Capodanno

Last day of the year
Last haiku- a drop of light-
to see us through the night.

Via Pergolesi

Winter trees dressed with
oranges- bright globes to light
busy shopping streets.

The Cake Decoraters

Three men in bright coats
sprinkle cocoa grit lightly
on the white iced streets.

Last night's dinner

My kitchen smells like

the inside of a tagine-

dark, warm, deep brown spiced.

Hunger

Haiku are poems

for people who have a fast

metabolism.

Noise 3

Orchestra of yawns
tuning up every morning
in my husband's mouth.

Noise 2

The shower that drips
on and on is my headache-
persistent drum beat.

Noise

The fly that buzzes
round the room is my headache-
alive and throbbing.

How not to cry

Think of the black tracks
that your mascara will make
on your pristine cheeks.

How to drink a cappucino

Stir in the sugar
with care, without breaking
the frothy cocoa heart.

How to sleep well

Eat a banana
and read from a book of poems
just before bed.

Writing haiku on the way home

Counting syllables
on the steering wheel- fingers
tapping unseen words.

Season of mists

All the colours gone
except a wall of red vine
leaves, huge hands waving.

Lost:

One husband, last seen
with new mobile phone and small
book of instructions.

Raindrops keep falling on the radio

"I'm never gonna

stop the rain by complaining-

because I'm free..."

Morning music

The bathroom door swings.
The wire hanger on its hook
quivers, jangles, sings.

Rain on Friday

Rain savvy student
hair wrapped in a plastic bag-
a Tesco turban.

Thursday, 10pm, M1

No satellite found
to navigate through the night but
I don't lose my way.

Rain on Wednesday

Stepping off the train
through a shimmering curtain
strung with beads of rain.

Monday Choirs

What if every chore
was really a choir, singing
a list of praises?

Monday Chores

If a job is not
on your list, does it still count
when you have done it?

Morning

A cloud takes a bite
out of the arc of rainbow-
a mouthful of light.

A haiku is quick

A fork that spears
a mozarella fish that swims
in its own milky sea.

A haiku is small

Early autum leaf
scuttles across the road
in the form of a mouse

Moon on Wednesday

Tonight you are pale
and far- a watermark left
by yesterday's moon.

Moon on Tuesday

Bright eye of the sky
unblinking, searches me out
in crowds of darkness.

The Expert 2

The mechanic takes
the whistling kettle engine off the boil.
Brakes fixed.

The Expert 1

He whistles a tune
through a pasta tube, tasting
to check it is cooked.

168 miles in the car

There's a little bird
trapped in the engine, that sings
when I turn the wheel.

Walking

Where there used to be
a river we find red mud
and water's footprints.

Tea with Grandpa

"I'm too old to write
haiku" but young enough to
run down the seafront.

Autumn

Runaway apple

wedged in the jaws of the drain-

held fast til it rains.

Don't jump

Man on the church roof
treads the tiled tight rope, then sits
cross-legged like a monk.

Wind falls

Wild apples rolling
down the village street- one stopped
outside our front door.

Haiku on the way home

Wholesome autumn fields
like brown bread- yellow summer
butter melted now.

Read on a billboard outside the King George Pub

"The colossal squid's
eyes are 28 centi-
metres across." Wow!

TBC (to be cleaned)

Two spiders hanging
upside down in the corner
by the Buddhist books

Surprise

Who would have thought it?
That I could grow into a
tomato lover!

Tomato Haikus 3

Lone green tomato
still in the dish, don't lose hope!
You'll be eaten soon.

Tomato Haikus 2

"We should go back to
bartering- one of your poems
for one tomato"

Tomato Haikus 1

Orange tomato
orbs like lanterns glowing with
a ripening light

Plea on the radio

More species of bees
have become extinct. Don't wait!
Plant more flowers please!

Odd one out

Green tomato picked
too soon, maybe you will blush
red like the others.

one haiku missing,
lost like a tiny button
from a cloudy blouse.

Colour hungry

After the grey, I
crave colour: pink cheeks, purple
onion, sunset plum.

Dinner on Friday

The cheesecake boat floats
on a vanilla sea swirled
with a sharp red current.

Being a Writer

Poetry window
shopping wistfully- wanting
to be on the shelves.

Dinner

I grate our garlic
for pasta-for courage before
we make mayonnaise.

First Day at Work

The begonias-
bright butter yellow, smile back
as he leaves the house.

The end of summer

The last August day
brings the first frost, light glitter
on the grey roof tops.

Weight

Separating eggs
for meringue, I imagine
one yolk's cold gold weight.

At least a haiku a day...

I've been a way a long time. More than 40 days have passed since the feast of St Swithin, and just as it didn't rain every day as promised, I didn't write every day either.

The myth is broken, or perhaps it was a curse.

Anyway, I am still a writer. And now I will start again. One day after one day after one day, raindrops strung on a powerline, trembling mirror pearls, for 80 days or more.

A long time ago I said I would write at least a line a day and more or less I did.
Now is the moment for something else, for a haiku, a perfect polished acorn, deceptively small, holding the force of an oak.

The tomatoes are ripening two by two, one for me and one for him, to balance on a bed of rocket like a bright round ruby.

Never give up on the sun...

This morning as I drive to work I decide that autumn has arrived and I think how there aren't enough words in the English language for all the shades of grey.

I even buy soup for lunch that burns my tongue with its unexpected heat.

But then, just when we had all written off summer, like a blue page ripped from a notebook, the sun comes back and reminds me that anything is possible.

To celebrate the abundance in our tiny garden I will write twice tonight.

Twice for the two tomotoes that turned from green to amber to red and then burst like plump balloons;
For the green beans that dangled like long earrings through the elegant railings;
For pearl after pearl of garlic, swollen proudly in their brown paper skins;
For the potaoes, precious stones, honest and gold.

Overheard in Sainsbury's

It's scone! (To rhyme with gone).

No its scone (to rhyme with own), otherwise there wouldn't be an e at the end.

As I push my trollley past the two shop assistants it makes me smile to hear English spelling being discussed at 4 o'clock on a rainy afternoon in the wine aisle.

I know my husband, who regularly despairs of spelling and who makes excellent scones, would be smiling too.

Rain

Does rain have a smell?

Or does it depend what it lands on, what it soaks into, like concrete or wool or tomato plants?

Today everything smells of rain. Everything is heavy with it, like my St Pancras station tiramisu, drenched in liquore.

Glue

Today in the supermarket in the middle of refurbishment I am looking for glue. I find it in an unlikely aisle by accident, just as another man is being shown the way to the same spot by a helpful assistant. It's obviously a good day for buying glue, whether you want the super stuff, like he does, or a just a stick, like I do.

Maybe its a day for putting old things back together or for sticking new things down- glitter and glossy paper, held still like a butterfly or a bright idea.

Balloons don't live forever

Yesterday in Leicester I saw a little boy lose a balloon. It sailed confidently into the sky, bright pink against dull grey, while his screams pierced the hearts of passers by.

I remember him again today, as I'm chopping eye-watering onions for a comforting soup, and I wonder what I would have done to console him if he'd been mine.

Would I have rushed to buy him another one, not quite the same, to quieten his cries?

Would I have wheeled him away in his push chair and decided that it was a good day to learn about loss?

Or would I have told him a story about the incredible adventures of the balloon that belonged to the air and to the eyes of everyone who saw it go by?

The secret life of wasps

Yesterday I heard on the radio that they had found the laregst ever wasps nest, wider than me and nearly as tall, in the loft of a country pub. All the way back home my mind is buzzing with wonder.

I think of the late night sounds of our house. Maybe we have the second biggest one nestled somewhere, which bursts into life when the lights are off, wasps dancing in the walls, wings whirring like the constant pulse of the fridge, swarming in the dark kitchen.

Solar Tsunami

Somewhere far away the surface of the sun is exploding into fireworks for us but I will miss the display from my earth bound bed, under a duvet of clouds, and can only imagine it in my dreams.

Yesterday is missing like a day of summer that should have been.

But this morning the sun finally broke through the heavy grey weight of clouds and gave me a shiver of light down my spine.

There's more than one way to stuff a courgette

With two recipe books propped open on the kitchen table, both our instincts and an egg to bring everything togther, we come up with our own way of stuffing a generous courgette, il siluro, the missile, as my husband has been calling it.

Now, two zucchine boats sit side by side in the oven, one slightly deeper than the other, their cargo of garlic and beef and other good things, bubbling, making my stomach rumble like a far away sea.

Potato babies

Driving back under cotton wool clouds I wonder what to write about, feeling time slipping away as the mileometer counts up towards home.

My answer is in the proud pile of potatoes, heaped on the patio table, pale golden pebbles still wearing the earth, just born, waiting with my husband, to greet me.

Listening to the house

I have never been good at distinguishing sounds.

Downstairs this morning I pause and tilt my head, trying to understand what I hear coming through the floorboards, trying to pull the correct entry off the sound library shelf.

Is it the whir of the toothbrush whitening, or the hum of the electric shaver smoothing, or is it the insistent buzz of the wasp, wings ringing in frustrtation?

The Midas Spider

This morning I move the chest of drawers forward to look for lost earrings. I find two silver hearts fallen there together and to my surpirse a single gold bangle, suspended just above the skirting board, wrapped in the melting grey velvet of a cobweb, held fast.

I rescue it and wonder which magpie Midas spider coveted and caught it and whether there was disappointment when they learnt the cold hard truth that gold doesn't taste good.

Falling

Yesterday I watched stilt-walkers in the rain, reminding me of long-legged elegant birds, on the surface of water. They were learning how to fall, so that they could dance without fear.

They didn't slip on the slick lake of concrete, not once, but the woman walking past, wearing pedestrian shoes, did.

I looked up from what I was doing to see her on the floor, on hands and knees from the fall she hadn't learnt, a crouched creature, waiting to be picked up and put on her own legs again.

Doubt stones

I notice how soon I lose the feeling of being a writer, how quickly the doubt sets in and how it sinks to the pit of my stomach the way fruit sinks to the bottom of a sponge cake.

I have to be an every day girl; to remind myself again and again what it feels like to write- like finding a pair of shoes that look pretty and fit.

Biscuit tins

This weekend we celebrated two wedding anniversaries, 39 years and 240 miles apart.

I arrived at the first one, bearing a biscuit tin as a gift, wrapped in white tissue, waiting to be filled with treats over the many years to come.

For the second one, 4 hours and miles of motorway later, we gave edible rubies- port and homemade strawberry jam- to mark the 40 rich years.

Then, we sleep deliciously, like a blog, says my husband and wake up bathed in the egg yolk yellow light of my other aunt's house and swap jars of deep red jam, like stories, over breakfast.

This afternoon, we drove the last side of the triangle home, talking about marriage young and old, with another tin on the back seat, holding lovingly baked lavendar biscuits, melted marzipan cookies, sticky anzacs and mini meringues, the left over treasures of our family, to savour a little longer.

From flowers to flour

Tonight the courgette flowers remind me of little purses, sunset pouches of petals, holding their treasures of dolce sardo to melt into stretchy threads (but no capers as I still haven't learnt to like them). We fry them in a batter beaten with sparkling water and eat them hot and crackly, licking the salt from our fingers.

I wonder who first decided it would be delicious to fry flowers from courgettes, my husband says as he puts one in his mouth at the same time as two green jewelled capers.

I often wonder who the first person was to discover any kind of food...
I think, how I often have, about the the first person who ever baked a cake; what genius it took to put eggs and sugar and flour together like that. How I would have liked to have been there at the birth of the first cake.

Spiders

I remember one winter morning when I had known my husband for only a few months, we found a spiders web dripping with dew jewels, just by his front door. He was surprised by how beautiful I found it, as though it had never occured to him before. But he remembered and for my first Christmas present a few weeks later, he gave me a book with an inscription 'Beautiful like a spider's web'.

Through my writing I have been spinning webs of meaning in my life, always trying to make sense, always trying to connect one thing to another, to hang quivering diamonds delicately on the strings of our lives. I have realised how much of a relentless spider I am.

I have also realised how easy it is for me to slip through the net that I have spent 100 days spinning; how long it takes to make a habit and how quick it is to break it, the way you can bring an intricate web floating down with one impatient flick of a feather duster.

Polenta

My husband has brought back a bag of polenta, which we cook for lunch to have with my roasted tomato sauce. We make too much, and have to leave half the golden grained cake on the plate, reminding me of the half-eaten moon last night.

The upside down moon

On the dusky terrarce, my arms feel the weight of water, which my husband would normally bear, sloshing in the green can. The moon is half a luminous melon, its other half missing, the way mine has been. In a few hours I will drive to the airport to bring him back. I think of my mother and sister, just leaving another airport, flying in a straight line south to Africa, where the moon, half or full, will be upside down.

The day after St Swithin

In Italy every day has a saint, while in England, you could count them on your fingers. But it's not surprising that one of the saints we do have is a weather man.

The myth of St Swithin says that whatever the weather on his feast day, the 15th July, it will stay that way for 40 days.

Yesterday it rained. Yesterday was my feast day, my 100th one in a row and I know, that I will continue, for at least 40 more, putting words on the page the way the clouds will throw rain like wedding rice all summer.

Day One Hundred

Today I wanted to write about cake, which felt right to celebrate the hundredth day, and because that is where it all began, with a birthday cake and a toast and a wish for more.

But in the end I have run out of time (which also feels right)- it is approaching midnight, and my unperfectly made bed is calling.
I know that when the clock strikes and we tip over into tomorrow, I won't turn into anything that I'm not already.
But I will leave behind a shoe, deliberately, so that I am able to find myself here again and again.

Sweet dreams, see you tomorrow

Day 99

It's day ninety-nine I say over dinner.

I have let it creep up on me willingly, playing a game of grandmother's footsteps, counting to almost to a hundred, not wanting to turn round and see the last day looming.

What will happen then? he asks.

Neither of us answer. In my mind I wonder if I will turn into a pumpkin.

Day 98

Today I am determined to laugh in the face of my smashed car window; to marvel at its splintered crystal surface like a lake of fragile ice; to find the force of poetry in the way it trembles and falls across the back seat as a thousand aqua diamonds.

Thank you to whoever did it this morning. Thank you because you also threw something heavy against my life, waking me up, reminding me of the joy of broken glass, the joy of the struggle.

Day 97

The sky knew what kind of day it was and the clouds were ushered in, whispering grey curtains to cover the sun.

I remember 11 years ago in Zimbabwe, when in the middle of the dry season, it rained, for just one day, a mark of respect for the funeral of a much loved man.

Day 96

Today I understand what it means to be a witness, to keep watch over someone's hope, to hold it like a moon that you know is there, even when the earth has turned away.

Day 95

In one of the many flats we sit up late and drink tea and eat cherries and marshmallows and remember.

In the morning I see the cherry stones, scattered and uncounted, hers mixed with mine, and I feel an enormous sense of friendship and freedom.

Day 94

I decide to stop saving the broad beans for some special occasion and pop every single one out of its pod and briefly into boling water, until their rubbery outer jackets can be slipped off to reveal their tender glorious green. One by one, they collect in the blue glass bowl, waiting to be dressed and decorated with salt and pepper and olive oil, and pale curls of percorino, like shavings of the moon.

And even though it is only an ordinary day of the week we eat lunch outside, with a cool glass of wine, longing for an umbrella, or a canopy of flowers over our heads.

Day 93

The relentless march of the spiders goes on. Now I watch as one works its way up and down the curtain, exercising its long legs. This morning I could have sworn I heard a tiny sound like the click of knitting needles and I imagined the spiders working, persistent grandmothers, their webs falling away from them in loops of droopy stitches.

Five years ago yesterday, London was reeling from unthinkable things, and I remember sitting in a sprawling Oxford garden and watching the spiders spin endless webs and threads between the the legs of the green plastic chairs, as though they were also trying to make sense of things, trying to stitch England back together where it had split at the seams.

Day 92 How to boil an egg

For lunch we have a wonderful warm salad of nutty new potatoes, hard-boiled eggs straight from their hot shells and green beans sauteed lightly with the first pearl of garlic from our garden; all wrapped in olive oil velvet with a bite of black pepper.

It is a lunch that makes us remember the miracle of eggs. I think of mayonnaise and my husband says it. This will be the summer to conquer it and at the same time meringues, as I believe the two were meant to be made together; the perfect use of an egg; a separation made in heaven.

Day 91

Today I heard a man being asked the question 'What's the best advice you've ever been given?'



In response he quoted William Blake: 'If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.'



I think about my 100 days of folly, nearly complete now, and I know I will have to continue, to persist in the act of being true to myself.

Day 90

I unwrap odd-shaped packets of cheese, from their waxy white market paper, making a spontaneous supper out of my Sardinian gifts; heart shaped auricchio; melon pale pecorino; a dolce sardo half moon.

Day 89

I clean a bathroom for the second time in 3 days: the first one was full of sand and traces of sun cream squeezed too quickly out of the bottle; the second one, wearing a weeks worth of dust and webs spun in extraordinary places.

I think how a housewife's work is never done and nor is a spider's.

Day 88 Sa Genti Arrubia

In the bathroom mirror I see the ghost of my bikini, barely there, slighter brighter white than the rest of me, which has turned pale almond or nociola, hazelnut, as my father in law always says kindly.

I kept my promsie to myself and didn't turn red. I am a flamingo at the beginning of the feeding season, not yet flushed fuscia.

But then I come back home, forget my holiday caution and burn both my shoulders in the surprising English sun. I am a flamingo after all, crimson-wing tipped, one of the genti arrubia, gente rossa, red people, as these ancient creatures were once called in Cagliari.

Day 87

On the too cold plane there is a woman wrapped in rose coloured Sardinian carpet.

I think about the things we bring and the things we leave behind.
The two delicate bottles of limoncello, lemon liquour, one with cream and one without, wrapped in a sarong the colour of a butterfly's wing.
The miele di millefiori, Sardinian gold, thousand flowered honey, still sitting on a shelf that we didn't buy this time and that will have to wait until Christmas.

Day 86

The sky is dull and heavy humid.

We are sugar and snow lipped on the terrace on the almost last afternoon: my lips powdered with winter white meringue- the last of the bianchini- studded with shiny almonds like jewels; his are dusty from a flour rolled panino eaten just like that as bread can be.

I think of snow and of the icing-sugar dusted torta della nonna I ate yesterday.

The weather's really changed. He contemplates the sky.

Time to go home. I say and pop the last almond into his mouth like a gift.

Day 85

I slip into the small space of time between leaving my friend and our afternoon tea and calling my husband to say I'm on my way home.

I delight in the fact that briefly, no-one knows where I am and I cross the street and go into the air-conditioned anonymity of Rinascente to window shop elicitly in its designer departments.

Day 84 Ladies that lunch

Cosa ci racconti?

Literally, 'what can you tell us?' But in the context of Valentino's restaurant at lunchtime it means 'what have you got for us?'

The waitress knows this, but instead of listing the dishes she says:

Once upon a time there was a princess, with azure eyes, light hair, tall, wearing a dress with flowers on it.

We all smile, especially me-tall and turquoise- and my super sweet friend-delicate and violet- wishful princesses that we are.

Day 83

I am hypnotised by my husband systematically dismantling a watermelon at the kitchen table, decisively slicing half moon after half moon, knocking the shiny black teeth out of the fat smiles with the tip of the knife.

It takes me back to the same table years ago, when we hardly knew each other, and I watched for the first time, realising that there is more than one way to eat a watermelon.

Day 82

Today we choose sleeping over sun-burning on the Sunday full beach and decide to have breakfast outside in one of our favourite pasticcerie, that I have been waiting to reopen for nearly 3 years.

Yesterday we were at the other favourite, Pirani, where people arrive in waves wearing sunglasses and weighed down with Saturday shopping; where the same woman at the till and the same busy baristas in waistcoats and the same constant clatter of cappuccino cups onto saucers, never stop.

The bar goes on. And it is hard to believe that we have been away half a year.

Day 81

Today I am spoilt for choice. After longing for lovely things to write about like a discontented hen scratching in the dust, I am suddenly overwhelmed, delighted by moment after moment like a row of fat peaches on a market stall.

I chose just two.

At lunchtime, on the pink-flowered terrace, I break the cherry curse and manage to eat one after the other after the other without once counting the stones.

And then as if to prove that superstitions are no more we stay out late with our wonderful funny friend, all the way past midnight, and we don’t turn into yawning yellow pumpkins, or even a droopy bunch of fiori di zucca, like the ones waiting in the fridge.

Day 80

I am writing this thousands of miles up where the sun always shines and the clouds are a grey feather duvet or a pristine field of snow.

I am in between lives.

The house I left in a hurry where I didn’t have time to put fresh sheets on the bed to welcome us home again at midnight in a week’s time, but where I did manage to empty the fridge into a bursting plastic bag for my mum.

And the other house, that is a bit of mine, where two firm flat beds wrapped in a sheet make one matrimoniale and where the red fridge waits for me to fill it and un-fill it with treasures from my market.

Day 79

What are you thinking?

Tomato.

I am thinking rose.

We are sitting on our terrace eating a last left over supper before we leave tomorrow. The first bud is pale pink pursed lips and we will miss its first kiss, but I hope we will be home in time for the tomatoes.

Day 78

At three o'clock everything stops.

We all take a long breath of hot oven air and hold it until the very last minutes of injury time are over and then it all comes out in a rush of relief.

But no car horns beep victory.

You almost wouldn't know it had happened. But then again, this is England not Italy, and this is only the beginning.

Day 77

The single headlight of the moon follows me all the way home, unblinking.
I share the midnight road with the moths, like flecks of ash from a far away fire.
In the sleeping village our bedroom light is still awake, an amber window to welcome me.

Day 76 Red Sky at Night...

The longest day dawns bright blue and cloudless.

'Why is blue a colour associated with sadness?' he asks me, while I clean my teeth. Then before I have time to answer, 'you're a poet you should know'.

But today I don't.

And I am still thinking about it, as we drive home late, the sky on fire, red for delight.

Day 75

While walking with an old friend in a town where I used to live I stop to smell roses, chasing a scent like a memory, but the neatly folded pink petals have no perfume.

Over dinner we talk about our grandmothers, and how we lost them long before they died.

On the way home, I stop again and breathe in another rose-looser, lighter- full of apricots and gardens and promises.

Day 74

On the late drive home we find red light after red light, but the sky is the colour of coral on the nearly longest day of the year.

Day 73

Tonight I'm embroiled again in the mystery of butter icing which has fascinated me since I was small.
I make it twice, once with coconut and once with lemon, and both times the transformation, from chalky crumbs to satiny cream, amazes me.


It is suspense I can stand, as I always know it will come together in the end, unlike an unbearable World Cup game.

Day 72

All the way home on the train after my sister dinner, I think about meringues and writing.

The huge pink tipped cloud meringue we shared, passing it between us, wasn't nearly as good as the ones we grew up on, perfect every time from our queen of meringues mother.

We talked about writing: how it suits me and not my sister, like a colour we can't both wear; how it is my element, belonging to me, like meringues belong to our mum.

Day 71

In the murmuring whir of the gym fridge, from my exercise bike throne, I watch a pair of white shoes pumping on the cross trainer. The heels don't quite touch down.

For some reason I think of the birds, heavy winged and daring, that wait in the lanes until the last minute before lifting their feather skirts up and away from the oncoming car.

I wonder what it takes to fly: what brain impulse, what muscle flex, what urgency.

I imagine them bending their bird knees and pressing down their yellow heels as the road trembles beneath them.

Day 70

This morning our parsley plant is in crisis, each stalk dropping deeply down to touch the window sill.
I am dismayed. My husband waters it.

Is that what it needs? I ask anxious and ignorant.

Well, there's not much else I can do, I can't give it mouth to mouth resuscitation...

We laugh more than you would expect and all day I am tickled by his quickness and the inescapable image of him kissing each prickly edged leaf back to life.

Day 69 Man versus Nature

From the office window I watch a building being slowly demolished, crunched piece by piece in the clumsy dinosaur jaws of a machine. It is amazing how fragile it looks, half eaten, with the momentous sky showing through.

I remember my little ash tree at home, still there despite the death threat having over it like the ominous power lines, and I imagine its roots rippling like muscles under the concrete.

Day 68

World Cup fever has stormed the streets, maurading like the plague and leaving deep red crosses above doors, windows, and this year even cars.
Yesterday, despite myself, I am infected too and I find myself in the pub, my voice blurred with others, 'Come on!!!' called out in frustration and hope.

Day 67

Yesterday I talked to my aunt, my sister writer, about the alchemical effect of writing on our lives.

We have noticed that on some days, miles apart, we use the same words, echoing each other, borrowing without realising.

And then mystically, hours after our conversation, we both write about necklaces, hers strung with treasured memory beads, mine with motorway cars.

I feel the thread of my life tugged by hers and think again about the invisible strings that join one thing to another, like a darting kite to the hands of a man.

Day 66

All day I look for poetry and find it in the most unexpected of places.

In a Friday night traffic jam, inching my way along the heavy thread of motorway, the cars are shiny heat beaten beads in silver, midnight blue and forest green, at times clustered close, jostling for space on the string of road, then spreading out, loosening...

On the way home, we are fewer, a precious necklace of diamonds and rubies, sparkling in the dusk.

Day 65

Stealing a few minutes in the station bookshop on the way home I crouch down by the poetry shelves. I put my hand on the floor to steady myself and feel the rumble of a train below in the deep belly of London.

They don't have the poet I'm looking for, but on my way out I pick up a postcard instead, reading:

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it... Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being...'
William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets.

At the last minute I panic and think that maybe the postcard wasn't free after all and that poetry, and my hunger for it, will set off the screaming alarms, will brand me a thief.

I keep walking anyway, out into the fast crowds, my head raised, my heart expanding.

Day 64

This morning my husband holds up an unopened packet of biscuits to his eye and mimes a little teardrop falling neatly onto the line where the instruction clearly states Tear Here.

He hasn't done this for years and it takes me back to another kitchen at the beginning, another table where we sat across from one another and discussed the intricacies and idiocy of English spelling.

Even now, he still can't quite believe that tear the ripping verb and tear the drop of salty sadness, are spelt identically.

But are you sure? he asks incredulously as he eats biscuit after biscuit for his Italian breakfast in our very English village kitchen.

Day 63

Today I read back over my writing, choosing entries like lottery numbers, for tomorrow's poetry competition deadline.
I decide which lucky ones will be scrubbed like new potatoes, cut like long-stemmed flowers for a vase, polished like raw gems, until they are ready.

Day 62

All day at work I have a hollow Monday feeling. My tummy is a bottomless well, into which I throw everything I can find: taught skinned grapes, ridged crisps, melting maltesers, all like foreign coins into a wishing fountain but nothing fills me up, there is no echo of response.

I am hungry for something else, for writing, for words, for the time to sift them through my fingers like sand, like jewels.

Day 61

On Friday I made my first strawberry jam, finally finding the fruit and the time to fill the jar that has been waiting hungrily on the top shelf (and 3 other odd shaped jars too).

Despite warnings about strawberry jam being stubborn about setting, something magical happens in the pan with the help of a lemon, and the swirling scarlet lava gets thicker and stickier and slowly, surely solidifies. It must be beginner's luck.

While the jam is cooling in the jars and the house is still heavy and sweet with the scent of molten strawberries the door bell rings. The man outside gets me to sign the death warrant of a delicate but determined tree growing by our steps, which is dangerously close to the overhead powerlines.

We'll have to take your little ash down he says.

At least now we know it's name, I console myself, as I close the door and I wonder if I will ever be able to make strawberry jam again without remembering the death of a tree.

Day 60

Today when I finally get back, my tired toes feel too far away from my knees.

My sweet husbands bends down and tenderly undoes the straps of my sandals which have hot hugged my feet tightly all day, like a promise kept.

As I step out of the shoes and onto the soft snow relief of the carpet, I feel like a contrary cinderella, bare-footed happy to be home.

Day 59

This morning I swim endless lengths thinking bikini. In the mirror while I dry my hair I look at my ghostly skin and promise myself again that this year I won't burn, that I won't become a prickly pink flecked daisy marked by the sun.

Maybe one day it will be fashionable to have skin as white as a mozzarella moon.

Day 58

After work I meet my mum for shoe shopping and doughnut eating.

The doughnuts are sugar on your finger rings, shared on a bench.
The shoes are shiny patent sandals that make my awkward red rubbed feet look sleek.

At home after getting the seal of approval from my very shoe particular husband, I re-read the label 'Good for the Sole'. I am satisfied that they are.

But the doughnuts are a guilty hole heavy in my tummy which only disappears after a trip to the cool humming gym.

Day 57

An impatient day, sun beating through glass, car engine sighing. There is no such thing as a short cut.

But sitting outside in the last of the late evening light, everything slows in a good way. We eat dinner the colours of summer and the Italian flag. Two puff pasty squares heaped with pale coins of courgette, red slippery peppers, silky spring onions and crumbs of salty feta. A little mozzarella melted over the top for luck.

I think how my father-in-law might like this new recipe, this chance meeting of left overs, and I watch as the first star appears.

Day 56

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief.

(The old superstition says that if you count cherry stones, you know who you'll marry)

Today I ate my first cherry of the year, a juicy ruby plucked from the blue glass bowl where it floated.

I remember cherries in Italy eaten like this from a crystal dish of iced water at a sunny table.

I try to resist my old urge to count the superstitious stones. I tell myself that it doesn't matter, that I'm married, that I don't need to control every last thing.

But it doesn't work. At ten I stop and the last cherry, round red surprise, goes pop in my husband's mouth.

Day 55- Carnival

Almost all the day the sky was a grey duvet promising rain. But nobody gave up hope and the parade went ahead, all the colours brighter against the colourless clouds.

We were rewarded with the sequined sun, a real carnival queen, raising a cheer from the crowds. A brief blessing but enough.

And now on the way home, still feeling the beat of samba in my heels, the sky is swept clean again, all except a feather flush of grey, a carnival cloud dancer, leaping, leading the night parade.

Day 54

White feather clouds sweep the early evening sky while we wait for the concert to begin.
I watch mesmorised as men caress the curves and strings of their guitars like lovers, their fingers as light and fast as a wing beat.

Day 53

When I realise that we won't be home before eight and that the sun won't come out in time to light up our patio for dinner, I forget about linguine with asparagus and prawns and a squash of lemon and suggest the pub. We arrive hungrily just in time to fill up our grumbling grumpy bellies for only £3.50 at our old favourite Old Moat House carvery.
We drive home just as the light is dying and make plans for tomorrow's picnic.

Day 52

'As you make your way home tonight, may you pause for a moment to gaze up at the night sky and let you heart communicate with the moon in wordless dialogue. Perhaps you might compose a poem and set it down in your journal entry for today. I would like you to possess such a poetic spirit.'
(Daisaku Ikeda)

Last night very late I forgot to write about the moon.

How it was a perfect gold penny, rolling low just above
the Birmingham skyline.
How it rose majestically all the way down the M6 and the M1,
a light bulb brightening in a dusky room.
How I couldn't my take my eyes off it; a single giant pearl strung on the neckline
of the night sky.

Day 51- Verde Speranza

Even though I have known for weeks that it would happen, I was still unprepared.
I wasn't ready for the view over the tip of the hill; not ready for the bright burning gold turned to pale sage green, in field after field after field.

Our sticky yellow season is over, and even though I will miss it like a sister, I remember that in Italian green is the colour of hope.

Day 50

Remembering three people from yesterday...

A man in a fluorescent jacket, with fluffy hair and cheeks bunched under his eyes, standing at the same rail replacement bus stop as me, tells me yes I’m in the right place. Minutes before, someone, someone young he thinks, has been run over just up the road. We were both too late to witness it, yet we are caught inextricably in the horror of those long moments, eyes fixed on the ambulances, wondering why. He doesn’t get on the same bus as me, but smiles goodbye, sadly.

Hours later in Hackney, a cheery woman bus driver with an open face has half a cigarette at the bus stop waiting for a turbaned passenger to go to the brightly lit shop across the road before she sets off. I’m not taking her bus and she confides in me that she wants to give up smoking. She waves goodbye as the bus pulls away and I notice how it has suddenly got dark.

I just make it onto the tube, last leap through the last set of doors which are being held open by a crooked man on crutches, welcoming us aboard.He only has 64p he says, and I give him the shiny pence that I find at the bottom of my purse. Out of gratitude not guilt. As I get off at the next stop he calls after me have a safe journey home and I carry the words all the way, worth so much more than 15p.

Day 49

After a long journey alone in London I’m finally on the train heading home, eating a strange spontaneous dinner of chilli rice crackers, vanilla maple smoothie and fat sticky dates, bought all in a rush in the snatched minutes before the last fast train.

Day 48

Today should have belonged to writing, as I once hoped Mondays would, but it has belonged instead to other things that had to be done.
I have only stopped to eat.
My left over pizza at lunch, glossy with an extra drizzle of oil to stop it drying out in the oven.
Then dinner, organic salmon fillets- pale shell pink inside, given a golden sunset crust on the grill pan, lying next to the first asparagus of the year, the unsnapped stems still stringy.
Made with lemon and thyme and love by my man, served with my roasted new potatoes, eaten outside at our little table and chairs as the day cools and tomorrow's clouds start to arrive.

Day 47

The moon is a half blown dandilion clock watching us on our evening walk.
We follow a trail of black feathers through the spinney where the air is oven still and out into a sea of yellow green quenched in light.

I point out pale flower bells bobbing at the side of the path, 'Look, they're so beautiful! But I don't know their name...'

'They're still beautiful.' My wise husband reminds me.

Day 46

Today we were tourists in our own village following a new footpath map, treading lightly over carpets of clover and a froth of fallen blossom, lead by yellow butterflies, like winged buttercups.

We search out the rare oxlip, a delicate marriage of primrose and cowslip, and I think I find one, but decide I will check later on Google, the wonderful resolver of all mysteries in our family. (I just have and to my surprise I was right. My Grandma, knower of the names of flowers, would have been proud).

Something about that walk stays with me all day, and I try to be a bit more of a tourist in my own life, noticing each moment that has never been before and will never come again just like that.

Day 45

Outside there are ripples of laughter from the pub, across the night sky, knocking on the window.
Other people's lives all around us, more obvious in summer.

Day 44

Today I was thinking about Day 50 and that maybe I should do something to celebrate. Maybe drink champagne, even though it will be a Wednesday and I am sure I will be busy.

Today we walked through the sticky yellow fields, the flowers towering almost over my head. We reached the centre, the day 50 of the field, and had to turn back. The middle muddy patch there that never dries out was too soggy to cross with my dainty bronze shoes and my husband's ever white gym ones. We had been too much is a hurry to get out of the door and into the sun to think about sensible footwear.
As we turn and go back the way we've come I keep looking over my shoulder, squinting at the glinting water that stood in our way and I am tempted to take a running jump, long and light, defying the laws of gravity and mud.

Day 43

Awake for nearly 20 hours now, my skin paper thin and almost see through with tiredness, I am wilting like wild garlic leaves longing for the deep soil under the sycamore trees.

Day 42

I get home at 8pm, carrying a carefully wrapped tin foil parcel of lasagne, lovingly made by a sweet Sardinian friend. It is an even better gift tonight when I had been wishing not to have to make the risotto I thought of this morning.
We put the defrosted stock in the fridge and turn the oven on and wait for the whole kitchen to feel full up on the smell.

Day 41

This morning I wrote a haiku on the almost last page of a visitors' book, sitting at the same table where our wedding guests once gathered round to decorate the pages of another book, with bright scraps of fabric and verse, for us.

This morning I wrote

Rainbows on our toast-
a breakfast blessing to wish
us well on our way.

and some of my inexplicable heaviness lifted, like the shy sun light coming through.

Day 40

We go on a brave nettle picking expedition- naming flowers, nimbly crossing a rickety bridge, not looking at the bulls. The stings are worth it for the soothing soup we are rewarded with, tasting of nearly nothing but green and goodness.

Day 39- Tables

Before setting out, we linger even longer over breakfast, imagining how our furniture would look in another house, what we would keep, what we wouldn't. I wonder how the long pale table could be perfect anywhere but in the purple kitchen.

In the afternoon we drive deep west under the playful light and the heavy bodies of clouds accumulating while the windscreen is flecked with the delicate bodies of insects raining against us. The honey perfume of the fields and radio 2 follow us all the way and I spot sweaty leather bikers stopping to buy strawberries for sale in the lay by. We discuss how we would spend 86 million.

Later, much later, we gather round, cradling cups of brick red tea and listening to my grandfather, the missionary, the milkman, telling more of his stories.

You don't need a big house, you just need a table big enough to get us all round, he says.

You don't need to win the lottery, just enough for a table.

Day 38

'My head hurts'
'Shall I chop it off?'

We are lying facing each other on the bed, and for a moment I forget the pain and am lost in the thought of how good it would be to have my throbbing head removed, like a wilted rose gently and skilfully dead-headed, so that a new one can bloom in its place, full of lightness.

Day 37

All day, and even when I woke briefly in the night, I have thought of things to write.
Bright snatches of sentences come in and out of focus while I'm busy doing everything else.
But in the end I sit in front of the computer with the promise of writing while my wonderful husband washes up again, and I am lost for words.

It reminds me of spending all day dreaming up dinner, trying out ingredient outfits, and in the end, opening the fridge, closing it, making pasta al burro, a comfy jumper that covers all.

Today for once I'm not tired and I'm not lacking time, but I am lacking courage to sit here for as long as it takes to write what I really want to say.

Day 36

I've always been such a good sleeper, but these days I'm only skimming the surface of sleep and can't seem to sink deep down and bone heavy to the bottom; can't quite let go of my day and let it become dreams.

Day 35

I sit in a long traffic jam on the way home and passing the park at this pace gives me the rare opportunity to reminisce.
A stretch of green and water between two roads, one old, one new, both going in the same direction; rich with memories.
Starting with the tennis court where one obsessive summer I played my best friend every day, rally after rally, never tiring and for some reason never being asked to pay, despite the sign on the gate.
Close by there is the circle of trees, protective and ancient, once a forest to my four year old eyes when I was a princess and my grandma was a king, a wolf, a witch, whatever was needed.
And thinking of her makes me think of the museum, standing guard over the edge of the park, the museum that she made me fall in love with, the only one I ever have.

The lights finally change but all the way home I'm still there, the memories sparking one after the after like the fireworks watched in the park with the people I have loved.

Day 34

Today I changed my desk top photo from a Morrocan market stall to a Magnolia tree in full bloom, from daring stacks of spices the colours of autumn to the soft shell pink blossoms of English front lawns.
I hope Spring will take note and come back, so I can switch off the heating again and stop worrying about our brave tomato seedlings being knawed by the delicate but biting icing sugar frost.

Day 33

I wake up from angry dreams with a sore throat as though I have shouted my way through the night. I have the Sunday blues and greys and it is hard not to waste the day with worries.

But in the end I don't. Sometime in the afternoon the sun breaks through like a bright yolk. And now just before bed, I look back at the treasures of my day: time with my sister over an egg and sausage and sticky-fingered crossiant brunch; a drive into the deep and dreamless sky to dinner with friends, the delight of dark wood chopsticks, delicate bowls of rice, 3 colourful dishes and then mung bean soup, comforting like a pat on the belly, the colour of the fields at first light.

Day 32

All night I dream complicatedly and wake up reluctantly to a dripping colourless world, as though someone has tried to wash away yesterday's painting. Through the half moon window on the way down the stairs I see a plump pigeon, the same shade of grey as the rain and the roof he is sitting on. Who has stolen all the colours?

As we drive west the clouds loosen and I am willing the sun to come. The bluebells at the side of the road are a tender shock of indigo, colour unclaimed by the night thief.

Day 31

After work I nap and then have a bath and the grey light in the bathroom is exactly how I feel, pale with Friday tiredness. Although I am tempted to just make a bowl of spaghetti to go with yesterday's ragu, the way my husband's eyes light up when I say '...or lasagne' convinces me. We make it together, standing at either end of the stove, layering the red and white sauces, slivers of mozarella, fluffy parmesan and pasta sheets. Like making a bed.
Passing spoons, we discover that even after all these years side by side in the kitchen there are still some words we don't have translations for. We exchange them now. Ladle. Mestolo. And I wonder if we will remember them in the morning.

Day 30- Election Day

All day the blossom has blown past the window, restless on the breeze, unseasonal snow.

Today what we can rely on, what we can be sure of, is that there will be a change. Tomorrow we will wake up and even though the glinting gold fields will still be there and the birds will still rise up from the road just before they are run over and my kitchen will still be the same shade of aubergine, something will have changed. There will be a new tilt to the landscape, whether we like it or not.

After washing up the plates from dinner and two breakfasts, I start over again. I make a ragu, a hearty slow cooked sauce that will welcome us home tomorrow, when we will know. The house fills with its smell, brown and familiar, and on the eve of change, I welcome the reassurance of this recipe, known in my bones, never failing to warm my heart.

Day 29

I am out of the house all day and I miss my purple kitchen and its promises and the only yellow fields are from my car window, too far away. It is only very late, walking down dark streets on the way back that I notice the smell of the trees, night blossom like confetti at a wedding party, and I feel home again.

Day Twenty-Eight

We have run out of jam. The many times used marmalde jar is soaking by the sink making me want to fill it and pass it on again, to sit sticky and bursting with sweetness on someone's kitchen table.
But the timimg is all wrong, it is too late for seville oranges and still a little too soon for strawberries and my week is crammed full of other things leaving no space for jam so I buy a glass pot of nutella at the supermarket and put the jar back on the shelf.

Day Twenty-Seven

I stand in the shower as the hot water prickles on my skin and think how I really am not good at gardening and I would much rather be in the kitchen, waiting for my Italian green thumbed man to come in with a handful of forgotten treasure potatoes or a first strawberry promising summer.

While I wait for him to finish off the weeds I go to the kitchen to attack the remains of last night's dinner, finding a gravy tidemark around the rim of the washing up bowl where I'd left the roasting rack to soak.
I try to make my knife and fork like the jaws of a cat, a savvy butcher, picking every last speck of flesh from the chicken carcass; some on a blue plate for a leftover salad lunch, some in a white bowl for a later risotto, some in the compost bin, too greasy and gristly for anything else.
Outside, dandilion heads are falling, severed with a small blade while inside I finish the job with scissors, my favourite kitchen friends that I use for everything from slicing slipperly spring onions to dividing up hot pizza straight from the oven.

We sit down to our green and white salads, perfumed with lemon oil, speckled with sunflower seeds and on the stove the biggest pot bubbles with chicken bone broth, filling the kitchen with a new scent.

Day Twenty-Six

At 6am the house still smells of yesterday's salmon smoke, even after three sticks of lavender incencse, even after a whole day, it is still there to welcome me when I open the front door; a guest that has overstayed its welcome, like garlic in your mouth in the morning. The only thing for it is to roast a fat, hopefully once happy chicken, with a spitting lemon oozing inside, making the oven sing and leaving a new perfume for us to come down to in the morning.

Day Twenty-Five

I'm a quarter of the way through and I'm so happy that I started out on this journey. I have seen my life with new eyes every day, have noticed the sky more, the street more, the stories more. I have been fortunate to wake up from a long and fitful winter sleep to see 'spring exploding onto the scene' (Ikeda) and to feel it exploding in my heart.

Day Twenty-Four

All the way home the sky rains and suns itself but the clouds are too heavy for a rainbow.
We are in the thick of spring now. The infectious yellow fields, the corpses of wasps and bumblebees on our beige carpet; the sun hungry nettles and dandilions, overshadowing our delicate jasmine and proud first garlic.
I keep wanting to stop the car and get out to stand knee deep in spring and breathe in its heady honey smell until I am sticky with it.

But I don't. I keep driving. And write furiously in my head, the throbbing fields over and over again until I'm home.

Day Twenty-Three

I feel like the grey rain and the blue clouds and the moonless sky.
Even wearing my pink poncho doesn't heat up my heart.

It's not until I'm scrubbing the steel sink, and cooking a salty tuna pasta, and noticing the purple kitchen walls sweating with steam that I begin to relax, and feel warmer inside, like the ruby wine in the deep belly of the glass.

And now for the first time in days I'm going to bed before 10 o'clock to my two hot water bottles waiting. One small, brown silk, present from my sister. The other long, large hearted man, promising to stay awake until I get there.

Day Twenty-Two

Tonight the moon floats under the surface of the sky, thin clouds forming a film over it, suddenly reminding me of the plump white mozzarella I bought at lunchtime, floating in it's own plastic pot.

I bought it from an Italian English cafe and carried it with me for half the day in a thin plastic bag, with a fennel salami and six little glass bottles of pear juice.

And all day, I kept feeling happy and wondering why, and then remembering my treasures, small but significant gifts, and imagining home; a pasta with fresh tomatoes, peppery rocket and soft mozarella just melting; the small wooden board with circles of sausage sliced; my husband's smile, touching my cheek, lightly like a pear juice kiss.

Day Twenty-One

Today it would be easy to be defeated. I'm a little bored of myself and my mind reminds me of a blank blue sheet. We drive home late and the the moon, fat and yellow, is burning a hole through the sky, insistent, follwing us to the door and I know I can't give up.

Day Twenty

After work we walk in the long shadowed yellow fields, while at home, pale dough kneaded by my husband's hands slowly swells and spreads in the tin.
On the way back we are walking into the sinking sun and I can't see anything.
At the last minute I turn and notice the paper thin moon fragile against the still blue sky.
Later the bread comes out of the oven, our own moon, almost round, fully risen, with cratered crust the way we like it.

Day Nineteen

On the drive home I imagine dinner in my kitchen the colour of aubergines. When I stop on the road to buy iced caramel coffee to keep me awake, I also buy two lamb leg steaks that I will marinate with garlic and the last of our Morrocan honeymoon spices. As I cross the monotonous motorway miles, away from my beloved soul friends towards my beloved soul man, a long line of ingredients runs past like lamp posts along the road. Rocket. Spinach. Tomotoes. Pine Nuts. Apricots. Cous Cous. Lemon Oil.

When I get home the tomoatoes are finsihed but I find a forgotten yellow pepper and fresh spring onions in the fridge. I chop them with spinach and dress with my loved lemon oil, salt, pepper and pine nuts then stir into the cous cous. A green and golden garden bed for the grilled lamb. A Spring Sunday night supper to make me feel at home again.

Day Eighteen- Afternoon Tea

Today we share a bottle of champagne, the colour of antique gold or ancient wedding dresses, on a bench overlooking the afternoon sea, and laughter rises up, a rush of bubbles and blossom. We lose the cork in the long grass but take endless photos to remember everything else.

And I wonder if someone walking past tomorrow will find it or perhaps they will hear our champagne giggles bouncing off the cliffs.

Day Seventeen

I drive across England in a diagonal line, heading down to the sea and where my two old friends are waiting for me, all the way feeling like a pebble squeezed tightly in the hand of child- treasured long after anyone can remember on which beach or on which summer's day it was first found.

Day Sixteen

In the morning I’m at home and I make bread and little cakes from my huge heart bowl. I think of my lovely aunt who chose the bowl with me, on the same day that I decided to write for 100 days. Last night I read her writing, day two of her own challenge, and I see that on the same day we have both written about our goose bumped bare arms. I don’t believe in coincidences but I do believe in the invisible threads that join life to life, one heart string tugging another.

In the evening I take the train home through London and watch the city skyline sunset, thinking what it takes to make those connections, or more accurately what it takes to make them visible.

Day Fifteen

I've been thinking about how writing my 100 days is like a long walk.

On day one I felt that first joy, that singing in your step that comes from starting something.

The next three days hurt. I would have found any reason to turn back, and every word was hard, like stones in your shoes and holes in your boots and brooding clouds on your horizon.

Then something changed, a wide yellow tipped field opened before me and I was half way across without even realising. If I was a runner I would say I had gone through a pain barrier or that I had found my stride. But I'm not a runner, I'm a writer, so I will say that I went through my first dark forest of shadows and doubts and disbelief and came out the other side; that I found the first notes of my voice.

And then it changes again. A cloud crosses the sun on day fourteen and suddenly I'm self conscious, aware of my bare arms prickling with goose bumps, unsure of the path.

My 100 day walk will be like that all the way of course. Thankfully. What is important is to keep putting one foot in front of the other, one word after the other.

Day Fourteen

Despite my enormous tiredness and the idea that all I want to do is curl up on the sun bathed bed in our room and sleep through from early evening to tomorrow morning, I somehow find the desire to cook dinner. And in the end it is not just any dinner, it is melanzane alla parmigiana which involves many things like slicing purple aubergine into papyrus strips to be fried and blackened and fill the kitchen with delicate and persistent smoke; like layering brilliant red tomato sauce, full of garlic but lacking basil as our plant died again, with the paper thin aubergines, milky mozzarella and drifts of parmesan melting into the dish like snow under the grill. We eat it on top of thick slices of bread, made yesterday by my husband, and think how lucky we are. Like eating in a restaurant I would say, like eating at home would be his reply.

Day Thirteen

After work, we both want to talk, but he wants to sit at the kitchen table and I want to walk.
In the end we do both. First at the table, with our white plates with white shop bought birthday cake, as all the homemade cakes are gone. Then outside, fast over the fields with the sky the colour of bruises, pale yellow, blue grey, the light coming and going and just home in time before it really rains.

Day Twelve

I rescued three squashed pears from the fruit bowl at the very last minute and put them in a pan, peeled and in pieces, with sugar, water and maple syrup, letting them spit and simmer while I rolled out 4 puff pastry circles. Hot oven, pastry circles in first for a few minutes, then pears in a sweet heap on top, brown sugar as a last thought and back in the oven to wait until we are ready to eat them all up with a teaspoon of vanilla icecream balanced on the top of each one and the last of a very good glass of red wine. It is just what I need to remind me to celebrate Sunday to the very last minute as I once promised a good friend I would, rather than be afraid of Monday before it has even arrived.

Day Eleven

We celebrated my husband's birthday, two days late but on the best day of the year so far, undeniably spring for once. A day of kissing gates, and old oaks, and nettle stings and dock leaves growing just by, and lunch outside and a sunny afternoon sleep and a long meal in what we declared our favourite restaurant and a late drive home all the while watching the moon smile.

Day Ten

I cooked butternut squash for dinner and saw that it stained my hands orange and that took me back more than ten years to a little kitchen among the gum trees where I discovered that I could cook all on my own and that I could love a vegetable so much. All those memories are orange, some bright, some fading slowly like the stains on my hands, and some gone.

Day Nine

Today on the drive home, I saw one magpie, just one, for sorrow. For all the rest of the journey I searched for another. I saw bright fat chickens at the edge of the road. I just missed a pigeon as it flew up infront of my windscreen, living dangerously, while I uselessly duck my head on the other side of the glass. I got home and then sat outside in the car and watched two little birds, annonymous brown sparrows, skip and dart in the sunlight. No more magpies, but fortunately I remembered that life is much bigger than our plans and rhymes and supersitions. No more magpies, but fortunately I saw joy, unfurling like the first flush of green over the dark fields.

Day Eight

Today is the day that I almost forgot to write you.
Today is the day that I burnt my finger on the oven, a scar to remember your almost birthday.
Today is the day that I baked almost 30 cupcakes that are almost all eaten already.

Happy Birthday for tomorrow my love, I will wish you 100 days in the morning.

Day Seven

Today, fortunately, I remembered that life is best in the living of it not in the thinking about it. It is best in the dancing in the kitchen and the careful chopping of broccoli and the stretch in my muscles as I run up the stairs. And although sometimes we might want to be the kite, soaring and dancing and chasing the wind, it is also wonderful to be the kite flyer, feet on the ground, fingers in the sky.

Day Six

One wasp freed from the kitchen window,
one wasp rescued from the stairs,
one wasp too late, lying listless in the little turkish bowl on the sill.

Spring is unfolding in the house of the birds and bees.

Day Five

Today with an old friend we look at photos of other people's weddings, drink a bottle of prosecco slowly and eat chocolates from one of our many boxes and I think how some things are constant and some change and both are good.

Day Four

Tonight I only want to write about dinner, that we made together while dancing in the kitchen and laughing at each other. I want to write about the little squares of Italian cracker spread with cream cheese and flecked with smoked salmon and black pepper, served on one of our large white square plates, eaten outside, our first antipasto al fresco, with a rosé wine in my birthday glasses. Then elegant trout fillets grilled with lemon and fat chips, all odd sizes as I never was any good at even chopping, and rocket dressed only with the lemon oil that I’m in love with, that I could drink for breakfast or pour over ice-cream, and more rosé, the colour of the trout. Then grapes, a deeper shade of red pink to finish, like the sky darkening outside.

Day Three

It would be so easy to give up. It is after 10pm and it would be so easy to slip out of my two day old rhythm of writing and in between the white sheets that I tucked tightly around the bed this morning.

When I got home after work I found the first fat bee struggling in the middle of the living room floor. I know there will be more, like there were this time last year. Or perhaps it is just the same determined bee, coming back again and again to be rescued.

Before even closing the front door I got the dustpan and brush and swept up the relentless bee, heavy with sleep and spring, and threw him out into the sunshine, where he landed on his feet.

I don’t know how long he had been there before I found him or how close he was to giving up. This time he didn’t. And fortunately neither did I. Somehow I managed to sweep myself up and throw myself out into the sunshine and maybe I will still be there tomorrow morning on my feet.

Day Two

On the way home I start to think about what to write. Going back over my day, like reading back in a book to remember exactly how you arrived where you are.
I think about what we will have for dinner and whether we will sit outside for the first time. I think about what I will do before anything else when I walk through the door. To my surprise, it is writing.
A list of today:
Going for walk without a coat for the first time
The brown fields on the drive home, familiar and marvellous
The smell of hyacinths as I open the front door
The sunshine through our bedroom window
Not noticing time passing
Feeling really hungry as I wait for him to come home for dinner and make myself hungrier reading recipes-butternut squash, pistachios, pastry- from a shiny magazine, and then hungrier still with my dreams on an empty belly.

Day One- Il primo giorno

DAY ONE- Il primo giorno
The first day is actually the third day as I wanted to start this two days ago! But I know it will always be like that, there will always be an excuse, a drawer to clean, a bed to go to early. I can’t wait for a day without these things as it will never come. I need to start now, on an ordinary April day, no anniversaries, no auspicious magpies, no more waiting.
Apparently Beethoven’s motto was “No day without a line” (From For Today and Tomorrow, Ikeda,p.210)
No day without a line. So every day for a hundred days I will write at least a line. I will battle that part of me that says I can’t, that says I’m too tired, that says there are more important things to be done. Right now, nothing is more important than to do what I have said I will, to be true to my word and the next one and the next one, as they slowly but inevitably appear on the page.
This morning we opened the Seville Orange marmalade and shared it on a piece of toast. The marmalade made by my sweet aunt and left in my kitchen as a gift just before my birthday. It had been waiting, full of perfume and promise, for a day like today. Any day is a good day to open a jar a jam, any day is a good day to sit down and start writing. No more waiting.
I noticed that, not that by chance, the marmalade jar is in the same jar that I bought from a shop in Cagliari more than four years ago for my first time peach jam made for the love of my life. It is the same jar that I carried to England when we came back, full of another batch of summer jam, and paid dearly for in excess baggage worth every penny. It is the same jar that I filled with golden jam made from a bag of yellow plums bought from our village fair and gave to my aunt for her birthday last October, the morning after my cousin’s wedding. And now it is back on my kitchen table, full again of jewelled fruit, and making me smile with memories and what is still to come.

A Birthday

On my thirtieth birthday my English and Italian friends and family held up plastic champagne flutes filled with pink spumante in a toast.
Cheers!
Salute!
100 di questi giorni!
I’d never heard this Italian expression before despite my Italian husband and being in love with Italy for nearly a third of my life.
It took another long loved Italian to tell me, the same friend who always reminds us to dab spilt champagne behind the ears like perfume; a giddy blessing for good fortune.
Cento di questi giorni...
It means ‘100 of these days’. I imagine 100 more birthdays, celebrations, days to remember.
I have kept the words in the days that have passed since, beating in my head like the endless onward march of spring coming.
There is something about every day being a celebration: not needing to wait until St Valentine to say I love you; not needing to save the champagne until we are rich; not needing to keep the rose petal jam for a special guest.
There is always a feast in our lives just waiting to happen. Pull up a chair, put out the purple napkins, do something with the leftover plums.
100 days. 100 things to celebrate and more more more...