Friday, May 16, 2025

Poster, stones and water.

1. I notice a poster advertising coffees in the village's church hall, and we let the satnav and our noses lead us past stone cottages with full gardens, through a ford to a stone chapel with a plain modern door. The hall has a long view across the valley to the fields where they are setting up Glastonbury Festival; we have a good talk with the women running it; and the coffee and cake are very good indeed.

2. We pass Stone Henge again -- the crowd it draws to bleak Salisbury Plain is as much a marvel as the engineering and the weight of history.

3. My two tiny bottles of water from the wells at Glastonbury are intact. I put them on the shelf in the kitchen to remind me of the people in quiet reflection in the Chalice Well's gardens and the White Well's shady roadside spot decked with flowers and ribbons, with a man swinging a thurrible and families filling their bottles and Japanese tourists washing their gemstones.

Watering cans, eating alone and settling down.

1. The grounding weight of my watering cans. 2. Our schedules mean that I eat supper alone in the peaceable, silent kitchen. 3. Now the chil...