rumble tumble

Wandering awed on a splintered wreck

The crow’s eye

Eskra rose daily at sunrise and went as usual about her work. She fetched the water and mucked out the horse and fed the animals and the remaining chickens. At the start of the week she baked the rationed black bread. But something within her had changed. A wheel in the middle of her was pulling tighter the strings that held every part of her, and she stared out the kitchen window and imagined what it would be like to let that wheel loose, to let the parts of her be flung upon the wind that came down wild off the mountains a hunter of souls.

When you remember that only a smallish proportion of the cost of dealing with climate change will be borne by governments, it becomes clear that this is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

The ground where she sat was turfy and springy. She leaned over a little tussock and examined it carefully, teasing out with her fingers the tiny plants of which it was composed, the mosses and the lichens. The combination of smallness and complexity in the plants fascinated her. She put her head right down on the tussock as though it were a pillow, and closed her eyes, listened to the sea, the birds, the wind. She never regretted having come to live here. She opened her eyes and saw, inches from her face, a tiny spider scale a blade of grass.

What a good man

3. Why do you write?

The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of the countless men and women who had also looked at the stars down the years, down the centuries. Now they were so completely forgotten that to think of them, as he did, was not true remembrance but an act of imagination. That this would be his fate too did not disturb him, but consoled him rather. He felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women who spoke dead languages.

It was a deliciously hot spring day – a day when there is both sun and crispness in the air and flowers look young and well groomed and dewy, not swooning and languid. And beech leaves are light as spring muslins, not black-green shrouds as later they come to be.