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This report is taken from PN Review 258, Volume 47 Number 4, March - April 2021.

On Holiday in the Old Meeting House
Birds, Bugs, and a Ghost
From the Journals, 3 – 5 August 1995
R.F. Langley
On Holiday in the Old Meeting House, Wenhaston, Suffolk

To Blythburgh (church) in the afternoon, never more full of sun. The eleven angels, primed a little, maybe, by my watching dragonflies this morning, their hair flicked up, wings stretched and swept and pointed, up there in the shining with the eighteen windows either side framing intense summer blue and stamped with slanting diamond-leaded and thickened mullion. straw-coloured stone. The wall of the Portaloo in the bushes is too hot to lean on. I leave the rest drawing and reading and go down to the hide on the Angel Marshes. Blue and pink water runs in wavelets into green reeds and paler purslane, with drifts of sea lavender. The path through the reeds, over the slatted walkway, is almost choked, so you push through the harsh leaves, swishing. Its landward end is marked by climbing vetch, clumped to chest-high, in the shadow of trees, glowing purple, with humble-bees in it, an agelena web, and closed flowers of... is it a marsh sowthistle? Too small for that, but the colours are so insistent that they leave normal surfaces in space behind and float back into distance and out into the head.

Coming along the path I sat down on the edge several times to steady the binoculars in the cool wind. The tide is right in. Wavelets break rather at random, into small heads, fresh and alive. At least 500 lesser black-backed gulls tilt and dip, with small squads of black-headed at the ...


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