under another sun

First of the month, and a big day. After the full Guernsey breakfast, I mooched off for a walk leaving Lorraine sunning herself by the pool. On the way to St Martin's graveyard, I was accosted by a woman in her fifties who asked me what I was photographing and lots of other questions and she told me where she had been to school in England. In the graveyard I browsed among the graves for people I knew. There are several there including Gwen and Dave of course, my grandparents. I moved on after a while and then went into the graveyard where I had a lengthy chat with the man who looks after the place, and keeps all the lawns trim. Friendly bloke and we talked about the recent lack of rainfall and so on. Afterwards I remembered a dubious character called Graveyard George who I used to speak to when a child. He smoked lots but always respectfully tipped the ash into his hand and put it in his jacket pocket.  Back to Lorraine and after a bite to eat, caught a cab out to the west Coast to...

Busy being poets Richard and I spent the day in the company of Rufus and Holly the Highland* Terriers. We were discussing important matters such as our Guernsey Doubles collection while driving around Guernsey. A day wandering free as birds about the island is one that's hard to beat. Joan Ozanne had invited us in for coffee. She is a genuinely fascinating woman, a mine of information with a speed of thought, and twinkle in her eye, which completely belies her age. She introduced me to some work by Denys Corbet , another Guernsey poet of the nineteenth century, and told me about a play she was writing set in Costa Rica. She said she'd lived in her house almost all her life, apart from when she joined the evacuation, as a teenager, just before the Germans came. Her father had hastily buried liqueurs in the garden, and found them years after the family's return, still drinkable. We then sloped off to The Farmhouse, a place new to me not far from the airport for lunch of incr...