This month, I couldn’t decide which particular topic to write about, so instead I’ve decided to write a brief bit about three nice elements from my Bank Holiday Weekend 🙂 Enjoy x

Moments of Nothingness…

Yesterday I took my bike out and went for an explore.  I didn’t really know where I was going, and looking back – I don’t even know where I really went – but I did, at one point, find a very nice spot of meadow upon which to sit and chill.  And so that’s what I did, for around twenty minutes or so.  Everything was silent, apart from a bit of breeze whispering through the grass.  A handful of people were out walking their dogs, but I couldn’t even hear a yelp.  There were cars in the distance, but they didn’t make a sound, they just… floated… like everything else around me at the time seemed to do.  It seemed that all I had for company were a few subtle rays of sunshine beating onto my shoulders, and the fresh scent of cow parsley.

It was all very peaceful and my little love affair with Kent intensified just a little bit more… what a wonderful place this can be for finding somewhere in which you can awaken the senses, and just ‘be’.

Moments of nothingness…
Nothing extraordinary to report;
Nothing ordinary to dismiss.
When I can lose myself in exploration of my thoughts…
Every day, needs a moment of nothingness…

And now for something of a somewhat different tone…

Can YOU see any ships?

It’s always the unscripted, random things in life that I find the most funny, and you can always rely upon a day out at an English Heritage site to experience something like that.

Today we visited Walmer Castle, a Tudor fort opposite the sea-front, near to Deal, that was constructed in the 16th century at the instruction of King Henry VIII.
In one of the castle’s many rooms, an old brass telescope stands on a tripod in front of a small window that overlooks the sea.  A sign stands next to it, “Can You See Any Ships?”.  The intention is obviously for a younger clientele to take a look through the instrument and activate their imaginations by believing that anonymous objects looming on the horizon are menacing French and Spanish ships, sailing over to invade.

It would have made for an interesting view I’m sure, but unfortunately all I got was a close-up of an elderly lady leaning against one of the bastions outside and looking dreadfully disappointed, most probably unaware that she was in the direct line of the telescope.

…It did make me chuckle…. and despite trying to intake as much as I could of Walmer Castle’s hundreds of years of fascinating history, the moody lady in the telescope will probably be the thing I remember the most.

And finally…

My mum recently brought down all her old family diaries from the attic for us to read through.  She’s kept a diary since the 1970s (clearly being the inspiration for me to keep my own, as I have done for nearly twenty years now), and I’m so glad she has.  Being still somewhat ‘young’, I have often believed and assumed my memory to be a good one, but reading through mum’s old diaries, I realise that there are many things that I have long since forgotten.  Some of the entries have also served to stitch additional patches to memories which within my mind are only fleeting, fractured and without context.

One such example is a fleeting memory I have of saying goodbye to my grandfather as he and my cousins got into a beige car outside of a house where the walls of the hall were peacock blue and seemed massively tall…  Reading the diaries, it turns out that this was actually a memory from a party held at my other grandfather’s house at 31 South Road, Faversham, during the Summer of 1988.  We had spent most of the afternoon in the back garden and I had played with a blonde-haired little boy called Ben who lived in the house next door.  Grandad Faversham had a miniature train and track in his back garden that people could ride down the garden on, and at the party there had – apparently – been a hidden tension between he and my mum over the fact that he was considering getting rid of it, much to mum’s disapproval.

The above occasion may not sound particularly notable, but reading back through the diaries it made me quite sad to think how susceptible our ‘memories’ are to a natural erosion over the years.  It’s nice to occasionally reminisce, and remember, and place everything into it’s context.  It’s interesting to look back and see – in daily detail – just how we ended up where we did.

I hope that one day somebody will find my diaries as interesting as I find my mum’s…

Song of the Day:  The Sugargliders – Ahprahran

Australian ‘twee pop’ from the early 1990s about life in a suburb of Melbourne called Prahran.  Pretty sweet stuff.