I’m still trying to do this thing with texture and shape, so I picked these acorns up off DMs parents’ drive. I like the different textures, with the cups all dappled and the smoothness of the acorns.

I deliberately picked up a whole bunch of different ones, some split, one with a parasite, one with mottled shell, one empty cup, one not properly formed. I wanted to use them as a metaphor for my life and my plans.

Mostly my plans end up squashed on the driveway of life, as these would surely have done had we not picked them up and brought them home. So often I find myself rueing the day I let a dream slip away from me or to be more precise, I rue the fact that I didn’t have enough courage to go after what I wanted.

Sometimes they partly form and then never get properly to fruition (like the tiny one in the centre and like many of my best plans), they just get formed and I don’t have the time or energy to make sure they happen. I tried to work up my gig photos from the 70s and 80s into a book, with commentary from my diaries of the time and the plan never got fully formed because I didn’t have the time (or indeed the will) to scan all the negs and touch up scratches etc so that book will never appear in a town near anyone!

Sometimes they grow and grow and eventually burst with pressure, as many of these have done. Of course once that happens they die. My plans for striking out on my own always end up like this.

Sometimes I just wake up and find them gone in the night, just drifting away with nothing more tangible than an empty cup to show for it. Just like my first and only other love.

Sometimes the idea or plan is just so diseased it mutates until it no longer looks like what I envisaged or functions properly at all. Just like my marriage!

Sometimes they are disfigured and unsightly but still basically work and these may be the best of all – they do their job but don’t ever win any beauty contests and that is just fine. My plan to buy a ‘workhorse’ car was just this – it looks dull, will never win a drag race or an endurance race but does the job I need it to do just fine.

But…….

Sometimes they are perfect. Sometimes they jump out at me and are just so right they need no further thought, they just work beautifully. These are the ones to nurture, they grow and evolve in their own way but are still strong, well-nourished and interlinked with me. DM is one of these (I dreamed about him for such a long time) and so is Cornwall. This won’t go from my system. It won’t leave me. It will grow and grow into a mighty oak and I will sit in its shade one day and look back on the satisfaction of having been able to DO SOMETHING that has altered the course of my life for the better. I have four days to get through before I can feel and taste that dream again.

Sometimes I just need my dreams and plans to stop me from feeling as though I have no power to change anything. I need them to make me a ‘can do’ rather than a ‘done to’. Each time I plant a new seed of a plan or a dream I stand a chance that it will grow for me. I never give up hope. I keep on planting……..