Drought was declared in half of England on Wednesday 29 July, including London, from whence I escaped Tuesday night, and, on Thursday, the whole of Wales. They don't declare drought in Scotland; they couch it in terms of water scarcity. In Manchester, the "Rainy City", the Environment Agency says we're in "prolonged dry weather", but there has been a bit of precipitation this last week, which has been at least slightly refreshing.
I've been reading Zoë Skoulding's A Revolutionary Calendar again and decided to see what tallies with 28 July in the French Republican calendar (in which saints get the heave-ho in favour of plants, animals, minerals and agricultural tools for the daily dedications), the day I was wandering on a cracked and yellowed Hampstead Heath over to Kenwood to see the Henry Moore sculpture, among other things – here I am pictured outside the garden-cum-book-shop. Anyway it's watering can, which seems pretty apt. The month right now is Thermidor, or summer heat.
Today, among other things, like actual work and returning to tai chi, I've nailed the fourth in the "desire lines" poems I've been working on. In a week's time, it's the Peter Barlow's Cigarette open mic poetry special, and I'd like some new stuff to perform, so this little side project, part of the bigger "Drought Thoughts", might be it. The "desire lines" are something Ella Frears was playing with as part of her Dartington residency and has been airing in recent readings I've been lucky enough to make it to. They are I suppose in essence a kind of contrapuntual, which can be read in various ways, and which I've been tinkering about with regularly ever since stepping firmly into the land of poetry.
So with the "desire lines" there is a middle section made up of single words (or thereabouts) to form its own sentence. I like the form because visually this narrow part sitting between two chunkier parts looks like a crack or a gap, and I decided yesterday to call mine "Fire Breaks", because topical, plus the sequence I've been chipping away at groups together drought-tolerant plants which have fire-related links. They also share lightning mythology and have medicinal qualities and culinary uses, and I'm taking some of the plants mentioned in Derek Jarman's Modern Nature as a jumping-off point – so elder to begin with, then laurel and holly and, today, gorse. (Gorse is day 16 in the French Republican calendar month of Frimaire (frost), btw, which lands on 6 December.) Not sure whether I'll add to the four I've made so far, we'll see.
I've also been busy making adjustments to the title poem of the "Drought Thoughts" project, which features all the words I wrote down in my notebook that include the letters "ough" in that order. Each line in the poem opens with an "ough" word, with a few others (and a few sonic red herrings) thrown in.
I am now aiming on compiling the poems I've written so far. In my head, something like four poems remain: a winterbourne stream and its opposite, although this might end up being a combination of "dry channel" and "water pools", and two heliocentric concrete numbers, which might include inspiration from next week's solar eclipse, idk. I can't make the first two until I have finalised all the rest, so it feels like an exciting cliffhanger to my favourite series at the moment. Oh, and the last proper solar eclipse like this in Northern Europe, in August 1999, I drove my Renault Clio to a field in proper rural France so I could be on the line of totality. Like you do. It was pretty good. My boss went to the Lizard in Cornwall and then to Moorfields Eye Hospital. She's on the wireless quite a bit now, so it obviously didn't do her any harm.
