Half-Eight-the-Hour Declares the Steeple
Half eight the hour
the Steeple declares ...
Hey mum, can I go blackberrying?
It’s dusk and I saw some really ripe ones
on the lane cycling back ...
I can?
Great!
Thanks.
If I get a good bowlful
You can make us all
your amazing blackberry-and-apple pie
and in return …
No … honest … no catch…
You’ll let me do an hour war-gaming
on Dad’s Mac?
He said I could
but that I had to go through you ...!
Fantastic Ma!
Give me 40 mins’
and I’ll be back
before the steeple strikes
the quarter hour!!
Hey, Barley, come on beauty
We’re going blackberrying
Yes Ma... got the lead!!!
Afterword
Where I live, I can walk the country lanes as I did 60 years ago and pick blackberries as I wind my way along the track, and I live within a quarter mile of the village steeple that strikes every quarter hour.
Some things remain in place despite the upheaval of this present world. Barley is a little older now, but Willow makes up with an abundance of youthful exuberance! Barley and I are content to toddle across to the Meadow via the footbridge across the pond, and then to return through the large flower bed where slates have been nicely laid in a way that suggests they just, sort of, fell into place. We call that Barley’s path! It means she doesn’t have to negotiate the chippings on the drive.
In August 2024 Barley departed and in my mind’s eye she and Amber still dash around the hedges and in and out of the undergrowth. The seismic departure of Tansy so young in the same month reminds us all of what anyone feels when a child is taken.
It is now March 2025. Willow now proudly heads up three youngsters, Hengist (Tandy’s brother from the same Litter) and now Isla and Magnus.
Life continues. We must never give in even though, at times, the world seems to be very unworldly. Every generation experiences this in every century. The one constant is Nature.
11 March 2025
(23 December 2022)
All Rights Reserved
LIVERPOOL
© 2025 Kenneth Thomas Webb
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Barley : Cornwall, May 2019
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
