Woken up just after five this morning by the rain. Came on slowly, I thought <here comes the wind>, and then it was hammering on the roof, walls, windows. Still-warm stove from last night, warm duvet, just awake enough to be in the moment. Then, after a few minutes, it stopped. Went outside: clear sky, all the way to the stars, above a drenched world. That was then. Three of the local bluetits now finishing the last of the nuts in the bird feeder. Rain very present in the air - that sense of light darkened by the imminence of rain: any darker, and this is the kind of darkness that turns into water.
    I shall write today, and in my pauses, I will begin to prepare for the weekend - driving a van-load of furniture to Bath on Saturday, back Sunday. Family reunion. So today there's a list of things to bring down from the attic, the main bedroom, et cetera. And an opportunity to get the remaining things straight. I think I inherit a sense of order - or more precisely, given that I live in a state closer to chaos, a fortunate ability to raise my own spirits via quick, incremental orderings of that chaos. If washing-up is a meditation, and if so, it's getting to be a big one here, I tend to meditate one saucepan at a time. Maybe today is a two-saucepan meditation, though. Three-pipe problem - three-pan problem.
    Thursday tomorrow. Must get a next batch of Katie up and scrubbed and into her best clothes for the Thursday Group. Talking the other day about doing Jemima Christmas for television; she predates the new Arthur Christmas film, I think, although I suppose that must have been in production for a while. <Every year, Jemima says "Can I come too, daddy?" This year, Father Christmas says "Yes!"> So far, the most favourable feedback has been from nine-year-olds. Good age to be.

So many birds this morning, gulls mainly, wheeling around above the house and the valley as though they've been blown off the sea by the wind from the South-East. Cotton-wool grey clouds racing along above them, and for a brief moment, a slice of blue sky down there at the source of the wind, cut by a pink vapour trail. Now it's all mixed together, and there's the impression of a white sun rising, with a plain, uniform grey colour above it. Agitated trees and bushes, sweeping wind. The horizon a silhouette.
    What now? Light the stove, I think. Settle down to a day's reading through and editing. Found this both beautiful and appropriate to (contributing to) the mood of the piece I'm editing. Lucinda Williams. Side of the Road. Live in 1989. I wonder about the extent to which the background music to a piece of work contributes to the work, or I suppose detracts from it. Singing, chanting, mantras ... okay, enough of wondering about that. Having put the headphones on and embarked on a YouTube voyage of clicking pretty much randomly on pieces of music, I suppose this piece is going to have a mood of many colours.
    And if I'm not careful, I'm not going to hear the 10am call. Enough music for now. The gulls have all gone, and maybe it's time for the day to begin. Serious now. Convincingly so. Ha ha.

Now, where was I? Some distance away, I think. A curious week has just passed, absorbed in work of my own, work of others', moving things forward but also waiting: this to be done; this to uncover that. And then a weekend of what felt like recuperation. Saturday to Lostwithiel, on the way home bought a battery charger (prompted by the flat-battery moment in the ferry queue; the purchase serving to kick-start, ha ha, that old impulse to draw things back together). Sunday spent in and around bed; the weak day after the worst of an illness, letting everything unwind - have I really been that wound up? There never was time to work on my knee, but we discovered the tension in my shoulders.
    There are rats under the shed where we keep the grain, and this morning I see the neat round hole they have bored through the floor to get inside. Time do do something about that. Also perhaps time to do something - no, not perhaps - about the hens' living quarters. Not well-constructed; in fact, annoyingly badly constructed - and isn't "annoyingly" a bad word to find in a description of the early morning? The dog left a copious message on the floor of the utility room last night, so words like acceptance, harmony, peace have been temporarily returned to the dictionary. Turn to "Eurch!" if it's there. We were right on time for the bus, but only in the sense that we nearly missed it. And we need another bottle of floor-cleaner.
    And isn't it wonderful how the sun emerges at just the right moment, and at just the right point in the sky, and at just the right slow speed from behind the cloud, to spread a glow across the desk and the keyboard in front of me? Just enough wind to move the leaves, where the light comes around the end of the house and iluminates them; just the right amount of silence to hear the birds.
    Yes.

Love the way everything comes alive suddenly. Is this cyclical, some kind of 'biorhythm' thing? Or something wider than that, given that it affects a group of people? We're all the same people, but there's more of a sense of urgency about being the same people. Everything brighter. And am I imagining (and if so, is it still real?) the way some, many, lots of people seem to be dropping the pretences and coming out more as themselves? In an "I choose to be myself" way. It's a big turn, taking months after the first touch of the wheel, but we're turning, and beginning to see the difference.
    This week began for me with the New York authorities moving in on the Occupy Wall Street protest, followed in short order by the Corporation of London issuing eviction notices to the campers at St Paul's (must check if there was any reaction from the established church), and then my early-morning radio went back to the euro drama, with a light seasoning of banks. The "eurozone" makes about as much sense as the Berlin Wall did, and bankers are rich in the way that a certain kind of canteen cook is, ah, not thin. But the comedy element is: governments want banks to lend more. These same governments can't pay their debts. If we have to have governments (discuss), shouldn't we swap these for better?
    Meanwhile, the world goes on changing. That thing at CERN has discovered - again - that neutrinos are breaking the rules of physics as set down by Einstein et al. Mischievous neutrinos? Neutrinos with a sense of humour? The birds are singing outside this barn and the ducklings, up past the orchard, are getting larger. They travel in a committee now, nine of them, chattering as loudly and urgently as the grown-up ducks. It was pleasing to read that the latest CERN speed-trap exercise was undertaked by a collaboration calling itself the Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus and shortening that to OPERA. Because - wait a minute - isn't OPERA breaking the rules of acronyms? Should be OPETA, surely?
    Or perhaps there are no rules?

Same old wind. Getting a bit boring now, got the idea, sleeping through it, sure, big change, but it's a reminder, also, that not all problems are solved in the single epiphany on the mountaintop. You come away with the tablets of stone, the words of insight, the clarity, but then you've got to follow it through in the ordinary world, with the ordinary people. They may be players in your drama, but they're also themselves. And you - I - may have been director for a while, dramatist with free access to the pages on which it's all based, but how easy is it to take that on this stage, which is a place where we all believe utterly in our roles? We don't know that we're actors here, and in our dealings with each other, we stay in character.
    Beautiful walk on Sunday, with the dog on Pendower. There were windsurfers and kite surfers; so many, must have been waiting for the day. And a scattering of people, dogs, but mainly the wind and the spray and the waves and that stream running down the beach at the Carne end among the rocks. Built a dam quickly, diverting the water, in honour of the many dams built with children over the years. Remembrance Day, a man with a dog and a spade, out on a windswept beach after listening to the service on the radio, remembering the past and mainly the successive families. Shakespeare said something about the many roles we play in life: child, boy, young man ... and onward. But I think perhaps King Lear would be the play for today, with the daughters' arguments for cuts in the king's retinue? What is the argument against cuts? There isn't one, except that they're wrong.
    There was mention of an e-petition recently. There's a debate in parliament today that was forced by an e-petition - it had so many signatures that it had to be taken seriously. In my redesigned world, I would take us back to the start of the protest at St Paul's, and instead of having the protesters lapse into cliches about capitalism and democracy, I would have them - at the height of media interest in what they had to say - making relentless on-air references to an e-petition. Easily memorable title; the folk back home could have signed up. Then we would have known whether, and how much, people cared.
    Today is the day police moved in to clear the tents of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. Mayor's decision. Health hazard, etc. Protest spokesperson soundbite: they's moving to Central Park, if I heard this right, and Central Park is going to be New York's Tahrir Square. Uh huh. Here is going to be there. Historical note: when Ceausescu was overthrown in Romania, the crowds attached ropes to a statue of the dictator and pulled it down: instant heap of rubble, great TV moment. So the US military tried the same in Iraq - mostly it worked, but if you've seen the footage - Saddam's statue had steel girders strengthening its legs, so not quite the same drama. What happened there can't be made to happen the same way here. Don't benchmark against a successful event elsewhere.

This wind is a riot, and an uncomfortable one. The shed is wearing a parachute, not a tarpaulin, and the bins are rattling around at the back. This time last year, the trampoline went for a short flight, ending up against the South end, but this year, I used so many tent pega and so much rope that it's staying put. I also took the safety nets and their supports off, so it's more like a low-lying, oversized oval hammock than a trampoline. So much of a wind and for so long - we're breathing air from mid-Atlantic, or further.
    So much to do ... 

Such a bright, blowy, not particularly cold morning; a morning for walks, beaches, waves, spray, wildness, back for tea and an open fire as the sun sets. Or maybe there's an opportunity to watch the sun go down. Side by side, if you were here, hands clasped around our knees on some imaginary high point. Such a bright moon the other night, after (come to think of it, also before) all those hours of talking. Life is a small thing, like a diamond, small on the scale of eternity, and perhaps it's like not (only) the diamond, but also the cutting tool that produces - no, perfects - the diamond. 'Perfects' not 'produces', of course, because the diamond itself is the product of nature and everything else that you imagine.
    Thinking, last night, about the proposition that we're all each other's teachers, in different ways. Those people in the end room, waiting. That blue angel and the great angel in here. Your five companions arriving and departing, you, me,  her, him, them. All of what I, you, we, they say and do contained within the boundaries of this learning experience. It's that, really; not just the duality but the small always contained within the great - the one always expressing the other. It seems now that life is the study: to release another is not possible; all that is possible, or indeed desirable, is to give what is not mine to give but yours to find: the freedom to choose to be free.
    To give is sometimes just to take on the role of midwife, right? And such a wind today. So much noise, so much movement. After this, nothing of what remains will be yesterday's air. We will be breathing the clean moment, no staleness, no past; just breathe in, open your eyes, and choose.

Walk to the stone bench in the blustery rain, clouds of rain blowing in off the sea, then back, reluctantly, wanting it to continue, to feed, water and let out the assorted ducks and hens. Wondering about evolution - why hasn't ivy evolved a stand-alone trunk like other trees? Why one go-it-alone, I'll-be-a-parasite species of tree? There must (?) have been occasional ivies with stronger trunks; why did they not have an evolutionary advantage? I like rain, as long as I'm listening to it from under the hood of a waterproof, or watching it from a warm, dry space.
    I wonder how different the world would be, if every now and then, the interviewee in a radio/TV interview came back with "What would you do?" If media training taught a combative approach rather than the bland delivery of a non-denial denial and a non-confirmation confirmation. Maybe I should retune to a music station, but the timechecks are useful. [Maybe they have those on music stations. Duh.] We were all stuck or faltering at the Thursday Group last night (I know; postponed from last week). Maybe this is one of those cyclical moments come round again: recommit; change direction; check out. And rest. We're all here until next time it comes around.
    But - in my case - they were right in unexpected ways. Took along a piece of writing expecting one conversation, got quite another. And a set of faults neatly pinpointed. There seemed to be pretty much general agreement when Kath said that she liked [the character] Louie, although Louie came in unexpectedly and so far consists of litle more than a few sentences. Even stories aren't under control, really, are they?

Sometimes, there's so much conversation in the kitchen that it's impossible to start early. Frost on the windscreen this morning, first time this year, and I wonder whether it says anything about me, that I like the couple of minutes in the car, engine running, half a mug of tea left, blower on, watching the ice melt. Yes, I know I could get a scraper, yes,  I know about jugs of cold water. I like watching the ice melt. Or maybe sitting in a warming-up car with frosted-up windows, womb-like, blah, et cetera. Or just not being in a hurry.
    No end to the excitement of living in what used to be called the country and is now rebranded the countryside. Ken Costa on the radio this morning - Weekend FT a week ago, was it the Sunday Telegraph yesterday? Now Radio 4 is in on the act - talking about capitalism and morality. Mr Costa has been talking about that for a while now, and let's hope this isn't just his fifteen minutes. My take on all of it: can't get beyond the notion that one person makes something, then "sells" it to somebody who needs that something; "sells" in the sense of using money as a token of barter, and we're all trading the fruits of our labour. A banker is a facilitator in the same way that a plumber or an electrician is a facilitator.
    Do let's not forget that whatever happens now - a (re)turn to morality, or a new set of mistakes, or measures that address everything except the elephant in the room - whatever happens had its beginning in the actions of a bunch or characters who put up tents in the free space around a cathedral. They weren't necessarily articulate in their intentions (demands? grievances?), but the (unintended?) consequence of their actions has been to show up a certain quality in the established church, to bring into speech the unspoken (but widespread) feeling that the resolution of the banking crisis has been unjust, and to reveal the dry rot in another pillar of today's establishment.
    I probably shouldn't (sic), but I do enjoy the way certain union leaders, interviewed about their members' pay demands, have taken to asking their BBC interviewers what they're paid. If a certain national broadcaster really was in the public-service business, it would drop the big-cost "stars" and get into the talent-development business. There are enough unemployed media-studies graduates to fill any number of local newsrooms. Cheaply.

Good to wake up on a Sunday morning with a head-full of ideas and a proper old-fashioned big red glow across the horizon. Even if I don't have to be up for several more hours. Even if a red sky in the morning is proverbially not good news for shepherds. Heating on for an hour, down in the house, and I shall light the stove in the barn in a few minutes. Red to bright red and orange, with a kind of purple and blue effect on the banded wisps of cloud above. Listening to the lady in the art department at the Truro College open day yesterday. Students do weeks of colour early in their course. I suppose I must have described weeks' worth of sunrises here. Won't look back; fear of lack of variety.
    And the man in the archaeology department, very enthusiastic, infectiously so, about how they lived, the evidence that could be found, what it told us and how our ideas had changed. He doesn't get many students dropping/switching out, because only enthusiasts apply in the first place. And, come to think of it, the lady in the Eng. Lit. department, pitching Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray, The Handmaid's Tale as set books - and gently pointing out that her course wasn't the media one. Not sure what you can get from an open day beyond a feel for the place and an impression of the staff. And I suppose enthusiasm is about the best impression, if you're prepared to be an enthusiastic learner.
    How infinite is self-discovery? We seem to inhabit types, and our questions, assumptions to/about each other seem so often to describe "the other" as a component of our selves. There's an implied "Given", in the sense: "Given you are this person (the sum of my current assumptions about you), what is the answer to my question, from the limited set of answers my assumptions make available? If that isn't too convoluted, and I suppose it is, but if the proper approach to a day's thought is to unravel it - perhaps it's the right kind of tangle. I wonder if self-discovery begins as an exercise in seeing through our assumptions about others.

Totally still morning. Fog - okay, mist - in the valley. I suppose fog like this would be "man fog" on the analogy of "man flu". The ground shimmering slightly, blurring one of the precise elements of the morning. Chilly and wet. Dew on the windows. At this moment, deep silence. One bird, briefly, but not enough to break the silence. A day for lighting indoor fires, although this is only the cold of wetness. No sun, just a grey that could be blue. Clear night last night, stars. The blue-tits figure out gradually that the level in the nut feeder has fallen to the bottom rung. Note: fill it today.
    This is a day for turning on all the lights and, er, Spring cleaning the clutter of things left for another day in the office: papers out of synch; old newspapers containing cuttings-to-be. And for assembling all the must-dos that have slid from a past <now> to a future <I'll get round to it> and asking - why not now? Bookmarking passages in fiction where people get paperwork done is a bad sign - especially when the passages on either side are intense. I have an uneasy feeling that at some point during the course of today, I will catch myself telling myself that I really must get organised.
    That kind of day. Who was the comedian who said, "I love work. I can sit and look at it for hours"? Possibly Tommy Cooper?
    Must get - on with it. Close.

Today began with me opening up Weebly, pressing the <New Post> button, writing a sentence and then deciding: not today. So I pressed <Cancel> and left it. But I've been thinking. Patricia has suddenly gone full-on into promoting her new book, The Poetry Diet. There's a book on Ruth's blog, The Mystic Cookfire by Veronika Sophia Robinson, and closer to home, I've been helping with the layout program in Apple Pages. Not that I'm an Apple person necessarily, but years of experience on QuarkXPress have finally paid off: most layout programs seem to inhabit a similar mental landscape. [Carol Buller illustrated The Poetry Diet, published by Thingley Press; Sara Simon illustrated The Mystic Cookfire, which is published by Starflower Press.]
    And before I digressed into that bracket, I was going to say that the Pages exercise was all about designing leaflets, et cetera, for a new enterprise, of which more shortly. Add to all of the above: Katie has come alive in a big way, with her friend Louie, in the Thursday Group story - meeting tomorrow - and today is a day full of new air blowing in from the sea. Taking this from Ruth's blog about Samhain a few days back - "For it was understood that in dark silence comes whisperings of new beginnings, the stirring of the seed below the ground" - I begin to wonder what lively seed this could be, blown in on such a wind.
    This is not a day for silence and that quiet voice. This is a day for the wind and all its voices. There are whole religions built on the notion that we should be child-like in returning to the wisdom of innocence. But maybe I shouldn't try too hard in putting together a close that combines innocence/childhood with the happy clamour of the playground and the noise of this wind. Maybe I'll just leave it there, and go outside.

These birds are just ordinary, the little yellow-fronted ones, hordes of them, that cluster at the bird feeder and peck the putty (and what else?) around the edges of the window panes. But there is a small laminated card, bookmark-sized, fixed, by way of a sucker like at the end of a child's arrow, to the kitchen window. On it, the little yellow birds, similar to these but not quite identical, are given an exotic name that I haven't heard before. So there is the possibility, small but pleasing, that my window panes and bird feeder are serving exotically named birds. They are such lively customers, and that was one of them above my head in the tree at first light. I wonder what names they give themselves.
    That was Samhain, and we have passed through the doorway into the dark half of the year. Yesterday was an ending; today is a beginning; this is the time of the silence and what the silence holds. That was Halloween, first of the great festivals at which the barrier between the living and the fancy-dress industry is at its weakest. No costume sold that will last until this time next year. We celebrate two festivals - the traditional and the commercial - and in doing so, perhaps we can't help but celebrate the duality at the heart of all things; I learn that the heart has two sets of two valves - one set is called the "semilunar", which is convenient. Wild day yesterday, wind and rain, then rain in the night and a still morning. Convenient weather for a transition, although the fires would have needed to be banked-up, covered, allowing the flame to smoulder unseen ... which fits.
    Perhaps next year I should mark the occasion with a bonfire, but perhaps the appropriate bonfire would be covered so thickly in leaves that it wouldn't burst into flame until well into the following day. First compromise of an earlier priesthood: give them a proper midnight fire, rather than the appropriate damp heap emitting no more than one or two wisps of smoke.