Bluebells where I am blueberries

I made pancakes this morning. I made about twice as many as anyone possibly wanted so there’s loads left, I think I may be living on their coagulated remains for the rest of the week. If anyone wants those really thin pancakes, not the good old American kind, then mine is the place to be.

There are some things which always happen, annually, in my life. One of them is getting worked up about bluebells, going too early, and then forgetting to go when they finally get really going, until suddenly they’re almost gone, and it smells of heated, crushed plants. My friend’s mother hates the smell of cut plants, can’t abide having Christmas trees around because she’s convinced it’s the smell of death. Or something like that. I think bluebells are beautiful, all those field of lilac, there’s something narcotic about woods full of bluebells.

And at the end of this week I’m going to a party which in my mind is linked to this dreamlike quality of the bluebells. That kind of haze of beauty, mixed with some childhood memories. Bluebells have so many associations for me. We did a project on them in class when I went to an all girls school called St Catherine’s, up in Guildford. The school was horrible, and although I still visited a few of the friends I made there a few years on, I’m almost out of contact with them all now. I remember us all trying to poison each other, fights and hatred and bullying all out of proportion with our eight or nine year oldness. Some prime suffering years right there.

But anyway, we did this project on bluebells. I still have the watercolour I did, here on the wall in the study. It’s really detailed, almost sadly so. Nowadays if you gave me watercolours and beautiful thick paper like that and told me to draw a bluebell you’d end up with a thousand images all energetically thrown down, none with that level of concentration.

So I guess I’ve found someone who I talk at too much and they don’t actually want to strangle me immediately. I always find it wholesome to not have to say anything and yet to say too much, although I might need to stop doing that.