When We Were Very Young

Looking kinda crazed and blurry after an epic crab-apple-jelly-making session

I am prepared to wager that the entire readership of this blog consists of, by elapsed time at least, adults. If you happen to find yourself skimming through this collection of words, I reckon your birth year predates 1996. Not that this is an 18+ blog, of course. You won’t find any age-restricted content buried within the prose (although you could argue that some pictures of my courgettes breached parental guidelines.) It’s just that the youth of today have better things to do than follow the witterings of a man who is (a) not famous, (b) not fashionable, and (c) can’t sing or dance. In fact they probably consider blogging a sadly old-fashioned means of communication - static text and pictures, limited interaction, with updates only once a week. Why don’t I have a live-feed of my life streamed to my personal website, replying instantly to all your tweets and Snapchat messages however inane, irrelevant or illicit they may be? 

In Aberystwyth earlier this year I was strolling through town with a couple of friends and we realised it was Fresher Week. Fresh-faced students were prowling the place in packs, searching for the cheapest bars and the opposite sex. With a sickening thud my gut contracted into my kidneys as I realised that these students had just been born when I graduated. Some hadn’t even been born. And now here they were, “adults”. Ok, perhaps that’s stretching it a bit.

Picture postcard moment

Many of you, being proper adults, will be familiar with the stresses of all that entails these days - pressure at work, families to provide for, houses to repair, Christmas to prepare for, and a rapidly changing world that seems on the brink of collapse. Finding time to savour the small joys of life can seem impossible. And yet at the risk of sounding like a self-help book, it is in the noticing of the small things, the beauty in the commonplace, that can rekindle in us a sense of wonder. A thin crescent moon. An icy puddle to jump in. The intricacy of a cobweb. The variety of tastes in a single mouthful of your dinner. We all experienced these things fresh when we were small. 

The Common Room hearth 

Next to Pilsdon’s church there is a beautiful gnarled crab apple tree, perhaps six metres high and even more wide, and until last weekend was laden with beautiful red and gold fruit, each not much larger than a cherry. We laid a tarpaulin underneath, fetched a ladder and a big bucket, and shook the branches as hard as we could. It sounded like a heavy hailstorm as hundreds of crab apples plummeted to their deaths. Sara and Lucretia* climbed right up into the tree to give the higher branches a good going-to. Below I occasionally got a crab apple crack on my head.  It was a lot of fun. Over 25lb of fruit filled our bucket, the weight of an average two-year-old. Later they filled our preserving pans and muslin cloths as we converted them into 22 jars-worth of sensual and translucent light red jelly. 

You will often find me on the Common Room piano

Pilsdon offers the chance to do the things that adults often find themselves too busy to get round to. Painting a picture. Listening to a Winnie the Pooh story being read (as part of our Advent discussion group series - you have to be there to get the link). Making a pottery bowl. Playing Scrabble. Sitting in the herb garden to watch the sunset.  I know that outside Pilsdon it can be harder to find time to switch off from “being an adult” but that doesn’t mean we can’t. Next time you see a climbable tree, you know what to do.

A mass weaving session in the Common Room. It will eventually form a woven nativity scene.

* not their real names