Tag Archives: Quantock Hills

Our son was born in the Quantock Hills, and we lived there for a while, in a place where Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry was inspired … that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill …

England, the green and pleasant land a link with Blake’s words on screen. This older version made me smile. In case the link won’t work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaJ4b0XYmI

Green hills come with grey skies. Endless weeks of rain leave me melancholic. Then I long for sunshine & hammock days, when fragrances of jasmine and honeysuckle linger until midnight, friends gather round a fire, tea-lights twinkle in trees, a glass of wine or two, or three. This year, sunshine flips to rain almost daily,  green overwhelms as jungle that needs mowing, trimming and hedge-cutting. I’m left wondering if the rare sunny day is worth all the effort and contemplate a Mediterranean lifestyle.

Years back, after three months of filming in a desert – swift sunsets, brilliant stars, marvellous moons, scorching hot days, cool nights, stark and beautiful – I returned to a lush and sensuous Bavarian autumn – myriads of colours, the smell of moist earth, mist, the sweet water of ponds soft on my skin, different kinds of dreams – such a contrast, it made me think how powerfully our temperaments are influenced by climate and weather, in ways we experience ourselves, in ways we feel and think, in ways we express ourselves, write poetry, compose music.

Countries with balanced climate are rare, so it’s unreasonable to expect people to be balanced and temperate. And would it serve us, I wonder? Would it make us too complacent?

We’re not machines. Each of us has a unique frequency, intricately bonded and tuned with nature’s whorls and spirals in continuous movements of renewal and becoming. I concede, even a single balmy summer’s day brings a smile and restores my senses – blue flowers swaying in the breeze, reading poetry in my hammock.

So I dream of sunshine, but too zealously. As in Plato’s myth of Er,  variety and extremes seem to turn the spindle of necessity and stimulate the imagination. What we commit to in life encounters grit – stuff that grows pearls in oysters and also polishes hearts. And there is the grace of precious moments, when seasons overlap in us, when all our senses are switched on, and the young, curious self, with its eternal projection into the unknown, imagines the unimaginable …