I write a lot about weather in my blogs. Mainly I think because there is a lot of it about. I am surrounded by weather here. The big skies, the scenic views, the hills and dales, are all a playground for the weather.

Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wind’ describes what it can be like:

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Just going out to get coal and wood for the fire can be exhilarating, or a battle, depending on how one is feeling at the time. In his poem, Ted Hughes had to get coal:

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up –

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guy rope,

Though I’m not sure I’ve had my eyeballs dented, probably because I’m not daft enough to look up into the storm. But I have been nearly blown over and the car doors taken off when I’ve opened them to get out of the car on arriving back after popping out to do a bit of shopping.

There seems to have been non-stop wind and rain for the past few weeks. My friend from London is coming to stay for Christmas, which will be very nice company, but I hope the weather eases off a bit otherwise there will be a week of them staring with horror out of the window at “The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,”.

There’s been a few fine days to break up the seemingly constant battering of wind and rain. Some spectacular flaming orange gold dawns and sunsets; and some clear frosty nights. 

One of the clear nights was during the Geminid meteor shower. There are supposed to be two or three shooting stars a minute and I stood for a while in the white frosted grass of the garden looking up hoping to catch sight of some. For whatever reason I didn’t see any. Whether I was watching south when the meteors were north, or east when they were west, is impossible to know. Or perhaps for the quarter hour or so that I scanned the sky there just weren’t any by some quirk of the randomness of the universe.

The stars are always there though. Even if we can’t see them because of cloud and rain. So I picked out the constellations I knew from my childhood, Orion and the Big Dipper, and gazed at them. There’s often a tawny owl calling near my house, but the night was completely quiet as I watched the stars.

When the cold eventually made me return indoors to the fireside I took advantage of the internet and downloaded a star map to my ‘phone so that I could find the constellations that I didn’t know the names of. And there in the map were the planets as well. Jupiter, the largest of them, clearly visible if you knew where to look.

I had intended to write today’s blog about my father. My therapist tells me it’s something I have to deal with. Find a pathway to some sort of forgiveness, try to see things from his point of view. Let go of the pent-up anger and disillusionment. Instead, I got distracted by the stars.

Do you ever find a way to distract yourself from the thing that you know you actually have to confront?

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member

Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wind’:

https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2013/09/02/lifesaving-poems-ted-hughess-wind/