I was plucking out weeds from between the concrete patio slabs. You were watering the tulips and tending to the vegetables.

We could grow enough to live off, you say sometimes, when the whiskey trickles down your throat and the fire licks your belly.

The belly of a man, heavy set from years of sugared, milky tea. From using his hands to build the house we live in. To build the room where I am standing,

with its beech furniture and scrubbed floors, it's nooks and crannies which make it impossible to keep clean.

All those years, washing when the weather allowed. Picking colours from a paint chart. Talking passionately. Loudly and quietly. We even talked about the weather, sometimes. You made poetry out of the atmosphere. But weather changes, rapidly and without warning,

the gentle wind you once called Odin's daughter has morphed into thunderous roars, shaking the walls you so carefully built around us.

we are ******* hard at the sky now, gasping for air. It is raw, unsterilised air, that burns your tongue as you breathe it in,

yet breathe it in we must.

I wonder who we are now. Weather beaten, windswept tourists. Should we have left this place years ago?

We scrub the floors. We mow the grass. We wait for something to happen

next.