Icarus @ 59 # 109

March has marched through the wetlands of winter into spring and thank goodness, it feels like it has been dreich for ever and a day. Yesterday, brunch and fine coffee in Wai Kika Moo Kau was fine but for some reason the whole of Sunday was treated as a rest day for serious exhaustion for all of us in the house. This was probably another look back at the hundred days of winter we have endured. Boy does it make a difference to wake with bright mornings and with the clocks having shifted forward to summer time the evenings are longer too. Now this is the real time for resolutions, this is the real start to the year, surely. I have a couple of resolutions I am resolved to keep. As Pablo Naruda said, 'You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep the spring from coming.'

FiftyFive ~ # 55

The spring garden - or at least April garden begins to show the cycle of years coming round again. I started this blog last Autumn, or Fall for the Americans and there is a feeling that we have come through a long dark winter, for it has been a dreich start to the year - certainly cold and dark - and now it is light and airy showing fecund promise. And with the promise of fecundity comes that newness feeling - no need then for me to be chopped up and stuck in Medea's cauldron to be boiled anew, nor do I hope A & D will think to cut me up - like the daughters of Pelias did. Though I have been thinking about St Augustine' Confessions, viz: "For verses and poems I can turn into food for the mind, for though I sang about "the flying Medea" I never believed it, but those other things [the fantasies of the Manicheans] I did believe." The flying Medea precedes Icarus in Metamorphosis, though it is said she was helped by flying dragons. But it does keep the flying theme open and also for the transformation of people into birds and flying chariots and the Icarus effect persists. Its a strange affair - and who better to sing such a song than the wonderful June Tabor - ages since I have listened to her and here with the mercurial Martin Simpson playing - simply divine: