All posts tagged: Peter Arscott

Frost’s Footfall

By PETER ARSCOTT

Image of bluebells blooming in a forest.

The bulky figure coming towards me on the path has a stick in one hand, a small bag in the other, but I can’t make out his face because the dappled light that filters through the trees in the wood is playing with his features. As with most people, my mind drifts when I go for long walks and I forget about my surroundings until something like the cackle of a crow or a breaking twig or the heavy tread of somebody approaching, snaps me out of my reverie and, for a nanosecond, I am in the grip of a timeless uncertainty. I think of bandits, pilgrims, squires and ploughmen but, by the time we are a few yards from each other, I see the pleasant face of what turns out to be a maths teacher on a weekend break. His rucksack contains a plastic bottle of water, which he finishes off in a few gulps, and his stick is one of those Nordic walking poles.

Frost’s Footfall
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Malus

By PETER ARSCOTT

apple

This apple I have only just bitten into as I stand in the cool dank store room tastes of November, already old and fading, and my tongue, so often dulled by the anaesthetizing effect of regular wine drinking, red wine in fact, and never white which has always produced a low-level ache in what I assume is my liver and is thus to be avoided at all costs, my tongue, as I said, was ambushed by the apple’s unexpected weariness, yes, a tired and indecisive flavor that was perhaps on the turn, perhaps only a day away from being rotten, its wrinkled skin an obvious warning of what lay in wait as it pressed against the roof of my mouth.

Malus
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