When I go for my early morning walk I sometimes don’t see a soul, or maybe just a figure in the distance. From time to time I might meet a someone coming the other way. We will greet each other, perhaps even have a brief chat. But this morning I was walking up the hill and where my path merged with another I found myself suddenly side by side with a fellow creature. We strolled quite happily together, talked about Hamlet, and then our paths diverged again.

The merging paths stirred a distant memory.

I was on the back seat of a stuffy little Morris 8 somewhere in France. We had been somewhere in France for many, many hours and been lost several times. It was very hot and I would have liked to have stuck my snout out of the window, but it was only allowed to be a little bit open, just enough to get rid of the petrol fumes, but not so much that it made a draught. I couldn’t inch it down further because it squeaked and gave the game away. A chap at the office had lent Papa the car. Mama was navigating.

Still, all the discomfort in the world couldn’t undermine the treat I had on my lap: the Green Book of Puzzles, given to me by Great Uncle Mole, and now I had hours and hours to immerse myself in it with no-one asking any more of me than that I should keep quiet.

I was trying to nut out a particularly challenging pictogram when I heard Mama saying that we should be coming to a fork in the road. Perhaps it was the pictograms and their incongruity that gave me a sudden image of a giant silver fork stabbed down in the middle of Route N74 as if it were mere mashed potato.

‘Is that “une fourchette dans la rue”‘, I asked with all the puffed up pride of an eight year-old mole who has just done a term of French. Mama said she had no idea. She was turning the map upside down. Forks were now the least of her worries. She had to work out how to circumnavigate Chalon. We seemed to be heading for Lyon instead of Geneva.

‘Nearly’, said Papa, who was rather more interested in linguistics than driving. “Fourche de routes”. A fourchette is a derivative of fourche from the Latin furca.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. And I was still none the wiser as to what a fork in the road might mean.

I asked.

‘It’s a bifurcation. Or perhaps…’. He paused. ‘Perhaps it could be any number of divarications’. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror. His eyes had taken on that dreamy look he had when his mind was elevating itself above the dreary business of everyday living.

Mama suggested he should concentrate on where we were going.

A fork in the road, whether literal or figurative, should be an exciting thing – an unexpected manifestation of options, but for me they more frequently present unresolvable dilemmas. I come to a standstill and go no further lest I take the wrong route. This afternoon I spent a little time with my snout in Great Uncle Mole’s O.E.D., trying to convince myself that if only I understood forks a little better, I would be able to resolve my fear of them.

Fork is a very old word, but then I suppose pitch-forks are very old tools. And strangely, it is the older figurative uses of the word, the ones that are obsolete, that most accord with the sense of unease I have about forks; the way they pull the rug of certainty from under your paws. In 14th century courts, witnesses whose testimony was contradictory were said to be forking. In the 17th century a forked fee was a bribe extorted from both sides; a forked argument was one that was deliberately ambiguous, or one that contained a dilemma. If you stumbled over a word, or used the wrong one, you might say your tongue was forking. In other words a fork is a deceptive trap.

But when I resurfaced from the O.E.D. and allowed myself to ponder again about my morning stroll, I realised that there was indeed a different way of looking at a fork. The path I had taken was not the handle but a prong and what I came to was a confluence not, as Papa would have put it, a divarication. Is there some way I can turn my fork phobia on its head? Can I trust, somehow, that my fellow prongs will do what needs to be done without my meddling, and that we shall come together in the palm of the fork with complete synchronisity?

We have been visited by deliciously unseasonal weather. Today there is snow on the mountain and a pelt-tingling antarctic breeze outside my burrow. Perhaps it will make the anticipation of Christmas more real. One of my dear molekin sent me an advent calendar this year, too. It transported me back Christmases past. Every year we celebrated the tea-chest ritual at the parental burrow. With a lot of huffing and puffing it was hauled up from our notorious cellar and was plonked ceremoniously in the middle of the parlour. The lid was eased off with the claws of a hammer and then, with as much restraint as possible we dug out baubles and paper-chains, tinsel and lights, flinging the wood-shavings onto the carpet. And our mama would retrieve the advent calendars She could never bear to throw anything away, and so they accumulated, year by year. They were displayed, precariously, on the curtain pelmet, obliterating the photographs of her children.

The more I ponder about advent calendars the more I appreciate what wonderful inventions they are. They draw out the pleasure of anticipating a major event ahead, and they also encourage us to savour each day as a separate entity. They are a rather splendid model for planning. Had we mole-scamps given a second thought to the old advent calendars, we could have opened a window for every day of the year, several years even – reflected, too, on years past.

It was this remembering the past through the provenance of each calendar that made me delve back into old murmurs. This, it seems, is the 50th murmurs of mole, and I thought I might turn it into a sort of – well not exactly an advent calendar. Over the last year you have accompanied through highs and lows, seasons and idle thoughts and writing hiccups. And you have been introduced to several members of my extended and scattered family. It seems only right that they should be gathered together as the year draws to an end. Imagine, if you can, that each of the twenty links of what I shall call my reflective calendar is a window back into their lives. Unlike an advent calendar the sequence is unimportant, allow your curiosity to take you anywhere you might like to revisit.

It all began a year ago with a snout and a little exploration. -1- I took you to St David’s Cathedral to ring the new year in. -2- And I first introduced you to Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty as they changed their calendars. -3- These two were such steadfast influences on my early life, and remain be a great source of inspiration and succour. We explored encyclopaedias with them -4- , and played with maps with Uncle Ratty,-5- if not being taken on his wild adventures of the mind, -6-. We met Mathilde, Tante Mole’s terrifying companion from Mulhouse-7-, learnt of her courage -8-, and how she returned from the grave -9-. Even more alarming was the neighbour Trelawny, -10- whose field held a tale that haunted poor Great Uncle Mole into his old age -11-. Uncle Ratty’s tempestuous sister made a brief appearance -12- , as did the not so subtle Mr X and his narcissistic brother, the amateur psychologist Cousin Ezekial. -13- We have not seen the last of them. We dug even further back into the life of Molex whose life was transformed by a lantern slide show -14- , And came closer to the present with Grandpa Mole -15-And Grandma Mole who adored colour -16-. I introduced you to my familiar Monsieur Boo -17- , contemplated his life under the oak tree -18-and bade farewell to two friends,-19- and -20- in winters that make today feel like a heatwave.

It has been quite a year – but would have been nought if you, dear readers had not been anticipated, and might have faltered without your support and encouragement.

Thank you.

Although my paws have been on the ground my snout has been in the clouds. The chimp arrives to pick up the post in ten minutes – but, alas, murmurs is not yet ready to go.

My apologies.

I was moseying about at the market the other day when I overheard a comment about how in the zen of archery a mole is to aim beyond the target. It stuck in my mind because I find targets and goals and endpoints rather forbidding. They become bigger the closer you get to them, so big that the concept of beyond becomes entirely obscured; so big that it is much more comfortable to stay where you are than get any closer. But if you were to focus on the space beyond the target, well then it would shrink back down to a gentler scale and, who knows, it might that you pass it without even noticing.

Had I been a less inquisitive mole, I might have wandered up to the nearest hill, taken up a lotus position and pondered this thought for a while, allowing it to seep into my being. Over the next week or so I might have brought the thought to life and put it into practice. I might have seen whether diminished targets lost their ferocity, whether I felt more courageous about approaching them, whether the far blue yonder (now visible) drew me on.

But I never can leave well alone. I decided to do a little digging, and soon began to think I had rather got the wrong end of the stick. For practitioners of Kyūdō, or the Way of the Bow, the target is seen not as a destination at all but as a mirror of one’s intentions. The archer is not shooting to hit the target. Hitting the target is a result of one’s right intentions. More than that, it is the result of a selfless alignment between heart, arrow, movement and the natural world. And each time the arrow is raised, drawn, and shot, it is done with such singleness of purpose, with such preparation, that it might be crowning point of one’s life.

This required even more pondering.

I thought about it when I lay under my doona last night, when I moseyed about on Knocklofty this morning, and over my banana and walnuts at breakfast. And it filled my mind when I was practicing Qi Gong in my weedy garden, especially in the second movement in the eight brocades when a mole takes an archer’s stance and is asked to draw the string of the bow back past its ear.

The intention has to begin long before the raising of the bow. You have to discern the target, distinguish the false from the true. As Zen master Torei says, ‘If the target isn’t right, it’s not even right if you hit it’.

I still want to ponder my first impression, to think about seeing the world beyond the work I am trying to complete, to see an afterwards and a broadening out. I want to breathe deeply, not freeze in fright as ends draw near. But I also want to go deeper into right intentions, smooth alignment and giving the moment its own life.

It was so cold last night I unfurled my second doona. This morning when I was dazzled awake by the late spring sun, I could feel a little bit of Antarctica strafing my snout. And then, when I strolled up Knocklofty, there was Mount Wellington glowing with a generous dusting of snow.

We are three days away from the beginning of summer, and I am filled with unseasonable zing.

I am beginning to wonder whether the indecision that sometimes assails me originated in the move I made to the antipodes all those years ago, and never quite being able to reconcile myself with the inversion of seasons. The chill of this morning gladdened me not just because I thrive in the cold, but because my Anglo-Swiss soul is appeased. It knows it should be heading for winter, that November should be drawing the autumn to an end, and that it should not have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from spring into summer. My Tasmanian body, though, is alert to the burgeoning vegetable patch, roses, raspberries and early daylight. It tries to persuade my retreating soul to lighten up, mingle, stay awake, eat lettuce, be more vocal, and spend more time with friends.

The hemispheric split is not unlike the disjunction that any being who has been uprooted from familiar territory battles with; the constant to-ing and fro-ing between our own lived lives and the tendrils that hold us to the past and dear ones whose lives continue elsewhere. The way this makes us feel both plagues and enriches us. It ebbs and flows. The hemispheric split has no such nuance. It is defined by its opposition and that opposition is directional.

I know in my mind that we are all heading in the same direction – that just as night follows day, summer will follow spring, no matter where I am, but the hemispheric split creates Spring/Autumn, Summer/Winter as dichotomies. And I feel as is if my soul is heading in one direction while my mind is heading in the other. No sooner does one thought or feeling enter my mind, when its polar opposite presents itself in equal measure.

Is it any wonder that I so often find myself in such an agony of self-doubt?

These last few days I have spent what might amount to hours squatting under the oak tree, occasionally weeding my new vegetable patch with my good paw, but often just listening to the rustling leaves and pondering. It might be hours, but time has been irrelevant. My familiar, Boo, when not hunting skinks, has been nestled in a pile of lawn clippings beside me.

A dozen or so years ago, when I had just embarked on a big work, and I was moseying my way down to the university, I decided to take a short cut through a piece of wasteland. The grass was so long it tickled my snout but what drew me in was the sight of blackberries so luscious, that they dragged down the branches that held them. My eyes were entirely tethered to the prize and I narrowly missed stepping on a fledgling oak. I knew that any day soon not only would the blackberry bushes be slashed but the grass scythed, too, and that this little oak would be decapitated. We moles are good little diggers and I had it up in no time. I rummaged in my rucksack for my notebook, ripped out a page, origame-ed a cup to hold my new protégé, and headed off for the university. The blackberries were all but forgotten.

I planted the tiny oak thinking of Great Uncle Mole who had not long since died, and remembering the big oak near his burrow that shaded us from both sun and rain when we had our picnic treats. Pies and hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and relishes and shrimps (outside food was always so different from – and so much better than, – indoor food); we would eat ourselves into a stupor. And at the bottom of the hamper, for after the very last crumb of fruit-cake, there would be a book wrapped in a linen drying-up cloth. We would settle our backs against the trunk of the great oak so that Great Uncle Mole could read out loud while Uncle Ratty slept off his stout. My absolute favourite was Argonautica and the story of Jason and his ship, the Argo, that had the gift of prophecy because it contained timber from the sacred oak of the oracle at Dodona. ‘This tree’, Uncle Ratty would say, one eye opening from his snooze, and his paw knocking at the bark behind him. ‘This oak was grown from an acorn from that very tree.’ And then, as night follows day, Great Uncle Mole would tell him not to tell such porkies.

Finding the oaklet felt like an auspicious start to to the big work I had ahead, if I could keep it alive, that is.

I hadn’t really thought of the practicalities. My burrow isn’t on the kind of grand estate that can easily accommodate an oak or three. Perhaps I didn’t have much confidence in its survival. My record for keeping plants alive has not been good, but this oak is a pretty sturdy tree now, perhaps some twelve feet high. It will no doubt become sturdier, spread its branches further, cast shadows over neighbours’ gardens.

And there are now eleven baby oak trees rising in the vegetable patch under its boughs.

I look at their brave, spindly little stems and imagine 17th century ship-builders eying them up for their curvature. It took about 700 oaks for the Dutch East India Company to build its ship Batavia. By the end of that century of trade and exploration, Europe’s forests were mere shadows of their former selves. They reckon on an oak needing to be at least a hundred years old before its timber can be considered, but I am not thinking of harvesting. I can’t even bring myself to weed them out now.

And there is another life in the balance just now, one that takes a great deal more pondering as I hunker under the oak tree. The purring familiar nestled on the grass clippings is wasting away. I have to decide whether to intervene or let be. At Dodona, the priestesses listened for the oracle’s pronouncements in the rustling leaves of the oak tree, and I know it is in the timelessness of this little spot in my garden that my decision is being made.

What is it that is so beguiling about silence? Retreating for nine days has only made me value it more. It wasn’t really silent. My listening was, if anything, more acute than usual. Feeble though they are, my little mole-ears became fine-tuned to the sound of birds cooing, cawing crowing, chortling; wallaby tails thumping; gravel under paws; ticking; traffic hums, roars and screeches; corduroy rubbing against pelt; bubbling, lid-clattering boiling water; dogs barking; toast-crunching; my neighbour filling a watering can, and wind straining the hinges of the window. The kind of silence the retreat provided was a wordlessness. I neither spoke nor got spoken to, I listened to no wireless programmes. I admit that once or twice I lifted my pen, allowing a word or two to escape into my journal. On the other hand, I eschewed all reading – all except one book, that is. I allowed myself to leaf through and absorb Warnscale,* one landmark at a time. It is a book that uses words in a painterly way, sparingly interwoven with drawings and maps, peepholes and photographic vignettes – each word inviting layers of thought rather than pace of progress. When my retreat came to an end and with it the book, I felt bereft on both counts. But a retreat cannot exist without its counterpart, a re-engagement with life, and that was also what the book was working towards.

When I emerged I felt no inclination to read, could not imagine what might be as nourishing. But then I felt a weight as I swung open the back door. My neighbour had hung a bag on the handle. In it was a book she had borrowed from the library: Shaun Tan’s Sketches from a Nameless Land.* Perfect.

The Nameless Land is a country Tan evolved for his book The Arrival* about a decade ago. The two words in the title are the only ones used. And it is crucial to the impact of the story that this should be so. The story is very simple. A refugee lands in a strange place and has to makes sense of it. In a series of exquisite drawings, some grounded in familiar photographs of forced migration, some fantastical – with strange codes, animals, foods, and transport systems of the new world. The wordlessness and strangeness forces a reader into the same bewilderment as the refugee.

It is a bewilderment that clutches at me somewhere between my chest and my throat, and hurls me back to a time when I was plucked from a life in which I was quite an articulate wee mole, and deposited into one that was completely incomprehensible. At the school in this new place I understood none of the rules, had no idea about codes of conduct. I knew none of my fellow pupils nor their language or the language in which were being taught. A blank sheet placed in front of me remained blank. I did not understand the instructions, nor had I the means to express any thoughts. The playground customs were baffling, the games a mystery. The only thing clear to me was my position at the bottom of the pecking order. It was terrifying. Too terrifying to even to pique my curiosity in the way the refugee in The Arrival takes in his new world.

But The Arrival calms me, too. Deeply calms me. I feel understood by it. Because it has no words there is an egalitarianism about the experience. Its depth was enhanced even further a few years ago. Lying on a beanbag in a wharf shed – the kind that refugees and emigrants are corralled into like cattle, – I watched images of the drawings projected onto screen while Ben Walsh & the Orkestra of the Underground played an especially composed accompaniment.*

Why is it that I spend my life at a desk wrestling with words when it is images and music and movement through the landscape that move me?

Is this what is so alluring about the silence – that it quietens my word-heavy world and allows my other senses to surface?

*Louise Ann Wilson. See my post Paw Prints, 2 October 2015
*Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006), Sketches from a Nameless Land (2010)
*The Arrival – Shaun Tan, Ben Walsh & the Orkestra of the Underground http://youtu.be/ZSV3T3X_IHY

I was lounging in a cane chair and nursing a glass of stout in my paws when the subject of railway tunnels came up. It was Monday night and we bellringers were gathered at our usual watering place, a kind of faux Raffles opposite the Cathedral. On the gramophone Vera Lynn was promising that we would meet again but I knew I wouldn’t be there the following week. I was heading off for a ten-day retreat.

One of our number had been traveling English waterways and was showing us photographs. Dead straight canals in the Fen country might have been lifted straight from Dorothy Sayer’s Nine Tailors, and the morning-mistiness of a lush river in Bedfordshire would have made Uncle Ratty weep, and me too, on his behalf. I don’t know whether it was the stout, or Vera Lynn, but when the very last photograph came to the fore and showed not a boat or a canal but the entrance to a disused railway tunnel, I was suddenly transported back to my youth and an outing with Great Uncle Mole.

I had rather been hoping to accompany Uncle Ratty who was sailing off somewhere with a chum to salvage bells and lamps (and treasure, I thought) from a village that had long been lost to the sea. Walking along a disused railway line with Great Uncle Mole seemed a very thin second prize, and I have to admit I was more than a little disgruntled.

We had been strolling for a couple of hours. It was hot and I was eying the old gas mask case he was carrying. It contained lemonade and madeira cake. I knew because I had seen Uncle Ratty pack it along with his own. Because I had already asked Great Uncle Mole once whether we mightn’t stop for elevenses, even though it was now well past noon I didn’t dare ask again. He droned on and on about the merits, or otherwise, of different gauges and the stability, or otherwise, of rolling stock. ‘One track mind’, I muttered. At that time puns seemed to me the finest form of wit.

Suddenly he stopped dead and poked about in the long grass with his walking stick. …’Aha’, he shouted with the enthusiasm of Archimedes. ‘Look, Moley, Look!’ What I could see was a rusty pipe like thing.

It was a switch, he said.

Oh, I thought.

But then as he told me what it was for and showed me how to throw the lever, I was no longer looking at bits of metal and difficult sums. I was on a train, travelling through the countryside. How would it be, I wondered, to be sitting with your bucket and spade and all geared up for a holiday in West Wittering and, unbeknownst to you, some trickster threw the points and had you hurtling towards Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum? Or, for that matter, how would it be if you were handcuffed between two guards and suddenly found yourself building sandcastles or collecting shells?

Oh to be that trickster.

How old was I then? Fourteen or fifteen perhaps. In those days the gleeful impulse to throw the switch would have far outweighed any thought of the consequences. Now that I am edging perilously close to Great Uncle Mole in years, I would have said my default position was avoiding decisions and sticking to the route I was already on; that I would not dream of throwing the switch on my track or anyone else’s. And were someone else to throw a switch on my track, I might have imagined myself clasping the plush seat with both paws, eyes fixed on the wrong landscape hurtling past the window, and worrying myself into ghee about all the implications, real or imagined, that this turn of events might have in store for me.

So I might have thought, but I find that I have greater equanimity than I expected. I had long been preparing myself for my retreat. I was anticipating with every hair on my pelt its silence, its attic room with a window overlooking the gardens, its beach, its all-meals-provided. I had well nigh packed, created a roster for watering, emptied the fridge, and organised a lift.

It was cancelled.

I didn’t collapse into a little mole-heap.

Instead, new vistas appeared before my eyes. My burrow transformed itself into a retreat. Coloured pens slipped out of their cases and wrote lists of small pleasures. The hands of clocks removed themselves so as not to be held to account. Cancelled appointments were firmly turned away from re-entering themselves into the diary. Knocklofty awaits longer walks at stranger times. At midnight tonight my contraptions will switch themselves off for the duration. Not even a murmur will be transmitted next week.

The switch was painless.

Yesterday lowered. Grey cloud suffocated the landscape and held moisture like barely suppressed anger. It was one of those days that feels mis-struck and I was in a grump. I couldn’t decide what project to work on, whether any was worthwhile. I vacillated, berated myself for vacillating and vacillated more.

In the end I decided that as I was in a grump anyway I may as well do something I really didn’t want to do. The task I alighted on was one I had been putting off. It required a great deal of paperwork. And because I had at one point decided that the papers I now needed were history and had nigh consigned them to a bonfire, my approach to filing them had been so anarchic, even Kropotkin would have been impressed.

I set my snout into an attitude of pained martyrdom and set off for the cellar.

There is in my cellar a bewildering array of trunks and suitcases, Gladstone bags, orange boxes, crates and tea-chests. They would have to be clambered over and hunted under, and peered into. All of them – at least nearly all of them.

But not the box that I discovered behind Great Uncle Mole’s old skis. It wasn’t large, but what it lacked in size it made up for in ornamentation. In rather crude disregard for its fine detail, Uncle Ratty had stencilled M O L E X. I know it was Uncle Ratty because this was his nickname for Great Aunt Mole. Not my great aunt, but Great Uncle Mole’s. Great, Great, Great Aunt Mole to me – but well, that was too much of a mouthful even for Uncle Ratty. He called her Great Aunt Molex because she had been excommunicated by some of the more stodgy members of our family. The story handed down by the more liberal of my mole kin – who, it has to be admitted, were at times rather more inclined towards effect than gospel truth – went something like this:

One night during a storm of Biblical proportions, when Great Aunt Molex was quite a wee thing, there was a great thumping at the door of the parental burrow. When, after some to-ing and fro-ing about no mole in its right mind being out in such weather and the racket surely being thunder and wind, her papa grumbled out of his chair and went to investigate. He found a bedraggled shape in a sodden cape with what looked to be an enormous hump on his back. The creature was beckoned inside, his cape removed, a large box with brass fittings revealed. He was thrust into the chair just vacated and invited to warm his paws on the fire. Soup was produced. Molex’s mama went off to make up a bed. They all had a brandy, even Molex though hers was watered down. Now warmed and oiled, their visitor told them he was a traveling missionary raising funds for the China mission. And as he was clearly not going to reach the metropolis that night why didn’t he by way of thanks for their most generous hospitality, show them his lantern slides.

It was long after a wee mole’s bedtime, but Molex sat on a pouffe in the dark transfixed by the missionary’s sonorous voice and the lurid and graphic scenes of heathens unfolding before her. She was seized with such a passion that her future was sealed that fateful night. The years passed agonisingly slowly for Molex until, at barely eighteen, she ran away from home and boarded a ship for Macau.

Needless to say the box marked MOLEX was a good deal more compelling than the search for my papers and I carried it upstairs to my study. The lid was tightly fitted and it took some manoeuvring with the paperknife. As I prised it open the wood squeaked with such pain that some creature might have been trapped inside, but what escaped was a strange smell somewhere between musk and ginger. The few belongings that had been sent back were wrapped in emerald green silk and tied with a tassle. On top lay a black-rimmed card announcing her death in Canton. Beneath was a collection of coins, minutes of the 1876 and 1878 meetings of the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Prevention of the Opium Trade, some cuttings from The Friend of China, a dictionary, several notebooks and carefully wrapped in more silk, bound concertinaed bamboo slips. Between each fold was a sheet of paper filled with Great Aunt Molex’s sloping handwriting.

The Chinese characters on the slips were a mystery to me but I soon detected from Great Aunt Molex’s words that what I had before me was a version of the I Ching, and I remembered that it was not her disappearance to China that had caused Molex to be excommunicated, but her various acts of sabotage against British government officials sanctioning opium imports, and her abandonment of Christianity for Chinese philosophy.

The more I read, the more I became convinced that somewhere within this vast work of translation lay a message from the impassioned Great Great Great Aunt to her lily-livered descendent. I gathered the coins together, rattled them about in my paws, and placed them on around compass points: K’UN, then K’AN – combining to the hexagram SHIH, the army. Five yin lines and one yang: ‘Everything is correct. Nothing will go wrong if the leader is wise and experienced’. If. My line of change told me the army had incompetent leaders. Either the commander had lost authority, or the army has too many leaders, and chaos would ensue.*

I sat among the open trunks, the suitcases and tea-chests and their scattered contents, and pondered the effects of too many projects, over-reaching ambition, lack of direction. A small piece of paper, an offcut, fluttered from the folds of the bamboo slipped as I packed it back into its silk wrapping: ‘Do not rely on the confusing advice of many’.

Time to grasp this life by the mettle. Like Great Aunt Molex.

*Martin Palmer, Kwok Man Ho, Joanne O’Brien, I Ching (1986).

It must have been a year ago – almost to the day. Some chums and I were traveling through the countryside. The sun was shining, the fields were green and the hills a bluish purple in the distance. Our trip had been planned some months before; our destination was about an hour away in orchard country. An old apple pickers’ hut had been converted into a workshop and there were going to spend the day cutting away at lino and printing our images. There was a sort of end of term feeling in the car as we tootled along. We were chatting away when one of our little band said: ‘And look, all the Roadies are out’.

For a moment I thought that she meant the toads of this world, the gleeful speedsters and terrors of the road, although it has to be said that the other drivers seemed as sedate as we were. I waited for more context and soon gleaned from the opprobrium in her voice and the pleasure her comment was giving the others it soon became apparent, that the Roadies she was referring to were in fact rhodies, the rhododendrons that bloomed splendidly in the gardens we were passing. Forty years on this island and I still haven’t picked up the lingo.

I know it must have been a year ago because today on my stroll I saw a rhododendron in full bloom.

It took me right back to the first time I heard word ‘rhododendron’ – so grown-up and mysterious. It was taught to me by my dear Papa. We drew out its four syllables, as if it were a chant like the sinister ‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…’, which was the kind of shanty Papa seemed to think was just the thing for small ears. We must have been staying at his parents burrow, I think, where the garden was filled with rhododendron bushes of every conceivable colour.

Although it was Papa who showed me how to enjoy the shape of the word, it is but a shadow of the memory I have of Grandma Mole when I see a rhododendron. Her name was Rhoda and her moleself and the flower are stored side by side in my mind. So they should be. Grandma Mole relished rhododendron colours: bright reds, oranges, pinks, purples. The primmer members of my family thought these colours clashed, but to Grandma Mole whose senses had been enlarged and saturated in Rajasthan and Kashmir, they became the expression of her liberated and generous heart. She wore big splashes of crimson and fuchsia and tangerine; adorned her walls, her curtains, her chairs and sofa with scarlet, magenta and lilac; poured Assam tea from a rose and carmine and gold teapot into matching cups. The magnificent rhododendrons in the garden brought Srinagar to their little Surrey burrow.

What these rhododendron bushes brought to me as a small mole was a place to go that was all my own, a sanctuary. All I had to do was part the dark the leaves with my paws, crawl inside and I was hidden from the world. When I was a little older and had discovered torches, I would head for a rhododendron bush with a book. It was dark and woody and often damp. It was heaven.