Devil's Coach Horses and other country delights

The newspapers have been full of warnings of record numbers of spiders preparing to invade our houses this autumn. I can announce that they have well and truly arrived in Sussex and they are looking in rude health.

However, there is another insect that seems to be gathering its troops in numbers far greater than the simple arachnid. It is black and lethal (to snails, earthworms and spiders that is). This rather sinister-looking creature is called a Devil’s Coach Horse. It squirts a stinking brown fluid from its mouth and anus when provoked. And it bites. It munches its prey to a pulp. The record number of spiders moving in to my house must be enticing it inside as I’m finding the devilish creature everywhere. As I was rooting around in the long grass earlier I even found one eating a dead robin’s eyeball.

I’m doing my best to live in peace amongst all these carnivorous creatures now that I’m a country girl, but I only seem able to sleep at night if my face and body are completely covered by the duvet. This means coming up for air at regular intervals which is proving somewhat disruptive to my beauty sleep. Oh well, you only live once as they say.

Silt

There is honesty in my house. It is as beautiful and as delicate as mother-of-pearl and semi-transparent, just like honesty usually is.

My chilli plants are pushing out lots of new flowers to make lots of lovely hot cherry bombs. But I’m concerned there won’t be enough heat to entice the fruit to develop fully. So I have just ordered enough seasoned logs to last through the winter. The warmth and heat from real wood, plus the smell, is truly wonderful and I’m sure my hot little peppers will like it too. I have a super-efficient new Danish log burning stove embedded in my bee hive fireplace and I can’t wait to watch the flames lick against the glass and warm the cockles of my heart.

I fell in the lake yesterday trying to rescue Zelda’s remote controlled speed boat. I usually end up in the water at some stage. I think I shall die drowning. I have had dreams about drowning all my life. I was always falling in the water throughout my childhood on my step-father’s boat. One moment I would be sitting on the top of the boat engrossed in my book and the next I would be in the river holding the book out of the water desperate for it to stay dry, calling out ‘Wait For Me!’. Luckily I haven't yet got entangled in the blades.

The bottom of the lake is very silty and I had silt in my knickers and silt in my hair. I was wearing an old but lovely Pierre Cardin dress to go down to the lake and it was covered in the ash grey matter but it has washed up well and the silt seems to have been removed from all the other places it visited. I felt sorry for the ghost carp. It must have been an awful sight for them seeing their beloved silt, which is where they sleep and dream, disappearing down someone’s knickers.

Another really delicious recipe with just three ingredients:

Take some lovely, small, ripe strawberries
Cut off their green bits and slice them in half
Put them in a glass bowl
Add some creamy natural yoghurt in big dollops on top
Drizzle over some amber maple syrup.

You really will be amazed. Maple syrup is my secret ingredient. It’s smoky, sweet, sharp and gorgeous. Please try it if you’re not already addicted. You can put it on literally anything.

Holy Grail and Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves

I need to add Herefordshire to my road trip. I’ve noticed something about people’s home-grown vegetables. All is fine when the weather has been behaving itself. But not so fine when the garlic has rotted in the ground, the celery stalks are as skinny as pencils and the Brussels sprouts are being devoured by thousands of cabbage butterfly caterpillars. All the trouble that goes in to growing these vegetables is rarely rewarded. This is usually due to the weather, slugs, snails, caterpillars, lack of watering etc. Some crops will be wonderful and all is fine if you don’t mind having green beans and tomatoes with every single meal you eat. But I still think I'd rather go to the market once a week and meet the people who really know how to grow vegetables and choose the most wonderful specimens for my plate.

I had a Reiki session today in Herefordshire that was quite wonderful. It’s one that helps you find your very own holy grail. I think it worked! Watch this space.

It was one of my daughter's eight grandparents who was doing the Reiki (it's a long story...). He is a mystic and has discovered a new way to practice Reiki. I get along with him well and after the session I asked him to recite this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to me:


Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

Earnest, earthless, equal attuneable, vaulty, voluminous..
stupendous
Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all,
hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, her wild-hollow
hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal, overbend us,
Fire-featuring heaven. For earth her being has unbound, her
dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; self in self steeped
and pashed – quite
Disremembering, dismembering all now. Heart, you round me
right.
With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and
will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth
bleak light; black.
Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle! Let life, waned,
ah let life wind
Off her once skeined stained veined variety upon, all on two
spools; part, pen, pack
Now her all in two flocks, two folds-black, white; right,
wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But these two; ware of a world where but these two tell, each
off the other; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts
against thoughts in groans grind.