Temple Cloud

I used to think the flowers of the spring were colour-coded.   Apart from the early, winter flowers like snowdrops and crocuses, spring began properly in March in a blaze of yellow: primroses, daffodils, celandines and forsythia.   April was white with wild garlic, stitchwort, cow-parsley, and blossom on the apple and hawthorn and wild cherry trees.   Then May brought the blue of forget-me-nots and bluebells, before summer turned this to the bright pink or purple of thistles, orchids, foxgloves, woundworts, willowherbs, and cranesbills. Of course, these were arbitrary distinctions.   But there used to be some sort of pattern of what order the seasons came in.   Okay, a few years ago I remember seeing daffodils, and birds building nests, before Christmas, but that was in Southampton, which is both an urban heat island and a port town on the south coast.   Rural Somerset must be different, surely?   Somerset gets actual winters, as in ‘You can’t get to the supermarket because the roads

While tidying my desk for Christmas (okay, trying to clear some of the mess of papers off my desk for the first time in years, and finding all sorts of letters I hadn’t responded to or hadn’t even noticed or opened, including letters telling me to make medical appointments, and personal letters from friends who are now dead and whom I can never respond to), I found something triggering. I know people overuse the word ‘triggering’ a lot, to refer to anything that annoys them.   However, this really was a reminder of trauma which caused me to relive the trauma to some degree.   Specifically, it was a handout from my therapist, which reminded me of a session which had gone horribly wrong and which was one of the reasons that I no longer go to therapy. I had been telling her about an insight I had had which was important to me.   I can’t remember precisely what I told her.   Maybe it was the realisation that the cute sayings we get taught in Sunday school like ‘The key to JOY is to pu