Trees are up rooted and planted upside down.
Head fuzzy too much red wine with cauliflower cheese.
Candles to the left of me, tea with soya milk to the right.
Sound of a dog barking.
The gas fire humming, clicking, clacking, whooshing.
Sat in my sheep onesey a present from my parents last Christmas.
The iron tree by Ai Wei Wei perfectly positioned in the graveyard by the chapel.
Ancient tree, rusting red, glowing in the winter sunlight.
Branches bolted together.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is covered in white.
Each sculpture is picked out by the snow.
Children are sledging between Henry Moore’s
There’s a snow man family complete with dog and cat.
The snow has frozen in the night and there is a crust of ice lying on its surface.
As I walk there is a delightful crunching sound.
The sky is blue blue blue and the sunlight makes it all glisten and bright.
Naoise delights in the winter landscape, he runs down the hill side, stands and kicks a collapsed snow ball.
He lies down on top of the Henry Moore Sculpture and takes photographs on his red camera.
At home the other evening he carved a little tiny maquette of this sculpture out of candle wax.
Looking at the Ursula von Rydingsvard’s work.
I want to climb inside these womb, tomb, cacoon wooden spaces.
Naoise wants to touch them.
I am drawn to some gloves knitted from wire with fake nail’s that suggest talons.
I imagine these scratching at skin and wounding.
On the way to the park, my friends played a memory game in the car.
I went to market and I bought ” a pie, a pebble, a purple giraffe, the moon, a fluffy kitten, some sausages…..”
The strings of words made nonsense poems and Naoise squealed and giggled.
I just drove and avoided the black ice and sludge.
New Years Eve tomorrow, the time of reflection and resolution,
I find resolutions irksome, but I make some,
Eat less, move more, get a job, apply for a PhD, smile with the children,
I will not be sad to see 2014 disappear, I will welcome the new
The buzzer on the oven has sounded, so I can’t write about the highlights of 2014
The children fishing off the pier in Assynt, the harbour porpoise that me and Syd spotted on our way back on the boat from the Summer Isles.
Or the lowlights, the car that ran over the foot of my eldest son that caused him such pain and discomfort, that caused me great distress, that disrupted our lives.
I hold them close, I hold them dear, for all the resolutions of improvement, I have my two beautiful boys, my partner and my home and the gas fire burns warmth when the earth is cold as iron and the water is like a stone.
