Intimidating Nature

Today is a lovely day. Birds are singing, deer are frolicking, ghost carp are jumping and the cotton is high. And my in-box has some lovely messages for me.

My house looks over the Blackdown Hills where Alfred Lord Tennyson’s beautiful gothic mansion sits majestically surrounded by ancient woodland. It is always illuminated by the morning sun - when the sun is shining - and Tennyson’s golden statue sits in the grounds looking out over the shimmering valley. I can’t see the statue but I know that it is there. I saw it in a magazine.

‘Flower in the crannied wall’ by Tennyson

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.


I have a love/hate relationship with insects. I love them and I am scared of them too. Now I welcome them into my life and respect their way of doing things. I have a big spider here, who lives in the living room and who kills the flies. She kills the flies and I leave her web alone. That is how we accommodate each other.

When I was 20 I lived in the south of France in a little house in the hills that had dangling beaded curtains over the front door. One hot day a praying mantis had climbed up the beads and was lying in wait for something, perhaps a male lover to devour. As I walked into the house from the garden the mantis became horribly entangled in my hair. In a mad moment of confusion and terror I knocked the insect onto the ground and before I knew what I was doing I was pounding it with a broom head, just like my mother had done with spiders when I was young. Until all that remained of the miserable creature was a disgusting green stain on the stone path outside.

I have never forgiven myself for that episode, and now I love searching for new insects and understanding more about them. One day I told Ivor Cutler this story and the next day he gave me a book entitled 'The Life of Insects' by Sir Vincent B. Wigglesworth. We spoke for hours about them every time we met. He liked the fact that I had been violent with them in the past but that I had atoned for my sins. He liked to examine cause and effect.