A month of green
Eating like a water buffalo
Hello friends
Before you know it, here’s June rolling in. A month of light. A month of green. A month when everything suddenly erupts with growth after the long, long cold darkness.
For a moment our garden looks like a real garden, not just a brown thicket of dead twigs. In a sudden rush the flower buds are opening and soft green leaves unfurling, each one briefly perfect. Soon enough, the next gale will leave them tattered and browned at the edges for the rest of the summer.
Sluggish bees, still feeling the morning chill, nose among the comfrey as I go to let the hens out. From the depths of the dog rose our summer resident sedge warbler is in full voice, ratcheting and rattling non-stop from his hiding place deep in the thicket, then darting away to shout at the world from another angle.
This late, cold spring means everything is behind. Our potatoes are just poking their first leaves through the soil and the carrots haven’t even germinated yet. But somehow the growth always catches up. Plants suck in the endless light of this month and turn it, miraculously, into food. Each blade of grass hoists itself out of the ground towards the Sun with such rapidity you can almost see growth happening.
June is a month of salad glut. The lettuces seem to double in size from one day to the next. Each day we pile great heaps of leaves on our plates, sharp with lively, peppery flavours that make supermarket salad bags taste like old soapy dishwater. We are eating them for all we’re worth, chewing them down like hungry water buffalo, before this lot bolt and there’s a hiatus before the next sowing really gets going.
June is also a month of music, when choir rehearsals for the Festival Chorus annual performance during St Magnus Festival, right at midsummer, are in full swing. This year we will perform Mozart’s Requiem, to which I contribute a quavering and amateurish soprano.
For a requiem, it’s a rambunctious sing, lots of emphatic forte, fortissimo, and galloping fugues that twist the tongue around the Latin words. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi we roar, trying to sound as stern as the last judgement. These final few rehearsals are where we get to really blast it out, learn the dynamics, tighten our diction, polish the rough edges off, and learn to perform the piece rather than just get through it. Hopefully. We did it before nine years ago, and, misreading the conductor, the whole chorus came roaring in on the Rex! half a bar before the orchestra. Oops.
The cool grey skies of Orkney come as something of a relief after the heat of the last few days, spent in the south of the country. London was a swelter. My lily soft feet, stripped of their insulating layer of thick socks, were rubbed to shreds by my seldom-worn sandals as I pounded the streets. But, it must be said, sashaying out of a warm evening to dine at an outside table and watch the splendidly gorgeous young people of the city laugh and talk and drink together was a rare treat.
Rarer still was the treat that brought me south in the first place: the final performance of Benjamin Britten’s Opera Peter Grimes, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Set in a run-down coastal town, Peter Grimes is a fisherman ostracised by his community when his two young apprentices die in separate accidents, the rumour mill goes into full swing, and the mob start baying for his blood.
This production has a contemporary setting. Concrete walls, discarded traffic cones, plastic fish crates and an abundance of tattoos suggest somewhere downheel like Jaywick. At the back of the huge Covent Garden stage, a plain slatted screen of horizontal lines like an Agnes Martin painting suggested the presence of the sea or a steel screen rolled down over an empty shopfront, depending on the lighting.
Peter Grimes a dark, unsettling tale of a complexity and ambiguity that has kept it turning in my mind long after the curtain fell. There were thrilling moments of dynamism and power when the stage filled with the full chorus romping and yelling, baying for Grime’s blood, and then the exquisite restraint of Allan Clayton singing the spine-tingling “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” with his back to us, his forehead pressed to a closed door in an introverted gesture of despair. (The linked clip is the same singer, same opera, but a different production)
Grimes’ first dead apprentice returns to haunt him as aerialist Jack Horner, tumbling through the air in grubby oilskins like a drowned fisherman rolling in the deep currents. He is as much a premonition as a ghost: Grimes is hounded from the village, takes his boat out to sea and sinks it, out of sight of land. As the sea closes over Grimes far offstage, the townspeople go about their business again as if nothing has happened, a chilling and anticlimactic end that lingers long after the curtain calls and clapping are done.
John-Paul Stonard writes, of this same performance:
Making Grimes the victim does not take away from the psychological complexity of the tale, but rather places that complexity on the community, rather than the individual. And in so doing a great message is put across. We cannot give in to communities of outrage. We must talk back with ever-renewed strength against those who wish to profit from our fear.
Yes to this.
He also notes:
The sea is the prime dramatic force in Grimes. Relentless, stately, horizontal, shimmering, full of mystery and a deep power that is also a great spiritual force.
Spiritual forces were also in evidence when I went along to see the paintings of the Baroque Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán whose work is brought together in an exhibition at the National Gallery. Fervent saints, knobbly lemons and sacrificial lambs leap from starkly lit canvases that hum with the zealous energies of the counter-reformation. It’s an astonishing body of work for a man who died at just 29.
And that lamb. Standing in front of this painting you feel you could sink your fingers right into that fleece. There he lies, awaiting his fate. Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi.
I’m back in my studio now, letting all this sink in.
Around me the sea, as ever, is relentless, stately, horizontal, shimmering.
I pick up my brush and try to respond, as best I can.
Join the Life Raft Creative Co-Working Session
Come and join me in the studio while I pick up the threads again. You are welcome our creative co-working session every Wednesday from 3 pm to 4.30 pm UK time. It’s very simple. We say hello, share what we’ll be working on, then leave our cameras on and work together in quiet companionship for an hour, then sign off with a quick check-in chat. That’s it! If you miss a session or can’t make it live, a recording is usually made available to paid subscribers (though not this week as I was away.) You can find them in the subscriber chat HERE.
until next week!
Sam
Wonderful post Sam. I went back to bed with cuppa to enjoy it. Thank you. I love your writing.
Really enjoyed reading this, now have garden room envy. Ours would be too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter to house all those plants. Just returned from a hectic week of island exploring, long walks, crazy wind and sea, sea, sea on the Orkney Islands. Although I’ve been several times before your homeland never fails to disappoint. Whether I’ll have the stamina to go to London to see the Zurbaran when I visit my brother is another matter. Happy painting!