swifts, watermelon, Flaubert's Parrot

Swifts usually leave for a warmer climate by the middle of August. Yesterday evening we watched and listened to a party of these acrobatic, screeching birds wheeling above the High Street. Behind them, over the Common, hovered a red kite - a flying toy and not the bird of prey.

Watermelons are at their most spectacular, after a slice has been removed, and the skin, with its pale green background and dark green strips, is contrasted with the abundant crimson flesh.

Some years ago I read Julian Barnes's novel Flaubert's Parrot for the first time quickly and with only moderate enjoyment. But it left its mark, and, prompted by it, I subsequently read or reread five of Flaubert's most important works and a selection of his letters. I read them with increasing pleasure and enlightenment, and now I'm rereading Flaubert's Parrot with increaing pleasure and enlightenment. It is relatively short but amounts to a critique of the great French novelist's work and life, while its own sparse plot unfolds. Thankyou Julian Barnes.

vacuum cleaning, slow cooking, lighting up

Sucking up an overlooked pile of dust or cobwebs in an awkward corner with the tube of the vacuum cleaner, the sweeper-head removed.

Slowly pot-roasting a brisket of beef with sliced onions and spices which, after two and half hours, create a rich natural gravy.

"You don't go to hell to light a cigarette". Greek proverb.

African music, tea for the Kaiser, ginger's progress

Standing outiside the front door, I hear, drifting up the hill through the warm rain, from a festival in the Pantiles, the sound of African drums and sporadic applause.

In A N Wilson's entertaining account of Great Britain in the last century, entitled After the Victorians, I read about Kaiser Wilhem II in exhile in Holland after the first World War. Although there was a question of extraditing him to face charges in Britain, the government was too busy at home to pursue the idea, and besides he was a cousin of King George V." The old gentleman was doing no harm to anyone, " writes Wilson. "His first act upon arrival in Holland had been for a good strong cup of English tea and his favourite reading was P G Wodehouse".

My ginger plant, the result of potting a small piece of fresh ginger root, has grown a second leaf.

wishful thinking, racing children, driving on the pavement

A 28-stone man on the Channel 4 news complains that he was made to leave a passenger plane, because he didn't fit any of the seats. He had been humiliated. "I was made to feel very small," he said.

Thee children carreer down a path in the Grove on those little scooters with tiny wheels. They hurtle into Grove Avenue and down towards the High Street managing to stop before they reach the main road. Just. What excitement!

Ascending Grove Hill Road I see a car coming towards me in the centre of the pavement. It is a remote controlled model car. Its owner, a few steps behind it, with the remote in his hand, is taking it for walk.

Montaigne, cobnut, dandelion clocks

I love Montaigne. He is not exacting in any sense. He is relaxed. He says: "When I meet with difficulties in my reading, I do not bite my nails over them: after making one or two attempts I give them up." Why waste time and energy on what is obscure? And he is modest: "Mistakes often escape our eyes but it is the sign of poor judgement if we are unable to see them when shown to us by another."

Under the cobut trees the path is strewn with broken cobnut shells. The squirrels have as usual been at work. Seldom do they miss a single nut. The trees are almost if not completely stripped bare. But as as the husks crunch under my feet, I spot one nut that has survived. I crack it open and eat its milky kernal and it seems like a feast. Meanwhile on a bough that has pushed through the roof vent of the greenhouse, hang two more nuts which the squirrels have been prevented from reaching. I'm saving them for another feast.

Two perfect dandelion clocks rise from between paving stones in a front garden. They are stately yet possess a sense of fun.

Ginger plant, buddleia, cooks and hands

The piece of ginger I planted in a pot now has a substantial leaf.

On a buddleia, also known as the butterfly tree, flutters one solitary cabbage white.

Too many cooks spoil the broth. And many hands may light work.

Upside down squirrel, painted face, good timing

A squirrel clings upside down to the trunk of an oak tree yet manages to hold a nut in its forepaws and nibble intently.

I see a little girl in a push chair with her face disfigured by what appears to be a horrible disease. I notice her sister walking beside her mother with the same affliction, until, with relief, I realize that both children are ornamented with face paint.

It showers heavily and I can rejoice that I ccmpleted my gardening chores before it started.

clouds, shadows, Dombey & Son

Watching majestic nimbus clouds piling up in the blue.

Shadows of leaves playing on the trunks of trees.

Reading the last of the 1000 or so wearisome pages of Dombey & Son. If this were the only novel which Dickens wrote he would surely not be thought of as a great novelist. It is tedious and sentimental, with a story, which is rendered no more believable by the weird behaviour of the central characters. Not for a moment do you understand why they act as they do. It is not worth suspending disbelief for.

dragon fly, open mind, hibiscus

A dragonfly is trapped between the paines of a raised sash window. It looks huge and sounds almost like a helecopter as it beats its wings in the confined space. It has a long, green body,which suggests that it might be a female Emperor dragonfly according to my book of garden wild life. How to free it? Luckily it works itself free, exiting the way it came in, through the gap between the two window frames.

"Open mind. You can drive a tank through it and not bump into anything on the way".
From Plutarch's Dictionary of Common and Uncommon Sense.

The white hibiscus is, at last, in flower. It is a hymn to whiteness.I take a close-up photograph of a single bloom. I look closely to see what the camera sees, and perhaps more - a bunched-up cluster of translucent white petals with delicate undulations like creases in a piece of fine cotton, three or four white stamens, and the only colour, a scattering of yellow pollen beneath the stamens. I must down load the photo to see if the camera agrees.

captive bike, wild nasturtiums, old person

Bicycles are often seen chained to railings or lamposts but one chained to a tree in the Grove strikes me as surreal.

" Old person. Anyone 10 years older than you. Do not speak to one unless you have to."
From Plutarch's Dictionary of Common and Uncommon Sense.

The grass of the curved strip which we call a lawn and which follows the curve of the road and the hedge bordering our house is green again after the rain. An unusual feature is the nasturtiums, which are popping up on it at intervals. Walking its length I counted five plants with two tiny but distinctive leaves. I'll have to find a way of mowing round them.

two crows again, fruit eater, blower

The two crows are in the Grove again. This time they are walking and not hopping. One opens its beak and caws restlessly from time to time. The other continues foraging. Then the restless bird caws again and confronts the tranquil one with its open beak. The other responds by squaring up with its beak open and the beaks clash. Is this affection or agression? I suspect it is affection. Crows are said to pair for life and these two are behaving like a couple.

A girl on a bench leans sideways over the arm rest to eat what looks like a piece of fruit and avoid the juice dripping on to her clothes. It must be a mango I think, though it is too far to see for certain. Only mangos are messy enough to require such a posture.

A man in goggles and ear-muffs blows leaves before him with a leaf-blower. There is a power pack on his back like a rucksack. Autumn is still far off, but there are enough dead leaves around to run before him, "as though from an enchanter fleeing."

Sun after rain, two crows, film stars

After the rain the sun comes out and warms the grass, which steams.

In the Grove two crows walk and hop. They walk, one foot at a time pecking at the grass as they go. When they want to make more progress without going to the trouble of flying, they hop, both feet coming off the ground at the same time.

When I tell a friend about the shop window in which there are at present pictures of 20th century film stars, he fetches an album of cigarette cards "issued by John Player and Sons" entitled "Film Stars third series". There they are, over glamorous paintings, in which even the men appear to be wearing make up - Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Gracie Fields, Erol Flynn, Vivien Leigh, Ray Milland, Laurence Olivier, James Stewart, and many others. Each card has been pasted in the place assigned to it, where there is a brief biography beneath the frame. Each picture is autographed by the star. It would be surprising if any were still alive.

flying time, confit, reunion

Looking at the time after a sociable lunch and finding that it is 5.30pm.

Confit of duck, crisped up after being removed from the fat in which it has been cooked and preserved, served with potatoes fried in the fat, and petits pois. A taste of the south west of France.

Meeting and eventually recognising someone whom you have previously only seen in fancy dress.

beatles, on the outside, weather

Apparently neo-nazis are threatening with extinction a species of slime mould beetle called Anophthalmus hitleri, because they are so keen to capture specimens of it, and retain them as pets. The beetle, which in 1933 , was named after Hitler by the man who discovered it, an amateur German entomologist, called Oscar Schneibel, is found only in 15 caves in central Slovenia. The habit, says the Independent where I read the story, of naming beetles after politicians seems still to be alive. Last year, three newly discovered slime mould beetles were named a. bushi, a. cheneyi and a. rumsfeldi.

Overheard from the pavement on the other side of our hedge:
Woman's voice: My father does that; my brothers do that; they never let me walk on the outside.
Man voice (fading): I would do that ... but..

Chalked on a blackboard outside the sailing club in Whitstable:
Thursday: rainy/ cloudy/ sunny.

Talking boat, seagull woman, branches

On the Thames, a boat full of tourists passes. On board, a guide with a megaphone has a loud, strident voice. He is describing the buildings on either side of the river. You can hear every word as the boat passes.

A woman friend, who loves eating fish, left a deep impression of this particular passion some months ago. In a restaurant, she began to pick at the head of a whole fish, which she had been eating and seemed to have finished with, prodding it with her fork, as gulls do with their beaks, and extracting the flesh until only eyes and bones remained. I wonder whether I will see a repetition of this intriguing behaviour when she is staying with us last week. I dissect a large turbot, which I have just cooked and start to serve the fillets, when true to character, she commandeers the discarded backbone, and, with her fork, tears at the shreds of fish, which still adhere to it, squeaking with excitement.


From the bedroom window I note the lower branches of the large lime tree outside the window moving slowly in the wind with the sort of rhythm people adopt when fanning themselves. Further away the more exposed upper branches of the tulip tree in the middle distance are waving in a more vigorous wind. This time the rhythm is rather that of someone waving to attract attention.

arctic beer, rubbish eater, fowls flapping

Drinking exotic beer. This one is Lapin Kult. It is described on the label as the premium beer of Finland. "Greetings from the North", says the label. "Made from the wild, sparkling waters of Lapland."

Moored on the Thames a raft like structure which acts as a filter in the tide and carries the legend "I eat rubbish". A noticed fixed to it claims that it collects 40 tons of rubbish every year, the equivalent of 800,000 plastic bottles. I feel virtuous just looking at it.

"The sound of her laugh: fowls flapping into the air being chased by a rooster."
As observed by Murray Bail, see, Now's the Time, August 14.

melancholy neon, silk road food, exercise by the Thames

A neon installation on a white wall in the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square in London consists of these words in neon letters:
And if I don't meet you no more in this world
Then I'll meet you in the next one
And don't be late, don't be late

We eat mezze and shish kebab outside a restaurant in Old Street. The restaurant is called Shish which is turkish for the skewer on which meat and vegetables are grilled. The menu is drawn from the countries through which the 2000 year old silk route between Europe and China once passed, and whose local cuisines have influenced one another over the years. I savour the food and, not least the names of the place associated with the silk route: Trebizond, Tabriz, Nashapur, Samarkand, Kashgar, Xi'an. Never far away are James Elroy Flecker's words: "
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

From the pedestrian bridge over the Thames, (St Pauls Cathedral on one bank, the Tate Modern on the other), I watch, on one of the beaches which occur when the tide is low, a solitary young man in a green T shirt doing some exercises; he leans forward and slowly rotates his torso, while breathing in the muddy air of the river.

Mallow

 

Whitstable fish market - Where's Tristan?

 

lost and found, open mind, sun

Grandson Josh goes missing on a family outing to Groombridge Place. After about 40 minutes, a hue and cry is set in motion. Eventually we find him sitting on a fence near the car park. Without talking to any one he has found his way, a long way, back from the Enchanted Forest. It seems that he deliberately set off on his own and didn't consider himself lost. Finding him was a beautiful thing, though losing him wasn't.

Open mind: the horse has bolted.

Looking for a third beautiful thing, I walk outside on grass, soggy for a change, with recent rain, and feel the warm sun on the back of my neck.

herbs, horse, showers

I cut herbs - chervil, tarragon, chives - to accompany a scallop and potato dish for supper, and particularly enjoy the aromas released into the evening air.

From a car window I see, for a fleeting moment, a horse in a particular position that I associate with Chinese drawings. Its body is facing foreward but its head is turned to the side and its neck stretched out to capture an especially juicy (one supposes) tuft of grass.

On the motorway we see showers ahead and it seem that we are going into the rain rather than the rain coming to us.

musket, fox without a tail, no ball games

I listen and watch entranced as someone dressed as an 18th century soldier explains the working of his muzzle loading musket to a group of small boys sitting in front of him. He is a natural story-teller, with perfect timing and a great deal of knowledge about what it was like to be an English soldier in America in the reign of George III. He is part of the entertainment in the magic forest at Groombridge Place, - a good outing for children of all ages. Now, I know precisely the origins of "half-cocked" and "ramrod".

There has been one fox or another in the vegetable garden since I have been working there; the current one is a misery. It has no tail, and when I arrive, he scuttles away, where his predecessors invariably ambled off with a mixture of dignity and disgust at being disturbed.

Most prohibitory notices have a streak of unconscious absurdity about them often falling uncomfortably between the specific and the universal. One near the pay kiosk at Groombridge Place suffers from something else as well: "No ball games inside the attraction", it insists.

rosehips, hunters, film stars

Rosehips hanging in bunches, too early for Autumn surely, but surely the hips of some early flowering almost wild rose! Each fruit has attached to it the whiskery remnants of sepals - all that is left of the flower.

"Hunter gatherers don't make good gardeners, nor gardeners, good hunter gatherers". JP

In the windows of Hoopers department store are photographs of all the film stars of the 20th century you can think of. People who don't normally look into shop windows stand in the street trying to name them all.

notes like these, beans, hydrangers

Murray Bail is the author of a novel called Eucalyptus, which I read a couple of years ago. It is set in his native Australa. It's about a man who promised his daughter's hand in marriage to anyone who could name all the varieties of eucalyptus on his estate. There are about 90 in all. It is an an odd and beautiful fairy tale, well written and intriguing. I am pleasantly surprised to find, this afternoon in Hall's bookshop, the published notebooks of Murray Bail, and even more pleasantly surprised that they consist of notes similar to those which appear in this log. One example, taken at random will suffice: "In a bus or tube I am torn between the necessity to read and knowing that I would become "more observant" if I looked round.

Picking beans in gentle, misty rain, I smell growing plants, damp leaves and the hanging pods and I don't mind if the water trickles down my sleeve.

The hydrangers, which a few weeks ago were bright blue clouds of flowers, have faded to a range of pale colours, pink and fawn and predominantly that pale green colour, called-eau-de nil. The colours reminds me of the silk scarves and handkerchiefs which old ladies used to have about their persons.

Plutarch's hedge

Tristan's imagination has run wild. (See the Emotional Blackmailer's Handbook. )Larry would not have been flattered. Nor Juli for that matter.

sprouting ginger, green grass, chocolate chip icecream

A piece of ginger in the kitchen has spouted an upright green tail. It looks an animal, a scotty perhaps but the the beige colour is wrong. I shall pot it and grow a ginger plant.

After the steady, penetrating rain this morning the grass has at last remembered that it is supposed to be green.

In the sun which followed the rain we sit in the Pantiles with chocolate chip icecream cornets.

new baby, magpies, chocolate cosmos

The couple who own the Italian delicatessen at the bottom of the High Street announced, a few weeks ago, that they were going back to Italy for a few weeks so that their new baby could be born in their home town. The shop has been closed for about a month now and has not yet re-opened, but by way of an announcement of a happy event, a big blue bow has appeared inside the glass door.

In the Grove, the showers have driven people away, but two magpies strut on the grass. People don't like magpies because they behave so badly to other birds, stealing their eggs and attacking their young, but you have to hand it to them, they have a presence. I am not quite sure what a dude is, but if the word applied to birds, I would say that magpies were dudes.

We have just acquired one of those cosmos plants that seem to be fashionable at the moment. It has pretty, chocolate coloured flowers which, a pleasant surprise, actually smell of chocolate.

Lucubration, be running, thinking

I came across the word lucubration this morning, and not for the first time, forgot that it meant nocturnal study or meditation. I like both the word and, though I rarely lucubrate, what it describes. Dylan Thomas may or may not have known the word, but he knew all about lucubration (lubrication too, by all accounts), when he wrote:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

This African proverb is quoted in The Week this week from a programme on Radio 4:
Every morning in Africa, a gazell wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle...when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.


"Thinking can be dangerous". From the Thoughts of Chairman Plutarch

Rich people, teachers, indigo

"Rich people prefer the company of other rich people so that they can talk about wealth to somone else who understands it." J P

I see a straggling crowd of school children ascending Mount Sion. Accompanying them, two in front and two behind, like hard working sheep dogs, are four school teachers wearing orange jackets, upon which are printed the word "staff".

I see in the paper an article on indigo - in its pure form, my favourite colour, and one of my favourite words. The colour comes, in its natural form, from a number of plants including indigo (indiogfera), a member of the pea family.

cuckoo pint,runner beans, Le Dounier Rouseau cat

One of the first plants I knew as a child was the cuckoo pint. I loved the bright red berries which clustered round the stem almost hiding it, and the alternative name, lords and ladies. And when they said that the berries were poisonous, it made the plant even more exciting. This afternoon the spikes of red berries leap up from the dry ground bringing a memory with them.

Picking this year's first runners, I snap one in two and crunch it between my teeth; it spurts out green juice.

Among the courgettes plants, which after the recent rain, have grown into a proper jungle, I see the orange cat, sheltering from the sun and looking like one of Le Dounier Rouseau's tigers.

blond squirrel, no parachute, surprise baby

I see, scampering along a wall above the station what I believe to be a squirrel, albeit a rather odd, squirrel. After a few seconds I realize that it is the head of a girl with a pony tail walking up a ramp on the other side of the wall. As she ascends the ramp more of her emerges dashing my hopes of having spotted a new species.

"When your parachute fails to open you might as well pretend to be able to fly." JP

Overhead at bus stop. One elderly lady to another: "She brought her baby. I thought it was going to look Chinese. But it didn't."

buddleia, bean tendril, cooking

By the side of a path I see a buddleia of a purple so intense that I have to stop to look again. It is a royal purple, rich and commanding, the sort of purple that goes with fine linen, worn by the rich man, at whose gate sat Lazarus.

While picking beans I feel something whip at my neck it is the purple tendril of the climbing bean, Blauhilde. If I stand here long enough it will wind itself round me and carry me down to the dark cellars beneath the earth where beans get their power.

"Cooking : Subject of tv game shows. Should not be attempted at home". JP

skip tank, heat returns, irony

A loaded skip has been wrapped in a tarpauline. For a moment I see it as a camoflaged tank.

The heat returns. People in the Grove this afternoon walk slowly as though stunned by it but seem to enjoy the enforced calm.

"It is in the nature of irony to be misunderstood for what it is by those at whom it is directed." From The Sayings of Chairman Petrarch.

telescope, summer afternoon, family portrait

"I'm building the biggest telescope in the world to see if there is anyone out there to whom I can say 'yes, I agree with you' ". From The Life and Times of Joe Petrarch.

We sit under a sun shade at a round table with lunch and a glass of wine and affable people to talk to. " Summer afternoon-summer afternoon... " wrote Henry James. " The two most beautiful words in the English language."

I meet, for the first time , the mother, brother and sister of a friend and note, with interest, family likenesses and indvidual differences.

stage, feather, sush

When, each morning, I raise the blinds of our bedroom windows, the world outside seems like a stage. There are usually pigeons on the roof or one of the chimneys of the house opposite; or blackbirds, or magpies. The sky is seldom empty, but it is today - no birds, no planes, no clouds. Today there is nothing to see that moves. It is like one of those plays, where the curtain goes up on a stage without actors, and the emptiness creates its own dramatic tension.

Walking past the lawn to the vegetable garden I see a single feather floating. Or is it flying? A breeze catches and it rises like a glider or a bird on a thermal. Then it falls ever so slowly to the ground.

In the trees in Berkeley Road the dry leaves of summer say "sush, sush."

No samba, sunflowers, follow my leader

A notice in the TOC H hall announces "No Samba until Thursday 17 August". I make a note of this omission in case it comes in useful.

A group of golden brown sunflowers with yellow streaks, stands above a pumpkin plant of which the first pumpkin is forming. This in the garden alongside the TOC H hall.

A man in a suit with a map in one hand and a loud hailer in the other walks across the Grove. Behind him is a string of elderly people, wearing anoraks, rain coats and sweaters. In the middle of the park, he stops and his followers gather round him.

Trolleys, gymnastics, foreign languages

Supermarket trolleys end up all over the town. Someone from Morrisons rounds them up like sheep and leads the flock across the High Street.

In a shop window, a large man performs gymnastic movements of knees and arms in order to stick a "sale" notice". on the glass.

"Foreign languages. Spoken by foreigners when they don't want us to understand what they are saying". From Definitions byJoe Petrarch.

Level playing field, smoke tree, toad

"On a level playing field it is easier to move the goal posts." From the sayings of Joe Plutarch.

There is a shrub in two neighbouring gardens, which has dark copper, almost purple foliage. and feathery flower or fruit stalks which seem to hover over it like little clouds. It is called, as I discover to day, Cotinus or smoke tree.

On my way back from the vegetable garden I meet a toad on the terrace. It sits dead still and I think at first it is a garden ornament. I look at it and speak to it gently but it ignores me completely.

No rain, nicotiana, bumble bees

It was supposed to rain this morning. Instead, a fine, blowy summer day with sunshine and white clouds. A good day for pottering in the garden, and potter we do.

There are two varieties of nicotiana, which I grew from seed this year. Both are now in flower. One has small cup-shaped flowers, pale green on the outside of the petals, and inside the colour of old claret, almost brown. The other, more unusual variety, has a remarkable corolla, cream on the outside, joined to form, above the calyx, a longish tube, which opens to form small, dark green, trumpet shapes, where carpels and stamens nestle, deep within, barely larger than pinheads. Green flowers, these.

There are lots of bumble bees around this year, such lovely creatures, minding their own business, in the lavender.

Romeo and Juliette, pub, ignorance

I do not claim to be a smoker, but every now and then, I have a cigar. Once a year I am given a box of 25 Romeo and Juliettes; they last more than a year. We'll put you down as a non-smoker says the doctor, which is fine by me. But what a pleasure, on day like to day, to taste the mellow tobacco, while sitting in the garden with book. The nicotiana, which is just coming into flower, looks on with interest.

In the pub a young man, settles onto a bench, a pint on the table in front of him, with the words: "There's nothing better than a pub on a summer evening." He is right.

The more I read Montaigne the more I love him. He is balanced, entertaining, witty and, though he purports to make judgements only about himself and based on his own experience, modest, honest and unpretentious. Just now I note: "to recognise one's own ignorance is one of the best and surest signs of judgement that I know."

Rowan, dog walks alone, herb fragrances

You might say that it's a premature sign of Autumn. The rowan berries are turning orange. A starling, plunging into the tree, has noticed too.

I meet a dog walking on its own, very business like. What sort of dog?I would say that there is something in its gait that suggets a Staffordshire bull terrier, but it lacks the machismo to qualify for the whole works. As it enters the Grove it raises a leg and pees agains a bollard which bears the notice "Keep your dog on a lead".

I sit surrounded by herbs, rub leaves between finger and thumb and breathe in.

a couple of drips, why do I like Flaubert so much? camoflage

We're sitting outside a pizza restaurant in the High Street. It is overcast and humid. Water seems to be condensing in the air. A waitress approaches us: "A couple of drips!" she says. "Oh, I didn't mean it like that!."

This morning I read, in Flaubert's letters to George Sand (written June 1867), where he is talking about the hatred that all "champions of order" feel for those who are outside the core of communal life. "Being always on the side of minorities, " he writes, " I am infuriated by it. It's true that many things infuriate me. The day I stop being indignant, I'll fall flat on my face like a puppet when you take away its prop."

In the garden, I pick the climbing beans with difficulty because they are so well camoflaged by their similarity in colour and appearance to the stems of the plants. This goes for the purple stems of the Blauhilde beans and the green stems of the Cobra beans. Even the flowers of the Blauhilde are of a rich purple. The difficulty of spotting the beans adds to the pleasure of picking them. It is like looking for and finding semi-precious stones or fossils.

a dish of vegetables, bhudda, long laugh

Unlike their supermarket equivalents, the carrots and turnips from the garden, are marred by the occasional worm hole and come in different shapes and sizes. I cut round the holes and chop them into equal cubes. I soften these in a deep frying pan with olive oil, some finely chopped shallots, and seasoning. Next are added this morning's crop of little green and yellow courgettes sliced into tidy disks and these too are sweated for a little until the final stage of the dish, which is to add a liberal quantity of home made chicken stock, and some basil leaves. The heat is turned up and the stock is reduced while the vegetables continue to cook. In a few minutes the stock has become an unctuous glaze in which the vegetables rest. The dish goes well with grilled chicken. If I had had a bottle of dry Alsace Riesling, that is what we would have drunk with it, but the last one had gone, alas.

At the corner of a lawn in front of one of the houses in Mount Sion a little fat Bhudda has appeared to turn our minds to higher things.

As I pass an open window I hear a woman's prolonged laughter, then catch sight of her, smiling, phone in hand; the laughter continues, much as an engine may continue turning after it has been switched off.

watering, sarcasm, swallow's wing

The pleasure of watering is to see the stream from the can absorbed by the dry soil, and to sense roots reaching for the moisture under the surface.

There is a regular spot in The Independent newspaper called Days like These, consisting of brief extracts from letters and diaries. Last week, on July 21 to be precise, it surprisingly described Thomas Macauley as "the French novelist". In today's paper is a letter from Bernard Sharp: "So was Voltaire a Welsh acrobat?" he asks.

A solitary swallow comes into view in the sky above the roofs for a split second. The evening sun catches the underside of its wing and shows it, golden brown, as it wheels and disappears.

linked by music, purple and green, cherry stones

Two little teenage girls share an ipod-type portable music player tucked into the top of the jeans of one them. Separate wires take the sound to their different ears, as they walk, side by side, though Calverley Park, joined by a sound that others can't hear.

In the vegetable garden I pick the first climbing French beans, a dark purple variety and a green. The purple is called Blauhilde and the green, Cobra. Once upon a time, a witch called Blauhilde fell in love with a prince called Cobra, and ...

Eating cherries in the garden and throwing the stones into flower beds is bad behaviour, in theory at a rate. But I am grown up and the flower beds are mine, and the cherries too; and the worst that can happen is that cherry trees will grow there.

sounds of a summer night, flying seeds, sad flesh

I sit in the semi-darkness and listen to the sounds of people living - in gardens, courtyards, patios, by open windows. The warmth of the summer night mutes ordinary sounds. You hear: relaxed voices, gentle laughter, the occasional yap of a dog, cry of a child, voice of a tv news presenter; on some soundtrack, you detect, its source unexplained, the last post; overhead, an aeroplane; on the road a car passes, its tyres mysteriously hushed by the heat.

Late at night, I hear a wind get up, a prelude to a storm, and, through the bedroom window, open beneath the blind, which is not quite lowered, catch sight of winged seeds from the lime tree, floating past in the light from the street lamp, like snow flakes.

Just at the moment my favourite poem is Brise Marine ( Sea Breeze) by Mallarme. I can't get it out of my head.

The flesh is sad, alas! And I have read all the books.
To get away, far away! I sense the urge of drunken birds,
To swoop through unknown foam, and distant skies...

Fish and chip queue, notes in the dark, meal in the rain

From the pub opposite, I watch the queue outside the fish and chip shop. A mixture of old, and young, bright and faded. The straggling crowd seems relaxed in the warm evening, though there does seem to be a straightening of backs, a more upright and eager angle of inclination in people as they near the counter. Service is inevitably slow; orders are large and complex; and then emerging from the shop door in the opposite direction to the queue, comes a succesful purchaser bearing in his arms, as though it were a treasured baby, a pile of tidily wrapped parcels.

In the garden, I write notes in the dark. Heavy drops of water condense in the humid air. Later I will be interested to see what I have written.

To day on the terrace outside the Spotted Dog, Heidi, Toby, Kim Jet and I , sit under a sunshade in the perpendicular rain and eat fish and chips. Through a gap in the trees over the nettles and pink and white policeman's helmet, we can see through more distant hedges and trees fragments of Penshurst and the weald in which it lies.

streams meet, spot-lit moths, paired words

In the bathroom basin I notice that the shiny convex plug reflects the stream of water from the tap, coming up towards it. At a certain rate of flow, the reflected and the real streams seem to meet and to flow into one another.

Remembering Fidelio on Wednesday evening, I recall moths flitting in and out of the spotlights, as Beethoven's music floats up toward them.

Anomalous words, which sound attractive at first glance, are often paired, some in hope and some in error, some in both. In Morrison's supermarket the words "succulent mangoes" used to describe rock-hard, unripe fruit, fall so neatly into both categories, that I cannot withold a frisson.

Shades of youth, sheep and people, let gravity take the strain

Watching people of my own generation milling about outside the opera house, I see in their aged faces, shadows of their former youth.

On the main lawn at Glyndebourne are groups of people with picnics. Beyond them, separated by a ha-ha, is a field of sheep, and beyond that, woods and downland. England on a warm summer evening. Something to be sentimental about? Perhaps. But certainly a pleasure to be there.

There seems to be a new development in design. First, it was toothpaste tubes, which once you had to roll up at the bottom to extract the last squeeze of paste .(Does that age me?) Now you have plastic containers withbroad-based caps, which can be stood on end so that the last remnants of the paste flow into and reside in the nozzle. Mayonnaise and salad-cream manufacturers seem to have copied the idea. The bottles, though more or less of the traditional shape, now have wide tops, and the label invites you to stand them on their heads, and so avoid the frantic shaking necessary when you get to the end of a container, which has been standing on its base. To this end, even the labels on the containers have have been reversed, so that at first they appear to be upside down.

Flying ants, swinging lavender, stopped clocks

The early evening air is full of flying ants. The sunlight catches their wings so that at first the ants, in their uneven flight, resemble thistle down.

A single stem of lavender swings in the still evening air as though it is moved by the wind. A bee has just left it for another.

From my Dictionary of Common and Uncommon Sense: Even when they have stopped clocks are right twice every 24 hours. But not for long.

wood pigeons, swifts, Typoo's tyger

Says the wood pigeon: " Coo, cooo, coo, coo. Coo." Every bloody morning.

In one window of the sky this afternoon there are swifts, high above the lime tree and the roof of the house opposite, advertising their presence by their sharp cries. In the other window there are house martins.

A life size wooden tiger with an organ-like mechanism inside it simulating predatory roars and the screams of a doomed European pinned by four huge paws, apparently attracted the attention of Gustave Flaubert at the East India Company museum in Leadenhall Street, when he was in London in 1851. It is mentioned in the new biography of Gustave Flaubert by the American Frederick Brown.

plastic buckets, silence, shade

I like the plastic buckets (especially the green ones) now available for gardeners. They are good for collecting rubbish and transporting compost and the like, but cannot compare with traditional, Sussex trugs, when harvesting fruit and vegetable and cutting flowers.

Listen to silence. It can be informative.

The pleasure of sitting in the shade and doing nothing.

scallops and potatoes, fuschia, dead fish

A dish of newly lifted, very small potatoes, rubbed, scraped, and boiled, tossed with lightly sauteed scallops and dressed with a cream and tarragon sauce.

The scarlet and purple flowers of the fuschia hang and tremble like earings.

Proverb of the day. Only dead fish swim with the tide.

solitary skateboard, hydranger blue, hoodie

I see a skateboard abandoned on the grass. It is distinctly lonely.

The blue of blue hydrangers is the blue of Mediterranean skies and says everything that needs to be said about blue.

I see a hoodie. I've nothing against hoodies. In the winter when it's cold I might be inclined to wear a hood myself. It seems a good way to hide your identity, and why shouldn't you? But I am glad that I am not a member of the Conservative party whose leader wants its members to hug hoodies. Even if I were a member, I wouldn't. Even if there were a hoodie I wanted to hug, I wouldn't hug it until it adopted a less intrusive item of a headwear. And if I were hoodie, the last thing in the world I would want is to have a chubby conservative envelope me in its arms. So where is the beautiful thing that has given rise to this observation? Not entirely beautiful perhaps, but it's amusing ( isn't it?) to spot what is ridiculous in the slogans which assault us from all sides.

Maltesers, thistle, leaves in cobweb

I suppose I have known Maltesers, those spherical chocolates with honeycombe centres which melt away in your mouth, for most of my life, though I haven't eaten one for years. Today, those taste memories are sparked by something I didn't know existed - Malteser ice cream. On one of those spikes, which are fixed on walls to stop intruders, someone has speared an empty Malteser ice cream carton. All those years ago, when I used to buy the little packets of Maltesers decorated with photographs of the chocs, it never would have occurred to me that someone would one day merge them with and sell them as an icecream.

What a magnificent thing is the thistle, in particular the Spear Thistle, which stands tall and upright pricking the air, surmounted, by its bold, purple crown-like flowers! My flower book lists no fewer than 18 varieties of thistle, of which the Melancholy Thistle appeals rather for its name than for its appearance. The flower head droops at first, hence the name Melancholy.

In a newly woven cobweb between the wing mirror and the door of a parked car are three yellowing leaves vibrating gently in the breeze.

blackbirds again, hazels, bubbles

For the last two years, blackbirds have nested in the wisteria next to our front door. On both occasions nestlings hatched on the last day of Wimbledon. In the build up to Wimbledon we watched, carefull not to disturb any birds that might be nesting, but no one appeared to be there. Now it seems that a female is sitting on a well hidden nest, but in contrast with previous years, she has seemed nervous every time the door is closed, and flies out straight into the neigbouring bay tree. Is she sitting on eggs? Will she continue to put up with our comings and goings, as have previous tenants of the wisteria? And is it too late to raise a family if that is what she is doing?

Squirrels invariably pick and crack open the hazel nuts which grow agains the wall of the vegetable garden before there is any sign of a kernal. In vain do I look every year for just one nut filled out to maturity. This year however I see a branch bearing several nuts pushing through the roof vent of the greenhouse. Perhaps a nut or two will survive.

Bubbles float across the Grove from somone's garden. At first, they catch the sunlight and shine like fine silver, then, as they reach the end of their brief lives, they lose their reflective qualities, and become stark circles before vanishing.

In the gutter, turnips, namesake

Some days a go I referred here to a narrow strip of front garden which had been sown with wild flowers. This mini-meadow has died back in the dry weather and its dead remains been raked up and left in an unsightly heap. A few yards down the road, however, some of the seed have found a new home, grown up and flowered in the gutter. Parked cars must have prevented the seedlings being swept up by the road cleaners. What did Oscar Wilde say about lying in the gutter and looking at the stars?


What a lovely contrast in colour are the turnips which I planted in the Spring and are now ready for harvesting! Beneath an umbrella of coarse, green leaves, the upper part of the root is purple, the lower part, white.

Opening at random the Penguin Classics edition of Montaigne's essays, I find a passing reference to my namesake. Of Plutarch, he says, "of all the authors I know, he is the best at combining art with nature, and judgement with knowledge". Something to live up to!

The mouse and the frog, embrace, lavender

A photo and short paragraph quoted in The Week shows a mouse taking a lift from a frog. Apparently the mouse escaped drowning by leaping on to the back of the frog, which was passing, when monsoon rains caused a river in Lucknow, India to burst its banks. It's the sort of story children like to hear and which you like to tell them.

Coming down the hill I see a couple engaged in an embrace. Or perhaps they are dancing accross the pavement. As I get closer I see that it is a girl carrying a large wicker laundry basket.

Lemon balm smells good by a path but tends to take over. Ruthless surgery is required. I halve the space that the clump occupies and plant some lavender Hidcote bought from the farmers market. Every time I pass the newcomer I feel a sense of satisfaction, and there's still plenty of lemon balm.

Footballers, soul, fundamentalist

During the line up at the beginning of international football matches I find myself wondering how many players get to sing the words of their national anthems. And how many know the words?

Definitions come to me early in the morning.
Soul something you are supposed to possess, but you just can't put your finger on where it is.

And another one:
Fundamenalist someone who studies the structure of bottoms.

face to face, hands free, pigeon builds

The clock above Tunbridge Wells station is a landmark you tend to take for granted, but today I see it for the first time face to face. On the top floor of Hoopers department store, they have left a fire door open for the sake of cool air, and across the roof of the building there at eye level is the familar clock from an unfamiliar angle.

A woman appears to be talking to herself as she walks towards me in Mount Pleasant. As she gets closer I realize she is on the phone. A mouthpiece must be somewhere on her person. A few years ago, there would have been no question that she was insane.

In the Grove, I watch a wood pigeon pick up a twig of at least its own length, and fly awkwardly to a tree where it dissappears in the direction of what must be a building site.

radio reflections, dog watch, seasonal forecast

From the arcade, which runs beside BBC Radio Kent, you can look into the studio. This morning the picture window of Hooper's menswear shop on the opposite side of the arcade, is reflected in the window of the radio station, so that I have a vision of an announcer with microphones and computer screens, who appears to be sitting among rails of hanging shirts and the word "sale" in red letters repeated without apparent end.

A dog with a terrier face but very long pointed ears such as you might expect on a hare sits on the pavement beside a table outside a cafe. At the table sits the dog's owner, a large man with two rounds of toasted sausage sandwiches in front of him. He eats the sandwiches with relish, breaking off bits before putting them in his mouth. Now and then, he bites a piece in half and feeds it to the dog. The dog watches the man as his hand moves the food between plate and mouth; so intent is its concentration that its head moves in time with the man's movements.

The fruit of the rowan tree appear. You do not immediately notice the green berries at this time of year, but they anticipate autumn in high summer as tightly closed buds of certain trees and shrubs anticipate spring in mid-winter.

skateboard ramp, viola, courgettes

A boy skateboards up a portable ramp and flies through the air in the Grove.

Among the newly sown grass at the edge of a pathway in the Grove is a loan viola peeping through the blades, a garden escape, and mysteriously far from its source, with no other flower, even a daisy, to keep it company.

Courgettes have got off to a poor start, but today there are four - two green and two of the yellow variety - among the not yet fully developed plants. I cut them and slice them into fine disks to augment a salad.

lime flowers, rain, privet petal

The flowers in the lime tree opposite are in full bloom; they have the colour and texture of clotted cream, made to look even creamier by the contrasting caves of green darkness within the tree's canopy.

Rain after extreme heat is followed by moments of coolness and the wonderful smells released by leaves and flowers into the refreshed air. Now the air becomes heavy and humid again getting ready for the next shower or more likely the storm, which is forecast.

There is a privet hedge on the corner of Mount Sion and Berekley Road from which grows a privet tree, left one suspects deliberately to assume its natural shape and purpose. It is at present covered in small white flowers, which are scattering their minute petals on the pavement. I notice one of the petals motoring steadily across the brick pavement. It has been snapped up by an ant, which is carrying it away.

Lettuces, wasp goes free, stuffed olives

Before it gets too hot, in the vegetable garden, I cut plump lettuces, spicey oriental leaves and rocket all reservoirs of cool water drawn out of the soil.

A wasp buzzes madly behind my head between the venetian blind and the window when I am trying to read. I am not the sort of person who takes pride in kindness to other creatures, but rather than kill this one, I raise the blind, and drive it towards the other window, which is open. It doesn't take advantage of it and goes instead to the closed upper window where it starts buzzing again behind the blind. With a rolled newspaper I urge it onto the lower part of the frame of the raised sash. All it has to do to escape is crawl down and under. I nudge it, but it goes in the other direction, until at last I push it, through the slats, with the newspaper so that it is forced to crawl under the frame and so fly free. Up it goes, and I feel a sense of release myself, and not just from the buzzing.

At the Compasses they serve bowls of big queen olives stuffed with feta cheese.

Talking heads, after the football, pigeons and doves

A young man and woman walk side by side down the High Street. Both are talking into mobile phones. To each other? Probably not, but an interesting thought.

In the silence that reigns over the town after the football match, a child's voice in the street beyond the hedge:
How many good players do England have?
Man's voice: Lot's really.

Received idea: Doves are pigeons which have been to school. One eats pigeons but never doves.

House martins, football spectators, passing ladder

House martins are nesting under the eaves of a house on the opposite side of the road. They seem to have replaced the swifts, which occupied the air space above our garden last summer; the young keep the parents busy, popping in and out of the cup-shaped nest. But I miss the shrieking of the swifts.

Football spectators have a strict dress code. Bare chests and flags painted on face and body.

A ladder passes above the hedge, it appears, without human intervention.

sunflowers and carrots, foxglove, miseries

Slow germination during the cold spring led me to sow sunflowers where the carrots which I had sown did not at first appear. When the warm weather arrived there came the odd combination of sunflowers and carrots in the same row.

A lone white foxglove stands upright in a shrubbery like a stately model waiting to appear on the catwalk.

In the charity shop in the High Street I come across a modern edition of a book by James Beresford, an English rector who lived between 1764 -1840. It is called The Miseries of Human Life. It was a best seller in its time and went into numerous editions. It lists in painful detail the discomforts and irritations of daily life with elegance and humour, though there is no doubting the author's sincerity in detailing his annoyance with his many pet hates. One example taken at random: "To be seized with morbid and irrresistable sleepiness, while in conversation with persons who have every title to your respect." It occurs to me that this book is the complete opposite of the Three Beautiful Things formula, which gives rise to this web log, and is the foundation of Clare Grant's eponymous blog.

Parsley, serve and volley, lysimachia

The green, bitter smell of parsley brings reality to the dream-world of perfumes.

In the match between Rafael Nadal( seeded no 2) and Robert Kendrick (seeded 237) which goes to five sets, at Wimbledon today, it is a pleasure to see Kendrick running up to the net and volleying directly after serving - an unusual practice nowadays and a style of tennis which restores excitement to a game made tedious by rallies from the baseline.

At the WI market I identify the flower which shed it yellow petals on our black dining table on Tuesday. It is lysimachia vulgaris. Nobody will really care but it pleases me to have put a name to it.

sunbather, rain painting, yellow petals

A woman taxi driver is sunbathing in the narrow car park between platform No 1 and the taxi rank at Tunbridge Wells station. She has brought a sun-lounger and lies flat out on top of it. She wears a white blouse, a pair of three-quarter length trousers and sun glasses. Her white sandles are parked neatly beside the sun-lounger.

At Tate Britain, there is an exhibition of paintings by Howard Hodgkin. They are almost abstract, produced usually in swathes of bold colours, which often extend on to the frame. Sometimes bold, broad beams of dark colour seem to create a new, crude frame within the old one. Inside bright colours operate like light within a wood or tunnel. Outside the Tate, there is a long flower bed, which has been sown with various cereal crops, poppies and other wild flowers, now mostly gone to seed - an interestingly textured frame, surrounded by green, and the rest of the world. From a distance, you might be looking at a more restrained than usual Hodgkin painting.

On our black marble dining table there is a scattering of yellow petals, from a posy of garden flowers, which our guests brought for Heidi's birthday.

Blue, pink and blue, pale green

Delphiniums: the blue of a mediterranean sky.

Dwarf pink roses of an old variety surrounded by pale blue lavender.

The pale green of thinly sliced, peeled cucumber . They lie between slices of thinly cut bread for old fashioned cucumber sandwiches in celebration of Heidi's birthday.

Garden rubbish, "confusedness in words", rain noise

For many years there has been an arrangement whereby people who live near the Grove may leave garden rubbish in a specific place in the park, and the Council, which maintains the park, will remove the rubbish. All the gardens in the area are small and there is usually no scope for a bonfire. Now the Council wants to stop collecting the rubbish. It says it does not have a licence to perform the task. It is hard not to admire the persistance of local residents, who are still leaving their hedge clippings and weeds directly beneath the notice asking them to desist. To such a spirit of defiance do we owe our rights and freedoms from Magna Carta to the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher's poll tax.

Hurrah for the early 19th Century journalist and politician, William Cobbett, who wrote in A Grammar fo the English Language, "Confusedness in words can proceed from nothing but confusedness in the thoughts which give rise to them. These things may be of trifling importance when the actors move in private life, but when the happiness of millions of men is at stake, they are of an importance not easily to be described".

We tell children that "pitter patter" is the noise the rain makes. I'm not sure that it always does. But standing under the big oak at the corner of the Grove and listening to the summer rain falling on its branches, "pitter patter" is what I hear.

policeman, lavender, drooping sedge

A policeman (one of the new community policeman) on a bicycle is rare sight, and one which brings on a twinge of nostalgia.

Lavender is on the point of flowering. The long stems bend upwards in bold curves, the buds straining towards the sun.

There is a dramatic looking ornamental grass, which has escaped from formal cultivation and grows near the valerian at the edge of the path, off Mount Sion, between back gardens (known as a twitten in these parts). Some research on google has revealed that it is Carex Pendula or drooping sedge. Stephen Dalton of the Natural History Photographic Agency, describes it vividly as follows: "The pollen bursts forth from pendulous inflorescences as they sway in the wind."

People you know, to market, fennel

Watching someone you know when he doesn't know you're watching. Does he behave differently to the way he normally behaves when you are together?

I remember, (I don't know why she comes into my mind) my daughter Pippa, aged about three, getting on for forty years ago, quite alone and unaware of my presence, rolling a cylindrical laundry basket round the room, and chanting: "to market, to market to buy a fat pig, joggity jog, jiggity jig; to market to market to buy a fat hog, jigitty jig, jiggity jog."

Florence fennel at the farmers market with its feathery leaves projecting from the ivory bulb like a head of green hair.

Philadelphus, getting to sleep, abutilon

There is a philadelphus or mock orange half way up Mount Sion. Its white blossoms cover it like snow, and its scent floats up and down the hill and into Berkeley Road, better than any artificial perfume.

It is very rare that I can't get to sleep. My method of overcoming wakefulness is to go over in my mind routes that I used to travel to work, especially the one that criss-crossed the countryside between Tunbridge Wells and Sutton in Surrey, avoiding the M25 and most major roads. It used to take an hour door to door; it takes five minutes to send me off, even though I am supposedly at the wheel.

It is the time of year when abutilon begins to flower. We have a white one; its bell-shaped blooms belong to summer.

mums and babes, "enjoy", fuschia

Three exuberant, young mothers , side by side, sweep past in the middle of Berkeley Road : each pushes a pram and in each pram is a small baby- a flotilla of motherhood.

On the terrace at Sankey's the helpful waitress says "enjoy", as she serves our lunch, an invitation, which a few years ago you would not have heard outside New York.

The fuschia in our garden is of the variety which grows wild in the hedgerows of Cornwall and the west of Ireland. This one in particular has been with me for at least 30 years, having accompanied me to this house from the last one, when it inhabited a pot. In the old days it used to die down every winter. For the last few years it has not only survived but has defied attempts to eradicate it. It must now be about 12 ft high. To me it is greatly to be preferred to the garish varieties bred for colour-mad gardeners, and I no longer begrudge it the space it occupies.

three beautiful things, early conkers, wind in the daisies

It is just over a year since I came across Clare Grant's web log, Three Beautiful Things (she has just completed her second year), and nearly a year since I took up her idea in my own. What appeals to me about this approach to log keeping, is its positive nature. There is no whingeing. You record only the things which, in the course of a day, have interested or amused you, and given you pleasure in one form or another.

For me it has become a sort of diary, but a diary, which ignores the routines and preoccupations of daily life - the subject of most diaries, and concentrates instead on a world of minutiae, which is generally ignored. It is also a way of sending post cards to new and old friends, but daily ones, to which, if they want, they can reply immediately, by making a comment. (And the more of those the better from old friends and newcomers). Above all it is about looking around you, and seeing wonderful things, which often become more wonderful the closer you look.

Why three things? One would bestow undue importance; two would imply contrast and invite comparison; three, on the other hand, reflects the variety and contrast, of which the world is made up.


It's mid-summer day when normally you would not pay attention to the young horse-chestnut, which is already sporting green conker cases. They are only the size of marbles but are complete with perfectly formed spikes.

Yesterday's wind is still blowing. I look down at the short grass in the Grove and watch the daisies, no more than a centemeter or two above ground level, quivering.

Grizzly man, creeping jenny, summer wind

A film, Grizzly Man about a man who spends every summer for 13 years with grizzly bears in a remote part of Alaska holds us transfixed. He sets up a camera and films the bears from close up, despite the danger. So there are no actors unless you count him. In the end he and his girl friend are killed and eaten by a bear (not filmed). A hundred hours of film are edited and augmented with interviews, by the director, Werner Herzog. The result is a study of a man, more than a little barmy, who is obsessed with these giant, savage animals, as much as it is a record of the bears.

I go out of the front door to look for something beautiful to mention here, and there by the front door are the first yellow flowers of creeping jenny, the ground-cover plant, which brings colour to a shady bed at this time of year. It has pretty pointed petals.

This afternoon, a warm wind is blowing, swinging the branches of trees, and bending shrubs to its will - a benign summer wind.

Chervil, moustaches, risotto

Chervil is used a great deal in French cooking. It looks like a very delicate flat leaf parsley and has a slightly similar flavour but with more than a hint of anise. A proper omellete aux fines herbes must include chervil among the herbs. I have grown it from seed this year and enjoy watching it develop in the flower pots where I have planted out the seedlings, and think as I do of light, perfumed omelletes.

A childish habit I have to confess to, and which I still get a kick out of, is drawing moustaches on photographs of politicians in the papers. I keep a special 6b pencil for the purpose.

Risotto is the most satisfying dish to cook. You stand over the pan and watch, almost feel, the rice (usually aborio or carnaloni. but sometimes violone nana from the Po Valley), absorb the hot broth, which is gradually ladled into it, and swell as you gently stir. Last night it was a seafood risotto. The broth was produced with the help of a cod's head, and the sea food consisted of tiger prawns and pieces of monk fish, gently sauteed and embellished with a little cream, the resulting sauce flavoured with Noilly Prat.

Gift of silence, crown, idols

Mary Wesley only started writing novels after the age of 70. Her recent biography is being reviewed at the moment. Her son , Toby Eady, says of her: "Her greatest beauty was her gift of silence: you did not have to talk with her. When she spoke you heard and when she was silent, you listened."

The last of the magnificent, almost white poppies in our garden has shed its petals. But it still retains its stamens, which curl up like the edges of a crown from the ovary with its clearly marked placentas radiating from the centre, which also recalls the structure of a crown.

Quote of day. Flaubert again, and no apologies. "To denigrate those we love, always removes them a little from us. One should not touch idols: the gilding sticks to you hands."

Gorrila, overheard, great ideas

Fun and games in the Pantiles: A balloon sculptor twists the thin, inflated balloons into toys for children, and the children shout for more. There is a town crier, a percussion band, and someone in a gorilla suit, accompanied by a woman with a cowboy hat and a gun, who is supposed to be the gorilla's keeper.

Sometimes you hear snatches of conversation as people walk past our hedge. This time it a teenage girl talking to a f riend She has a strident voice: "You get prgnant and die," she says.

Quote of the day. Flaubert again. "Great ideas, like pine trees, grow in the shade and at the edge of precipices."

shop talk, white peony, scent of rosemary

In the the train, a man and a woman on their way to a meeting are talking or rather gossiping shop. The woman has an ear for this particular lingo. Distracted from my sudoku, I make the following notes of the phrases he and she employ:
Nature of the beast
Proactive
Not in the real world
Nine years she used to be there. Didn't get a party, a gift or anything.
An addictive victim
Like a rabbit in the headlight
Took a pension for a job he was never qualified to do.
They're milking the charity for everything
He charges for the car then he charges for the train ... the greediest little tike I've ever met.
He loves cleaning windows
She's too busy to see me before the end of August.

A neglected flower-bed beside an untidy house has a gorgeous white peony, with several fluffy flowerheads rising out of the weeds.


This evening I trim back the rosemary. It releases a spicy scent on my hand, which makes me think of a Mediterranean hillside.

After the rain, cigarette sadness, mathematician

The sound of this morning's heavy shower comes in through our open bedroom window like the rumbling of a heavy duty lorry idling its engine. In the warm sunshine afterwards you can smell oils and resins released into the air by vegetation, and every object is outlined with unfamilar clarity.

Outside the Kent and Sussex Hospital there is a sad scattering of cigarette butts, testimony to a new sort of outcast.

On the gate of a house in Castle Road in Tunbridge Wells, just below Church Road, a new plaque has appeared, which records that Thomas Bayes lived there from 1724 - 1761. Who was Thomas Bayes? He was a non-conformist minister and a mathematician, who only recently was recognised for his work on statisitical theory, in particular with a theory dealing with probability - the origin of much market research and opinion poll techniques, still in use today.

more tables in the pantiles, portrait of a couple, valarian

My favourite place to sit in Tunbridge Wells is outside the Italian delicatessen and snack bar, Gastronomia in the Pantiles. Last year when the weather was warm there was intense competition for outdoor tables. This year the owner, Giuseppi, has invested in several more tables and some smart black sunshades.

I watch a middle aged couple at a table. A glass of white and a glass of red wine is bought to them: the white for the woman, the red for the man. Was it predictable that it should be that way round?

Valerian is a medicinal herb, which was used by Arab physicians as long ago as the 10th Century. It is also highly decorative, producing magnificent pyramid-shaped, pink inflorescences, and requires no special cultivation. In front of a neigbouring house, it grows, this summer, without any human involvement from the intersection of a wall and a crude concrete forecourt, as though it was something that belonged in the Chelsea Flower Show.

Grilling sausages, leaden balls, mother squirrel

Grilling sausages in the garden, a celebration of summer.

When, some years ago I read Juian Barnes novel, Flaubert's Parrot, I noted these words of Flaubert: "I am, when I write a book, like a man who plays the piano, with leaden balls on each of his fingers." It was something I could understand.Today, reading Flaubert's correspondence, I come across them at source in a letter to his mistress, Louise Colbert. The remark was made when he was 30 and engaged in writing Madame Bovary. Coming across it again, I felt I had completed a circle.

A picture has been stuck in my mind since last week when I saw, on the BBC's Springwatch programme, a mother squirrel teaching her young to jump. One refused to follow her from the roof where their nest was. First she jumped her self to show how it was done. Then she tried to push the infant. Then she left it to whinge on its own. Finally she returned and, picking it up between her paws, and with some difficulty, carried it across the gulf.

Lost and found, islands of grass, kitten on the wall

How good it is to find something which you have given up for lost! My notebook, which I lost last week, has turned up in my daughter's car. I am glad, because although I had reconciled myself to doing without it, it had several useful but indecipherable to anyone else, notes on our Munich visit in April, and a drawing or two.

In the Grove, there are two sort of islands - islands of shadow, and islands of long grass, uncut to allow drifts of daffodils leaves to subside with dignity.

At the base of the yellow brick wall of a car park building, someone has painted or stenciled a life size black and white kitten. There is not other sign of graffiti.

Old MacDonald, Chinon, truffles

Sitting in the garden, I hear on the pavement on the other side of the hedge an approaching song. It is a young woman singing Old MacDonald had a farm, accompanied by the screams of an increasingly irate baby. "Ee aye, ee aye O," sings the mother. "Ea eea, eah, eah", screams the child. Down the road they go, the child slowly dominating proceedings, but the mother battling on unpeturbed, with rather a pretty voice. "Old MacDonald had a farm, with a quack, quack
here, and a quack quack there ..."

In this hot weather, what better than a glass of Chinon, the light red wine from the Loire, which can be served chilled and goes with food or without it!

I see that you can buy (from a firm calledTruffles UK) oak and hazel seedlings impregnated with the fungal spores of truffles. But you have to wait 1o years for the trees to grow and the fungus to develop. And then the truffles are the inferior summer truffles (tuber incinatum) and not the black truffles (tuber melanosporum), which I once saw hunted in Perigord with the help of a pig. Nor yet the white truffles of Alba which have a faint smell of garlic, and like the black truffles, require a a lottery win to purchase even a few shavings.

Poppy shadows, cheese omelate, bean plants

A white poppy rises towards the sky at the end of a long stem. The sun behind it outlines the shadow of the furthermost tissue thin petals on the nearest.

A cheese omelate, light and folded over a creamy filling of melted cheddar, is a lovesome thing.

The bean plants, which I set out yesterday, were standing up this morning straight and business-like.

Shade, starlings, herrings

Reading in the shade.

Starlings foraging in the grass like chickens do.

Sweet pickled herrings, which have been marinated in olive oil, with a salad made from Jersey Royal potatoes flavoured with chopped dill.

sleeping cat, floral litter, shades of green

The black and orange cat who comes to the vegetable garden is asleep when I arrive this morning. She lies with her head in the shade and her body in the sun, and her forepaws resting on the the lowest bar of the fence. I am there for at least two hours and in all this time she doesn't move, though she does open her eyes once to have a look at me.

On the the newly cut grass the white petals of poppies and the red petals of roses make a litter which is more or less acceptable.

In the sunshine you notice the bright green where the sun falls on the grass and the dark green in the shade. Within the tree the outer leaves catch the sun the inner leaves grow darker and become verdurous glooms. "Verde que te quiero verde".

Unexpected picnic, dialogue, keeping cool

An unexpected picnic with daughter Pippa and grandchildren at Pesnhurst Place, where an obstacle course playground absorbs the children's boundless energy.

There is children's entertainment on the theme of Pinochio on a grass stage in the Penshurst Garden: Actor (To the audience): Do you know who I am?
Grandchild: You're an idiot (idiot is this four-year old's favourite word, his embarassed mother says).
Actor: The critics are here. We've got a critic from the Guardian.

I lose my notebook, and succeed in not getting upset about it.

Wild life, footsteps, church bells

The grassy verges along our roads, according to figures quoted in The Week, total 65,000 acres (the size of the Isle of Wight). They have become a haven for wild life including: voles, kestrels and orchids.

Sitting in our little garden, you hear footsteps but cannot see the owners of the feet that make them. There is a certain sort of measured footstep, not lingering, not hurried, which is pleasure to hear.

You used to hear church bells too often to be worthy of comment. Now their sound drifting over the roof tops of Tunbidge Wells on a warm Saturday afternoon, deserves to be noted.

old house, bellowing truck, grass

A pleasing sight: an old house, its roof tiles and brickwork the colour of old claret, settled into a cluster of trees which, like it, always seem to have been there.

A builders' truck bellows like a monster as it reverses.

I am thinking about grass: meadow grass that has not been cut, and whose tiny unpetalled, florets are polinated by the wind, and seem to move in waves like the sea; cereals, which has provided food for men and animals since the beginning of time; ornamental grasses; and the hundreds of other grasses, which ornament the earth, including bamboo, which is of course a grass.

just in case, cheers, elder

Outside London Bridge, a roof is protected from burglars and graffiti writers by some rolls of barbed wire. A sign just behind it reads: Warning Barbed Wire.

Some people signing off on the phone say "cheers, bye." I realize that when I used the phone a lot, I picked up the habit, and used to wonder why. Cheers, alone was enough wasn't it, I used to think. But now I'm not so sure. Cheers, anyway.

Like flying saucers elder flowers hover over headgerows, and over solitary elder trees. Time for elder-flower cordial. I remember meeting an old admiral once, who used to make it and used it to flavour gin.

Pigeon in the net, alternative destination, thistle

To deter pigeons, they have suspended netting from the roof structure of Charing Cross Station. One pigeon must have got through and, sad to say, is now suspended, dead and shrunken, by a wing from the netting. Its little head hangs down, curled over like the hook of a clothes hanger, and its little claws clasp the air.

I like hearing the announcement for the Hastings train which ends its journey at a place called Ore. You hear: "... West St Leonards, StLeonards Warrior Square, Hastings and/or".

They are refurbishing a house which abuts on the Grove, which explains, why beside a recently planted magnolia on the grass by the wall of the house, rises a magnificent, four-foot high thistle, with a stem about an inch in diameter.

Wildness, false perspective, orange fungus

There is a narrow strip of front garden behind iron railings in front of one of the 18th Century houses in Mount Sion. It has been sown with wild flowers, a small formal hedge, at the back. Charlock, poppies and thistles push through the railings and spill on to the pavement. Wildness imprisoned, you think.

Walking up the High Street I hear a snatch of conversation from two men sitting outside a cafe: "You have a false perspective on the state of England..." I hear no more. Football, I wonder? Probably. Or politics? Or geography?

In the Grove, I catch sight of what looks like an orange plastic flower in a corner between a gate post and a wall. It is a bracket fungus prompted into existence I suppose by the unseasonable weather.

Bank holiday, blue geranium, watering in the rain

I wake up remembering that today is a bank holiday, and think of the money suspending for a while, or at least slowing down, its breeding activities.

The first blue geranium, urged on by the sun between showers, is in flower by the front door; others, in full bud, are waiting to follow suite.

In the vegetable garden I hoe for a few minutes and then, driven in to the greenhouse by a heavy shower, water the the tomatoes in their grow bags.

Hedge between showers, starlings gone, letters of Gustave Flaubert

Rain prevented me from tackling the long, high hedge which separates our garden from the road and shelters us from the curiousity of passers-by. An electric hedge-trimmer is not a good idea when the leaves are wet. Today they were dry and the job is nearly done.

The starlings, which were so busy a week ago, are relieved for a while of their parental duties. The recess, where they nested at the top of the column inset into the wall of the house opposite, is silent and empty after the raucous screeching of the nestlings, which must now be foraging for their own meals.

Flaubert's letters, which I am reading immediately after finishing his marvellous but neglected last novel, Bouvard et Pecuchet, is proving even more exhilirating than I had imagined. "Don Quixote and Sancha Panza are more real than the Spanish soldier who created them. But no invention of Flaubert is as real as Flaubert," wrote the Argentinian, savant, Jorge Luis Borges. He is right.

hillside trees, lost lawnmower, oriental radish

I like the sight of trees dressing a hillside.

In a neigbouring garden is a small, unkempt lawn, where rye grass has sprouted its seeded stems. Watching balefully over it, the grass nibbling at its rusting blade and roller, is an abandoned lawnmower.

In the Farmers' Market this morning there are bunches of long, white oriental radish, such as you might see in a market in the Far East.

travellers, broken umbrella, tricyle power

"True travellers alone , " wrote Braudelaire, " leave for the sake of leaving".

A broken umbrella, with its ribs broken and its black cover flapping like a bat's wing, is a sad sight, but a surreal one too. This afternoon I see one stuffed into a litter bin which bears the logo of Walls Icecream.

An immense noise in the Grove as two small boys race down the sloping path on strange tricycles. They have two small wide-tyred weels behind and one big yellow-hubbed wheel in front. They are low slung and the seats are angled so that the drivers can lean back a few inches above the ground to obtain maximum leverage on the pedals.

Wet and warm, noisy starlings, internet statistics

After the cold and wet, it is warm and wet, with the wetness on the grass and in the soil. So a good day for setting out lettuce and courgettes plants. This afternoon you feel the wamth of the sun and you can almost feel and certainly smell things growing in it.

The starlings, which have been feeding their young in a nest at the top of a column set into the wall of the house opposite, must now be breathless, if that is what birds become, with rushing to and fro with food. The nestlings are becoming increasingly aggressive in their cries for more. What is the world coming to?

Well I'll tell you. With today's Independent came a map of the world in facts and figures.
It tells us that the population of the world is estimated to be 6.525 billion by July of this year.
Of these 1.018 billion are internet users. That's what it says.