Since I last reviewed my website, the wider World has endured wars, volcanoes, floods, fires, and, the Covid virus pandemic. Here we’ve merely had a little über-wet roof-ripping weather.
Now a new, nearer war has begun: Irony rattles across the news screen: men with assault weapons wear anti-viral masks lest they breathe on their marks fleeing terrified across the snow.
There are some 12,705 nuclear warheads on the planet. 4,000 are already on the gas-ring awaiting a safety-match.
Past my allotted three-score years and ten as I am, there is scant I can do with whatever time is left, save to hope and pray for swift and effective dialogue and resolution and then view the meadows and minefields of my own life and my unscripted leaps, scrambles, lurches and spills along the unmarked and sometimes unlit path. While my mobility has changed (and my appearance! I thought it a fairy-story that hair could go white with shock and, I’d had no idea I was so vain!) the mind has expanded and the creativity has gone into – indeed jammed into – overdrive.
This is fortunate. My having agreed to become a trustee of the South West Academy, the Cosmos said Aha! and provided commissions for five unexpected and demanding canvases and, enquiries for enough further painting to keep me occupied for the next two years, while my role on the Academy Board has compelled a swift embrace – more of a grope in the dark really – of zoom meetings and not-so-very-broadband.
I started my life a full two miles away in a cottage in the lily-sweet valley of Landewednack on The Lizard Peninsula. My father, a muscular Fabian conscientious objector, had spurned a protected job in aircraft design, and was working as Ploughman and Cowman at Churchtown Farm while my mother was not entirely overjoyed to be the farm slavey.
With what conscience I know not, they held hands and watched the sky across the Channel gleam with fire as France burned.
Please may it never again come to that. Carn Barrow March 2022
A Stormy Spring
