Times, Tides and Saint Trillo

Calendar – June

Just look around and see a miracle.
Its brow quite smooth, the sky is bright. It's noon.
There's a gold crest, now, on the stream and all
The acacias by the roadside are in bloom.
With diamond body a big, devil-may-care
Braggart of a dragonfly is writing
Signals that flash on the bright summer air.

Miklos Radnoti

I was going to say that for the past month or so I've been living in a very different time, but there's something innately absurd about such a statement, even if when I thought it, it seemed to be truthful. How can we live in any time other than now? Our thoughts, feelings and imagination may not be concerned with what is happening around us, but that does not mean we are somewhere else – or does it? In the grip of some summer fever, with the chill of autumn bedraggling the nasturtiums, just when they're about to burst into glorious reds and oranges, my mind is not too sharp right now. Time seems to have many scenes and acts, characters and centuries, and when a friend of mine said years ago that he dreamed that time was a sphere, that felt profoundly right. So much can be within a sphere, not just in terms of right or left, north or south, perimeter or centre, but all the 'places' in between. So many layers of it.

Nestled in between the surface activities of watering plants and watching them grow, of watching cats watching mice,

of short journeys into a sunny city, [where I had a rare sighting of the famous headless seagull ] I've been editing a book that describes the years of the Hoxha dictatorship in Albania, hence the 'different time'. There's not a lot of humour in it, so I was glad of a bit of light relief when the writer, Fahri Balliu, described the mourners at Hoxha's funeral.

'The mourners were paid out of the state coffers. They were paid up to 200 old leks if they scratched their faces and tore their shirts, 150 when they sobbed, and in some special cases they were paid more if they managed to break into the queue of weeping mourners. …......[These] scenes full of various plaintive and mournful characters would have been the envy of Dante's Divina Commedia. '

Between the end of the editing and the beginning of the fever I took a train to Wales, where I saw a preview of F's film about Albanian immigrants in the UK. It will be shown in Albania first, and then translated into English when it will hopefully find an outlet here. But all this will take some time. It was a gloriously sunny week-end, and I caught the last performance of Re-Act Theatre Company's hilarious Charity Begins, written by Sylvia Jenkins. The following day M and I went to Colwyn Bay, strolled by the water, and discovered the Chapel of Saint Trillo, said to be the smallest church in Britain. It is built over a Holy well, which is still there, and is said to have healing properties. St. Trillo apparently came from Brittany, but apart from that, I haven't been able to find out much about him.