Bantams

Hens; There is nothing quite like keeping a couple of hens to potter round the garden.  They are pleasant birds, no trouble, except perhaps in the summer when they refuse to be shut up because it isn't dark yet but I want to go to bed.

I used to love watching them potter through the soft fruit bed, and though I had a period in Chelmsford when I didn't have any when we moved to Normanby we got a pair of bantams.  When I left I gave them to the farm up on the hill.  All their runs and chicken house on the trailer, I can still see it as I wished them well.

The bantams were less tame than my brown hens but would follow me round the garden along with Lucy and even my little feral cat took to them, and would lie stretched out on top of their run.  Companionship in animals is something we do not talk about, but they are not always chasing each other about.

The thought of hens came to mind because of a photo my daughter sent me this morning from their camping trip (the blow up mattress has already gone flat) a photo of a hen pottering  outside the tent, with the caption, another pet to add to my list along with the thousand flies. Camping is fun, I introduced it to her from an early age, we had a canvas tent, the holes prettily decorated with Laura Ashley patches. Camping can be fun, it can also be hell, depends on the weather and whether there is a decent loo around.

My favourite place to camp by myself was at a campsite just outside Solva, it was called Nine Wells, and had a lovely walk down to the cove and even a small Iron Age settlement, Porth-y-Rhaw, one of the many that are to be found on this Pembrokeshire coast.

Photos to come later

A Jeremy Hooker poem

I have neglected my blog for some time, but on checking back through my sitemeter, I often find a blog called 'Matrix' has been visited quite a lot. Don't know why I called it Matrix perhaps it is the name of the poem I forgot to record. But the poem by Jeremy Hooker is a firm favourite of mine, catching within its words the slow dying of history caught for evermore in the dust and 'petrified creatures' of chalk.


A memorial of its origins, chalk in barns and churches
moulders in rain and damp;petrified creatures swim
in its depths.

It is domestic, with the homeliness of an ancient
hearth exposed to the weather,pale with the ash of
countless primeval fires.Here the plough grates on an
urnfield, the green plover stands with crest erect on
a royal mound.

Chalk is the moon's stone; the skeleton is native to its
soil. It looks anaemic, but has submerged the type-sites
of successive cultures. Stone,bronze, iron; all are assimilated to
its nature;
and the hill-forts follow its curves.

These, surely, are the works of giants; temples
re-dedicated to the sky-god, spires fashioned for the
lords of bowmen;

Spoils of the worn idol, squat Venus of the mines.

Druids leave their shops in the midsummer solstice;
neophytes tread an antic measure to the antlered god.
Men who tresspass are soon absorbed, horns laid beside
them in the ground. The burnt-out tank waits beside
the barrow.

The god is a graffito carved on the belly of the chalk,
his savage gesture subdued by the stuff of his creation.
He is taken up like a gaunt white doll by the round hills,
wrapped around by the long pale hair of the fields.