Wednesday I go very late it’s been a busy day beginning with a trip to the orthopaedic with R after yesterday’s fall, feeling the jitters of the full moon, The Swanp Cypress are greening up and golden in the low light, I pass over a furry friend and find strange fruit in a tree at the Fleischmans, May blossom is everywhere right now and Deer and Harts’ Tongues are licking the ditches, I go to a spot where a pair of men have just been digging, there are shallow scrapings with exposed roots, what for? I ask myself. The Bayou has a silvery mercurial surface in the evening light.
An arm of hawthorn gestures towards the podium, is that an invitation to make a stand, to be someone I wonder, I like its emptiness. Leaves are lit up in the branches and some entangle willow fluff, reminding me oddly of Halloween. There are so many beautiful framings of the water along this northside path, I stop at the place that has recently been cut, the council have spread out their clippings from the felling of the other day.
Up on the heath the bracken rises up from the charcoal remains of gorse, the little camp fire retains its invitation and the swing is at ease while the sun sets making an orange North North West glow – we are less than a month away from its most Northerly reach. The dead Elms finger the sky from pockets across the Glen.
So late now that my entry gate is locked and I have to head back to the main one at the zig zag. Even now a young woman sits alone, a raft on the football pitch, she’s on a blanket and i say Hi to hear my voice and let her know it too, I see she is dressed up prettily in white and on the phone as I pass. Later I see her friend arriving in with two pizza boxes, looking more casually dressed and happy as she tucks her phone into her shorts, I’m relieved. I see the council have been planting trees here too, rows of saplings where R and I released the hedgehog last year. It’s a full moon tonight and she’s lying low and lucid blue on the horizon, there has been an eclipse, seen in other parts.
Thursday was a day away from the park, though I was zooming about it with M the dancer and A the poet, in conversation with a petitioner who is making an application under Creative Climate Action funding for the Glen. We are disappointed to hear that he hasn’t set foot in the place, though he has seen the flat version on google maps. He has been pointed in our direction by L Parks-Exec, who recommended to A that he should downgrade his proposal to be in with a chance. T the P talks of Place Making got me annoyed – the Glen is already A Place without his help. After a long session R consoles me at home – Make Place for Space he says. Too right we need the gaps. There is speculation on all fronts. I make some signs for the clean up.
Friday I go and put up the signs and meet with A and M to regroup. We’ve had a mail from T the petitioner looking for our support for his application. He wants bios and job descriptions, and costings, we all find this a bit much, being organised like this by an interloper, for a grant application. I remember how quick he had been yesterday to revert to his plan for building having allowed us time to digress into our preference for slowness, he is a trained counsellor (he told us this but I already knew) after all. By the time he’d picked our brains about where to build, at which entrance, and who might make a film, we were all tired. So we talked about all of this and said we’d draft a mail together, keeping a lid on our emotions and politely refusing his request.
