Moss

I don't understand the title of this photograph 'Seahorse Tamer". I have my own issues with seahorses, and those who give you gifts bearing them, but that's another story.
For a period of my life, I attended a boarding school in the deepest English countryside; the mornings would smell of peat and grass and something earthy and fresh, a smell I long for every morning since and have just come to realise this yen when I looked at this picture. The school was surrounded by acres of forest and farmland, almost all supposedly of no access to the students boarding there but we paid no heed, as young people are wont to do. The evenings were terrifying, things moving randomly in the night, but the mornings were magical, filled with the possibility of love, light and fairies. I am not blind. I see the tombstones in the photo, and yet in the dappled morning forest light they seem beautiful to me too, covered as they are with moss, that squishy green stuff that dullls every border and makes all edges fuzzy and promising. I wish I was there, inhaling that weird green smell and pretending to be a forest sprite.

"Cat Among the Pigeons"