Imageless Images

Sadly, due to computing issues, we have no pictures this week.

As an anitdote to a rash of paved over drives and solar lamps, at the end of last summer, I planted a blackcurrant bush, picked up cheap at B&Q.  It is now beginning to burst its buds: green and yellow leaves unfurling from the pink buds like indoor fireworks, or the newspaper palms we had to make at this time of year, every year, for Palm Sunday.

1980: Already, the golden vegetable and fruit age of the suburb was dying, but I didn't see it.

I have started considering the world of Folk Suburban window sited ceramics, blasting & blessing as I go.  This week I wish very much to blast! a display of off-the-shelf vases I have seen in a window round the corner.  Alternating are Superdrug-pink and white vases, in strictly equal number.  I am imagining these have been bought, all at once, and for a 'look', with no real care whatsoever.  No piece or assembly is important, and will be gone again in a year when the colours 'go out'.  They stand opposite the remains of an ancient orchard, marked now only by a wall.
I beg leave to bless!, however, a nearby china robin on a ceramic mound of rubble, painted green on the top part and with Happy Christmas picked out in gold and white on the lower.  The robin's breast is too red, and its wings too brown, but this robin, sitting in a windowsill as it does all year round, I only presume was given with care, and is thus proudly displayed.

News reaches the Folk Suburb of the final landing of the space shuttle.  A metal model of this lives in our house somewhere.
I was drawn to remember the evening of the first landing - it was a summer's evening, I am sure, where the sun shone low, pale yellow gone to white through a slightly misty haze of tired heat; stuffed with gnats.  We were playing a game, I remember it well, of attempting to chip-land a football on the rows of haysweet cut grass in the park.  It was already turning grey, from lying there so late in the day.
The sky, I remember, was clear pure blue; maybe with a 'plane streak in it, I'm not sure.  I'm sure my mum, washing up in the shade of the kitchen, would have warned of chopped up dog shit being in the clippings.

Lateish - and people are disappearing inside to watch the shuttle come in to land. The light rushes silently out from the old lanes.  We stayed in the park, with the gnats, chipping the football.