Ullswater

In one way or another St Connel worked his magic.

For a while now I've been troubled that I couldn't find my marriage certificate which I need for my DBS form for some voluntary work on a research project that I have become involved with for MIND. 

On and off I've been searching through the chaos of papers and places where I rather randomly keep things of importance. I haven't enjoyed it because every time I start I turn up something that floors me.
It has become increasingly upsetting and every time I start I'll find some deflecting activity to take it all away and distract me. Yesterday was a supreme example, and a day I could ill afford in what is a rather hectic time where I don't seem to have much time to come up for air.

Anyway, today I set to again and had a mass of stuff resembling an archaeological dig gathered around me. I chucked a load of stuff but wasn't even getting warm as far as certificates were concerned. I found everyone else's essential paperwork but mine. I worked backwards through mum and dad's paperwork from the house, mum's stuff from all the years of health care, dad's stuff, old course accreditations, wedding cards ... it must be there, I'm sure I remember keeping it there ...no .... and then further back still ...all of G's papers, cards, family papers .... but still no sign .... 

Suddenly, a dawning ... a retracing of my steps over the last five years, logic kicked in, like looking for lost keys .. when would I have last needed it? And then it dawned on me, rather terribly ... and of course, I found it, just at the point at which I had last needed it ... just as it if it had been found in a bog (inspiration for today's poem). It was with the Certificate of Cremation. Damn it.

In spite of it all I'm glad and relieved I've found it even though it was well and truly buried in my subconscious and at the bottom of a whole heap of archaeology that had piled in behind it and buried it well.

The Tollund Man - Seamus Heaney

I 

Some day I will go to Aarhus 
To see his peat-brown head, 
The mild pods of his eye-lids, 
His pointed skin cap. 

In the flat country near by 
Where they dug him out, 
His last gruel of winter seeds 
Caked in his stomach, 

Naked except for 
The cap, noose and girdle, 
I will stand a long time. 
Bridegroom to the goddess, 

She tightened her torc on him 
And opened her fen, 
Those dark juices working 
Him to a saint's kept body, 

Trove of the turfcutters' 
Honeycombed workings. 
Now his stained face 
Reposes at Aarhus. 

II 

I could risk blasphemy, 
Consecrate the cauldron bog 
Our holy ground and pray 
Him to make germinate 

The scattered, ambushed 
Flesh of labourers, 
Stockinged corpses 
Laid out in the farmyards, 

Tell-tale skin and teeth 
Flecking the sleepers 
Of four young brothers, trailed 
For miles along the lines. 

III 

Something of his sad freedom 
As he rode the tumbril 
Should come to me, driving, 
Saying the names 

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, 

Watching the pointing hands 
Of country people, 
Not knowing their tongue. 

Out here in Jutland 
In the old man-killing parishes 
I will feel lost, 
Unhappy and at home.