joy. Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgement of pain. Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine. Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible. This, too, is a gift, for when we fall in love with the living world, we cannot be bystanders to its destruction. Attention becomes intention, which coalesces itself to action.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Foreword to Old Growth (The best writing about trees from Orion magazine), 2021
Just past the Autumn Equinox and there’s that beginning of term feeling in the air, a quickening as the seasons slip down and along, a new coolness in the air. It’s been a strange not-quite-there summer with more work in it than play. But the fruits are ripening with a number of events connected with my Writing the Climate residency coming up I hope you might have time, space and inclination to check out.
At Durham Book Festival on October 12th at 7pm you’ll be able to tune into Dawn Chorus, this year’s collective poem project I’ve curated and orchestrated with artist and film-maker Christo Wallers. 115 people from all over the world sent in their audio clips in response to our open call and we’ve gathered all of them together in a very special collaboration that captures the spirit of the birds’ waking up to renew our commitment to positive climate action, however that may play out in our individual and collective lives. You can find the details here – and there’ll also be an essay available soon about the making of the piece. I look forward to hearing how you find it in the comments box in the online space on the night – especially all those who contributed. Thank you for your inspiring words.
Straight after the premiere of Dawn Chorus, you’ll be able to stay and watch a conversation between myself and Kate Simpson, editor extraordinaire of the powerful new anthology Out of Time – Poems from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021). We’ve called it Beginning Again and, as well as discussing Dawn Chorus, we’ll be putting our heads together to think about what poetry can bring to a climate crisis that it’s hard to find the right words for Full Stop. You can see all the details here. Both events are free, and a link will be available soon.
Once Dawn Chorus is launched, our podcast series In Our Element will also start airing. As well as being broadcast on Resonance FM and several other local radio stations nationwide, two episodes will be released on New Writing North’s sound platform every week leading up to the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November. Produced by Sonderbug, there are ten altogether and each one focuses on a particular element as a way of exploring different perspectives on the climate and ecological crisis. I’ll write more about this and all our wonderful contributors in more detail later, but for now I just wanted to let you know it’s on its way.
There’s also a chance for the over-50s to take part in an online reflective writing workshop, offered on Friday October 8th (1 – 2.30pm), as one strand of the Older and Greener initiative from Newcastle Elders Council, Newcastle City Council and Equal Arts. It’s called Waking Up to Climate and you can find out more about it here. Again this event is free, but booking is required as numbers are limited.
I’d also like to say thank you to the Journal Culture Awards for voting me Writer of the Year. It was strange and very moving to back among the region’s cultural community for the first time in 18 months at the prize-giving event in Durham Cathedral. A bat flying between the pillars all night was a memorable highlight. Congratulations to all the shortlisted artists, performers and organisations.
This sounds like enough to be going on with – but do join me for one or all of these various events, nicely timed for the growing dark and this beautiful wild time of year.
Be well.
L
x
August is a yellow month – hypericum, mullein, alchemilla, ragwort, oilseed rape. A small black beetle is inexorably drawn to all that yellow and the promise of protein-rich pollen, hence its generic name ‘pollen beetle’. August is also the month for an insect less visible to the eye – the berry bug or harvest mite, in the Trombiculidae family, relative of the tick.
Every August the wily, indiscriminate berry bug (that the French call aoûtat after the wily, indiscrimate month) comes to my garden – and me – to feed, enjoying what sweetness I have left. With its precise and persistent mandibles, the larva punctures my skin, injects a digestive enzyme, chews a hole called a stylostome and leaves raised red itchy spots on my arms, legs, torso, neck. Without realising what’s in the air, I start scratching and then, it dawns – the hypericum’s in bloom, and I remember it’s that time of year again: August, the difficult month.
Looking back, the long summer holidays stretched out into an infinity of sunshine and sand and no school – an exciting, dangerous mixture of freedom and boredom. Where we lived, on the south coast, most of that happened near water, either salt or chlorinated, but sunny days that weren’t beach or pool days would be spent either ‘down the lane’ or ‘over the railway line’. These were lonelier places and therefore potent with risk, though no one spoke of that; the taboo carrying a terrible weight of darkness.
‘Down the lane’ there was water, a trickling stream and a flat wooden bridge, and sometimes boys, precocious with leer and innuendo. It was where I learned what an oak tree was, saw my first celandine and picked blackberries, scratched much worse than a hundred berry bug bites. It was where a girl called Hazel from ‘up the road’ fell out of a tree and got spiked on a piece of metal jutting out of an abandoned van. The drama – screams, blood, sirens, uniforms – hushed us all for days.
‘Over the railway line’ there were pigs that squealed and grunted and boys on scramble bikes that whined like giant insects. Hidden by trees, there was a circuit they would ride around in pointless ovals on Sunday afternoons, a ritual of speed and petrol. This was the place where every December Mum and I would go in search of a Christmas tree. My mother trying to carry her saw nonchalantly, as if it were a handbag or umbrella. Again, this was dangerous, forbidden but necessary, some ancient feudal right. No one else used to have Christmas trees like ours, long-needled straggly pines, sticky with resin, rather than compact, domesticated, garage-bought spruce. We’d spend a long time choosing ‘the best one’ – the right size (no taller than the ceiling), a good branching shape – and carry it back, Mum at one end, me at the other, like a comedy double act.
We’d also collect cones that my mother would paint white or scatter with glitter to make Christmas decorations, miniature worlds that confounded scale, where a tiny Santa Claus sat on his sleigh in a forest of enormous pinecones and a tall red candle that year after year was never lit. We’d find holly and cut a carrier bagful to prop sprigs behind pictures or on the mantelpiece in odd little pots that only appeared at Christmas out of one of the big brown cardboard boxes Mum kept on top of her wardrobe. The holly also scratched and prickled but it was easier to bear then because we were all wrapped up in coats and scarves.
I grew up thinking that was what ‘Nature’ did to you – cut through your skin, made you itch, sometimes drew blood. It wasn’t clear to whom it belonged, whether we were entitled to it or not. It was all somewhere else, prepositional – ‘down’, ‘over’, ‘across’, ‘beyond’. Entering it meant crossing a threshold into another world, transgressive, full of menace. Our occasional forays to find something we needed, according to the season – brambles or greenery – involved taking something that both was and wasn’t ours. The house was changed by it, more and less itself. It made me feel the gnaw of adrenalin, cortisol, that sense of a bigger, unknown world beyond our street, my school, the town.
My mother had a phase of making arrangements out of dried grasses and ornamental seedheads – arid affairs that gathered dust on the radiogram and windowsills. I’d keep going back to look at them, touch them, puzzled by this bit of outside brought indoors, not knowing if they were dead or alive.
Because we lived in a flat we didn’t have a garden. There was a small patch of green in front of our block planted with bland shrubs that never flowered, mostly waxy laurels, a single oak tree, with thin grass in between. My mother was the self-elected custodian of this contingent green space, requiring her to go out with shears and saw at regular intervals to keep everything in check. The job was really housework outdoors, a stay against chaos and doom, the shame of untidiness.
A bookish child, I recoiled from anything with a whiff of animals. The nearest I got to the countryside was Anne of Green Gables, and later Wuthering Heights – an unhealthy bipolar map of the world. When we read The Wind in the Willows at school, I sulked and tuned out, listening to my own thoughts instead. What had a talking toad to say to me? I have great caverns in my imagination full of trapped rabbits and lost otters, caged bears and dark horses.
One reliable zone of fascination however was the wildflower series of Brooke Bond Tea cards. It was incredibly exciting when my mother opened a new packet and I could slip my fingers between the green paper and the lining to fish out a new card and see what it was. I learnt everything I know about flags of the world, the history of cars and costume from them. And wildflowers. That’s how I knew that the yellow flower that grew down the lane in the spring was lesser celandine, and recognized others from C.F. Tunnicliffe’s blurry paintings: cowslip, sweet violet, foxglove, ragged robin.
Their names were enchanting – the sound of them like snatches of song, a spell, the sort of thing you might call someone you loved. These flowers might have been printed on small rectangular pieces of card tucked inside packets of tea but I recognized them. Naturally they became part of me, my story, an almost whispered, immensely seductive invitation to explore one corner of the natural world that didn’t bite and mostly didn’t scratch, that stayed still, didn’t run away and abandon you. Flowers made no noise. Among them there was no sense of trouble. I knew I could go there because I was there already – I was ‘of’ it – a lesson in the genitive case.
Another geometric world I shared with my mother was more arcane – even the name sounded mysterious, like a flower itself. Philately. Around the age of ten I became interested in stamps and, with my junior kit (album, hinges, starter set and magnifying glass) bought from Woolworths in the town a bus ride away, I began collecting. I soon graduated to being a specialist – having ascertained that a proper philatelist concentrated on stamps from one country, or illustrated with a chosen theme. More for pragmatic reasons than patriotic ones, I decided to collect stamps from what everyone in those Commonwealth days called Great Britain. I pounced on all the letters that arrived through our letterbox and soaked the stamps off their envelopes in saucers of water; big commemorative ones, a special prize. As with the tea cards, this is where I extended my education and learned about the world’s currencies and capitals, British bridges, the origins of antiseptics and the Red Cross. My mother and I would go to stamp fairs and look at thousands and thousands of stamps in an afternoon. I’d buy a few sets or first day covers to add to my collection and when we got home we’d consult the Stanley Gibbons catalogue, amazed how much each scrap of coloured paper was worth. Whenever a new set of stamps was issued, my middle sister, who still lived at home, would post me a first day cover. Although the anniversaries they commemorate have long past, I still have them – Votes for Women (50 years), TUC (100 years), Captain Cook’s First Voyage (200 years); my sister’s rounded capitals in thick blue biro, my name and our address, before postcodes were invented.
Turning the musty yellowing pages of my home-made loose-leaf folder, which I still have, I discover the threepenny Spring Gentian issued in 1964 to mark the Tenth International Botanical Congress in Edinburgh. There’s a smudge and a space where both the hinge and stamp have been lost above my note recording the ‘1/3d Fringed Water Lily’. By the time I was nearly nine in April 1967, the price of a second-class stamp had risen to 4d. There were four different ones in the British Wildflowers series – Hawthorn and Bramble; Larger Bindweed and Viper’s Bugloss; Ox-Eye Daisy, Colstfoot and Buttercup; Bluebell, Red Campion and Wood Anemone – all taken from Keble Martin’s classic Concise British Flora. The 9d Dog Violet and the 1/9d Primrose were drawn by the distinguished botanical artist Mary Grierson. Both their names in tiny capitals at the bottom of each stamp; I had no idea who they were, or what many of these flowers looked like in Real Life. But I was touched in a place that stamps celebrating National Productivity Year or British Technology, or even the First Flight of Concorde, could never reach.
Despite my focus on British stamps, I also had a soft spot for stamps from other countries emblazoned with flowers, intriguing as book covers in a foreign language – lilies from Hungary (Magyar), cacti from Brazil (40 pesetas), waterlilies from Viet Nam, tulips from Afghanistan (‘Queen of Sheba’ and ‘Jewel of Spring’). When I went to the Grammar School and started to learn it, I began to understand the usefulness of botanical Latin – all those different countries, alphabets and painting styles, using the same way of describing their flowers.
And for all their bright extravagance, it was comforting that they were contained in squares and rectangles. Sometimes even triangles, from countries I’d never heard of. The shapes were like flowerbeds, small pieces of garden you could hold in your hand, carry in your pocket or pencil case, put in a special book to look at on rainy days or lonely nights.
Edna O’Brien called August ‘a wicked month’. It is a difficult month for us all, I think, but especially for gardeners. The big story about growth is past, fewer plants are in flower and things are starting to get blousy, set seed. Hungry caterpillars and insects leave their perforated calling cards in petals, leaves and stalks. Green is starting to fade and dry. Karel Capek, in his curious and wonderful book The Gardener’s Year, published in 1929, says ‘a real gardener feels it in his bones that August is already a turning point.’
Those achingly long summer holidays. Nights still short, showered with meteors, petals falling from the heavens. Postcards landing on the mat, pictures of faraway places and exotic stamps. Tanned skin freckled with bites. A big fat book to disappear inside. My mother’s birthday, Lily – named after a flower – who showed me all she could of Nature, in that strange, tight world, the working-class garden of the 1960s.
I wrote this for Durham Book Festival nearly a decade ago when I began the botanical journey that led to my poetry collection ‘Reading the Flowers’, published by Arc in 2016. To celebrate it being on this year’s new Laurel Prize longlist, initiated by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and the Poetry School, Arc have a special offer throughout August. You can buy the hardback for the price of the paperback (the offer also applies to my previous collection ‘You are Her’) via their website. In these difficult times for small presses (and poets), buying poetry books is a great way to support literature and culture and keep us all thriving.
Enjoy your August and stay well.
Last week we were supposed to be holding our first Climate Reading Group at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle – a prelude to Rebecca Solnit’s visit. This, like every other cultural gathering, had to be cancelled and, in our shift to connecting online, you can read my brief report of Solnit’s book of essays Whose Story is This? on New Writing North’s blog. I hope it persuades you to read the book, if you haven’t already.
We are working to make it possible that our next group – reading Karen Solie’s poetry collection The Caiplie Caves – will take place online via Zoom.
Wishing everyone well.
L
x
I started reading Muriel Spark’s The Public Image (1968, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), set in Rome, on the flight over. She mentions that Time tends to go anti-clockwise there. I was interested to see how that played out during my fortnight’s stay at the Accademia Brittanica, The British School at Rome.
A fortnight is too short and too long for a writer – enough time to relax and be complacent, whilst staying open, searching for what stirs you; and not enough time, once you’ve found your hook, to stay there and excavate, experiment, understand and deepen.
All the city’s clocks were full moons, electrical storms, a partial eclipse. Rome – Eternal City, Dead City – is bigger than you are. You might as well submit. I went to see a friend read from a book he’d written about the moon. He wasn’t there – just a ring of people talking about it. In Italian.
‘Go thou to Rome,’ said Shelley, ‘the paradise, the city, the wilderness.’ For me, lingering in gardens, it was more paradise than wilderness. Although the often 30 degree heat felt like a small lick of inferno.
Inevitably in the heat, I was drawn to the city’s many fountains – particularly the forty in the Villa Borghese Gardens – one per two hectares. And there was a memorable outing to Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where the fountain is god and goddess and my mouth stayed wide open all day long. A big O, clock, water spout, moon.
Now I’m home, I’m not sure what day it is. Whatever direction Time is going in, I will pluck the day and eat it. Carpe Diem. A hundred thousand fridge magnets can’t be ignored.
Botanical 