cyclamen

the weather today is weather from childhood. the sun drifts in a daze between grey clouds which litter the sky, its warmth ebbing and throbbing slowly, stretching the fingers of a hand out as rigid as possible before it fades back to grey and cold, and the wind blusters. 'I am still here', it says, but everybody has those days where all they can do is just glide from noon until dusk.

this was weekend weather. those weekends in late winter, those weekends with nothing to do but sit and be. back then window-panes, double-glazed, would block the cold of the wind and crystallise the warmth of the sun as you lay on the carpet in a golden parallelogram, or on the black and white linoleum checker-board of the kitchen floor. the thrum of the washing machine, and the reassuring sounds and smells of a mother doing What Needs to be Done. from the garden, beyond the glass, would emerge a father, knees dirtied and numbed hands turning the dishwater brown.

in those moments the sun defers to the clouds, something feels lost and the Light feels far away. one must fend for ones self at these points, glad for a transparent shield from the cold push and pull and rip of the wind. in Hyde Park, there is no such protection - it whips the hair around your head and dry chestnut brown leaves skitter across the path.

the Round Pond is surrounded by a fence and birds of all sorts throng, ducks limboing under into the water. sparrows skip and hop, tumbling over one another; mallards show only their hind-feathers as they bob for food in the shallows; a moorhen dances a side-to-side skip in a puddle; swans and geese view everything with a suspicious eye; and a grass-green parrot darts across the water. the biggest of them all, a yellow digger, rumbles around the banks with long neck bent to the ground.

by the Orangery, there too are tawny leaves, but these do not graze lost and lonely across the concrete. they are the silvery-brown leaves of the beech hedges, and they hold freezing but dignified onto their branches, chattering like a rainstick - not wielded excitably by a child, but ponderously by an adult in reminisce.

close by are the hazel arches around the Sunken Garden Pond, clipped and waiting for the sun to break from its malaise and bud, then shoot and cast dappled shade upon the path below. for now they hold nestled at their base clumps of purple cyclamen and sprouts of crocuses.

these were there too, in childhood, just like this. planted years before, perhaps even before you were alive, at the bottom of the garden, on a day like today. each year they would gather, vibrant and cold all at once, regal purple hats and solemn silver-embroidered leaves, to stand beneath the apple-tree and nod in the wind.