Green juice, winter flowers, eyrie

A green juice, the colour of unopened buds in Spring. It is made from kiwi fruit, which provides the colour and the acidity (plus apparently lots of vitamin C), cox apples, bramley apples (more acidity), and grapes to adjust the sweetness. To combat the cold, a generous root of ginger.

One of those afternoons in Winter when the air is saturated with a cold, misty rain; the sky is an unremitting grey; the pavements are wet and barely show their colour. Mount Sion is bleak, but there must be something to note for this log. The finely shaped, mature Japanese cherry in the front garden of Walmer Cottage, will more than suffice; its pink flowers defy the oncoming darkness; and so do the yellow stars of winter jasmine in the garden opposite.

I've always loved the thought of those attics, which you read about in Paris and elsewhere, and sometimes see from the train as you leave or enter a London railway station. From the pavement, at the bottom of Mount Sion, I catch sight of a lighted window on the top floor of one of the tall houses built as guest houses to accommodate visitors to the Spa in the Eighteenth Century. I can just see, in its frame, a shelf of books. For a brief moment, though I am happy to be going back to my own shelf of book, I wish myself up in that eyrie.