scent

Ispahan macaroon, Galeries Lafayette, Paris

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Ispahan.

Perfect circles of
infinite air;
meringue.

Raspberries, picked at dawn,
glistening with dew,
by the hand of a young
maiden, remembering her lover
in a far away land.

Cloud of fresh cream
hand-speckled with lychee
released heady and trembling
with delight from
spiky shells.

Tinted with rose
reminiscent of childhood perfumeries

Slowly it slipped
from the fork
and all the way down to my heart,
now crying
with the bliss.

Ispahan.

Note: Written on location in Paris at the Pierre Hermé boutique.

five luxuries

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a perfect cup of tea, made by someone else, right to the end (into my hand)

waking up on a Saturday with no alarm, refreshed, and discovering that it is really quite early

arriving at the beach to run the moment the sun comes out after the rain

making an illicit diversion to the department store on the way to work and being welcomed with smiles, chocolate, fragrance samples and a hand-massage

using a pretty-and-robust umbrella on a rainy day

Expecting

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I am pregnant
with my own younger self.
She is waiting to be born in me,
an adult, almost forty.

I see her playing in the past,
skipping, smelling flowers.
When will she turn around
and step into her future?

I move closer,
hold my breath,
and I can hear her singing
softly to herself.

She sings the music
of the trees, the words
of butterflies,
and hums along with bees.

Held by the moment,
attention ripples
from her skin, her eyes.
She is utterly alive.

I call her name.
She looks around perplexed,
cannot see me,
scans the sky.

I call again,
regret the urgent tone.
How did that
fear get there?

And so I spread a blanket,
set out cups of tea and cake.
I read my book and let my presence
gently draw her close.

Yes, I sit and wait.

things I want to tell my children but might forget – bathing

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But before we go to France let’s talk about a few more things to do with getting up.  After breakfast, I like to have a bath (I would like to have written ‘take a bath’ because this is how people in olden times might say it and it is like a wink to the past to do this, but really I would normally say have a bath).

Quite a lot of people think that there is no time to have a bath in the morning.  Maybe it is because you haven’t arrived in your life yet, but I love to have a bath and because I am in charge of my own time and not (yet) sharing it, I can.  When you arrive in my life you will probably start by being bathed in the evening before bed.  This is nice too because you can go to bed all clean.  I am not sure, we will all have to see what works for us all.

But back to bathing.  Whether in the morning or at night, a bath is a special event for several reasons.  Firstly, it is a real privilege because in the time and place we live, we have warm running water.  Secondly it is like swimming and your whole body can enjoy the pleasure of being in a comforting environment.  If you are grown up like me, bathing also connects you to lots of happy memories of childhood, and for all of us bathing connects us to people who have lived since the beginning of the world, because bathing is common to many cultures (a culture is build up of actions and thoughts in a particular place or group over time); people have always needed to get clean.  In the bath you are your most ordinary self.  No one is expecting anything of you and it’s clear that you are skin and bones and toes and legs and arms.  It is easy to forget this at other times.  It’s also somewhere where you can smell beautiful smells that sometimes you don’t have time to take in.  I love rose and peony but I also love seaside smells and richer scents like verbena and fir and lemon.

When you are in a bath there is a fun game you can play which is called Bubble Factory.  You put bubble bath in and then see how much foam you can create by agitating the water to make bubbles.  This is particularly fun if you are in the bath with your brothers and sisters.  Also, you can make foam hair and beards and pretend to be Father Christmas, and you can make designs in foam on your tummy.  Foam is amazing!  It’s incredible that you can create it from just a tiny bit of soap and water.  Once my brother put bubble bath in a special bath called a spa-bath and it made so much foam that the room was filled almost to the ceiling and he couldn’t see the door to get out!

So a morning bath can set you up for a happy day because of all the lovely things that you get to experience in the water.  In the house I live in now, I can also see the sky from the window in the bathroom which means that sometimes I can lie in the bath and watch clouds float past.  Then it’s like there’s foam in the bath water and foam in the blue sky, which makes it feels like the inside and outside worlds are singing call and response to each other.