We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

assembling a beehive

by sonja berlin-jones

/
1.
assembling a beehive 33:33
buy track

about

Yesterday I left home at 5am and walked to some cousins near Salisbury and had lunch with them and then walked into Salisbury and caught the evening train home and went straight back to bed. Yesterday was bank holiday Friday so I was expecting the countryside to be busier than normal - my "normal" is a dead weekday. But no - outside of Bentley Wood I said Hello only twice - not because I ignored everyone else, but just because there was no "everyone else". It was deader than ever.

Walking through Bentley Wood I passed three couples. They might have been a straggling group all together. Yesterday morning before leaving home I was 78kg. That's okay. I'm slim. But I want to be skinny. I want to be back down to around 70kg and sometimes flirting with the mid/high 60s. Last time I was hanging around there people would tell me I looked ill and they were worried and was I taking this all too far.

Weight loss isn't my obsession. Walking is. It is my addiction. I know this because when I've not been on a long solitary fast walk for a while I get flashbacks to moments and places along my favourite walks - just like years ago I'd get the flashback of how great life is drunk and need to get drunk again. Long walks are my reason for being slim - if I go over 80kg then sometime towards the end of a walk I might get an aching joint and I will know that the next morning I will be painfully stiff. I don't get those bothers when I'm in the 70s.

Yesterday at lunch I met one of my uncles, who I'd not seen for a decade or so. He's 84. He told me the stuff I'd heard from people even older than me - about how amazing it is that life has changed so much and he cannot do the things he once could, and I flatter myself that I am more empathetic than most and I was almost crying along with him. I know what's coming. I saw it with my wife and my mother and the five hundred people I knew in my previous village.

Being slim won't stop it - my uncle yesterday was as slim as me - but I am getting that good taste in my mouth that's the taste of abstinence - and yes I broke my no-unnecessary-purchases rule this morning and nipped into BHF to buy some (very necessary as it turned out) DVDs for a pound each but at least they will stop me going to the cinema for a few times - and overall I get that slow buzz of leaving the deadweight behind - unenjoyed stuff and my more miserable/needy "friends" and blubber.

Yesterday my cousin showed me the beehive kit that she'd bought. I had no idea. She wants to keep bees but knows nothing about it. I want to keep bees again but have nowhere to put them. So it will be problem solved. One day soon I shall walk over again and assemble the hive and frames for her (us) and we'll put it in a sheltered sunny spot in her garden and we'll see about getting some bees. Keeping bees again has been my final/only ambition for a few years now - ever since I moved into the city. It will be wonderful to know that within walking distance there is a beehive that I can visit and open and sit and watch the workers flying in and out, plopping onto the cedarwood and running into the cool hive with yellow and orange and dark red pollen on their legs and bringing another reason to keep my weight and possessions down to more suit my age.

recorded today, photo near Michelmersh yesterday morning

credits

released April 8, 2023

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

sonja berlin-jones image

sonja berlin-jones Southampton, UK

katharinebeastman.bandcamp.com

contact / help

Contact sonja berlin-jones

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like sonja berlin-jones, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring Riley Pinkerton (aka The Rat Queen) from the theatrical NYC rockers, Castle Rat.
listen now