Dark quickens to overcome the light, the seasons are part of a natural cycle dependent on the sun. I wake up to hear Lucy's gentle snoring as she slumbers on her mat in the hallway. Of late I have woken up on sad dreams, having to haul myself out of a sense of melancholia, switch on lights, make tea.
But as the light appears in the natural world, soft mists over the fields rise, the peachy glow of the sun rising through the copse, nature has set out to enchant once more. Yorkshire Pudding talks of grouse and I remember the trips over the moor, the moment of sheer delight as several baby grouse ran across the grassed lane and huddled against the old stone wall their mother anxiously following. The harebells so aptly named as their fragile beauty of pale blue nods in the breeze by the side of the road. Yet I cannot go there without my heart breaking.
The balls of fluff, tiny red grouse, will grow, wander around the moors and then the heavy machinery of beaters and guns will bear down, the grouse will rise and the bullets will follow. Its the f****** economy says our rather precarious prime minister, yes he is starting to rock gently over, hypocrisy is not a good road to take . Who the hell voted for him in the first place? God preserve us from the news.
Quotes taken from Ted Hughes - Grouse.
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| Long line of grouse hides |
And so I finish on a happier note!!
Really I am trying hardly ever to watch the News any more - it is all so depressing and, as you rightly say, our Prime Minister does at the moment shall we say to be kind - seem to have lost his way. How anyone can shoot a grouse I have never understood - when ovenready they are hardly a mouthful and taste mainly of the heather they live on.
ReplyDeleteI remember an old friend always complaining when the farmer who lived near always brought her pheasant or rabbit. Of course it was the preparation she disliked, just to have a mouthful of bird at the end.
DeleteI gave up game bird as a young child, when it was served for Thanksgiving at an uncle's home. Lot's of birdshot. But seriously, I understand grouse are for the game.
ReplyDeleteYes who hasn't bitten on a piece of lead, funnily enough when I was a child brought up by my grandfather, we had a lot of 'wild' food, rabbit, pheasants, and fish but then it was the end of war and rationing which dictated that.
ReplyDeletePreviously, I had not been aware of that Hughes poem. Thanks for sharing it. I like the way that this blogpost has been written. It has a genuine "literary" feel - capturing your reflective September mood effectively.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that. Hughes was of course himself a hunter but he always manages to capture the creature and its environment. Killing makes me angry when the only goal is glory in the death of an innocent animal, it is a senseless act. I see photos of giraffes, lions and even rhinoceros with posed gloating hunters alongside and my thoughts are unrepeatable ;)
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