MANLY APPLAUSE

I’m in the park tonight watching a football match. No idea what’s going on: the red team are getting heated, and the blue team are doing a lot of shouting. Thinking about it, that might sum up every football match. Nevertheless, I’m enjoying the rhythms from the sidelines.

I think I’d like to be part of a team. I mean a sports team. There’s a lot of community and camaraderie going on. The blue keeper just did a diving save and got a manly round of applause and a pat on the back. The only problem is that I’d have to be good at sports.

Maybe I could join a quiz team! Perhaps you get the same camaraderie for knowing things. Honestly though, I don’t think I have the time. Plus that sounds like committing to be in a pub on a semi-regular basis and I’m not sure about it. I think my motivation has always been learning rather than proving.

Reds scored. There was some effing and jeffing after that, as you might expect. I worked out from an early age that swearing is part of it all, and I didn’t much like it. Plus if you’re not very good at football but you do happen to be forced into playing every now and then (hello school), the effing and jeffing tends to be pointed at you. And I really don’t like that. I’d rather watch the looping projectile motion the ball takes as it’s punted upfield, gravity pulling it inevitably and beautifully towards the earth. There’s lovely physics at work in football, I always say.

And that’s probably why I don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the match. Nice to see the manly applause though.

RAGGEDY CURTAIN

I’ve found a place to sit and think. There’s a nice view, and it’s far enough from the houses to be kind of secluded among the trees.

I used to do this kind of thing all the time. I wonder why I stopped. Probably though, each of us could ask the same thing about a great many things, if we sat and thought about it for a while. Irony.

There are birds singing. Robins, blackbirds, I think maybe even the squeaky wheel of the great tit somewhere. It’s nice. A propeller plane above the leaf canopy, then the thunder of a jet engine crossing the sky.

I feel teary. It is tiredness of course, but I know enough to know that it’s like a raggedy curtain revealing backstage to the audience - not the curtain’s fault. And the teariness is there behind the scenes whatever kind of curtain goes up.

I should get back home, I suppose. Sammy doesn’t like it when I’m not there, and she’s due home herself any minute. Plus, I get the feeling it might rain. There is something in the air.

The wood pigeon now. A dark grey squirrel pauses halfway down a tree trunk, freeze-framed. Then comes the bushy tail. The sky turns greeny grey as a wind picks up in the trees around me. Yeah. Time to get home, isn’t it?

THE LAST WINTER BEFORE THE LONGEST SPRING

Golden sunshine this evening. The trees wave, birds dart from branch to branch, ready to sing the sun to bed. The older I get, the more I like springtime.

Strange then that I should feel like bursting into tears. I do though. My eyes sting and my head’s heavy; no reason, at least nothing obvious. I just feel a bit melancholy.

I was listening to a podcast about eschatology, the study of the biblical view of end of the world. Cheery. It’s such a messy topic - you can interpret so much of it in a hundred different ways, and there are long, theological, academic labels for everything. It’s like a physicist trying to describe spaghetti. I gave up. Why can’t someone just make it simple? And useful!

I think I’m tired, more than anything. That would explain the melancholy mood. The weird thing is that I’m not sad particularly. I’m a little fed up and I’m a lot confused by life, but I’m not upset. Still the tears bubble beneath the surface.

Perhaps that’s what eschatology needs - a little aching, a deep longing for a better world. Maybe it really is just tears before bedtime, the last winter before the longest spring. Perhaps I should do my own podcast.

Sigh. I don’t know. I think I envy the birds out there, singing to the sun from the dappled branches, not because anyone is listening, not because the sun even knows their song, but simply because that, above all things, is what they do. 

ASKING QUESTIONS

Hard to believe it but I wrote a poem, after a long, long gap. Sigh. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.

Asking Questions

I wish I had asked more questions

When younger and simpler, and green

I’d have asked older people

For wisdom they’d learned

And the difficult things that they’d seen

I wish I’d been able to quiz them

On all that they’d found on the way

I’d have asked them to show me

The truth of the world

And then written it down straight away!

But now I have lived through the decades,

And many are younger than I

I wish that they’d ask me

For things that I’ve known

As the summers and winters went by

I wish I had asked more questions

As the cogs of the world rolled away

So perhaps I should ask

All the youngsters I know

And just see what they might have to say

QUIETER TIMES

It’s a sunny evening. Fields flash by the train window, cotton wool clouds and blue sky. England is such a beauty sometimes.

I’m going to switch off social media. For me, not for everyone, though that would be quite some power, wouldn’t it? No, I’m going to use an app to disable all those platforms bar WhatsApp. And especially including the news. For one week, I want to try living without being weighed down by it all. I don’t need to be informed; not for the next seven days anyway.

Petrol will go up again. More nonsense will happen here, there, and especially over there - of course. But just for a while, I don’t think I want to know about it. Let it be.

The trees are painted gold at their tips now. Bright sun in the west angles through the window, throwing shadows and shapes onto the carriage and the seats in front. We flicker through the dappled stripes of light and shade. Forest and sun and leaf and siding, all moving like a silent movie, ticking through the frames of a great story.

People used to live like this. We were aware of our world, not just through lenses and screens, not through glossy photographs or even flourishes of paint on a grand canvas - we lived in it. Time was slow, and ignorance was somehow bliss. But it was all real.

I wonder how I’ll get on. Will the news find me anyway? Will opinion and article track me down? I hope not.

ARTEMIS II

I am loving the Artemis II mission. Yesterday, we watched on YouTube, as four astronauts circled the actual moon and began their return journey to Earth, 250,000 miles away. 

In a weird juxtaposition, on the other channel, at the exact same moment, the US President was in a press conference, blistering about wiping out Iranian civilisation. I'm not making a comment about that by the way - I'm just reporting on the contrast. Somewhere out there, looking back on the swirling, boundless blue and brown and white of our planet, distant from the bare moon, a speck of life in the bleakness of space, brave souls in an aluminium can, with a unique perspective.

What I love most (and there's a lot to love about this mission of course) is the absolute geekiness. And I mean that with the greatest respect! These are people who just love what they get to do and are super excited about it - you can tell! In the old days, they used to send pilots up in space rockets, but these days they send beaming scientists, and I am loving it. What a brilliant way to inspire people to get interested!

What's more, the message of these astronauts is for all humanity. Sure, three are American and one is Canadian, but the spirit of adventure and exploration is so clearly, so universally human. In the 1960s, the Apollo program must have had a similar unifying effect, but for most of us who weren't around, this is a real moment in our lifetime - not just to push for the stars but also to remember who we are and the beauty of the planet we live on. I think that's remarkable.

I stayed on the NASA channel. On the other, I suspect the mood was different, a lot more scowly than four excitable scientists in space, living their best life. We're amazing when we work together, aren't we?

THE ROAR ECHOES STILL

“I don’t want Easter to pass me by,” I said in the dark. There was a hint of sadness - it was my own voice but it still took me by surprise. I think Sammy picked it up too; she flung a tired arm around me, half asleep, probably unable to ask me what I meant, but loving me anyway.

What do I mean?

I mean that I don’t want it to just be like any other holiday. I don’t think I want to sleepwalk through it, go the passion play, eat a chocolate egg and have a good old roast dinner in the afternoon. I think that’s what’s happened in recent years - a sort of numbing to something that ought to be treated with awe and wonder. Imagine being so fascinated with the stone table and the broken mouse-nibbled ropes, so blinded by the morning sun and the deep magic, that you actually forget that Aslan is right there in front of you.

We lived opposite a park when I was young. At this time of year, it would burst with green, and there’d be a sea of yellow daffodils. The sky was bright blue and the world was fresh with new life, enjoying the white spring sun. I remember the smell of chocolate and hot cross buns, and tea and simnel cake - there was a lusciousness to it all that I still sort of miss. 

But all of these things were echoes of a far greater feeling, a wondrousness at the story of Jesus that must have somehow coursed through my blood into my tears and laughter and joy and sorrow and love, ‘mingled down’ as the hymn says. Look, I don’t want to get all mushy or preachy or anything, but it’s that that I miss. It’s that that I don’t really want to pass me by. And I can’t help asking myself, where did it go?

I really love that bit in the book where Aslan, newly woken from the stone table, just roars - and the whole of Narnia seems to shake. I don’t know if I always hear it, or always know it, but somewhere deep down, that resounding echo is what Easter should really be about for me.