the thought fox

As I write this - Pocket (quarter Bengal) is sitting traumatised on my lap. I went to let the ducks out of their house this morning.(It used to be the wendy house and still has curtains in it and a picture on the wall) and heard this dreadful catawauling. I just couldn't see where it was coming from so I went round to the duck house and there, with his head stuck out of a hole in the door that the rats had made was Pocket(quarterBengal). He could not go forward and he could not go back. He was well and truly wedged. It looked like those wooden cut outs you get on the pier when you poke your head through a hole and it looks as if you are dressed in a stripy bathing costume or as a Victorian policeman or have the body of a goat and someone takes your photograph. Only Pocket looked as if he was wearing a shed. Poor boy must have been there all night - I suppose he had snuck in when I put the ducks to bed and I hadn't seen him and shut him in. He eventually prised himself through with a little shoving from behind and has been sitting on my lap ever since.

Pocket (quarter Bengal) recovering

 All good on the tulip front and I managed to plant up the sweet peas the other day. Cupani, Henry Eckford and the two pink ones. I'm trying to grow them up a rickety structure I've created out of hazel on the lines of the Eiffel  tower.

tulips Abu Hussan and Flaming Parrot

sweet pea Heart's Delight

Henry Eckford

cupani

I have just spoken to some friends of mine who live in Islington and was really envious to hear that they had ten baby fox cubs playing around their trampoline. I am so jealous. All the foxes seem to be in London. In fact the first foxes my girls ever saw were in Peckham. You just don't really see them in the country apart from dead by the road. They had a hunt up here last year and I stood by the gate and watched them all canter on by. It was the funniest sight because as soon as the last horse had passed my gate the fox strolled out from behind the hedge, crossed the track, popped through the fence and trotted off down the garden. I gave him the thumbs up but he was in rather a hurry. The Hunt were none the wiser. Perhaps I've always wanted to emulate the character in "Gone to Earth" who had a pet fox - but without having to fall down the mine at the end.

Emily

Ted Hughes imagined his creative force to be in the shape of a fox

                            

The thought fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest;

Something else is alive

Besides the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf:

Two eyes serve a movement that now

And again now, and now, and now.

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees and warily lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Beezle pleading to be removed from Pocket's{quarter Bengal) account of the duck house