thinking through digging

12 noon - I’m thinking of the blues and the reds ‘obby-‘ossing their way around Padstow today in an ever increasingly drunken stupour. I hope the sun is shining on them too.
We’ve an Easterly wind today which I think accounts for why it doesn’t feel excessively hot even though the temperature in my shed at 11am this morning was 32 Centigrade.
I was thinking whilst digging that I must be losing my strength as I was tired after only a short stretch but I’m putting it down to the increasingly dry and hard ground and the sun’s rays. In a moment of shade I glanced up at the sun to see the smallest cloud passing across it. I’m not too far off the end of this bed now, the thought of fresh rocket, coriander and lettuce spurs me on.
Yesterday on my way home along the country lanes I stopped to congratulate a ewe who was licking clean what appeared to be the third of her freshly born lambs, then only a few paces on a white mare with a tiny black foal in white socks.
My neighbours must be having yesterday’s stew again for lunch.

3.30 – On completion of digging and laying out dividers for my herb and salad bed I noticed that my onions are starting to brown at the tips of their leaves. Odd how digging causes a kind of blindness to other tasks, but an openness to reverie…
…The sun is so bright today that I kept seeing fragments of straw (blown over from where they’re meant to be mulching my broad beans) and mistaking it for metal – how does my brain allow me to make this (albeit interesting) error of judgement at least three times? I wondered if magpies collect it for the same reason, rather than lambs eyes, a fact I was introduced to by a farmer-neighbour younger than I was ready for. I also found an object that seemed to resemble an animal’s tooth – this prompting together with my memory of childhood loss of innocence reminded me of when we took our eldest daughter (as a little girl) to see a dead whale, beached at Long Rock, near Penzance. What I noticed was that people had sawn off the whales teeth presumably to take away as souvenirs and that it was, like a rock, covered in crustaceans. I remember hearing it said that it was thought to have died because of its tail being badly severed by the propeller of a boat. Our daughter, on the other hand, rather than finding it a fascinating fact of life and death was traumatised by the experience to such an extent that even now aged 22 she averts her gaze when she comes across even an image of a whale.