Psychotherapy

 Hundon has a village shop selling basic essentials, and a pub that's open four-and-a-half days a week, but all other amenities are a drive to Clare, Haverehill, Bury or Sudbury. Kelly, our hairdresser, works in Clare and Ann has relied on her for many years. There are several hair stylists in Clare, and Kelly had worked in one of the bigger salons before setting up on her own. She has an air of calming reassurance that makes the visit a pleasure as well as a necessity, and I now always try to go to her too, having abandoned my regular cutter in her old salon. I have started a portrait of Kelly hovering over Ann's scalp, but it doesn't seem to come right; I made the figures too small and they seem buried in the dull background wall, but I also took inspiration from Kelly for my new poem, Psychotherapy.  

Psychotherapy

The dark grey chair hears her troubles:

Lost dreams, threads of fraying hope, thin wishes,

Voiced despair, absorbed like fallen hair 

hitting the ground unheard; 

swept away to indifferent oblivion.

On the wall a giant clock, 

black against the white cell wall, 

sweeps away each second, 

timing the closed session to its allotted ending.

Her hands, professional, calm, relaxed, reassuring, 

massage as the hair is washed, worked, cut, curled, set and sprayed,

Absorbing sound like a velvet curtain while problems slide past.

John H

Yesterday I was able to cut the grass, which had grown hugely with all the recent rain but finally the sun has returned. Too long for the mower, I could strim it down to a manageable level. The battery-powered strimmer gives me a hint of old rural life, when most of Hundon laboured on the surrounding farms, scything the crop. It is a satisfying motion that induces relaxation and contentment like a physical psychotherapy, and I only needed to sit once for the whole lawn, unlike when I mow it and need to sit several times with a drink of Crabbies to revive me. 

Near the pond, a frog jumped out before my approach but hopped away to scramble on the patio, risking the sun before my blade. He won't be able to hide in the grass now but will shelter under one of the rocks skirting the pond's brim. I love frogs, their lythe shape, their amphibious lifestyle, and their wonderfully exposed lives: from bursting out as a clump of swelling spawn, to displaying openly their quiet development of head and wriggling tail, and the sudden growth of legs and loss of tail and gills as they continue to evolve, unlike the hidden changes of mammals. The tadpoles do not fare well in our pond, for the fish see them as fresh ready meals and few survive. We stocked the pond many years ago when I first dug it with a pair of goldfish brought proudly home in plastic bags from the fair at Long Melford, supplemented with a few others from the garden centre. Two or three have grown large, and there seem to be new fry every spring, somehow keeping the numbers steady.

The lone frog reminds me of the cruelty of some boys who boasted of 'blowing' frogs. This led to an edict from the headmaster that any boy caught doing this would be caned, but I always wonder if such behaviour is a pre-requisite for men who go on in other regimes to become torturers or vicious jailers or perform other acts of cruelty, now relieving their inner torment by destroying trees or shooting wildlife, or persecuting weaker people.

Alba Donati's New Book

The boys are off to Brazil for three weeks soon, so invited us round for a farewell meal. Andre prepared a Nut Roast Wellington in a perfect puff-pastry envelope even decorated with pastry flowers, all worthy of a top prize. We didn't get back till midnight. Ann continues to have debilitating bouts of tachycardia but insists on continuing her housework between sessions of lying down. Hopefully the repeat cardioversion booked for next week will be successful.

I've just finished Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati. This too, like all books that grip the imagination, is psychotherapy. The beautiful descriptions of landscape, events and people carry me to those mountainous regions of Italy and illuminate them and the characters as though I am among them. Donati, too, shares her love of books and scatters recomendations like dandilion seeds, feeding new ideas for reading. If I were younger, I would have gone on a pilgrimage to Donati's little village in the hills just to sit among her books and draw in the air. But when I was younger, I was materialistic, full of other ambitions and pilgrimages, so it is only now in the serenity of years that I can discover the calm of words beyond medical notes and scientific texts. Such is the way of our unbalanced lives.