Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity

I want islands. I want the wind off the sea, over the dunes and lakes up to the mountains that loom unmoving over all this land. I want empty moors and sunshine that gives way to driving rain, and all of us safe out of it under the eaves of summer houses. I want to go back forty years to when we didn't worry about things we didn't know could ever exist, to when my dad looked cool in his pressed trousers and formal shirt even when he went out bird-watching, to when he dragged us out into any type of weather with barely time to choose the right coat.

The other parents at school have been complaining about how much home-work the children are being given. When I was at primary school, the only work I did at home were occasional projects, one about human physiology and another about the Second World War – bodies and more bodies I suppose. Now I hear that a collection of the great and the good – the people who we look up to – have said that modern life poisons childhood. My daughter gets homework every week – this week she had to go and draw the glacial stone that rests in one of our parks. I already had photos of it but we dutifully tramped over there so that proper observations of shape and colour could be made. I expected hordes of small children to be clustered around the rock, pushing each other out of the way and asking each other about the finer points of composition. In fact we were the only people there apart from one mother who turned up, took a photo and disappeared. Doesn’t really seem quite right to me that. We could have saved ourselves the trip I suppose but that is cheating. I will admit that I did OCR the text of the notice but that wasn’t actually asked for.

I thought of something really important and interesting last night and it was vanished into the mess of dreams that I seem to be having. Several times over the last week I have remembered something and spent minutes trying to place where I thought about it and eventually found that it was in one of these dreams I have been having. After so many of them being anxiety dreams, the most recent ones seem to have been benign things, general narratives with no great negatives but nothing really wonderful either. Just writing about these has brought an image of Kenneth More in Doctor in the House - something like the riotous celebration of victory in the rugby match where the mascot was stolen by the rival team. Not sure why though it does seem to fit with some of the more negative “medical” dreams which I have been having.

For some obscure reason, I just ended up at this website http://www.s4c.co.uk/clwbgarddio/ which is for the S4C show. S4C have decided to cancel the show and it has just led me into a reverie much like the one which opened this entry. For a fleeting moment I wanted to give it all up and spend the day in some garden somewhere, out on the soil when it is dry or quietly pottering in … er … the pottering shed. My wife will be falling about as she reads this because gardens and I do not really go together; the huge lawns of my parents’ old house put me off because I used to have the job of raking up the cut grass after the beast of a lawn-mower had done its work. We also had a rotavator which I only got to use once I think because I demolished a shed with it.