Geese and Pennines

I’d just fallen arse over tit on sheet ice overlain with fresh snow in the middle of nowhere just before I took this. Once I’d realised I hadn’t broken anything I just sat in the snow and cried for all that’s lost and thought it was better to be there amongst the geese than looking up at a window in Preston Infirmary. It struck me as ironic…the hidden layers that slip us up.

I walked across the fields homewards thinking of all our little individual losses and W.H.Auden ….

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


In loving memory G.E.K. 25 years on … hard to believe.