Scrumping in Four Acts

 Act 1 – The Crime

 Scrumping, if you are six years old is an adorable, forgivable thing. When you are 64, it is simply a crime; I had noticed the plums as little green knubs long before they had filled out and ripened. I planned to take a picture, post it on Facebook with a witty line, but never did. The theft was premeditated.

            A letter written and needing to be posted, and the plums dangling over the walls. It was inevitable.

Act 2 – Regret

It wasn’t my tree. They were not my plums. I was not six years old. What I wanted was legal access to the tree. I wanted to be invited in to pick the plums. Truth to tell, there were none left my side of the wall that I could reach. I might not be six but being 64 was no guarantee of height.

            I uncovered a scrumping poem, printed it off, folded it carefully and put it in an envelope. The plan was to present myself on the doorstep, explain my actions and hand over the poem.

            No one answered. I retired to the pub on the corner, settled down with a soft drink and set about writing on the envelope something of the history of my scrumping days. I posted it.

Act 3 –Invitation

‘Thank you for the amusing note and poem. We are so pleased that you were able to get a few plums- you can come and get more if you wish. In the next couple of days, we will be harvesting and freezing but also giving away to our neighbours as we do each year.

Please come and say hello!’

An email from Val Falcon

Act 4 - Harvest

I met the plum tree owners today and spent an hour chatting, drinking tea and getting a guided tour of their veggie garden, polly tunnel and fruit trees. Awesome. Got a huge bag of plums and a bag of runner beans too.

            Val and her husband were such generous people. They were of the heart ‘what’s mine is yours if you need it.’ A lovely testimony.

Creativity

 Since discovering BBC Sounds, I find I like listening to something at night. I suppose that in the quiet my tinnitus is that much worse without the day’s distracting noise. For a while I listened to Emili Sande’s ‘Composed’, a wonderful mixture of old and modern classical music with a sone or two thrown into the mix. I moved on to listening to ‘The Sleeping Forecast’. Whoever thought to mix the shipping forecast with classical piano music? In my sailing days I paid attention to the shipping forecast. That makes it sound very exotic, doesn’t it? My sailing days can be counted on the fingers of one, possibly two hands, happening during May Day bank holidays, crewing for a boss that hired a sailing boat for a weekend and headed for the Crinan Canal.

Now I am listening to ‘What Makes Us Human?’. I admit it was the RE teacher in me listening to see if it was worth playing bits of to a third year RE class. When I left teaching, I was working on a unit of studying what makes us human, looking at it from different perspectives, some religious and some not. Yes, I know I retired four years ago and there is no unit being produced. I fall into teacher-mode holes occasionally.

The guest speaker was Pam Ayres. She is a remarkable poet. She was a favourite poet at our Saturday Sunset Café poetry nights.

The podcast begins with reading a personal essay on the topic of being human. This is followed by a conversation with the presenter. Jeremy Vine usually does it, but he must have been on holiday.

Pam’s answer to what makes us human is the ability to create. All of us, she insisted, are creators in some way or another. We make things. At this point my mind flits to bower birds –‘As bird behavior goes, the displays of bowerbirds are among the weirdest. Male bowerbirds have taken up architecture to impress females, building large hutlike structures of twigs, decorated with shiny beetles, shells, and other colorful touches.’ (American spellings on the web page) Nature is brimming with creativity is seems, but do they choose to do it or is it built in DNA that compels them?

As regards poetry in particular, or writing, she was asked whether it was something everyone could do? Were we all born with the ability to write a poem or a short story? Do we really have that novel within? No we don’t. Some people are born with that creativity to see something and translate it into words and evoke a response from a reader. Even the natural writers and poets work at their craft. Poetry doesn’t fall into anyone’s lap. It is a gift, but one that comes with graft attached. Did she say that writing can be a learned thing for those no gifted? I might have fallen asleep at that point. It must be, I think. If we only did the things we were gifted to do I think we would miss out on a lot of experiences. Sometimes it is in doing the unfamiliar that we discover that there is a gift there after all.

I have been writing for decades. I was a late developer. There was nothing in school that even hinted at an ability to write. I thought I fell into it, stumbling into an evening creative writing class when I should have signed up to do counselling. I didn’t fall into it at all. God knew the gift was there and that I needed to be in the right place and the right time to find it.

A friend last week was speaking words of encouragement over our small praise and prayer group. She said that in me she saw a river, swift moving, full of life, bubbling over. Not a river of water but of words that swirled, words I was catching and using to write poems and stories. In everything I wrote the love of God was on display. In me there was an unquestioning acceptance of what she said. I have stopped thinking that my poems are not good enough. Too often I stand back and wonder where the words came from. God. I am most ‘me’ when I am writing, even in the struggle to string the words together.

We are made in the image of God and He is the Creator. Why should we not show His image so clearly when it comes to creativity? We are, perhaps, most like God when we are making something.

The Top of the Hill

Cracks Hill is probably not a household name for most people. I remember it as an out of bounds place where trespassers get prosecuted.

‘Situated between the villages of Crick and Yelvertoft, near bridge 14 of the Leicester Line of the Grand Union Canal, Cracks Hill offers fantastic panoramic views of north Northamptonshire, Crick and the surrounding area.’

I never knew the bridges along the canal had numbers. I remember walking along the canal path. One year, Biology homework compelled a friend and I to search out different ways plants launched seeds into the world. I remember particularly that the friend's final report had sliced apples in it, complete with pips.

I always imagined that there was a fantastic panoramic view at Cracks Hill. Being an imaginative child, I also imagined there was a gamekeeper with a gun hiding behind a tree with a trigger-happy finger who was just itching for someone to climb over the fence.

I have seen bigger hills since that didn’t tell me I would be prosecuted if I climbed them. And I have climbed them.

Times change.

‘The Council was given stewardship of Cracks Hill in 1999 and manages the site in partnership with the Friends of Cracks Hill. Crick Millennium Wood Pocket Park, the Jubilee Wood and the canal towpath are all nearby. A beacon sits atop the hill along with a plaque explaining the history of the hill and the directions of points of interest.’

I feel robbed somehow. There was no plaque in my day and no opportunity to look for ‘evidence of a large pre-Roman Iron Age settlement…found in the area.’ I looked for seeds one summer when there were more interesting things to look for on the hill.

Exodus 19 features not a hill, but a mountain, Mount Sinai.

There was no gamekeeper hiding behind the tree taking pot shots at the uninvited heading for the summit.

‘Put limits for the people around the mountain and tell them, ‘Be careful that you do not approach the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain is to be put to death. They are to be stoned or shot with arrows; not a hand is to be laid on them. No person or animal shall be permitted to live.’ Only when the ram’s horn sounds a long blast may they approach the mountain.”’ Exodus 19:12-13

There is something almost heartening that down at the bottom of the mountain there were someone people who would ‘force their way through to see the Lord’. They were people whose parents had fed them stories about God and the encounters with their ancestors. They had been weaned on promises. And God was so close. They had no idea yet of the holiness of God that could not tolerate sin.

I think too that there must have been somewhere in among the thunder and the trumpets the sound of a heart breaking. It was always God’s plan to dwell with His people – but not yet, not without the tabernacle and not without all the safety precautions in place.

The other day I was crossing the playing field at the back of the house heading for the far corner and the path the other side of the fence. There was a dog. I don’t know dog breeds. Is there a Benji breed? Small, wild haired, full of character? There was one of them at the far side of the field. I thought for a moment the owner had thrown a ball, but no. The dog had spotted me and was determined to make me his new best friend. He hurled himself across the field with one single desire – to reach me. He landed at my feet and turned belly-up for a tummy rub. It was a wonderful moment. I had a slow-motion picture running in my head.

Cracks Hill was denied to me. Mount Sinai was denied to the some that really wanted to see God. Cracks Hill is no longer denied to me and now, because of Jesus, I have access into the presence of God. I am not going to be stoned or shot with arrows.

Such freedom. I want to be like the dog in the field, hurling my way towards a best friend. One single desire.

Dog in the Field

dog in the field,

collie black and white,

sleek, graceful

circles left low to the ground.

sinks to lying down,

nose to the earth.

swift to move right,

deft, silent,

drops down,

alert and watching.

ears twitch

listening to directives

only he can hear.

intuiting instinct

only he knows

he steers the invisible sheep

into the invisible pen,

awarded top marks by

the invisible ‘One Man and His Dog’.

and the man

on the path

in the park,

sees only the screen

on his mobile phone.

Hey Mrs Tambourine Lady

I love the pre-amble the Voice gives to Psalm 150. ‘…the worship of the one True God ought to be full of life and energy…voices lifted, shouting for joy, trumpets blaring, stringed instruments playing, people dancing, pipes humming, tambourines keeping rhythm, cymbals crashing.’ The question followed about whether our worship was our worship was ‘too quiet, too reserved, too structured’.

I was about to think about that question in relationship to my own church experience of worship when my thoughts went off in a different direction. What was I going to do about it? How was I going to contribute to the life and energy of worship? It’s all very well questioning the how quiet or reserved or too structured worship might be but what we do about it matters.

Verse 4 instructs us to ‘Praise Him with the blast of trumpets high into the heavens and praise Him with harps and lyres and the rhythm of the tambourines skilfully played by those who love and fear the Eternal. Praise Him with singing and dancing; praise Him with flutes and strings of all kinds!’

That’s me ruled out for the most part. But I do have a tambourine. Years back when I was reluctantly accepted into the worship group and told I did not have a good singing voice, I asked my husband to buy me a tambourine for Christmas. It turned out that I didn’t have a great sense of rhythm either. I can see now where their reluctance came from. The heart was there but not the music. But the heart matters too.

‘You have a tambourine,’ said God. It was under the stairs. It was the right size to fit in my rucksack, so I packed it in. I think I intended to leave it in the rucksack. The idea came to me that there might be tambourine players among the worshippers. Someone else could play it.

I remembered years ago at a worship meeting with the local Salvation Army. I was a student then, a member of the Christian Union. I think we had choreographed a dance, part of which involved tambourines. What is it about the Salvation army that makes me think they are experts with tambourines? They were a gracious audience. No one offered us tambourine lessons.

I took the tambourine out of the bag. There was lots of admiration, and in the time before the meeting began lots of people played with it. With the start of the meeting it was back in my hands. That lack of a sense of rhythm came back to haunt me. I think I must have reached that age where I am indulged, that old lady eccentricity age. No one turned around and frowned at me. One lady went as far as to say it had made her day. It had lightened her spirit. She suggested that I bring it to a mid-week prayer and worship meeting. I might do that – after I have scrolled through some You-tube clips on how to do it properly.

Doing it properly was not my real intention. Doing it badly was to be avoided, but doing it properly brought with it the idea of stifling the heart. I’d stopped taking the tambourine all those years ago because ‘doing it properly’ was held in high esteem. It was thought that not doing it properly was getting in the way of other people worshipping. I am glad that we have all moved on.

The Voice commentary reminds us that psalm 150 ends the Book of Psalms. All that came before, the other 149 psalms, ‘reminded us of all the reasons we should praise God.’ Even the tough psalms gave us no reason to stop praising God. ‘Praise is what God created us to do; it is one of our highest purposes in life.’

A very big part of taking and playing the tambourine was about bringing myself in line with scripture. I had been commanded to praise Him with the tambourine. Obedience comes in all shapes and sizes.

Yes, I know that there is dancing in there too – I will save that for next week!

 

Lord, fill me such that I shall overflow

That fragrant life might follow where I go

That love unquenchable, my heart will sow

Lord, set my feet upon Your chosen way

Your wonders on the road be on display

And praise unceasing falls from lips today