bird life, singer, compasses

House martins have been busy in the nest, which they built last yearunder the eves of one of the houses opposite. The young blackbirds in our hedge have, meanwhile, fledged. The world of birds and the human world proceed in parallel.

A man, who walks about the town singing loudly and tunelessly but always cheerfully, is one of the characters we have become used to in Tunbridge Wells. Most people turn away in embarrasment when he approaches them, but a woman in charge of the organic meat stall at the Farmers Market in the Pantiles, today, says in a friendly way: "Hullo". He stops singing and chats to her.

For some time I have been unable to enter links in the box on the side of this log. But an opportunity to re-format has allowed me to correct this want. And just in time. There is a new blog, the iniatiative of Lucy Kempton, a regular visitor to this one, which is our joint domain. In it, she has set out to illustrate, with her beautiful and mysterious photographs, the series of 50 sonnets, which I wrote a few years ago. The photographs are not mere illustrations, which seek to repeat images from the poems, but, instead, introduce complementary images, which extend and qualify the text, and stand in their own right. I have never sought publications for these poems, but this is better. The new site is called http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/ There us now a permanent link to the site in the right hand frame, and there will soon be other links to the sites of other visitors and those which I visit. Where the stone falls in the pond, the circles grown wide.