Now's the time

composition pipe gulls

2012-01-31T16:38:00.000Z

Blackbird, berries and chimney.

The smell of tobacco burning slowly in a pipe greets me as I walk down towards the High Street. I wonder if the man smoking it is enjoying it as much as I enjoy the result of his efforts. In the days when I smoked a pipe I always preferred the smell of the tobacco, raw or smouldering in the bowl, to the act of smoking itself. Keeping the pipe alight might have been an art but it was often more trouble than the pleasure produced was worth. In the same way I often (but not always) find that music overhead is more pleasurable than music intensively listened to. I find myself wondering if other pleasures half encountered, anticipated, dreamt about or remembered (a la Proust) may be preferable to their origins.

I often see sea gulls singly or in groups over Mount Sion and The Grove, invariably in the same flight line. But never have I seen one on the ground here. Then I remember that apart from the ocean, gulls love tips, and that the direction they take is towards the refuse tip in the North Farm Industrial Estate where there are delicacies almost as rich as those found in the sea, and certainly more plentiful.There is nothing for sea gulls in The Grove

path money wrong

2012-01-30T17:37:00.000Z

Path across The Common. Paths reaching the brow of a hill have a charm and promise all of their own.

Monday mornings, when you have the choice, is the wrong time to visit the bank. Entrepreneurs, are paying in their takings after the weekend. As I wait in the queue I watch tellers counting thousands of pounds (it seems). As they put the bundles away each clasped by an elastic band, I can hear the money shuffling into the vaults, whispering to itself, snuggling down, keeping warm in the economy.

The telephone rings. Somebody says my name with confidence and not without familiarity. Then, "It's Diane. Diane Rhodes!" I suppose I am not alone in forgetting the names of acquaintances. So I hesitate, but have to admit that I don't know her. Part of me expects a prompt, something like, "you know, we met on the stair case in Grand Central Station you caught me when I fell over my suitcase." Or, "it was on Bondai Beach. The shark swallowed your surfboard..." No such luck. A miserable anticlimax. I must have the wrong number". Still it is better than someone from a call-centre selling double-glazing.

path milk sarcocca

2012-01-29T16:15:00.000Z

Into the wood. One of the paths leading from the London Road to The Common.

"We need milk" says a woman in the supermarket. She has a loud voice. She says it again to her little husband
who has it appears no voice at all. "We need milk," she says shouting this time." That's three times I told you."

O that scent again. Perfume I should say. Again I smell it and then hunt for the shrub. There are two this time. In a shrubbery in Calverley Ground, proud of being able to identify it, I spot two of the bushes with their dark green leaves and small, star shaped white flowers. The aroma still makes me think of the warm smell of horses.

holly Siberian shorts

2012-01-28T16:04:00.000Z

Holly berries close to. I come in close to avoid the usual Christmas card view. A strident display like this one is supposed to promise a cold winter.

Warm days in January are a bit disturbing. Nature up the spout. Global warming in action. Now they are beginning to talk about snow and ice or at least frost. I feel a sense of relief. But not everyone likes it cold. "Do you think we're going to have a Siberian winter?" says a neighbour as we pass in the street. Siberian? Now that would be climate change.

It is cold already today. In Mount Pleasant I pass a man of middle age staggering up the hill. He has bow legs, one of those Australian, leather cowboy hats and is wearing shorts and short socks. Sturdy is the word which comes to mind as the best to describe him.

doodle wash dear, dear

2012-01-27T16:32:00.000Z

One of the recent "doodles" which I have very deliberately made with water colours. I call them doodles in spite of their serious intent, out of a sense of uncertainty as to their true nature, but they could equally well be described as postcard-sized drawings or paintings. Some, like this one are abstract. Others which will appear here in due course are more representational. The most difficult to do are the abstract ones.

In the gents in Calverley Ground the hand dryer is more approachable than most of its genre. I admire the simplicity of its design. There is one opening into which you insert your hands and three buttons labelled soap, water and air. Each of them works. The manufacturer Wallgate deserves to be named here. As some comperes might say: "Please put your hands together" for it.

"A neatly dressed grey-haired man is sitting opposite me in the train. There is a table between us. He is wearing a fawn raincoat. From beneath the coat peeps a tweed lapel, a modestly patterned tie and one of those check shirts which betoken a certain kind of quiet, middle-class aspiration. He is engaged in a crossword. ""Oh dear, dear," he says to himself, as he shifts his position and folds his paper into tighter oblong.

proportion fashion humming

2012-01-26T17:52:00.000Z

If you were a few millimetres tall this face would represent a good climb. As it is it is a part of the outcrop of rocks only a few meters high at the top of Tunbridge Wells Common, it is less of a challenge, but photographs can be deceptive.

A sign of limited intelligence is to identify people and objects by dominant features rather than by closer detail. I fear that my own limitations are revealed where fashion is concerned. Today a woman in the train, with short cropped grey hair with blond highlights could be one of our neighbours. I realise that she is not the neighbour only because I know that the neighbour is on holiday. This haircut seems to be quite common among women in a certain age group.

Ahead of me an old man with a white stick walks cheerfully along. He is humming. He wears a red baseball cap. When I overtake him I see that the cap is inscribed with the logo St Dunstan's which is a school for the blind.

stripes alarm how

2012-01-25T16:14:00.000Z

Vapour trails and branches in the evening sky.

As I walk across The Grove a burglar-alarm is ringing. Its demented obsessive song persists as I move out of earshot on my way to Mount Pleasant. On my return it is still ringing. No sign of fleeing burglars. No screaming police cars. All sorts of innocent explanations are given for alarms being set off. Undue vibration due to building works nearby is a common one. Another is spiders or insects picked up by the sensor. I know that if I were a burglar I would find that the din upset my concentration no end. The job must be stressful enough as it is!

In the convenience store this morning the proprietor greets me with, "and how are you do day?" I tell him and wander off in search of milk. On my return to the counter, as he takes my payment, he asks again: "How are you today?" Nothing has changed since we last spoke. But I tell him. This afternoon I remember that I forgot to buy some juice. I feel a little foolish going back to the store for the second time in one day. I go straight to the shelf where the juice resides. When I proffer payment, "how are you today?" says the proprietor.

crow age pony-tail

2012-01-24T16:23:00.000Z

Another family photo. I can't resist it when Mr Crow in a posing state of mind allows me to approach to within a few feet.

Paul Johnson, the historian, essayist and former editor, proclaims the achievements of old age in the edition of The Spectator. Lord Palmerston was eighty when he died, and still in office, as prime minister, he reminds us. His age in no sense impeded the quickness of his wits. A fortnight before his death he attended a military review in Hyde Park with Queen Victoria. When she complained of the smell of the sweaty soldiers, he replied "Yes Ma, am, it is known as esprit de corps." His last recorded remark, delivered with his staccato laugh, was "Die, my dear doctor? That's the last thing I will do."

In Mount Pleasant, a smartly dressed young man in a suit and Trilby hat stops to light a cigarette. Protruding from beneath his hat is a beautifully coiffured pony tail. Noticeable for its chestnut sheen, it hangs above the collar of his jacket like a question mark.

way scrap marmalade

2012-01-23T18:09:00.000Z

Part of a logo familiar to almost everyone in this country. It is normally attached to the single word "footpath". On his own this man, because he is no longer merely indicative, seems to have gained in personality and presence. Even in ambiguity.

Labels which have to be peeled off individual, supermarket fruit such as apples or pears showing their provenance or variety can be a nuisance, but when the labels are removed and stuck into my scrap book next door to something inappropriate such as a Turner landscape or a nude by Cranach, they can take on a new and surprising significance.

Nine jars of Seville Orange marmalade still hot and ready to be labelled are my reward for today's chopping, boiling and ladling.

morning percentages forecast

2012-01-22T16:12:00.000Z

Cold and frosty morning in The Grove.

In these hard times shops are closing. It is the season of percentages. Fifty percent off in one instance. Seventy-five in another. But always with the weasel words "Up to" skillfully inserted so as not to be noticed by customers eager for a bargain.

Weather forecasts, professional and amateur, are unhelpful most of the time . Black clouds are massing in the West. It's going to rain. But where? Not here. Or there. but not down the road. There is no precision. My own all-purpose weather saw is:
" All signs and portents do ignore
't will rain when it rains, not one minute after,
not one before".

cloud alive silver

2012-01-21T16:01:00.000Z

Pigeons flying across a cloud wheel in the wind.

As I am leaving the train a woman points to an almost deflated balloon. It is bright green and still has enough gas in it to make it bob up and down on the floor beside a seat as though it has a vestige of life in it. A woman waiting for the train door to open points it out to me. I think it scares her. "I thought it was a plastic bag", she says. You can't be too careful nowadays.

The sky is silver over The Grove this afternoon. In places where the sun is, dazzling; in others, its tones reduced. Higher up there is a hint of pale blue, but other colours are scarce. In the foreground: the trunks of silver birches.

dry quiet ferret

2012-01-20T16:13:00.001Z

Rose fruit in Winter.

Although cars are parked in The High Street, none is to be seen passing in the road. It is quiet. Not much on in town this morning. You can hear the light rain falling. I am on my way to the station. London should be busier.

In the Strand a man in army fatigues and a hooded jacket walks with his arms crossed in front of him. Curled up in his arms is a ferret.

bee moss stones

2012-01-18T16:51:00.002Z

An early bee alights on a packet of tobacco outside the pub.

I leave the path on The Common and walk across sparse grass and moss which is springy under foot. Just to be walking on such a surface on a brisk, fine day is enough. Enough for what? Enough to sing about.

Dave Bonta, poet and poetry editor, writes on The Small Stones or River of Stones idea, which is to be found on a blog called Walking Our Way Home, in praise of brevity. His own Morning Porch observations (a limit of 140 characters) have been made regularly on a daily basis over several years have fulfilled many of the Small Stone objectives (ie to notice something properly every day and write it down). I believe that I have been doing the same sort of thing for the last five years, while Clare Grant, from whom I copied her idea of Three Beautiful Things to be noted daily, has been doing it for at least six years. "Bad writing," says Dave, "happens when decent writers are unwilling to let go of any felicitous expression." Few who aspire to write well will disagree with those words and may share a general inclination towards what is brief and yet complete in itself.

textures moo context

2012-01-17T15:48:00.000Z

Cracks and shadows.

"I can almost hear it mooing." Comment by the late Denis Thatcher, husband of the prime minister, on a very underdone steak.

Sometimes you can only see something properly when it outside its usual context.

camellia sparrows puff

2012-01-16T15:48:00.001Z

First camellia. Another annual photograph in the same spot in Grove Avenue.

One of the houses in Belgrove has a tall holly tree in the garden. It is alive with sparrows. You can't see them except every now and then as they flutter in and out of their domain, but you can hear them, ringing like bicycle bells, long before the tree comes into sight.

On The Common I am walking down hill towards the town. Coming up the steep path towards me is a woman with five little dogs, two of them on leads. She is wearing a pink anorak and a white, woolly hat. In response to my "good morning" she says: "I'm out of breath. It's my age."

peeling axe books

2012-01-15T16:32:00.000Z

Paint peeling from brickwork reveals the shadow of an animal.

Two log stories. And a half. Outside the pub a man appears and selects a log from the stack. He few minutes later he brings it back and replaces it. " A ball stuck up a tree," he says by way of explanation. Later, one of the pub staff arrives with an axe. "Don't worry, " he says, as though the sight of a man with an axe might evoke a scene from a horror film. " I want to chop a log up to make some kindling. Customers are complaining that it is getting cold". The word "blog", I have always supposed, is derived from the phrase "web log". Another log then.

While talking the other day about the difference between reading a book or on an eReader, I am reminded of a passage in Albert Camus' unfinished, largely autobiographical novel, The First Man. Describing his discovery of books as a child in a lending library in Algiers, Camus writes. I translate loosely: "Each book, moreover, had a particular scent derived from the paper on which it was printed, a scent, refined and secret, that J would have been able to distinguish with his eyes closed ... And each of these scents before he had even begun to read, overwhelmed him and drew him into another universe full of promise, obscuring the room where he was, the quarter in which he lived, the town and the entire world...."

berry apocolypse age

2012-01-14T16:29:00.000Z

Rowan berry with robin.

There is something apocalyptic about the notices advertising sales on the windows of shops which are closing down. Not the least of them, if you argue from the particular to the general, is "Everything Must Go.

Go over the notes from last year's check up the optician remarks: "Next year you will be 80." My reaction is a typical instance of intuitive rather than careful thinking. She must be wrong, I think. At my last birthday in September I was 78 and at my next birthday in September 2012, I will be 79. But she is right: at this time next year, a year from now, I will be 80.

wings silk belly-dancing

2012-01-13T16:42:00.000Z

Between the pages of a notebook this seed of a member of the acer family has matured elegantly revealing the delicate veins on its wings.

Here's something worth a poem. Or a fairy story. On the BBC today is an account of a golden cape woven from spider-silk. Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley who live in Madagascar wove the silk of 1.2 million female Golden Orb spiders to make the embroidered garment. Its rich butter yellow colour is derived entirely from the natural colour of the silk. The spiders, about the size of the palm of a human hand were collected daily, by 80 helpers, "milked" for their silk and returned to the wild. The cape is on show at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and can be seen on the BBC web site.

In the Oxfam book shop a woman is saying that she and her husband went to Morocco for Christmas. "We wanted to get away from Christmas. But when we got there it was everywhere, Christmas trees, the lot.... We did see some belly dancing though." "Were you tempted to get up and do it yourself? asks the Oxfam lady. "Yes, but I resisted it."

aerial scent new

2012-01-12T16:03:00.000Z

Writing in the sky.

This must be the third or fourth year in succession that I have drawn attention to the powerful scent of the Sarcoccoca shrub which flowers at this time of year. Its unobtrusive white flowers have an astonishing perfume. As my plant book says "you smell them before you see them." The shrub in question is in the garden of a house in the passage called Belgrove which leads from Little Mount Sion to The Grove. Every year I forget the name of the plant and have to look it up again. Fortunately now a bookmark in The Botanical Garden leads me directly to it and reminds me that it is a member of the box family and originates in The Himalayas. I have in the past tried unsuccesfuly to describe the scent. My best attempt goes back to the time before I had identified its source, when I fancied that someone had a horse nearby. The smell of a stable, straw and of the horse iteself after exercise still seems to fit the bill.

A small child, just at the walking stage, is introduced by a group of adults to a push chair in which a new baby lies swaddled in blankets. "It's a baby," says one of the grown-ups, "your brother." After briefly satisfying its curiousity the child runs off to investigate more attractive occurences.

randomness unseasonal diversion

2012-01-11T16:26:00.000Z

A couple of pages from my scrapbook, where randomness is the rule. Or almost. Available space is important in deciding what goes where and sometimes colour but not subject matter. Unexpected juxtapositions are the result as well as the object. It's the image that counts and its appeal to the eye, as much as what it turns up next to. The picture bottom, left, is as it happens a Christmas card from fellow blogger Marja-Leena Rathe and her husband Fred. Above it on the right is a reproduction from a magazine of one of Mark Rothko's noble abstracts.

Today, January 11, Geoff tells me outside the pub that he has just seen a bee and three butterflies in The Grove. As he speaks a bee arrives and settles on his packet of tobacco. It is attracted we suppose by the yellow colour of the wrapping. "Look," he says, "it's exploring the bar-code."

I have always enjoyed the rather ponderous use of the word divert to mean amuse. It has a Dickensian ring about it. So it is that whenever I see, as I do today, a road sign announcing "Diverted Traffic", I imagine cars with smiling radiators and windscreen-wipers dancing with hilarity.

robin boneless reader

2012-01-10T16:17:00.000Z

No more seasonal bird than the robin at this time of year, full-throated, bright and, like this one relatively unafraid of a man pointing a camera at him.

An advertisement for "the best boneless chicken" rather terrifies me, as someone fond of chickens and suitably separated from the living creature, of chicken too. It is an advertisement for a new Kentucky Fried Chicken brand . It has the KFC logo, a picture of old Colonel Sanders and the slogan "So good". The brand is called Dippin' and Strips. The poster shows bits of breaded chicken in a box beside a pot of red dip and one of white, and the price £3.69. I'm runnin'. Away.

On the bus I am beginning to enjoy the satisfying "ping" when you show you free bus pass to the
electronic reader. But you don't get a ticket anymore. I have always liked tickets, even the new ones printed and torn from a perforated reel. I remember with affection the coloured tickets pre-printed on oblongs of thick coloured paper, and taken by conductors from dispensers which were part of their kit, and punched to the sound of a bell by a machine hanging round their necks.

again Miss Otis ashes

2012-01-09T16:33:00.000Z

Mr Crow again. This comes from the archives, but seeing him on parade this morning, I am prompted to look up his photo again.

Yesterday evening a BBC 4 programme called The Great American Songbook takes me along one of the many paths opened up by the blog Tone Deaf. If Signor Dar Ponte will forgive my trespassing on his preserves, the lyrics of Cole Porter come to life in the programme sometimes in unusual guises. The folk singer Kirsty MacColl makes startlingly good job of Miss Otis Regrets She's Unable to Lunch Today. Her version is accompanied by the band of The Irish Guards, and the sad ballad of the respectable Miss Otis, who is hanged for shooting her lover, and has therefore to break her lunch appointment, is performed in dirge-like march time, rather than in the blues style of the original. Miss Otis Regrets was first performed at The Savoy Theatre in London in 1934. You'll find the MacColl version of 1995 on YouTube.
Above the High Street a flock of pigeons swirls up like smoke and ashes carried in a gust of wind before settling on some rooftops.

skeleton long-suffering relief

2012-01-08T16:13:00.001Z

The skeleton of a leaf gracefully flattened against the tarmac.

In Sainsbury's a pale woman closes her eyes and holds back her trolley as I inadvertently cross her path. Her expression suggests that such sacrifices of space and time are too frequent in her life. In a later encounter a shadow of a smile crosses her face, but her eyelids are still lowered.

With a sense of relief I read that the UK economy should be growing strongly by 2050. I simply can't wait.

back-lit fragile candle-lights

2012-01-07T16:27:00.000Z

Today's squirrel dramatically back lit by the afternoon sun.

Fragile, is my small stone to drop into a pool. It is a word, which keeps returning to my mind. We live in fragile islands of relative calm in a world where men and Nature challenge each other for notoriety in outbursts of horrific violence. A universe of unimaginable proportions, which we do not yet completely understand, is, meanwhile, riddled with explosions across unimaginable distances. Beautiful? It depends where you are standing and in which direction you are looking. A terrible beauty perhaps!

In The Pantiles an art gallery has closed down to be replaced by a hair-dressing salon. When you look though the window the room seems to be poorly lit. A central chandelier is oddly out place and the lights above the mirrors are modest in their intensity. Then it strikes me that women or men for that matter, staring at themselves while their hair is rearranged, are probably more comfortable if their faces are not exposed to the harsh, clinical light required by a surgeon or a dentist. As the philosopher, Francis Bacon observed of truth, " it doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so dainty and stately as candle-lights".

lamp post greeting rescue

2012-01-06T16:37:00.000Z

Another abstract composition taken from paint peeling on a lamp post in The Grove.

The blond woman with the white Pomeranian is walking ahead of me in Sutherland Road, her dog ahead of her eager for the freedom of the park. "Happy New Year! " she calls to a man approaching with an Alsatian and a Cavalier King Charles both tugging on leads. "Happy New Year! he responds. All three of the dogs begin barking whether as part of the exchange of greeting or because they making territorial statements is not clear. "Thank God it's over," she says. Is she referring to 2011 or to the recent festivities?

A flotilla of pushchairs comes into sight. From the midst of it, a wailing cry goes up "Lion". One of the mums turns back. "Lion," she says, waving a yellow fluffy toy. All's well with the world again.

wet wind anecdotes

2012-01-05T16:41:00.001Z

A leaf and a twig on wet pavement bricks in Tunbridge Wells.

Today the wind is showing off everywhere: above the roofs a flock of crows wheels in the sun against flying clouds; in the tree tops it makes roaring noises and whips the branches as though trying to snap them off; and over the paths in The Grove dead leaves race like wild children, skip and jump and hurtle round corners.

If you like anecdotes you will find plenty of them in Craig Bown's entertaining One on One about unlikely meetings between famous people (Marlyn Monroe and Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin for example). Today I read of the notorious but well documented dinner party attended by, among others, Stravinsky and Marcel Proust on May 19 1922 at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris. It was notorious because the guests, which also numbered James Joyce and Picasso, did not apparently get on as well as might have been hoped. Proust, placed next to Stravinsky, hoping to flatter, apparently tried to compare the composer to Beethoven, adding, " doubtless you admire Beethoven".
                                "I detest Beethoven".
                                "But chere maître, surely those late sonatas and quartets..."
                                "Worse than the others."
A full account of the dinner is given in the book, A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport Hines devoted entirely to it .

twilight thieves Booz

2012-01-04T16:34:00.001Z

The Grove at twilight.

A sinister police notice is posted in The Grove. "Cat thieves," it warns, "are working in the area. " There are a number of cats I know around here. Every time I meet one I feel that I need to advise it to beware of strangers. But we speak different languages.

Such are wonders of You Tube and Google. The other day I draw the attention of a friend who lives in Paris to a poem by Victor Hugo. It is well enough known in French apparently. It is based on the Bible story of Boaz and Ruth, who gleaned ears of corn in his fields. Hugo's poem is confusing to a newcomer unused to the French spelling of Boaz, which is Booz. I ask her how the name is pronounced in French. Today she emails to tell me of a video on You Tube where the poem is read by the actor Gerard Philippe. To my relief it is pronounced in two equally stressed syllables, removing once and for all the intrusive and inappropriate association with booze.

roof Wittgenstein sea

2012-01-03T16:23:00.000Z

Four pigeons and two weeds on a roof.
Every now and then I have a go at reading Wittgenstein especially when I
hear somewhere what an important and influential philosopher he is. His claim to fame is that he set out to prove by a remorseless logical process that most philosophical speculation is nonsense. I have tried to follow in detail the argument of his chief work Logico Philosophicus but my mind simply isn't up to it. I do understand however his preface, and like it the more I read it. I like it because it is pleasingly simple and yet touches on the profound. In it he sums up the sense of his book in these often quoted words: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what cannot be said we must pass over in silence. ...the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts... It will only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense".
I would have one question for Mr W if he were alive today: are the limits adjustable? My purpose in asking it is because I have wondered where, in the spectrum of sense and nonsense, poetry resides? And I now wonder whether the philosopher's withering logic which touches on the limits of sense - what can be spoken of, and nonsense- what cannot.be spoken of-, allows a place for poets to attempt to push back the borders of what cannot (elsewhere) be said?

In the pub I ask an old sea captain whether he has read the maritime novels of Patrick O'Brien set in the Napoleonic Wars. "I don't need to read about sea fairing," he says. "I did it. The sea is is in my veins."

crow grass fart

2012-01-02T17:17:00.003Z

That crow again. I photograph him whenever the opportunity arises.

Stories reside in small and unimportant things. Round the denuded bollard where unofficial grass had begun to sprout, a few blades have reappeared only a few days after it was scrapped away (see a recent post) by council workers. Nature always fights back.

Albert Camus' posthumously published, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme draws to a large extent on the author's impoverished childhood in Algeria. His grandmother, strong willed, dominating, every vestige of sentimentality driven from her character by loss and hardship is unforgetable. "Quand on disait de quelqu'un, devant la grand-mère, qu'il est mort. "Bon, disait-elle, il ne pétera plus." When it was said of someone in front of his grandmother that he had died, "Good," she would say, "he won't fart any more."

dove grass doing

2012-01-01T16:55:00.000Z

One of the collared doves that live in The Grove. It is spotlit here by the low afternoon sun. It is interesting that they always show up on the same side of the little park, to the west above The High Street. Their territory seems more restricted than their rougher pigeon cousins.

Grass grows round the base of some of the bollards in Mount Sion. One morning there are sounds of scraping metal on the other side of our hedge. Inspection a few minutes later reveals that the grass has gone. There is a neighbour who can't abide grass growing out of the pavement. It seems that he has prevailed on the Council to remove this particular patch, more or less opposite his front door. Other bollards further down the street have retained their sparse skirting of grass.

In Sainsbury's this morning a cheerful man ahead of me in the queue at the newspaper counter asks me: "How are you doing?" I have never met him before. I tell him, "fine", and enquire how he is doing? A minute later he asks the benign assistant in charge of the counter how he is doing? He in turn indicates that he doing OK. "How are you doing?" he says to me, when I come to make my purchases. "Fine," I say and to break the chain of repetition, wish him a happy new year. It strikes me that the murmur of such greetings across the country this morning could, if concentrated, amount to a mighty roar. A roar of good will and friendliness. Nothing wrong with that.

December holding feathers

2011-12-31T17:01:00.000Z

The Grove in December, contre jour.

In the convenience store in Grosvenor Road, the owner lays the telephone on the counter. It is emitting continuous, nagging, tinny sounds. "I am trying to sort something out," he says. "I'm holding on. They keep playing music. I hate it."

On the TV last night are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the "dancing cheek to cheek" episode of Top Hat and Tails - that surpassing moment of movie elegance. Among the commentators in the documentary of which this clip is a part is Astaire's, daughter Ava. "It is not true," she says that Ginger Rogers and her Father quarrelled. In fact they were always good friends. Though it is true that Astaire did lose his temper on the occasion of the "cheek to cheek" scene because the feathers came off her flowing, white dress. Though the dress filmed so well, following the couple's movements, the feathers flew into the air and got into Astaire's eyes and nostrils. Of such detail is history made.

incident starlings abandoned

2011-12-30T11:05:00.000Z

In my archive today I come across this photograph of a painting which I did some years ago. It is one of a few pictures of which I am reasonably proud. It is called Incident on the Beach. Looking back on it I realise that it focuses, on my relationship with women and with beaches, both of which are important to me. Perhaps that is obvious. I rather miss having it around.

Starlings in The Grove again. Today they occupy a different tree. Before seeing them I hear the gentle whistles and fluting sounds which so appeal. There are only a few today. Larger groups make more of a din. I remember when they used to take over Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Nelson's Column and the trees in St James Park. I remember in particular meeting my friend Anna by appointment on the steps of the National Gallery on one such day when the starlings were in charge. "They are making a noise like breaking glass," she said.

On a pillar in front of a house in Mount Sion someone has abandoned a paperback. It is called Double Decker. It is by Jacqueline Wilson whom I know of as a best-selling author of children's books. I pass it twice. On the first occasion it is closed. On the second I note that someone, or maybe the wind, has opened it exposing the title page. It is raining and the paper is sodden.

bread medical dunandunate

2011-12-28T16:13:00.001Z

At the Pantiles Farmers Market.

Because someone very close to me requires a hip operation I ask a neighbour about a similar operation he has undergone. It is dangerous territory because it means that I will receive a full account of his medical history. He does however let drop the name of a surgeon which I am looking for. A few minutes later I escape with a smile and a cheery "happy new year". The art of ending a conversation is sometimes harder than that of beginning one. Both need to be cultivated.

A word floating around at the moment is dunandunate. It means to over use a word that has recently been added to your vocabulary It is apparently at present a failed candidate for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. But how long will that last? A Google search reveals its growing popularity.

roof response action

2011-12-27T16:24:00.000Z

Crow on finial communes with chimney stack.

Reflecting as one does at this time of year on people you have known and their behaviour, I recall a certain sort of person, who makes a study of how to unnerve people by not responding to them. I am thinking in particular of someone I knew years ago who used simply to stare back, keeping his face as expressionless as possible when you made a point. You did not know what he was thinking, whether he disagreed or agreed or thought your opinion not worthy of his consideration. When you are young and unused to such treatment it is extremely unpleasant. Nowadays it is identified as "passive aggression" or something of the sort, and a proper response might be a punch on the nose or better a lengthy quotation from Finnegans Wake.

As another year heaves into view I am nudged by the thought, driven by a sense of urgency, that there are still things to do and places to visit.

friends sticks shrubs

2011-12-26T17:46:00.000Z

The friends whom I described a few weeks ago.

Some of the people I see most days round here, I stop to speak to. But some I see in the distance, when you can't easily greet them. Today on the other side of The Grove I catch sight of the man who used to walk with two sticks. About three years ago he had slipped and broke his hip severely. For a long time he barely ventured out, and when he did, he moved very slowly helped by the two walking sticks. Later he graduated to one stick, a great mark of progress. Today I note with pleasure that he is walking without the aid of any stick. His walking stick is held parallel to the ground, and rather than lent upon, it seems to be, a token or charm carried against chance.

Two new shrubs appear in The Grove. A passer by who lives opposite the location of the new shrubs, says that he asked the young man, who was planting them what variety of shrub they were. He didn't know. I remember that a few years ago I had a similar experience with a tree-planter, engaged in giving a permanent home to a number of saplings. "What are they?" "No idea," he replied. "I just do what I am told."

2011-12-24T18:59:00.000Z

And very best wishes for the New Year to everyone.
All summer long we watched while we sat in the garden in the evening, three pigeons - a couple and a hanger on - on the roof of the house opposite. This morning, as on previous mornings recently, the three are still in there, performing some sort of territorial routine. The couple sit close together on the parapet looking down on the street below. The hanger on is on the chimney. They could of course be different pigeons behaving in a similar way, but I like to think that they are the same ones.

In the convenience store this morning a woman is shopping with a small white dog on her shoulder. It is, she says, a cross between Yorkshire terrier and something which I didn't catch, but which sounds oriental. "She likes sitting there," says the woman. And I can see that it one of those treats that this little dog cannot do without.

tough cats pies

2011-12-23T18:54:00.001Z

True grit. So far it hasn't been needed to spread over the roads and pavements in these parts.

I like cats, even love them, but sometimes cat- love can seem to go too far. This is the last paragraph (names, cat, human and geographical have been changed to avoid possible embarrassment) of one of those round-robins full of news, good and bad, which sometimes accompanies Christmas cards. It strikes me as being rather well written:
"Our seven cats became 8 in May, when we adopted Marianne, a poor stray who turned out to have bone cancer. The vet amputated the affected back leg and gave her six months to live, but she seems to be doing well and is very happy. George, one of our long standing cats, was diagnosed with pancreatitis in April and underwent extensive tests. Although he was also given a grim prognosis, we put him on a special diet immediately, removed everything possibly in the garden and he is still going strong. I always take any ill cat to our wonderful homoeopathic and conventional vet outside Cambridge for a second opinion, Even Joan has benefited from his expertise, and, like the cats, takes her pills every evening too."
I am not sure that the nearest and dearest who are staying with us this Christmas like mince pies very much. But I have nevertheless made a dozen and half and dusted them with icing sugar, because it is something I like doing. If they are not eaten at home they will make nice presents for neighbours.

bridge sleep volubility

2011-12-22T14:56:00.001Z

Two pigeons on the bridge above Tunbridge Wells station.

Yesterday I referred to a book of classical Persian folk tales told by Shusha Guppy. I bought it on impulse from Hall's bookshop two days ago and it is proving, like much else of my reading at this time, greatly rewarding. In particular I love this traditional way of ending Persian stories:

Our story is told and you must rest

Though the crow has not yet reached its nest.

There could, surely, be no lovelier or more peaceful thought on which to drift off to sleep.

As a voluble person I increasingly love silence. I am reminded of the Victorian cleric and wit, Sydney Smith, who remarked of Macaulay's conversation that it was enlivened by brilliant flashes of silence.

river sleep clash

2011-12-21T16:58:00.000Z

Thames scape. St Paul's, unusually in a photograph taken from this viewpoint, is tucked away on the left. On the extreme right is the unfinished Shard. Click for full picture.

"'Close your eyes so that sleep doesn't get into them,"' said Zahra, as she gently closed my eyes and continued with the story." So begins the introduction to Sasha Guppy's The Secret of Laughter, subtitled "Magical Tales from Classical Persia. How better to invoke the atmosphere of the bedtime story, and to whet the appetite for mystery and excitement, and to recall childhood contentment and ensuing drowsiness!

Talking of Jack Russells, among the bizarre news stories of the year, I read of a woman who returned her Jack Russell to a rescue centre in Kent, because it clashed with her curtains. The woman told the staff that she had "spent a lot of money on the curtain". (From the current issue of The Week). Lucky Jack Russell.

saucer thinking anticipation

2011-12-20T16:59:00.001Z

This flying saucer is hovering just over the fence beside the pub. I have not tinkered with the photograph, but I had drunk a couple of pints before taking it.

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman illustrates the difference between the two modes of thinking in which we engage, with the following: "Do not, " he says, "try to solve it but listen to your intuition".
   A bat and ball costs $1.10.
   The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
   How much does the ball cost?
"A number came to your mind," he writes. The number is of course 10: 10c. The distinctive mark of this easy puzzle is that it is intuitive, appealing and wrong. Do the math and you will see. If the ball costs 10c then the total cost will be $1.20 c. (10 c for the ball and $1. 10 for the bat). The correct answer is 5 c." I confess I puzzled over this longer than I should have done.
This is just a taste of an intriguing book which is far from being one of those cure-all recipes for how to live. Rather it is serious science presented in a way which we can all understand, and which explains much about our thought processes, decision-making and how we often manage I speak for myself) to be wrong as often as I am right, if not more often.
I have often thought that I am not very intelligent, yet intelligent enough to know the limits of my intelligence. This book helps me here.

This afternoon I pass a Jack Russell on its way to The Grove. It trots eagerly ahead of its man. In its mouth is a tennis ball. I know Jack Russells' amazing capacity to catch balls in the air on the first or second bounce, and admire them for their speed and enthusiasm. This one reminds me of how I used to feel when on my way, racket in hand, to the tennis courts, hardly able wait for the feel of the grass or tarmac beneath my feet, and the the thought of a backhand drive or low volley in the game to come.

cranes brute my lady

2011-12-19T16:45:00.001Z

Cranes above London in the declining sun.

Bollards in Mount Sion are designed to deter motorists from parking on the pavement. They often also provide target practise for motorists attempting to reverse. Evidence of brute force carelessly applied is seldom absent in the shape of a leaning bollard and up-ended bricks in the surrounding footpath.

For too long now my interest in the written and spoken word has distracted me from listening to music as much as I would have like to. Lorenzo da Ponte with his new blog Tone Deaf has ended all that. My head is full of music, my ears are ringing with it. For the sixth time to day I am back with "Did you not hear my lady, go down to the garden singing ..?." Not for a long time had I heard her. But now all that is changed. I hear her all the time. Thank you Lorenzo.

roots language resolved

2011-12-18T16:54:00.000Z

Among the roots. Oh those little claws. So useful.

A blond woman whom I often see in The Grove walks a snow white Pomeranian on a lead. She has an accent which I take to be Polish and I have heard her talking fluently in a language which I think is Polish. This afternoon I see her with her dog. And note that she addresses it in English. "Come on," she says, " as it sniffs and shuffles among some leaves at the end of the lead. "We're going home."
I ask Heidi who speaks fluent English to me all the time, in what language she would talk to a dog if she had one. "German, " she says, "of course."

Problems resolved are cheering and welcome at Christmastide. Friends who have had a disagreement with someone close to them, and have barely been on speaking terms, are to have a Christmas meal together, and the news now percolates that yesterday a case of drink has been delivered by one to the other. I ask no questions but feel a warm sense of satisfaction.

chanterelles dream Christmases

2011-12-17T16:40:00.000Z

Poached duck egg and chanterelle mushrooms on toast at Brawn restaurant last week. The impression still resonates.

The last dreams you have during the night are the ones you tend to remember. I wake convinced that I have lost the top of a Waterman ball point pen, which I have become fond of as one becomes fond of frequently used tools. I am in Piccadilly but the shops are shabby and there are worrying things going on. The top drops off the pen and neatly falls down a drain. I wake up saying " oh dear, oh dear" to myself. I am regretful rather than distressed. It is cheering however to wake up properly and to find the black, gold-trimmed pen intact on my writing desk.

Like Christmas, Father Christmas tends to be in the singular; you think each of them as separate from others of their kind, belonging to a particular time and place. The old man is usually of ample proportions, rosy cheeked and a little ponderous. But this afternoon the sight of two father Christmases striding across The Grove side by side, with their bright red garb fringed with white, brings a note of cheer to the darkening scene. They are young, lithe and brisk and their beards and moustaches are all over the place.

shard wrong pronunciation

2011-12-16T17:09:00.000Z

The new sky-scraper near London Bridge Station slices into the sky beneath a crane which dwarfs other cranes at work nearby.

At Charing Cross without realising it I insert my return ticket into the automatic exit barrier instead my "out" ticket. The machine seems to swallow the ticket without raising the barrier. I explain to an railway official and she lets me through. Only when through do I think of looking to see if I used the wrong ticket , which of course I had done. Back I go. "See if it's still there," says the young woman. It is lying there in all innocence spat out by the machine and I feel relieved out of all proportion to the importance of the incident.

Twice in the last two days I am corrected in my pronunciation ( this is nothing to do with accent) of the names of products. In the first instance without telling me that I am wrong, a young relative twice says Riesling as though it were Reisling ( the first syllable rhyming with lies) after I have just used the accepted pronunication twice. And this afternoon, a salesman who says that he works for the company, pronounces Braun as though it rhymes with Brawn, after I pronounce it to rhyme with Brown. I suspect that in this instance he is half right because almost certainly in English speaking countries, the German company accepts that it is unlikely that Braun would be pronounced as it is in Germany. Well I try.

clams inspiration holly

2011-12-14T17:02:00.000Z

A dish of clams at the restaurant called Brawn in London where we meet for a family lunch. The restaurant, on the corner of a street in Bethnal Green is full of sunlight. We drink Sauvignon de Touraine.

A neighbour rather apologetically offers me a book in a blue cardboard box. It is a gift from shop in the town of whom he is a customer. "It's of no use to me," he says. It is bound in leather and has a tongue which feeds in to a loop to close it. The leaves are gilt edged. Is it a diary? Or a bible? It is just a book with plain leaves, no lines, no squares, just blank pages. I gladly accept. I find it hard to resist such things. Blank pages call out for words to make them happy.

The holly trees round here are laden with berries. Such displays ares supposed to promise a cold winter. But perhaps they just mean that it is a good year for holly, as one might say in June, it's a good year for roses.

off cuts news queuing

2011-12-13T17:01:00.001Z

First there were the Christmas cards. Then the trimmings, and the fine trimmings from the guillotine. Here are the fine trimmings. The trimmings are used for book marks.

Today's news is dominated by two things.
First, the reaction in Europe and the UK to the British Prime Minister's rejection of a treaty designed to bring European countries into closer union, particularly fiscal union, in order the avoid the collapse of the Euro currency.
Second, by possible sitings of the Higgs Boson, the missing particle which the Standard Model of the universe requires to explain mass in sub atomic particles. If the Higgs Boson, sometimes known at the God particle, doesn't exist, will someone have to invent it? Research is carried out in the Large Hadron Collider which forms a huge circle under parts of Switzerland and France, and fires particles at one another at speeds approaching the speed of light. It seeks to recreate the conditions which existed when the universe was formed by a big explosion 13.8 billion years ago.
Which item of news is more important?

In the post office unit in the newsagent at the bottom of Mount Sion a queue stretches between magazine racks and shelves of assorted goods. "I hate queueing," says the woman in front of me. But she doesn't appear to notice the magazines of which there us a vast and tantalising choice. For example: Nuts, by appearances, a lads' magazine; Model World; Auto Express; Muscle and Fitness; Golfer; Tattoo life. I pass the time writing down the titles.
The woman in front of me reaches the counter and hands over her letters for weighing and stamping. Most have addresses in mainland Europe. "We're out of Europe stamps," says the woman behind the counter, without apology, breathless and with that note of triumph, which certain people whose job it is to serve the public, reserve, in moments of stress, for the public.

magpies Cotan Hazlitt

2011-12-12T17:04:00.002Z

Two's for mirth.

Some years ago I was fortunate enough to see at The National Gallery an exhibition of paintings by the Spanish artist, Juan Sanchez Cotan, a contemporary of Shakespeare. His canvasses are almost all simple accounts of vegetables and other food items. Unlike the exuberant Dutch still lives of the same period,objects in his pictures are often arranged on a shelf with a dark, blank space behind, and shows them lit from the front, the viewpoint of the artist. The shelf is not quite a shelf for, examined closely, it seems to have no wall behind it and to have uprights to left and right which make a sort of frame. |One of Cotan's paintings reproduced and analysed in The Independent a week or so ago, shows: a quince and a cabbage hanging from a string above a shelf or ledge, and on the shelf; a melon, from which a slice has been taken, a slice of melon, but not the entire segment; and a cucumber protruding over the edge of the shelf. They are lined up from left to right, one beside the the other in the order which I have described them without an apparent attempt at composition, but one feels a considerable amount of thought and no little reverence. I describe the painting rather than reproduce here it because it is another way of bringing home the extraordinary presence of the subject matter. Google will doubtless show you the painting which is called Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber.

Here is an often quoted observation made by the English essayist John Hazlitt. No apology for quoting it again: " Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; because he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."

production vegetarian garters

2011-12-11T16:11:00.002Z

The end of the Christmas card production line Chez Plutarch.

Vegetarians I confess scare me even when they apologise. I ask my spiced apple juice, selling friend at the Farmers' Market if he knows what had happened to the stall selling meat from rare breed animals. "I'm a vegetarian," he says "I'm afraid I wouldn't know" Part of me admires those who refrain from eating their fellow animals. My only excuse for not being a vegetarian myself is that I admit to being a carnivorous animal. Metaphysically speaking blood drips from my fangs, as I stalk among the market stalls seeking flesh.

When I was a lad in short trousers, our school uniform required us to wear long socks which were pulled up just below the knee. Inevitably they would come down, as we ran and played, and ended up twisted round the ankles. (Pull your socks up was widely heard in those days and was more, or perhaps less, than a metaphor).To avoid this happening garters, made of elastic, were provided.. Images of long legged gaiety girls with frilly garters holding their stockings in place round their thighs, supervened in later years, and almost entirely expunged memories of the little bands of elastic below our knees. Until, that is, my socks begin, the other day, to be sucked down into my otherwise comfortable fleece lined winter boots. Long socks still fall down. Only elastic bands - garter substitutes - save the day.

silver station barefoot

2011-12-10T16:39:00.001Z

Sunlit webs. (Click for whole picture).

Do you believe that profitability is not the only criterion for the running of public utilities? And that certain public utilities like the railways should be kept well clear of private ownership and the profit motive which drives it? If so read the chapter called Railroads: a Case Study, in Tony Judt's polemic in favour of social democracy called Ill Fares the land. (Penguin). It is made all the more haunting by the quotation from Marcel Proust at the beginning: "Railways stations do not constitute, so to speak a part of the surrounding town, but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their signboards they bear its painted name."

A tall girl wearing black leggings strides up the somewhat uneven, brick pavement of Mount Sion. Despite the cold morning, she has no shoes on her feet. Instead they are in her left hand. They are black and their long, narrow heels explain the anomaly of their position.

harnessed irenic stop

2011-12-08T16:59:00.000Z

Two ponies and their traps ready to go, unlikely visitors to the convenience store in Gosevenor Road a few days ago.

Irenic is the word I want to remember today. It means peaceful and suggests reconciliation in argument, the opposite to polemic.

The little water colours which I have started as a project have no purpose other than to show form and colour which attract, please and in the long term, interest the eye. Sometimes they are abstract and sometime representational. Simplicity is hard to a achieve. Knowing when to stop, and when to continue, as in other activities, is the secret of success. The beauty of water colour as a medium is that it cannot forgive transgression of this rule.

floor meeting unfound

2011-12-07T16:10:00.000Z

"Get a shot of the floor," says L d P, drawing my attention to the worn linoleum at The Blogger's Retreat, a little feted but still potent attraction of the place. This is some time ago when he is still Barrett Bonden (How difficult the present tense becomes, when blogs fall and new ones spring forth). I oblige, not realising how much the peeling surface fitted in with my attraction to layered and peeling render.

Every morning recently Mrs Plutarch draws my attention to a chimney stack down the road crowded with pigeons. For some reason they like to gather there as the day brightens.Why, we don't know. Perhaps because at the base of one of those chimney someone is stoking a good fire. After a while the pigeons give the impression of looking at their wrist watches and saying in chorus: " Goodness me, look at the time. Must be off to work."

Walt Whitman is quoted in the leader of the December National Geographic:
"But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?"
Sometimes questions are more satisfying than answers.

leaves found melting

2011-12-06T16:28:00.000Z

Hanging on until the last.

A Parker ball pen of which I was fond disappeared a few weeks ago. I kept it in my pocket and used it to make notes when I saw anything of interest while walking about. I assumed I must have dropped it after scribbling in my notebook, until today when I felt something in the lining of my jacket. Something believed lost and then found is something gained.

Mid-morning, I am standing in The Grove where I have stopped for a minute to listen. All the sounds of the town meld into a murmur, interspersed with more immediate sounds closer too, an accelerating engine or a voice. It is quiet but very far from silent.

crow rubbish cheese

2011-12-05T16:11:00.000Z

Crow on finial.

At the market in The Pantiles a stall displays animals put together from old cans and other rubbish and presented as sculptures. "Recycled rubbish," says a notice. It reminds me of a time a year of so ago when I took a series of photographs of discarded cans and cigarette and sweet packets in the gutter and on the side of the road, and presented them as discrete and shining images. Born again. I am glad that someone else has had a similar idea.

A market stall displays freshly opened cheeses. I remark to the stall holder on the smell which sharpens the appetite. "I can't smell them", he says; "I'm too used to it."

evening rose-buds Newfoundlands

2011-12-04T16:17:00.000Z

This evening in The Grove.

Chinese tea, perfumed and decorated with rosebuds, was a Christmas present last year. Today I realise that I have neglected to drink it. The donor will be with us in a couple of weeks time, and will doubtless inspect the tin. Every day now it is rose buds mid-morning. And it is no hardship in case you get hold of the wrong end of the stick. The tea is wonderfully fragrant. And lovely to behold. Dried rose buds reside among the leaves and come back to life when hot water is added, like Japanese paper flowers.

Two Newfoundlands live on the periphery of The Grove. They are called Seal and Sophie. They are not related but are good friends. Sophie's man stops to talk. "She has just had a bath" he says. "It takes three hours. It has to be entrusted to a specialist. We can only have it done three times a year, because otherwise it would dry up the natural oils in her coat."

escape model sheep

2011-12-03T16:52:00.000Z

Whenever I go to the Bloggers' Retreat I like to take a peek out of the window at the end of one arm of the L-shaped restaurant. The view looking south across the river largely consists of this fire escape and the half landings on which are accumulated mops and buckets, old chairs and other detritus. I can never refrain from photographing it, if only because it is a reminder of how the rear of buildings differ from the front. In one you see something approaching the truth and in the other what others would like you to believe is the truth.

In the bay window of one of the pair of bow-fronted 18th Century houses at the bottom of Mount Sion there has, for as long as I can remember - about 25 years -, been a model sailing ship peeping out from behind partially drawn, dusty curtains. Today I notice that the window is empty and there is a "for sale" notice outside the house.

People who live in the same area all their lives are to be envied for their peace of mind and calm. At lunch time today at The Compasses, Bill recalls an old man in the Yorkshire Dales. He was nearly 80, he says, and he remembers him saying how "with a little old widow, he ran a few sheep nearby". Apart from a stint in World War 1 he had never left The Dales. He had not even been to the local towns of Leeds or Skipton.
Until a few years ago there were people living here, in the so called "village area" of Tunbridge Wells, who had never strayed further than the High Street, let alone visited London.

company why good morning

2011-12-02T17:16:00.001Z

Mr Crow with pigeons.

Why do I blog? I am asked. Because...

. I like to look around me and to share what I see, hear or smell what may be of interest to others. Or may amuse them at least.
Describing such encounters is rewarding. Words are always a pleasure to use as well as to read and hear.
I like to record what is about me. The place where I live becomes more interesting the closer I look at it. That must be the same for most places.And apply to most other people wherever they happen to live. The principle of looking closer is easily extendible to taking photographs of what is discovered and to using the macro lens as well as zooming out. Invariably it is to compose a picture which includes only what is necessary and excludes nothing that might be unnecessary.
I like, this blog in focus, to go to sleep thinking about what I have encountered during the past day and wake up wondering what I will find in the coming day..
There are certain things that greet me first thing in the morning like old friends eg a pigeon on the parapet of the roof of the house opposite, the tulip tree through which at this time of year the sun climbs like a silver monkey. They would not be the same without the presence of a blog through which they may be shared.
Of the choice of ways to turn when walking out of our front gate both of which offer Now's the Time their distinctive pleasures and promises.
Of The Grove, a small park on our doorstep where there are trees, birds, people, dogs and squirrels to watch and comment on.
There is, in a blog like this, always the opportunity for a gnomic pronouncement. Brevity is for me one of the great virtues. I like the aphorism, the one liner, the pithy summary. My concentration span is probably too short for anything more.
Of other blogs. I owe the word "gnomic" which I have only just learnt to use to a fellow blogger, who has recently transmigrated into the personage of Lorenzo da Ponte. His blog Tone Deaf and its predecessor Works Well are instances at once of the charms and the perils of blogging. A world which is all charm and peril free is barely worth living in. So long live blogging.
It is an exercise for the mind as well as for the senses. There is much to be missed if you don't look and listen and even more if you don't think about what you have heard and seen. And without the exercise there is the risk that the mind and the senses will go to sleep and snore.
I have got into the habit of it. I have blogged almost daily for nearly six years. Without it something important would be missing from my life, like being without tea or The Archers.
It brings news friends and keeps in touch with old ones. To both I sometimes think that I am sending postcards daily from where I happen to be which is usually the same place.
In occupying the mind, it is a therapy against the awful noise of crisis and war, cruelty and lies, wickedness and stupidity, that streams out of the TV and newspapers, and which it is hard to escape unless you cover your ears with your hands and scream, or accept it with the detachment which comes from enlightenment or from indifference.
....because, to quote Kathleen Raine, my favourite poet at the moment, Because I love, all night long the river flows/into my sleep, Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms/ and sleeping wake and flowing are at rest."

This morning there is a mist rising which is silver tinted with gold. Good morning.

London fish balance

2011-12-01T16:11:00.000Z

London skyline from Waterloo Bridge. (Click for whole picture)

Three young women are walking with push chairs side by side in The Grove. As I pass I hear one say: "Families are like fish: they go off after a few days."

Walking towards me up Grosvenor Road is a young man in a leather jacket. Round his neck is a baby sling with a very small baby pressed against his chest. In one hand is a take-away coffee and in the other is a sandwich. He is walking slowly and very carefully.

crow beer alas

2011-11-30T16:28:00.001Z

Today's crow.

My favourite joke at the moment. A girl goes into a pub with her boy friend. The boy friend says:
"I love you." The girl says: "That must be the beer talking." the boy friend says: "No, it's me talking to the beer."

Only one good thing comes out of Barrett Bonden's decision to abandon his thought-provoking and thoughtful blog called Works Well. It was entertaining, witty and to the point even when its original focus on technology became blurred. The good thing that came out of its closure was an hour- long telephone conversation - good at least for me, rather than for others who have lost Works Well permanently. Knowledge of Bonden's granite-like character inspires little hope of revival. His reasons for closing it are mysterious, though we know that someone - another blogger - was wounded by a comment which he made, not on his own blog, but on the other blogger's blog. The whole business is disturbing. As from a face behind a veil two mysterious eyes stare out, benign, kindly, wise, accusing, suspicious, menacing? Who knows? At first my response to the news was such that I reacted to it without fully understanding why Works Well was to go. My comment on Works Well ( comment number 21 of 21) was written in indignation as well as partial ignorance. However it earned me the epithet "gnomic" which gave BB the opportunity to use the word and me to learn its meaning. Gnomic I like. Now there is the topic Why do people blog to explore, the dangers of blogging and so on. From time time gnomic utterances will now transpire, a poor substitute for those of BB himself.

entrance identity Kobe

2011-11-29T17:14:00.000Z

Entrance to the underworld.

When I was at school I edited with a friend a literary magazine to which both pupils and parents contributed. Among the senior contributors was the poet Kathleen Raine whose collected poems I have in front of me. I remember one of her poems in particular. It was called Amo Ergo Sum. It began with the lines "Because I love,/ the sun pours out its rays of living gold/ pours out its gold and silver on the sea." I it remember especially because it was my first of many encounters (anticipating my later employment as an editor which extended for some time into the era of hot metal) with a compositor, or type setter. Knowing nothing of type or magazine layout at the time, I remember feeling immense gratitude for his help. Only his unfamiliarity with Latin and Descartes caused surprise when he referred to the author of the poem as Ergo Sum. It is the wrong reason for remembering a beautiful poem, but such is the way events work on us.

Chris who cuts what remains of my hair is a gourmet. He tells me that he has just cooked and eaten some "Kobe-style" beef. Kobe beef is exceptionally tender, evenly marbled meat, which is to be produced in the remote region for Japan form which it gets its name. Legend has it that each animal is looked after by its own keeper and massaged daily with sake. The animals are said to be sustained on beer and corn. Some farmers in the UK and elsewhere in the world are now producing tender beef with similar care and attention (hence Kobe style), though I doubt that the detail matches the myth either in Japan or elsewhere. I ate some of the genuine stuff once in Japan and can vouch for its tenderness and flavour. Chris says that having cooked and tasted Kobe style beef he is now intent on trying the real thing. He has found a supplier who charges £160 per kilo. "It's cheaper than going to Japan," he says.

plaform factory cat

2011-11-28T16:39:00.000Z

Waterloo East looking west.

A number of people whom I know have stopped sending Christmas cards. I like the practise. As you get older it helps establish the fact that are still alive, presuming that you are. When I don't hear from someone who usually sends cards I confess to worrying a little. I like making Christmas cards. Last year I entrusted the job to a company operating from a shop in Mount Pleasant to whom I supplied my photograph. Their work lacked what shall we say, the love that I try to apply to the job. This year modifying a photograph of a piece of graffiti, imposing a festive message, designing, printing and folding the card is all my own work and though it may not be highly professional it is performed with at least a smidgen of, what shall we say, love.

A neighbours cat which has taken over out garden as a part time resident stops as it crosses the road to inspect me with a resentful stare. I realise that it is the colour of a fox. There are foxes which I have seen recently which I can distinguish from this cat because of their scruffy coats and confident gait. The cat ( is it Burmese of Siamese? It has the lean and hungry look of oriental felines ) is altogether sleeker, and when rebuked for scaring birds, scuttles off (uncat-like when you think about it), without a shred of dignity.

lace exageration skating

2011-11-27T16:05:00.000Z

Lacey cobwebs cover ivy after frost.

The sun low in the sky this afternoon tends to go the head, so long are the shadows, and so dramatically lit are people's faces and the branches of trees. It is a time for other sorts of exaggeration. Some young mothers are chatting on domestic matters beside the playground "My store cupboard is a bit over stocked now. I find I've got 9,000 tins of sweetcorn..." says one.

A skating link has been installed in Calverley Ground. There are floodlights and fairy lights in the trees. Unfortunately health and safety authorities must have insisted that it is encircled by a fence, so that it is less picturesque than it might otherwise have been, and all you can see is a sequence of body-less heads gliding above the parapet.

chance coincidence bench

2011-11-26T16:52:00.000Z

Sometimes a graffito merges with its background to produce something of interest. This one appears on a lamp post in The Grove. It strikes me that it would be satisfying as an abstract expressionist painting.. My only contribution has been to identify it and crop the resulting photograph.

This morning I take out my mobile phone to call Mrs Plutarch. I need to confer about purchases in the market and anticipated guests. The phone vibrates in my hand. I answer it. It is Mrs Plutarch calling me.

The other day I spotted in the distance a man sitting on a bench with a woolly dog beside him also on the bench. The dog's paw rested on the man's knee. A second dog sat on the ground under the bench. Today I see the same man and the same dogs. The dog on the bench occupies the same place beside the man, its paw on his knee. The other dog is under the bench. This second siting with its precise resemblance to the first strikes me as a significant indication of habit and routine as well as of an unusual relationship.

outline time wear

2011-11-25T16:35:00.001Z

The outline of the tree follows the outline of the leaf. I may be repeating this image or confusing it with one recent photograph which showed the shape of the tree in the veins of a leaf.

We, the gardener and I, are discussing, in the context of the prolonged Autumn, the imminence of Winter. "Every week that passes is one less," he says. I know what he means. But the words resonate with meanings beyond my comprehension.

As I walk down Mount Pleasant, I catch sight of an elderly man with a long expressive face caught in a beam of sunlight. I think to myself how much I like the wear and tear on old faces that tells of experience, and a mingling of pain and joy. I exclude my own face from this general preference. I see too much of it when shaving in the morning and know its history too well.

leaf sermon less

2011-11-24T17:02:00.000Z

At this time of year I often find myself snapping a leaf like this one, rain soaked and flattened into the pavement. It is the same sort of photograph, but of a different leaf faded eroded to form a different picture.

Almost by chance I find myself reading, in the King James version of the Bible, the Sermon on the Mount which begins in Chapter 5 of the Gospel according to St Matthew. I read it on my Kindle which makes it surprisingly more accessible than my old bible. So many of the verses are familiar from earlier reading, probably at school, perhaps later, but still a long time ago, that it seems that I am being prompted to recall what I already know by heart. I find myself surprised, though it is almost a platitude to say so, how many of the phrases ( even more than I thought) are now part of the English language.

With the recent occupation of the area in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London by anti-capitalists confronting the bankers of the City of London, several clerics asked the question: which side would Jesus have been on? The answer is in The Sermon on the Mount. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and dust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal".

This and what follows must be among the most often quoted and, at the same time, the most widely ignored pieces of advice in any religious doctrine. That may also be said for the earlier demand: "For I say unto you , Love your enemies, bless them curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you." Not much sign of that nowadays. Or ever.

A familiar sound on the brick pavements of Tunbridge Wells is the rattle of someone pulling over them an item of wheeled luggage on his or her way to the railway station. Only a few years ago you saw people staggering under the weight of one or two overloaded suitcases, and a heavy puffing sound resulting from the exertion. One thing at least is better than it used to be.

starling working ponies

2011-11-23T13:50:00.000Z

Bird tree fruited with starlings.

Two days ago our computers stopped receiving signals. And so did the television. Both sets of signals come via cable provided by Virgin. Today the problem is sorted out and so we are back on air and glad of it.

An unusual sight in Tunbridge Wells. In Grosvenor Road, outside the convenience store are two ponies each harnessed to a one-seater tubular metal trap. Beside them are two lads snacking on packets of crisps. They tell me that they race them. "Where", I say. Anywhere we can," they say. A few minutes later, I am walking up Mount Pleasant. I hear the clop of hooves. There are the ponies with their owners trotting up the hill among the traffic.

branch opposites Routemaster

2011-11-20T17:20:00.000Z

Branch inThe Grove.

Some of the buildings in Tunbridge Wells - the main line railway station for example - seem to be constructed in such a way that you imagine, because one side is more impressive than the other, that what was intended to be the front is at the back and vice versa. Sometimes I have a similar impression with people. You see someone from behind to find when you have caught up with them that you have gained a completely false impression. You may say that one is misled by a false description.

In Piccadilly we board a Routemaster bus with a rear platform and a conductor. It must be one of the very last in service. It is painted a cream colour rather than the traditional red. The young conductor is too deep in conversation with a young passenger with a rucksack about uprisings in The Middle East, rebellions and freedom, to look at our bus passes. They are in agreement about the wickedness of those in power, authority and force of arms. This is London. Where else? A sense of fete is in the air. Bliss to be alive. Who can dissent?

If anyone wonders why the text is centred, it is because I have a formatting problem with Blogger.

wall staring shard

2011-11-19T16:46:00.000Z

A central heating vent, a hook and a rusty stain on the wall of the pub.

In the restaurant where we are having lunch there is a man of vast girth sitting at a table opposite ours. Mrs Plutarch has her back to him and cannot see him. He and his party, the bill paid, rise and prepare to leave. I whisper and mouth to Mrs P, a fellow people watcher who is deprived of this particular view, the word "enormous". Unfortunately one of the big man's party catches me in the act. With an understanding smile, however, he nods goodbye, making me feel a little less uncomfortable, but still uncomfortable. How lamentably far I have come from the time when as a child I was admonished not to stare. I stare all the time. "Curiosity killed the cat!" they used to say. But cats have nine lives.

Beside London Bridge Station the new glass and steel building known as The Shard because of its blade-like, tapering shape is nearing completion. A crane working, it seems non-stop, is hoisting glass panels and other components into position. The crane reaches into the clouds above the summit of the building's towering frame. An enclosed walkway or lift tracks the crane to the top. I think of the driver and the view of London he must enjoy, in his precipitous cab, as he manages his controls.

message tap like

2011-11-18T17:56:00.000Z

Before the pub the works - the imprint of a former occupation above The Compasses.

Item on my restaurant bill : " One jug of tap £00.00."

On the train going home today there are - like- two school girls and they are - like - talking most of the time about - like - boys. And they have - like a lot to say about boys, and - like - show that "like" is a useful word to indicate- like - how to talk about whatever boy is- like - on your mind - like- at the moment.

wild crisp bench

2011-11-17T17:13:00.001Z

There is not much wild about our neighbourhood. Technically I suppose the squirrels in The Grove are wild. They subsist on acorns and beechnuts provided by the trees, and depend on the human population only in as much as it encourages the trees and preserves a relatively unfettered environment. On the whole people do not feed the squirrels and do not discourage their dogs from chasing them. From time to time Tunbridge Wells Borough Council initiates a cull by leaving poison in boxes at the top of trees, which reduces their numbers. As a rule the squirrels do not allow you to come too close before they run off. This one is an exception, but there is still a hint of wildness in its eye, the shadow of suspicion and if you look closely the image of the photographer.

When I was a child there was a breakfast cereal called Rice Krispies, a sort of popcorn using rice instead of corn. ( Through Google I learn that Kellogg's still produces it). The slogan which encouraged its use played on the noise it made "crackle, crackle pop" when milk was added .This must have appealed to me as a four year old because I have not forgotten the noise or the sense of anticipation promised and satisfied. Today I remember it when I hear the last of the Autumn leaves going" crackle, crackle pop" in the breeze.

There is a bench in The Grove which carries a brass plaque indicating that it was donated by the Friends of the Grove to commemorate The Great Storm of 1987 when so many of the existing trees were felled by the wind. I remember going to bed shortly after 1 am, when the hurricane had not yet struck, and waking up five hours later to scenes of devastation. Because one's life is divided onto distinct periods of varying lengths, and because the present period includes The Great Storm, it still seems to me to be a relatively recent event. Yet 24 years is no minuscule parcel of time.

profiles warning bee

2011-11-15T16:48:00.000Z

Profiles in an oak against the evening sky.

I hear a tinkling sound from the wilderness of the neglected garden next door. It is a cat stalking in some shrubs and long grass. The bell on its collar warns its prey. Cruel to the cat whose nature is crossed? Or to the birds who are alerted?

A bumble bee, this morning, unaware that it is mid November, hovers round the spent flowers of a lace cap hydrangea, while the last dead leaves of the lime tree over the lawn flutter to earth.

balls lamb foxy

2011-11-14T16:29:00.000Z

There are two games - cricket and tennis - which have given me more pleasure than any other, and still do vicariously. In my study two reminders of these sports persist in the forms of the appropriate balls. Where precisely they came from I cannot remember, but they remain pleasing souvenirs. I like the way, in this picture which I have just taken, the cricket ball seems to be floating a few centimeters above the table, no deliberate photographic trick, just chance.

At the Farmers' Market on Saturday a couple who are sheep farmers sell finely sliced, smoked, air dried lamb, which resembles Parma ham or the Spanish Serrano ham which is cured in a similar way. I offer some to our guests who find it succulent. And so do I.

At The Compasses they talk of Spud Taylor who once attached a dog lead to a fox fur stole which, to the consternation of the staff, he "took for a walk" round Marks & Spencer, stopping from time to time to admonish the ersatz animal, for failing to keep up with him.

last fly agaric silence

2011-11-13T17:28:00.002Z

A late nasturtium, lit and shaded by the the low sun of a November afternoon.

In the triangular shrubbery in Berkeley Road, known as The Village Green, several fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) are sprouting from among the dead leaves. The red mushrooms with white spots were used to stun or kill flies. You left chopped up pieces in a saucer of milk and flies drawn to the milk succumbed. As far as human beings are concerned the fungus is a powerful hallucinogen. Laplanders noticed the effect that it had on reindeer which it made drowsy. The Lapps used to swallow it in a dried state. It induced dizziness and a death like sleep which must have had some sort of mystical significance. Don't try it at home. It can kill.

At 11 o'clock this morning everything stops in Sainsbury's in order to observe the two minute silence for Rememberance Sunday. It is always a moving moment mercifully free of politics and one hopes of national preference. In the supermarket, where shoppers stuff their bags at the checkouts and bar code readers emit endless competitive pinging sounds, there is sudden halt to the flow of cash in and the flow of goods out. The unaccustomed silence has a special significance. People's faces relax as the usually frantic shoppers stand in the shopping aisles as though stunned by an enchanter.

somewhere shocked rudeness

2011-11-11T17:02:00.000Z

Overhead a plane full of people is going somewhere.

In an article in today's paper on food preparation is this quote, picked out in bold type: "I was truly shocked at how easy it was to make cheese." I feel unpersuaded to read on.

Rudeness has an appeal all of its own. It adds a harshness and sour flavour to shopping chores, which sharpen the appetite. In a cutlers shop today I ask about butter knives. I indicate a broad bladed knife with a large flat hook instead of a handle. The hook is almost the same size as the blade. "Is this a butter knife?" I ask. "Yes," says a surly attendant. "What is this for? " I ask indicating the hook/handle. "I don't know," he says."We're closing down. There's 40 per cent off." When asked he shows me a more conventional butter knife which I buy. There is 40 per cent off the price. But that isn't the point.

window rescue 21

2011-11-10T16:15:00.000Z

Feet and shoes.

There is a neighbour who loves other living creatures as St Francis must have done. I have seen here help trapped spiders. She will rescue bird and door mice, bees and butterflies. The other day after heavy rain a lot of earthworms come out to dry in the sun. Many have strayed on to the footpath. Without a moment's hesitation she begins meticulously to transfer the worms out of the way of thoughtless feet.

"I'd like to be 21 again," says Bill at The Compasses, "and know then what I know now!"

apples turf framed

2011-11-09T16:18:00.000Z

Last apples cling to an old tree.

In The Grove they grub out with the help of a small mechanical digger and a mechanical shovel a bank of untidy shrubs next to the playground. They replace the shrubs with turf. The turf arrives in a van in strips like rolled strips of green carpet. And the new grass ism settled into place as quickly as a carpet.

In a single moment a picture composes itself among fallen leaves and the trunks of trees. The two crows, so often present in The Grove, waddle across the frame while four squirrels scamper around them.

art toneless glumes

2011-11-08T16:35:00.000Z

Part art. Someone has left an adhesive graffito on a rusting metal casing. Erosion, if it has not improved it, has neatly modified.

There is an absence of tone in The Grove this afternoon. The ground strewn with leaves, the paths brown, the shrubs, black and ochre, the trees trunks slate-coloured, the branches scratched against a grey sky. It is not raining but the still air is full of moisture and heavy drops condense and fall from above with an occasional plop.

The Observers Book of Grasses, Sedges and Rushes sits on my desk. I enjoy reading about Glumacious plants ( a lovely word which goes some way to explain my pleasure) if only for the vocabulary which comes with them. An example from the introduction: " The naturalist understands by "grass" such plants only as fall under the description given below of the Gramineae, a natural family of the larger order Glumaceae which differ from most other flowering plants in having their flowers enclosed in chaffy scales or glumes known as spikelets."
It is apparently common to confuse the grass family with other members of the Glumaceous order belonging to the family of Cyperaceae or sedges. It is pleasing to be reminded that bamboos of which tall forests are found in Asia, are grasses. And sugar cane too.

mystery waiting apples

2011-11-07T15:48:00.000Z

Mysterious window.

A menacing traffic warden seems to threaten us, car-less as we are, as we walk down Grosevenor Road. He fixes his eye on me from under his cruel hat. "You can't wait there, mate," he says. To my relief he is addressing not me but the driver of a car drawing up behind me. But you never know nowadays.

Alongside the garden where I grow vegetables, the deserted garden of an empty house is layered with blackened stalks, fading grass, and thistles which have flowered and flopped. Everything this morning is sere and damp. But apples still hang on to the branches an old tree that has lost its leaves.

rose netsuke white beans

2011-11-06T16:58:00.000Z

The last rose of summer.

Nick the fishmonger who is a collector of netsuke, the little Japanese carvings, greets me in the supermarket. He produces from his pocket a small bag which he opens to reveal a green dragon meticulously carved in wood.

Coming home from a quick turn round The Grove we meet the two grown-up daughters of some friends. They have had Sunday lunch with their parents and tell us about the neck of lamb caserole served with leeks and a white bean and garlic purée, instead of mashed potatoes, which their parents cooked for them. The cold wind blows round our ears and makes us hungry.

My reply to Lucy Kempton's question: If you could would you go? has been posted with Lucy's approval and some of her suggested improvements on our Compasses blog.

chair alright doubt

2011-11-05T16:53:00.000Z

Holiday file still active. Chair for shadow.

Is that a four letter word I hear? I am standing outside the small open space outside Hall's Bookshop where vehicles maneouvre and unload. Yes it is. "Fucking hell," shouts an angry man. A hired van has just failed to knock him flat. He is sturdy and agile and not above being coarse when coarseness is called for. "I'm very sorry," says the driver of the van, who looks as though he is not used to the vans ways particularly in reverse. He leans out of the window. "Are you alright?" "I'm always fucking alright." Tunbridge Wells is all the better for a little metal sometimes.

Bertrand Russell quoted in the The New York Times says: "The fundemental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt". That has always struck me as true. It explains why so many politicians appear or feel that they ought to appear so sure of themselves.

balanced starlings found

2011-11-04T17:04:00.000Z

Pigeon posing in the Pantiles.

There are more starlings around this year I am glad to say. This morning there is a tree in The Grove laden with them. As I look up at them and listen to their fluting chatter, a man stops and says: "Where are they going? They do have a chirrup don't they?"

On my way to the fishmonger I buy some milk at the convenience store with what I think is a "£20 00 note. At the fishmonger I find that I have only the change from a "£10.00 in my wallet. Did I get the wrong change from the milk purchase? Or was I mistaken about the note. I call in at the store on my way home,. "No," says the young man, "you gave me a £10.00 note". I believe him because I am quite likely to have been wrong, my mind being on other things. But it turns out that I was right all along. When I get home, the young man at the store takes the trouble to ring me up and tell me that I must have dropped the £10.00 from my change on the floor. Apparently a customer had picked up.

brand ageing chips

2011-11-03T16:26:00.000Z

Some brands are beautiful regardless of the necessary commerce which gives birth to them.

As I pass the friendly shoe mender's next to the station and catching a glimpse of him behind his counter, I realize that the mender is no longer the young man that I knew when I first lived in Tunbridge Wells. Other people show their years. And I must show them too, except that when I face a mirror I do not look for them. What is more I seem to employ a natural filtration system to avoid them catching me unawares.

I knew that sooner or later the poem that I submitted to Qarrtsuluni in September on the theme of Worship was going to be published, podcast and all. It is still a bit of a shock or rather a pleasant surprise when today it comes up on the magazine's regular prompt announcing its posts. Dave Bonta who introduces the poem is kind enough to remind me and others that this is my sixth appearance on Qarrtsiluni. I always wondered what it would be like to be a published poet. Now I feel that I am beginning to know.

posing coach works creatures

2011-11-02T16:56:00.000Z

Mr Crow poses for camera in The Grove. I agree with Martha, The Crow's comment here the other day about the "unintentional pomposity" of crows. They are self-important above all else. The way people can be self-important. Anthropomorphism is a weakness of mine, but crows seem to invite it.

This used to be a "coach works" says Bill referring to a former function of The Compasses pub outside which we are sitting. At our feet is a circular sheet of steel about two meters in diameter. There is a space in the centre now filled with tarmac. The steel is painted black. He explains that the wheel was placed over the steel; molten metal was poured into the central hole for the hub; and strips of metal applied to the rim of the wheel. The metal tightened round the rim, and the spokes shrunk into position. "No glue, screws or rivets needed." How often have I seen and trodden on that circle of black steel and not given a thought to its purpose!

This morning I am early in The Grove. People dressed for work are hurrying in the direction of the station. A woman with two energetic dogs, which are haring about among the trees, remarks as I watch and photograph a squirrel reaching for a nut while balanced on a branch : "I like watching squirrels. They run up tree trunks and play hide and seek with the dogs. I like them: little, living creatures." As I walk on she says: "Have a nice day." The phrase seems to be catching on, on this side of the pond. But seems to have more meaning here than on the other side, perhaps because, there, it has been longer in use.

fall warden riots

2011-11-01T16:40:00.000Z

Autumn in The Grove or if you like Fall. Either way all the leaves are going to come off and soon.

Over the top of a car a military hat passes. I look again to see if a guards officer or the like is walking past The |Compasses. But no it is a traffic warden.

On the BBC website there are photographs taken by Lewis Wheld of the riots in London last summer. Most people I know felt rather ashamed that they occurred regardless of why they did. It now seems that it was less a social protest or a instance of gang culture gone mad, rather than a spontaneous outburst of greed and lawlessness. Pictures of worried faces against a background of shops on fire and broken windows, firemen with hoses, policemen running with riot shields. A rioter in a mask and hood his arms outstretched triumphantly above his head and a solitary fireman surrounded by billowing smoke stick in the mind. Not the place to censor or seek to explain, rather to admire the photographs which show homo sapiens in chaos.

mosaic friendhip snow

2011-10-31T16:28:00.000Z

Autumn mosaic in The Grove. Colours this year are more intense than usual, everyone says. And everyone may be right.

On a bench sits a man with his arm round a big woolly dog. The dog sits on the bench beside him, one paw on his knee. A similar woolly dog sits beside the feet of the man. Contentment.

Last year heavy snow falls before Christmas had me shovelling snow with a spade, not the best way of clearing the footpath. Today I buy a snow shovel or snow scoop as it calls itself. It occurs to me that this new tool will probably prove to be a charm against heavy snow fall, and may hang around all winter, just a pretty face.

crow parsley wet

2011-10-30T17:11:00.000Z

The crow whom I call Mr Crow patrols The Grove today. I always imagine that he believes that the park belongs to him, particularly when he has this expression on his face.

For years I have tried to grow parsley in a parsley pot, an earthenware pot tapering towards the top, with holes in it through which the plants are trained. This year for the first time it has worked, a flourish of fronds, a green halo.

Today the leaves in The Grove are wet and exude Autumn smells, mushroomy and a little decadent. A gardening programme on BBC 1 recommends stuffing refuse bags with dead leaves and keeping them moist to make your own leaf mould.

tubes onions stealing

2011-10-29T16:13:00.000+01:00

Scaffolding collapsd and ready to depart.

For as long as I can remember I have cultivated Welsh onions. They have the advantage of perpetuity. They look a bit like spring onions, but have somewhat larger bulbs, and grow in clusters. To harvest or to propagate them you break away part of the cluster, and eat them chopped like spring onions or plant them out. Today I break up the clusters which have been occupying the same bed (vegetable bed!) for several years and set out a new row for next year and fill several pots with extra onions. Oh, and the taste? Better than spring onions, perhaps a little stronger, more pungent but with a savoury, spicy undertow.

At the checkout in Sainsbury's this morning, I organise my collection of bags, ready for filling off the conveyor. To my surprise I find a solitary lime at the bottom of one of the bags. It is left over from last week's shopping, but I am pricked by a ridiculous feeling of guilt. A security guard looking over my shoulder could accuse me of purloining it. My problem is that I am obsessively honest, horrified by the idea of shop-lifting. But have to ask myself whether such compulsion doesn't mask, an underlying wickedness. If it were not that I feared censor, self-imposed or worse, the censor of others, I might be a natural born thief. Or at least a believer in the dictum that all property is theft. I simply don't know, but I do remember the warm feeling of triumph when as a child during the war, we scrumped apples, from the school where I was a boarder. "What's this?" said the teacher, pulling back the bedclothes in the dormitory, to reveal the hard-won fruit. That's stealing, she said.

dill collared cheeks

2011-10-28T16:35:00.000+01:00

The dill which provided gravadlax earlier this year has now flowered and gone to seed. It has in its present state proved a useful addition to flower arrangements and will doubtless provide fragrant seeds for seasoning.

For the last few years collared doves with their delicate, grey feathers and the black collars, which gives them their name, have been around in one particular corner of The Grove. Apparently they have only recently been common in the British Isles. We have also seen them regularly in Spain where they have been longer established. I have photographed them in both places. Usually there is only a pair in The Grove but today I see four birds in the usual place, and then flying down from the fence, a fifth.

The skate, which we had from the fishmongers the other day pan fried in butter with capers, was all that we had hoped. The pieces are usually described as "skate wings", appropriate for a flat fish of the ray family. I am not sure what a whole skate looks like, but today the "skate nobs" at the fishmongers, turn out to be skate cheeks. "We're trying them out," says the fishmonger, "they're a bit like scampi. We'd appreciate some feed back."

wall laughing last

2011-10-27T17:26:00.000+01:00

Peels and cracks and strata revealed.

So impressed am I with Victor Hugo's compelling novel, The Laughing Man, that I have ordered a copy in English, to give to the next deserving person I encounter. I am only half way though the French original L'Homme qui Rit and find it difficult to put down. It is the first Hugo novel that I have read. The better know Notre Dame and Les Miserables have not appealed perhaps because of their fame as films and musicals. The pocket sized classic English edition of L'Homme... arrives to day. When at school we learnt and recited VH's lament for the Battle of Waterloo which begins " Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine!...and produced mixed feeling of triumph, guilt for being on the winning side, and laughter because Waterloo station, just round the corner, badly fitted the melancholic alexandrine music of the words.

Today the last of this summer's extraordinary crop of courgettes are to be grated, fried seasoned with a little feta cheese added to some beaten eggs, and turned into a fritata, an Italian omelet of which we have become very fond.

touching specifically conker

2011-10-26T16:22:00.000+01:00

Clouds, snouts approaching.

In Calverley Precinct there are often young people with clip boards. Invariably they are pushing one cult or another. Their habit is to greet you in a familiar way which people of my generation find uncomfortable. "How are you? " asks a young man, as it seems into the air, then catching my eye, adds, " you in particular?" But this old fart is not for stopping.

There is something about conkers newly released from their spiky green packs, that produces the sort of thrill you get when opening a present. Today digging over the bed where beans grew this summer I turn up a bright new conker, shining like polished furniture. There nearest horse chestnut tree is about 100 meters away. Only a squirrel could have brought it there. But with some difficulty because it is a large nut for small jaws. Unless it was a fox! But foxes don't bury conkers. Or Do they?

window slug Pam

2011-10-25T17:13:00.000+01:00

Upper floor window of Hall's Bookshop with reflection of pigeon.

In the bed which I am turning over for the Autumn I recoil at the sight of an enormous slug. It seems to glower at me. Slugs are not my favourite creatures. To my relief this one turns out to be the vestiges of a rotting courgette or zucchini. I bury it with special pleasure.

Inscribed on a bench in Calverley Precinct. "Pam. Born to shop. 1950 - 1997."

stacked TV ivy

2011-10-24T16:47:00.000+01:00

Chairs and collared dove.

"Excuse me, have I seen you on TV?" says the waitress at The Crown at Groomsbridge. "You look just like... you know that man in ...." A celebrity at last. Well not quite. Having denied my appearance on the screen, I offer my autograph which is politely declined.

There a lamppost near our house where ivy has climbed exuberantly. It is almost half way up, as though it is some kind of rampant legging.

walkies chill diet

2011-10-23T17:11:00.000+01:00

On the beach at Sitges. The last of the summer wine.

A regular feature in the Saturday edition of The Financial Times is an interview with a well known person under the banner Lunch with the FT. I don't always read the interview, but I never miss the panel containing the lunch menu. What saddens me nowadays is the sobriety of the meal. Wine rarely features. A puritan frugality seems to be the order of the day where alcohol is concerned. Lunch in my lunching day was rarely anything but over the top. Saturday's FT excelled itself in demonstrating this new puritanism. The subject of the interview was one, Millar S Dexter, who owns a "preppy" clothing chain called Crew. To accompany their meatballs at Paulino's in New York, he and his interlocutor drank Diet Coke and Peligrino. The meal was followed by two cappuccinos. Cheers.

I read but I do not write novels. Sometimes, though, the title of a novel waiting to be written comes to me even though I haven't a clue what it would contain. Today's inspiration is Wind Chill Factor. Aspirant or accomplished novelists are welcome to have their way it.

fading spice crunch

2011-10-22T16:35:00.000+01:00

There is still a firm of builders and property developers in Tunbridge Wells called John Jarvis. This abandoned building in all probability belongs to them. Its peeling logo against a lovely blue background and rusting corrugated iron have the air of something about which to be nostalgic.

In the Farmers' Market this morning outside the public library, I buy myself a mug of hot spiced apple juice, tasting of ginger and cinnamon. The store holder a former journalist, who also sells apples and cob nuts dipped in chocolate, invites me behind the stall to drink the juice quietly away from the crowd. From there as |I sip I watch shoppers coming and going, stopping and starting while their lingering glances dwell on fruit and plants and displays of meat and cheese. Leaves blow past me from the lime trees that border the road.

In The Grove the sun warms the dry leaves turning from green to russet. On the ground they crunch under foot and rustle as you kick them. In the branches they whisper and gossip dry and ready to fall.

web bamboo resoles

2011-10-21T16:31:00.000+01:00

Wired.

Every year at this time, there is the pleasurable chore of taking down the bamboo pole structure on which I grow climbing beans. In recent years I have become tidier and more disciplined. Now I tie the 8ft poles into bundles of 12, so that I can stack them neatly in a sheltered place. The beans plants look straggly and begin to turn brown. The beans themselves have become pods many of which are dry meaning that beans can be de-podded and saved in envelopes for sowing next year. A pleasurable job but not a patch on erecting the structure at the end of May ready for a new crop.

What shall I put in this evening's soup? In a few minutes it will be time to make a stock with the remains of a leg of lamb. The stock will be fragrant with celery and mint. For the soup there will be home-grown tomatoes for certain, a few beans, some finely sliced, very small courgettes, late but not yet attacked by the frost. And probably some little cubes of the last bits of neat from the leg.

leaf tools fate

2011-10-20T16:45:00.000+01:00

The tree in the leaf.

In these Indian summer days the sounds of people at work with tools as they fortify their houses against the coming winter are everywhere. The tools seem to imitate the noises that animals make: the hiss of sandpaper; the whistling and screaming of drills; the cawing of saws. On top of that when the rubbish disposal vans arrive, there is the anguished bellowing of hydraulic cylinders as they tip and empty wheelie bins into the belly of the van.

There is a story in The Compasses that the chair against the bar beside the door is unlucky. Several of its regular occupants have met an early death. A good reason to avoid it, but few of the perpetrators of the myth are superstitious. Rather they are driven by a gift for story telling. Today some one tells the man who is sitting there quietly doing the Telegraph crossword about the story. "You don't like me do you?" he says laughingly to one of the myth-makers; "you never told me. Never mind, I'm not superstitious." "He's a journalist," someone say, as we watch him he walks off with his Telegraph. " He's a clever man."

towel circles tidy-up

2011-10-19T17:04:00.000+01:00

Towel scape. The beach towel provided by Hotel, San Sebastian Plays spread over our balcony wall. The sea sparkles beyond it. Our holiday is already fading quickly kept alive only be photographs.

We all move in circles most of the time. Today, during a short walk to the local cashpoint, we meet the same people twice, then again. The people in question happen to be Nick Law and Alec Law, the latter sitting up in his pram. The third time round they are accompanied by Clare Law who has been at the hairdressers. Clare is of course the Clare who is the author of Three Beautiful Things, the inspiration of this blog and I believe of many others which have adopted a similar formula.

Wires are one of the less comfortable side effects of electronics. Today I rearrange my telephone, desk lamp and computer and loudspeakers in order to minimise the tangle and have everything in reach. Soon all will be wire-less. For the time being, I play Erik Satie's Gnossienne No 5 to crown this small achievement.

honey vase diplomacy

2011-10-18T17:01:00.002+01:00

A bumble bee collapses on our doorstep. Give it some honey someone says. We watch it feast and revive.

On the garden table a vase of cut flowers seems out of place but cheers in an unexpectedly chill wind as coals might in a grate indoors.

In the village of Hawkurst, where there is a small cinema., we are having difficulty in finding somewhere to park. In a cul-de-sac some people stare apprehensively at my friend Peter who is driving. All the parking places belong to the houses in the small road. We are about to go and the couple who are loading a car continue to watch us with suspicion. As he backs the car, Peter lowers the window and says " I saw you were worried, we're not going to park. It's obviously a problem here." The woman smiles meaning"it is" but says, "Have you tried the car park." Full," we say. "We're off to the cinema," says Peter. "Look," says the woman, " park over there,"pointing to a space over which she has parking rights. Peter offers her and the man with her a sweet as we leave to underline our appreciation of an act of kindness.

sails onions polysyllabic

2011-10-17T16:29:00.002+01:00

Red sails at Sitges

When, several years ago, I wrote about Roscoff onions which we were able to buy from Sainsbury's at the time, I was surprised and delighted to find that someone else knew of this delectable allium from Brittany. My correspondent was Lucy Kempton who has subsequently became a dear friend and collaborator in several ventures including the exchange of poems to be found on our joint blog, called Compasses. Yesterday, over here from Brittany, Lucy visits us and brings among other goodies from Brittany a bag of Roscoff onions from her local market. Time has made a neat circle and the onions are back in Now's the Time.

When tweeting I find myself using polysyllabic words, an added challenge to what and how to communicate in 140 characters.

explorer fog trolley

2011-10-15T17:35:00.001+01:00

Exploring the beach at Sitges.

When ever I hear economists and bankers talking about the state of the economy I think of fog, old fashioned sticky fog writhing round lamp posts and chimneys, visibility about 8ft. So it is with some amusement that I see in the window of Maplin, the electronics shop, a fog machine. No need for one; just switch on a current affairs programme or read the newspapers.

In the supermarket my trolley tries to run away in a crowded aisle. I steer it away from an impending collision. "Well caught, " says the man with whom it has nearly collided. For a moment I hear clapping from the boundary, the unmistakable sounds of cricket.

hopeful looking treasure

2011-10-14T16:58:00.000+01:00

In last rays of the evening sun, a hopeful rose.

A pigeon is on the parapet of the house opposite this morning. It is one I often see. It looks over the edge, tilting its head to left or right, looking for something to eat.

Almost anything I uncover when turning over the soil in the vegetable garden seems to have an archaeological value: a chip of blue china, the perforated lid of some kind of dispenser (Bill at The Compasses says later that it could be the filter from an old gas mask); a bent and rusted piece of metal; a fragment of the serrated edge of a saw blade. Deterioration and corruption seem in a perverse way to add value, but the value is only for me. I assemble a small collection.