Twilight Companion

Under the eaves, he could feel the heat of the roof tiles on his back.  Stepping further into the shadows, he watched her preening in the old mirror above the bench, her hair the colour of his twilight companion.

Adjusting herself, so that a narrow shaft of light lit only her eyes, she dampened her lips, darker and redder in this light.  She brushed them softly with her thumb.  Copper eye shadow, her lashes long and slow: in this light the image was just as she would like it.  Her skin, no longer needing to appear tanned, was as perfect and flawless as that of a china doll.  Again, she gently stroked her lips.

His eyes shut and opened in a long slow blink, in time with hers, then dropping without a sound into the hay, he moved across the loft floor to the edge, directly above her.

Edwina felt only a faint rush of air.  Enough to make her start.

Witch Hunt

"Literally millions of women were burnt at the stake for being no more than herbalists or midwives, or just different.  Above the herd.  The Church of course had far more sinister reasons for raining down horror on women....It didn't really matter who the poor creature being tortured and burnt alive was; she was just a tool by which the Church could make women into the evil ones, never to be trusted or heeded."

Ancient Ireland

It wasn't so long ago that Homer's Iliad was believed to be no more than a collection of myths and legends.  But in 1870 Schliemann, by following The Iliad, discovered Troy.  Is it possible that The Celtic Legend of Oisin in the Land of Youth and the High Deeds of Finn from ancient Ireland are, just as Homer's Iliad, not myth but based on fact?  The observatory at Newgrange in Ireland suggests that its creators had an advanced culture and must have been studying mathematics, astronomy and time to a high level around 5,500 years ago, well over a thousand years before either Greece or Egypt had started their rise to civilisation.  In 'The promise Tree' a female investigator starts to pick up the pieces.  She is following the intangible, the invisible, the romantic in her everyday life.  But gradually what she is following begins to have form.  Were the Irish of Newgrange, balanced as they were on the edge of western Europe, all that was left of what was possibly the earliest advanced culture of our civilised world?

Time Travel

I wonder, is it feasible that certain places on the Earth's surface can make time travel possible?  Weak gravitational changes, like ley lines, that can somehow allow escape into another dimension, when gravity or some sort of magnetic field can no longer hold the mind and the body together?

Wood of Dreams

Isn't it a fact that our forests, woods and parks are places where dreams come true?  Even if only for a moment in time.  We sit and plan and dream, and for that short time in the park we are sure our dreams could come to pass.  Read 'The Promise Tree' by Si Texen.  It's fanciful, but the Wood of Dreams does exist for all of us.

Juno, Jupiter, Minerva & Isis

I wandered through a misplaced collection of carved and numbered stones.  Moments later a crowd of Spanish children engulfed me.  Forty children and I looked at the remains of the temples of Juno, Jupiter, Minerva and Isis.

Arrow of Silver Water

Below her now, an aqueduct, arrow of silver water, leads her to a bustling Roman town.  The hot air smells strongly of vinegar, honey and cured fish, mingled with smoke and the faintly sweet smell from a funeral fire.  It is late May in the first century AD.

The Hill at Hissarlik

"Ah well, as I said my dear, I'm off to Troy and the hill at Hissarlik.  I had an idea, you see, that as Troy was such an important trading city, it might also have been an observatory.  You see there's a mention in The Iliad of Helen running like a mad woman to the observatory tower when she heard the Trojans were losing the battle."

Solstice Observatory

Went to The Knoll yesterday evening with Rupert.  Looked at a Victorian folly about four miles from Bodiam that turned out to not have started life as a folly after all.  Noticed a lot of mistletoe, viscum album, growing on the oak trees there.  Today is the first real winter's day we have had: white frost in the morning and a sea fog later on.  Folly turned out to be a solstice observatory.  Very old.  Possibly pre-Celt.  Rupert thought Grooved Ware People - five thousand five hundred years ago.  A school of astronomy in Kent, long before the great pyramid of Kufu in Egypt and some two thousand years before the time of Moses.

The Grey Goose of Winter

The grey goose of winter and a country gardener

Rode out to a green moon of spun glass.

In the white wood of watchers

Time stood with tick fingered

Knowing all angels' first secrets

All cheats' endless lies.

Go gently now Walter,

Fold her in your arms,

Give her moonsparks and gay fairgrounds,

Love's true promise and goodbye.

Si Texen

Roger the Cat

"Roger the cat. It's his name, not an instruction."

Nature Witch

"Does the night sky look different in autumn?"
"It does.  What do you sweep the night sky with?"
"I don't know.  A broomstick?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of a telescope."

The Long Man on the Hill

Again she watched the dog fox cross the ploughed field below the chalk figure, heading for the vicarage garden.  He stopped, one front paw raised, to watch a rook digging in the furrows.  Then (did he shrug?) he went on his way.  The fox lives at the vicarage.  And the Long Man on the hill.  She sipped her coffee.  That wasn't a man's walk.  The angle of the leg to the hip: that was a woman.  Walking away over the hill.  Where to?  And why?  And for how long had she been on the hill?  Had she been there, like Rupert's observatory, over five thousand years?  Like a henge monument?  Like Stone Henge, maybe?  What was she marking?  A direction perhaps.  South?  Again, why?  Surely, if these people studied the orbits of the stars and were capable of creating this figure on the curve of the Down, they must have been able to write?  But if so, on what?  Not on stone, or clay tablets, or they would still be with us.  So something less durable, less long lasting.  Like paper, perhaps....An advanced culture over a thousand years before the pyramids of Egypt.  How tempting was that then?