countryside

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In my dream I was in this amazing cafe taking five floors of an abandoned building in Brisbane. Right at the top was a little terrace looking out only on treetops. There was a waitress dressed up in a robot suit she could not see out of which blinded her from doing her work, she […]

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Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it […]

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I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not […]

Watching an adolescent duck flying upstream and surfing down, flying up and surfing down, over and over on the fast-moving river. Finally he hauls himself out on a low-hanging branch and sits there, drying in the sun, quacking with satisfaction.

Switzerland: land of milk can honey. I am back and the milk from the Bioladen is fresh and sweet and creamy. Honey-coloured cattle browse along the path flicking fat mosquitoes with paint-brush tails. It’s all pretty: even the oversized Lego industrial landscapes. Life is orderly and a little prim. A church on every hillside: Catholic […]

I walked downstream to the picnic place where someone had made a heart of stones and filled it with pads of moss. The stones have gone now but the moss remains and some of it has taken root. A wet Spring. It makes not a green heart shape exactly, but something like. Heart like a […]

By the river new wildflowers are now growing, the seasons progress with colour and line. Some of them are upright prongs of dark pink clovers and some, I suspect from the shape, might be buttercups. Buttercups are famous! I’ve read about them since I was a little girl, in English novels. But I think I’ve […]

It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed. A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like […]

I met a horse. This horse had several large brown friends, in white socks, a kind of uniform they wore with insouciance, all of them living apparently in a big barn with straw trodden into its stained concrete. Horse life is boring, I suppose, when it’s under a roof. The horse fixed me with his […]

When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

Afternoon cycle ride down to the shops. I say down, but I really mean up: this is Switzerland. We set off up the side of a steep quarry and my host, who is in her seventies, left me so far behind that I had some trouble once I reached the crest working out which side […]

My arms are full of scratches from traveling among the trees along the river. It’s interesting how so much of what we see is due to attention. A woman passed behind me as I was crouched in a mossy hollow this morning, poking the water with a stick, and until she was almost on top […]

As I walked, a man in brief, flared jogging shorts came running towards me. I decided I would look at him the way men sometimes look at women. I gazed at his ankles and shapely calves. I gazed at his thighs. I gazed into his face until he had to look back at me. He […]