relief, moss, water

In the doctor's waiting room a radio, chained to the wall, is gushing ersatz cheerfulness. It's Radio 2, as the horrible jingle keeps reminding you. I am trying to do a sudoku. Reading is out of the question. An elderly lady who is sitting next to the radio, with a single movement of her finger, switches it off. I look up. "You don't mind?" she says, half apologetically. " Mind? Thank you!" I say. Florence Nightingale herself could not have offered greater relief.

I notice on the top of a wall, at eye-level, a flourishing colony of moss. Little stalks, topped with spore bearing capsules, project a centimeter upwards from the green bed like flowers, only, as I learn subsequently from a reference book, they are not flowers. I think I have always had a soft spot for moss as it does for those who have cause to settle down upon it.

After the rain, the sun comes out. As I walk in the Grove, I hear the sound of water dripping from the trees and overflowing from the guttering of a house, and watch a stream flowing down the brick culverts at the edge of a path. The water is clean and bright in the sunlight.