New House Vibe

 A few years ago, we bought an old house. I started a poem about it - it was old and unloved, the wires needed stripping, it had 'efflorescence' on the walls (look it up, it's nowhere near as gorgeous as it sounds). Generally speaking we've made slow progress, although I have a kind of vision for the house - white-walled art gallery meets book-nook library with a smattering of natural history curios thrown in.

The garden is more of a challenge. How to develop a botanical jungle that resists slugs and snails, is fragrant with herbs and feels like an oasis when I only have about 4ft square to play in....

Move

Amber-eyed, 

the Overlord presides 

over the detritus of the living room

where I have badly stacked the incoming boxes

such that the bottom one

is compressed and extrudes its contents.

Arms ache from van trips and stair treks.

In the echoey dining room, rows of vertically-filed vinyl records 

are causing the IKEA cupboard to sag in the middle, 

temporarily shored with two garden bricks

yanked from stacks behind the weather-beaten shed.

The exterior brickwork has a white efflorescence 

that suggests water seepage.

Electrical wires hang from door jambs like stripped veins.

She’s old and weary, like us.

The front door mat is curled to catch unwary feet.

Things move in my peripheral vision

and move back again when I stare 

like scenes from a scary movie

where the new owners have disturbed the lives

of those who came before.

That first night

I sleep like a cat with fleas

hearing sounds of the street all night

through the meniscus of my dreaming.

The house has a broad back of centuries,

wrapped around me, dusty, impregnated 

with other handprints.

Years pass.

She is still weary but her rooms

are lit with light, filled with echoes

of our noise-making. You painstakingly

revealed her wooden window sills, smoothed walls

and ceilings. We infuse her with splashes of passata,

garlic hummus, chilli oil from the garden vines.

Family

is what you become when you live

in the same nest. Cats morph on the retaining wall.

Vinyl crackles as the needle drops. This year

we’ll give you a new roof and stem the damp

although you don’t seem to mind it.

You’ve seen worse.

Factchecking and the Forest World

It is reassuring when even the most exciting new science is questioned and fact checked by peer scientists. We need this, in a world of disinformation, AI-written articles and deep fakes. Even those who witness and catalogue signs of climate change encourage peer review that may contradict their findings based on longer-term evidence or differing analysis models.

So I dug into a Guardian article about discrediting the concept of the 'wood-wide web' with avid interest, having aborbed The Overstory by Richard Powers and followed the explosion of interest in Suzanne Simard's 1997 study that inspired it.

I was not expecting to find Daniel Immerwahr's article so richly rewarding with its nuggets of peripheral but related information. His fascination with trees goes beyong merely critiqueing Simard's stance, and providing the context for the outpouring of enthusiasm that her research engendered, and instead takes us on related pine-strewn paths of his own interests from the explosion of new plant writing, to what botanists bring to the table of ethology (plant and animal psychology). Full of intriguing diversion (trees can smell themselves, can a rat's spinal cord act like a brain, do some plants have a form of sight?) it's well worth a read, and nature writers may find inspiration in it for worthwhile exploration for their own writing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/mother-trees-and-socialist-forests-is-the-wood-wide-web-a-fantasy?