Our Shakespeare’s Birthday/St George’s Day Jaunt to Tupholme Abbey; followed later by visits to the bookshops of Horncastle, including The Most Dangerous Bookshop in the World (Tim Smith Books).
Ranin and Chelsea selfie
Frank thinks of Britt Ekland
Joel looks at a pond
We eat pizza
This is another pond
Ranin gets to go into an English field
Photos from the Fourth Lincoln Drift:
“Who You Looking At?
Weird Beastie Looking On.
There’s more to this than meets the eyes (ie, you can see two students reflected in the window).
At the back of student flats.
You may be having a coffee but you’ve still got to write something.
That includes you.
How to look studious in a secondhand bookshop.
It always ends with cake. Today, for Ranin’s birthday.
HOMECOMING
I take the Romany’s sprigged heather,
tuck its pink tight buds curled like
baby fists tight as a talisman,
blue with longing, into my bag.
I am pierced mid-flight
by a hint of traveller she sees
within – an Irish woman
on the grandmother side,
Ellen Glancy unschooled, catholic
in tastes and religion,
pawned her soul for potatoes
that lay rotting, bleeding
into darkened sod.
Her pilgrimage to England
and Alfred, then retracing steps
to Enniskillen for the wedding,
returning to peg washing
not in a whipped north-easterly
which cut the souls.
Back across grey waters
fretful and choppy, till her own
broke a tidal wave, her firstborn.
Homesick for emerald patches,
a mercurial sky tilting meniscus,
struggling for freedom.
Iron rain lashes my face,
her slashed smile a rent petticoat.
Merging the troubles one with another,
I take her hand in mine,
it lies still but warm, without
need for words.
*****
BOLSOVER CASTLE
I stride the battlements; crenelated Portland stone,
Sheer five hundred feet below grassy fields.
A twenty-mile fish-eye panorama of peaks;
Arkwright’s Sutton Hall, Bess’s glass Hardwick.
Beyond receding greens to softened hues, greys
Through anthracite, slate, to a sooty-blue meniscus
The wind moans the miles, traps whispers in
An ancient avenue of limes to the riding stables, keep.
I descend eroded limestone steps, scoured clean
By tides of serfs; stranded in landlocked Derbyshire.
by Susan Flower (alumna 2010-2011)