Hello,
And welcome to Issue 3 of TheMagazine. Yes, the second one to come out during March and another relatively short one. Which I’ve decided is my preferred way of things from now on. Shorter and simpler editions of whatever ideas come to me while I’m out walking around. Which I’ve written some more about in this Issue’s “Back Page” after other articles about the allotment and, well, Nat King Cole.
Ronnie
One Day
Early in the Springtime
Just over two years ago I wrote a very short post on here called “I think that’s it” after a satisfying afternoon at the allotment. And this is another very short piece of writing after most of a prefect day thinking the same thing in the same place. Written while it’s still the day I’m talking about, Monday 18th March 2024. A sunny blue sky springtime of a day, when it wasn’t forecast to rain and it didn’t.
I began the day extra early, up more or less with the dawn and out for a walk before breakfast. Something I’ve been doing each morning for the last several for reasons of let’s just call it happiness. Not a long walk of my eight to ten miles variety, just local. And when I got home from it the coffee and breakfast tasted better in that “food outside” way that camping breakfasts always would.
Afterwards I was getting ready to go out again, over to the allotment, when Sarah said she’d be coming over there too. Later on when she’d finished some work. And that’s when the best part of the day began. The part that’s got me calling the whole thing perfect. I spent the rest of the daytime there, Sarah arriving for a big part of the middle. While hours passed, loads got done and even more planned out, in peaceful contentment.
I’d been briefly at the allotment the day before and had told Sarah when I got home, that so much was pushing its way above the soil it was like a switch had been pulled to turn the springtime on. So I’m glad we were both able to be there together today. In all that primal energy, it’s sudden perfection.
Hours later, happily tired and ready to start walking home, I looked back at what I’d written about that similarly perfect allotment day two years ago. I’d said:
*“I’ve been perfectly happy working on this little piece of land with these tools this afternoon. As if maybe this is all I want to do now? Look after my life, this plot of land and the people I love. I think that would make me perfectly happy. I think that’s it.”*
And it was and is pretty much all I want to do. On days like today, when a switch has been pulled to turn the springtime on.
Some Unforgettable Inside Songs
For When I Really Needed Them
I’m writing this the day after I spent two hours in a hospital expecting to learn I would soon be having heart surgery to replace a defective valve. In the event and to my intense surprise and relief the day’s expected surgery news didn’t arrive, though I’ll explain more later. But first I want to talk about Nat King Cole. Who turned up yesterday with a whole concert of inside songs (I’ve mentioned what they are back in Issue 1) exactly when I needed them most.
I hadn’t listened to him or even thought about him for several years. But yesterday, in between turning up in Outpatients, having my weight and height checked, then waiting to see the cardiologist, it was like Nat himself came in, sat down beside me, there in the Broadgreen waiting room, and sang me every one of his most popular songs. All except for “Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer” which I never like and asked if he wouldn’t mind skipping. But all the rest. Songs like:
Unforgettable
When I Fall In Love
And Stardust
…were the absolute best balm my worried soul could have asked for, right there and right then. All inside me with every word remembered for exactly when they were needed. And when he got to the end of the 20 or so songs, and I knew from the nurse I’d be getting seen very soon, Nat did an encore of “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” at my special request. So that when I walked over to the doctor’s office...
“My homeward step was just as light as the dancing of Fred Astaire.”
And everything was ok. Much better, anyway, than I’d expected. So much so that a while later, as I was walking away from the hospital, Nay King Cole didn’t need to come with me. Because by then my more usual “moments of unexpected happiness” inside song was able to take over. Meaning I walked home humming along to Weather Report’s jumping for joy “Birdland.” But it was Nat who’d seen me through til then.
And the “explain more later” I said I’d tell you?
Well my defective aortic valve is still defective and may very well need replacing before very long. “The problem is mechanical and so the best solution would be mechanical” the doctor said. But not now and not yet does it need doing. Because the latest test results show the condition of my heart has not deteriorated over this past year. Which might not sound enough for a sudden outburst of joy to you, but after my past year - of falling, breaking, worrying and waiting - it was. Moving on, as I now have, from expected heart surgery” to “careful monitoring.”
Thanks to the careful and constant care of the NHS. Accompanied on the day and in the place where they were most needed by a whole collection of Nat King Cole songs that, it turns out, are living unforgettably inside me.
Photo Gallery
Walking…
Allotmenting…
And contemplating eternity. It’s been that kind of a month.
The Back Page
They’re Only Words
Before finishing this issue I wanted to explain the line of words I’ve now got decorating the beginning and end of The Magazine this time. The display called “walking, reading, listening and thinking.”
These are the simplified version of a much longer set of words I’d set out for myself when I first had the idea of what The Magazine might be about. A set of words I’ve come to think are “a bit much.” Because they’ve got in the way of, rather than helped my writing. By their implication, if only to me, that I might be about to write regular and individual articles on all these things.
When I don’t actually want to. To feel obliged, say, to write a philosophy article because I hadn’t done one for a while. I can’t come up with things like that.
Because although I’m interested in all those things above my great joy is the way everything I end up actually wanting to write about turns up in my mind or on the streets when I go out walking. Which is why the new and simpler set of words are more like the process, or the practice i go through to write.
I’ve always admired and been slightly jealous of what artists and spiritual people call their practice. And wished I could find one of my own. Their practice, it seems, being how artists and spiritual people describe what they’re for and carry out what they believe in.
My practice then, it turns out, is walking, reading, listening and thinking. Which I worked out, as is only right, by walking. Along Princes Avenue, round the corner onto Croxteth Road, then along the Smithdown end of Ullet ‘til I got to the lights at the crossroads and thought “Yes.”
So these are it. A simplified description of what my writing is about. And an encouragement to me to keep on doing what the words say. Especially now walking is officially good for my health.
And I know they’re only words but, as the Bee Gees once beautifully sang and said, words are all I have.
Ronnie,
Liverpool,
Date 2024
Previous Issue here
All contents ©Ronnie Hughes
Thanks for this and thanks for the three gifts,Ronnie! . I have given one to my daughter,one to my nephew,and one to a Dutch friend who lived in Liverpool for about eight years and loved it here. Happy Easter to you and Sarah xx
Thanks Liz.