Summer is a comin' in

Summer is a golden-haired girl dragging a favourite muddy stick across the Heath. 

The entire Heath.

Summer is a pixie in a polka dot dress with fete glitter on her cheeks. 

Her sister dreams peacefully under the protective embrace of last season's tree,

as she stirs mud puddles with purpose.

Summer is a lot like that opening scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, except without any boring history books.

Eating sand and punching art

I recently took the girls to the Tate Modern. They were not impressed.

After punching an installation (Ali), I thought it best for us to make hasty exit. I should point out here that no actual damage was done to the museum, or to the kids.

Art imitating chaos, or chaos imitating art?

So we meandered down the riverside, wobbling on cobblestones and struggling over stairs with the Death Star buggy until we happened upon a truly wonderful thing.

The South Bank Centre is celebrating sixty years since the Festival of Britain by littering the riverfront with sand and beach huts. There's an exhibition, a freebie postcard photo booth, and even a giant bulbous purple cow (some sort of performance area).

There are free and paid events going on throughout June and July, and there are unusually helpful people floating around the area to tell you all about it.

So if you are in London over the summer and aren't sure what to do with the kiddies once they tire of smacking modern art, I highly recommend a stop by the South Bank Centre. It's not every day that you see crumbling '50s British seaside reconstituted under the watchful shadows the London Eye and Parliament.

The girls ran wild on the mock beach for hours, filling their ears, noses, throats and pockets with sand. But they didn't stop there - they sailed on a speedy boat to a magical island with a cake and ice cream shop on it, where lucky customers can opt for 'extra sugar please' when ordering.

The SS Extra Sugar Please.

It was a wonderful day, and their imaginations were firing on all cylinders and exploding into space. I was left smiling like an idiot and humming that old Morrissey tune.

I frequently gripe in smart-arse and whinge in hyperbole about ketchup-spatter and sleeplessness. But I'd hate to give the impression that I'm totally oblivious to what I have: big picture happiness constructed of a million petty annoyances. My great burden is my great joy.

I get to spend my days in the close company of my beloved sand-eating art-punchers. I can't think of a greater blessing.

This week at Chaos HQ

We've been living under a Charlie Brown cloud, jumping puddles and stopping to smell the roses.

Raindrops on rosebuds.

How is your week?

Snakes in the grass

My time on this island began in Oxford nearly a decade ago. I arrived in my early twenties with my beloved by my side and not much else.

I quickly discovered the particular fish-out-of-water-feeling that comes with landing on foreign dirt - like that first cold step outside after a swim - a lonely, shivering kind of uncomfortable that starts at the pores and ends up in the bones. Thankfully (somewhat) temporary.

Travel with me alone towards Iffley. 

Like many before me, I discovered that England is expensive. Especially Oxford. Especially since we were already broke. So my beloved and I cultivated free hobbies, like walking.

One day we left Jericho and wandered into Port Meadow, an ancient common northwest of Oxford. We passed The Perch, the Trout (pubs), the ruins of Godstowe Abbey and kept right on walking. Quite unplanned, we walked 35 miles that day. By chance we bumped into a self-proclaimed recovering journalist called Linda Ellerbee who was trekking the length of the Thames for her 60th birthday (and later wrote about it). She walked with us for a while before hitching a ride on a narrow boat. It was from her that we got the bonkers idea to walk the length of the Thames, which we later did.

Return to dust. 

Iffley lies down the Thames Path in the other direction, south of Oxford, past Christ Church Meadow. There is a 12th century church there called St Mary's. It is so old that the faces protruding from the stone have returned to blank slates. Accross Iffly lock, there is a meadow, and in the springtime the meadow is full of an unusual-looking native flower called snake's head fritillary.

Rose by another name.

We spent our two Oxford springs searching out snake's heads in the grass; skint, foreign, blessed with companionship and sturdy feet. A less lucky twenty-something called Keith Douglas wrote this about Iffley four years before he died at Normandy in 1944:

What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle and I will hear
and come another evening, when this boat
travels with you alone towards Iffley
as you lie looking up for thunder again
this cool touch does not betoken rain
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly. 

This ramble into yesteryear's photo album was inspired by Flashback Friday, hosted by the lovely Cafe Bebe.

This week at Chaos HQ

It was too wet to play.

My favourite post from recent days.

22: Turtle doves

Advent day 22 has landed, after circling around The Gallery (thank you Tara at Sticky Fingers).

Joined at the lip. 

Birds, like fish, tend to be aggressive jerks when it comes to dating. You couldn't, for instance, bring a mallard drake home to meet your mum. But a handful—doves, robins swans, eagles—form couples.

I identify with swans. Mostly because they are grumpy. They are also territorial, belligerent, structurally incapable of being useful before noon, and mostly useless after that. They are defensive, nest-proud, and they shout at anyone who looks sideways at their kids. They eat all manner of murky pond gunk, and appear to communicate through a series of honking and farting noises. 

Muddling through the pond-scum of life together. 

But swans are also graceful, deliberate, unflappable. They are loyal unto exhaustion and they love unfailingly for life, only opening their wings wider to allow for ugly ducklings. Which is to say, swans also remind me so very much of my other half, Papa. 

A strand of three (or four) is not easily broken.