new angle, brightness grows, rules of argument

From Eden Road there is a point where you can look across at the weather board clock tower and cupola of the church of King Charles-the-Martyr. You usually look up at them from below, in the Pantiles or Chapel Place. Here you are almost on a level with them, and they looks so different that, for a moment, you cannot place them. When you do, you appreciate them all the more for their elegant architecture, set against the slopes of the Common.

In the Farmers' Market in the Pantiles today, there are stalls bright with daffodils, polyanthus and primroses in pots. Their brightness sprouts in the sun under the striped covers of the stalls.

A few minutes spent with Montaigne this afternoon are rewarding. On the education of a child he says, with particular aptness, when you consider how poorly people, politicians in particular, engage in argument nowadays: " Let him be made fastidious in choosing and sorting his arguments and fond of pertinence, and consequentially, of brevity. Let him be taught above all to surrender and throw down his arms before truth, as soon as he perceives it, whether it be found in the hands of his opponents or in himself through reconsideration."