"...and how she gave me life, and how she made it in..."
Happy belated Beltane to them as celebrates it! I got back from seeing cybermule (H) in Bristol last night. I read Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests on the coach down. I kept looking up and there were rookeries, then globes of mistletoe, in the trees lining the motorway. It wasn't always easy to tell the two apart, until the rooks lifted from the branches. H picked me up from the coach stop and took me to one of the best second-hand bookshops I've ever been to. Serious tome-lust. They had the original Pearson's publication of The War of the Worlds in there. I couldn't have justified three hundred quid to splash out on that even if I had the money. But I looked at it in its glass case and drooled. As you do. So many damn things I lusted for, from the collected novels of Saki to wee Arthur Rackham prints. I did buy the first day cover of a stamp celebrating oaks, issued just a couple of weeks after my birth, and a book on Victorian kinetic toys. H bought me a book from 1830 called Insect Architecture; she came away with a book of photos by Warren Ellis, a Richard Mabey, books on fossils. We had a quick pint in the tiniest of pubs and went back to her house, which I already miss: full of little bottles, photos of ghostly dogwoods and collapsing tower blocks, ceramic suns. There was a small party on Saturday for H's birthday (one of her presents was the badge of a running hare, done in burnished, variegated copper). I met her family and friends; I was shyer than I'd like to have been with them, but I think we got on okay - we have friends of friends in common. I basked next to a small outdoors fire, supped Hobgoblin. H sent me homewards with Robert Graves' Greek Myths in my rucksack, and M was there to pick me up. We grabbed a pub dinner. There were two song thrushes conversing over my head as I smoked in the beer garden; one right behind me in the recently-scalped ivy. We got back and the toy dinosaurs M had bought from The Works had filled the living room with the smell of plasticky glue. They're out on the balcony now in the hope that rain will wipe out the fumes.