rooftop, humming, edge

The movement of pigeons' feet is usually entertaining if watched carefully.

Three cyclists, one after the other, free wheel down Mount Sion, their bicycles humming on a continuous note like insects.

Tidiness and wildness do not, as a rule, go together in a garden. It seems to me that part of the art of gardening is to contain the one within the other. I reflect on this as, not entirely characteristically, I make a neat edge between an area of brickwork and the newly cut grass, and step back to admire the effect - too much like a public park or formal garden, I think to myself, but feel a sense of satisfaction nevertheless.

conversation, cards, bee

Conversation in the Grove where it is always afternoon. "Summer afternoon ... summer afternoon," wrote Henry James, "the two most beautiful words in the English language

Cards arranged upright on a table facing inwards, glimpsed through a window, betoken a birthday. I don't know who lives there, but many happy returns all the same.

As I make my through the Farmers Market, a bag containing a dahlia with dark purple leaves and a salvia with bright red flowers in either hand, a woman says to me " you're going to be a busy bee". I think to myself that if I were indeed a bee, her remark would be as true and even more appropriate.

iris, gambler, anniversery

Looking into an iris, the complexity of the pattern multiplied exactly as a feature of the species is a source of wonder.

Outside the Ragged Trousers in the Pantiles a man asks if he can borrow a pen. "I'm just going to back a horse," he says by way of explanation. At the next table, he sets to, marking a racing list in a paper spread out before him. He has a mobile phone and is in the process of calling his bookmaker. When five minutes later, we are about leave, I approach him to retrieve my pen. I put my hand forward in a gesture to indicate the pen, which he is holding in one hand, and not wanting to disturb his phone call, I don't say anything. Not expecting me and obviously preoccupied, he extends his free hand and absentmindedly shakes mine. Eventually he catches on, and returns the pen. I am still wondering whether the pen helped him back at least one winner.

Today, I realize to my surprise that I have been writing this blog for precisely four years. That adds up to 1440 posts and to an average of 360 posts a year. It was always my intention to post three observations every day, following the example of Clare Grant, whose Three Beautiful Things, now in existence for just over five years, has proved a lasting inspiration. Looking for subjects, which are curious, interesting and beautiful every day, continues to be a pleasure and to be a formula, which assists in the maintenance of my sanity if not complete happiness. Apart from the personal satisfaction, which it brings me , the blog has made me a number of friends across the world, who seem to share my appreciation of the charm of small things, the richness and variety of nature and even the intricacies and pleasures of technology. I wouldn't be without it. Or them.

contrasts, weed, lovely

Clouds and bamboo behind the Black Pig look exotic, more like Thailand than Tunbridge Wells.

Ground elder is an irritating weed, but when the earth is soft, as it is today after the rain, it is satisfying to ease its winding roots with a fork, to disentangle them from the clinging soil, and extract them in their entirety from the herb bed, and the bed where I grow roses for cutting.

The sun brings out the best in us. The waitress at the Ragged Trousers wants to spread good will but runs short of polite farewells. As we leave, she beams: "Have a lovely rest of the day!"

toad-flax, cormorant, rain-watching

A few days ago I mentioned ivy leaved toad flax, a pretty trailing plant that grows wild on walls and in odd corners, I didn't have an adequate photo at the time. Here is one to make up for the omission.

Story-telling must be an art as old as cave painting. The Panchatantra also known as the Fables of Bidpai seem to be drawn from among the oldest stories in human culture, and were first written down in sanskrit. I come across them today under the title Kalila and Dimna in a pretty book, where they are retold by Ramsay Wood. At Hall's Bookshop they tell me that this is a publisher's remainder, but how it comes to remain unsold, I find hard to understand. The book is subtitled Fables of Friendship and Betrayal, which like the stories themselves, are as old as human nature. Some of the stories are very short. Here, as a sample, is a short one picked at random:
The Cormorant and the Star
There was once a cormorant which caught sight of a star's reflection on a gentle sea. Thinking this slowly wavering patch of light was a fish, he dived underwater and tried to catch it. Of course the cormorant failed, yet stubbornly he continued to dive again and again, believing that by effort he must eventually succeed. In the end he grew so angry and frustrated that he swore never again to dive after a fish.
From then onwards, even though he suffered extreme hunger on a meagre diet of small crabs, shrimps and shells found along the shore, the cormorant refused to dive after any fish, for he assumed it was as impossible to catch as the star on the water.

While in the vegetable garden a heavy shower comes down suddenly. I retire to the greenhouse, and stand in the dry while the raindrops beat against the glass and splash up from the paving outside. With special pleasure, I note the elder at the bottom of the garden, bow down under the weight of the rain on its cream-coloured, foaming corymbs.

station, cheering up, sandwort

By the railway station.

While in Hall's bookshop I am greeted by a neighbour reputed to be a serious bibliophile."We've just come in here to cheer ourselves up," he says. I look round to see if his wife is with him. She is sitting down and looking into the distance. Her expression suggests that bookshops are not places likely to make her cheerful.

In the long grass in the Grove are masses of tiny, white star-like flowers which I am tempted to call bedstraw, but which, I suspect, are fine-leaved sandwort, though only one of my books lists it as such.

roller, pea-eater, pop

I feel increasing sympathy for old, neglected things like this garden roller in a friend's garden. This is a structural detail.

Just after reading Lucy's comment here on Molly (her spaniel), who eats mangoes, I am talking to my friend Chris whose dog nicks garden peas of the plants and munches them pods and all. Apparently it also manages to cull raspberries straight from the bushes.


Today a young man with a plastic water bottle overtakes me. The bottle goes pop as he grips it to take a swig. I look round surprised. "Sorry, " he says and smiles.

poppy time, persiflage, dancers

No compromises here.

Persiflage is too good a word to leave to the French language alone, whence it has migrated into English. Banter or mockery doesn't match up to it. But English, sad to say, doesn't have an equivalent verb to persifler or a noun, the equivalent of perfileur or persifleuse, for someone who practices persiflage.

Morris dancers troop through Chapel Place on their way to perform in the Pantiles. They wear round black hats with yellow ribbons falling falling down their back; white stockings and gaiters. Bells seem to be suspended all over their persons. They tinkle like tea trolleys. For some reason they always make me laugh even when they are not performing.

chives, scream, mango

Chives. Onions without tears.

From the motor repair shop on the corner, a mechanical spanner, screams like an animal as I pass.

Of all fruit, mangos are the fruitiest and most aromatic; and of all mangos, I think to myself as I prepare one for breakfast, the Alfonso is the fruitiest and most aromatic.

caught, watching, conkers

Balloons captured by silver birch.

In the front window of a house, a small child holds a bowl in one hand and chews meditatively while watching the street.

Clusters of embryo conkers glow emerald green, where the white pyramids of horse chestnut flowers presided a few weeks ago.

springs, tooth, pubs

In a skip, the remains of a bed.

At the dentists, the hygienist, as she taps and scrapes away, asks, rhetorically because my mouth being open, I am precluded from replying, " how's the tombstone?"I take very little specific interest in what is going on in my mouth, having so far refrained from having nicknames for individual teeth or desired to know their intimate secrets. When I am able to speak again I ask her about the tombstone. "It's just a name for an old tooth. Yours seems to be hanging on," she says, " a bit wobbly, but still sound." I think to myself that apart from its provenance, it has quite a lot in common with its owner.

Outside Sevenoaks railway station, there were two pubs, at both of which, when I lived in that town, I used to drink from time to time. Today, as I emerge from the station I realize that neither - The Farmers Arms nor the Railway and Bicycle - is there any more. Both are holes in the ground to be developed as blocks of flats or offices. A melancholy end to friendly and often welcome refuges.

On Compasses, the dialogue proceeds. Lucy reveals what she is waiting for.

frieze, elder, south wind

Summer in the Grove, 2.

In the twitten, the alley between houses backing on to one another, I spot an unofficial elder sprouting beside a wheelie bin. It has but one brand new saucer of white flowers which enlivens a dreary corner. Elder is reputed to keep witches away from the house and, I dare say, from wheelie bins too.

In the Oxfam bookshop I spot a book of weather lore. Opened at random, it tells me that "the south wind warms the aged."

sunshine, strings, background

Summer composition. People arrange themselves beneath the trees in the Grove.

High pressure means that vapour trails remain like random lines scratched lightly with chalk across the sky

My neighbour, Denzil, tells me that he and his wife were sitting on a bench on the expanse of grass enclosed by the ancient walls of Tonbridge Castle. In front of them in the distance a large crowd of wedding guests was assembling for a photograph. As they watched, they saw a man approaching them holding in his hand a glass of Champagne. "Ah," says Denzil to his wife: "How generous". But when the wedding guess drew close, it was to ask Denzil and his wife, to move in order to leave the background of the photograph unencumbered. As the Spanish poet said "cuando pitas, flautas, cuando flautas, pitas." When you expect pipes, you get flutes, and when you expect flutes, you get pipes.

message, sage, rainbow

From the broken window of an abandoned tanning salon, I was able to select this message.

What I like about the herb, sage, is its name, with its connotation of wisdom. The Romans called it Herba Sacra and mixed it with cheese. In French, sage means "good" in the sense of good behaviour. So you say to a child: Est-ce-que tu as été sage? Have you behaved yourself? I like that too because the implication of wisdom adds a pleasing dimension to have you been a"good boy or girl? The herb is however called sauge in French .The Spanish and Latin name of the herb, meanwhile, is echoed in the name we use generically for the numerous garden varieties - Salvia. When the sage, which I planted last year in a herb bed, comes into flower just now, I realize that its purple flowers on tall stems could belong equally well in the border of a flower garden.

While watering the seedlings with a hose, this morning, a rainbow in the wide band of the spray touches me with a benign giddiness.

fly, wild, democracy

I do not like flies. The only reason for including this one, is that it is on the outside of the frosted glass window, where it has settled, and I am on the inside.

Through the open bedroom window, I hear very early in the morning the honking of geese flying overhead, and later, just outside, the harsh call of a crow. Both these sounds of the wild restore a sense of perspective in the slow, comfortable time of waking up.

Two quotations made by Clive James in his regular Sunday morning talk on BBC Radio 4 strike me, this morning, as worth recording. Both define democracy which seems to need defending in the present political climate. The first is from Karl Popper: "It's democracy if the government can be changed at the people's whim." The second from Albert Camus: "Democracy is the form of society devised and maintained by people who know that they don't know everything."

no hands, delivery, pole

Tunbridge Wells West railway station was opened in 1866 and closed to passengers in 1985. For the last few years the station building served as a restaurant. During the process of its restoration under new ownership, the hands of the clock have disappeared. The tower helped earn the station the title of the St Pancras of the Weald in its early days. Since the closure there is no direct access by rail to Brighton and Eastbourne on the Sussex coast, though it is still possible to travel to the coast by rail on the main line from Charing Cross to Hastings. Film buffs who recall the sinister hand-less clock in Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Wild Strawberries, may wonder whether the hands of the station clock will soon be restored.

A young man delivers free magazines door to door in Berkeley Road. The magazines are tidily stacked in a push chair. In the push chair, as though a chance incumbent, is a sleeping baby.

A squirrel, which has strayed our of the Grove, hesitates at the foot of a telegraph pole in a residential street. It looks up, decides against the venture, and scurries off to find something closer to a tree to run up. Disappointed, meanwhile, I put my camera away. You can forget a squirrel half way up a tree but one half way up a telegraph pole ...A nice thought!

The second

geranium, pink,final

Today's geranium. This is the true geranium, not to be confused with the widely cultivated pelargonium displayed in pots and window boxes.
It is called cranesbill in the wild because the shape of the seed head resembles the beak of a crane.
There are numerous wild varieties, all members of the geranium family, which includes the delicate Herb Robert, found in woody places at this time of year. This is one of many garden varieties of geranium. It is useful in partially shaded places, where it flowers prolifically as it does in our little patch of garden.

When I was writing regularly about wine, I did my best to encourage people to drink more rosé, and not to think of it as a pussy-footing wine, uncertain of its identity, half way between red and white. Today, in the sun, on the terrace behind the Black Pig, we thought to ourselves, a glass of the pink stuff in front of us, how right I had been. Light enough for lunchtime, pigmented enough to provide some substance to accompany a salad.

Jean Rhys' best know book, The Wide Sargasso Sea, is a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre. It is the story of how Rochester's mad wife in the attic comes to be in the fix, with which Charlotte Bronte confronts her heroine and the reader. In a review of a new biography of Jean Rhys, I read this quotation from her letters. She writes of how, when reading she looks for something that "...knocks on the heart, which means That is the truth, that it is final. That comes from an au delà." I know what she means.

cystus, tennis balls, buttercups

Bees and cystus.

In the compost heap, I find a composted tennis ball, its woolly wrapping reduced to a rag, its central rubber sphere intact - smooth, black rubber. Another tennis ball emerges, this time in reasonably good condition. With some of the compost brushed off it's good enough for serving.

What are weeds, someone said, but plants growing where you don't want them. Today, I find a lettuce in a row of beetroot, and one of those oriental mustard, among the broad beans. The mustard, a broad leaved plant, with a purple tinge to its leaves, has an appetizing, spicy taste. Both the lettuce and mustard are wanted and will remain with their new neighbours until required for the table.
Meanwhile the section of the Grove, where the grass, now naturally seeded with wild flowers has been allowed to grow, is beginning to look free and shaggy as intended. Among the tall grass, sport buttercups. The most ordinary of flowers, they are often thought of as weeds when they appear on lawns and in vegetable beds, but here, they are allowed to show off and reach up from the end of their stalks to be looked at. The French call them boutons d'or, gold buttons.

new-fledged, crash helmet, sirens,

Today's blackbird. Judging by its small size and demeanour, it is recently fledged.

In the Grove, I often pass, as I do today, an elderly woman wearing a crash helmet and walking her dog. It is the sort of helmet that cyclists wear, and I ask myself whether she cycles to the Grove with her little dog in a basket on the handlebars. More probably, as I have never seen her or her dog on a bike, she wears the helmet as a fashion item. Or maybe it makes her feel safe from the perils and dangers of modern life.

Racing up the High Street, its siren wailing and its tyres hissing on the wet road comes a police car, flashing its warning light. Other traffic gives way clumsily. Behind it comes a police van, like the car, white with blue and yellow insignia, and blasting its siren. It brings a thread of excitement to a dull afternoon. People look at one another, their eyes lively with anticipation. For a moment, it's like the movies.

dish, raindrops, Pooh Corner

Dove on dish.

The humid air begins to condense and a few big drops of rain splash on to the path in front of the house.

As I switch on the radio I hear the comforting voice of Alan Bennett reading from the House at Pooh Corner. No one could read it better. Unfortunately I am only in time to hear the ending... "With a nod of his head to his friend he went on with his walk through the forest."

shopping, art, swifts

Picking and choosing at the Farmers' Market.

As I watch the BBC TV documentary about the origins of Homo Sapiens, one point in particular strikes me as reassuring. The presenter, Dr Alice Roberts, is focusing on the arrival, around 40,000 years ago, of the first Homo Sapiens in a Europe already occupied by Neanderthals. "The Neanderthals, were intelligent, technologically up to scratch, like Homo Sapiens (ie made stone tools). What is more they were aclimatised to the cooler northern climate. Yet the Neanderthals became extinct, while Homo Sapiens, which had emerged more recently from the warmer African climate, survived". Why was this? "The capacity to create works of art such as carvings, cave paintings and figurines, developed", she says, "in human not in Neanderthal culture. And this gave us the edge, defined us, set us apart and helped us define territory and identity."
Art sometimes get a bad press nowadays. It is seen as a spare time activity, an indulgence and, when professional, sometimes eccentric and hard to understand. So it is good to think that in the early development of the human race, art played so important a part in our survival. During the Ice Age, which nearly killed off early Europeans, the artists who occupied the caves of southern France and the Iberian Peninsula, produced such astonishing paintings, were fulfilling an important social function. Something, which artists today, no one should doubt it, still fulfill in an age, no less scary than the Ice Age.

In the High Street, despite thumping amplifiers in Chapel Place, celebrating the bank holiday with deafening rock music, I hear the wild, shrieking of swifts, overhead.

still life, balloon, punsihment,

Still life at the Farmers' Market.

A long, black, sausage-shaped balloon, about 30 ft long, bobs and writhes in the wind. It must be filled with some kind of gas. A man hangs on to one end, which children sport around it.

Another relic from King Charles' School: "Page 347 of the King Charles' School Log Book (school records) for the period between 18 75 and 1897 shows the following:
Birched C Hambley for truant playing. This step was taken by the desire of his mother but I have little hope of any good resulting as the mother at home connives at his absence and unless the parents use their power for the benefit of the boy a good birching is not likely to make the school attractive to him. We find that boys who attend regularly like school, but as soon as they are allowed, as in this case, to ride about in a butchers' cart two or three days a week school become more distasteful than birching.

wolf, rules, saw

The grey wolf in the wall.

Opposite the church of King Charles the Martyr is the former King Charles' School building. It is a large room which was, for a while, a Chinese Restaurant. The Chinese owner, an Elvis impersonator, gave regular performances for customers. Last year he sold the premises, which have now been nicely restored as a conference room. It is often open during the day at weekends as a coffee shop. Round the walls are memorabilia of the school, which ceased to be an educational establishment in the 80s. A number of former pupils are still living in the town. Here, as a taste of the standards of a different age, are the contents of a framed inscription on the wall of the conference room:
Rules
Pupils at King Charles' School were required to observe the following rules:
Profane no divine ordinance
Touch no state matters
Urge no health
Pick no quarrels
Maintain no opinions
Encourage no vice
Repeat no agrievances
Reveal no secrets
Make no comparisons
Keep no bad company
Make no long meals
Spare not. Spoil not. Waste no. Want not.
I have been asking myself, how far back these rules go, and which if any of them would, or should be applicable today.

On a bench in the High Street two young men sit on a bench. One has a guitar, the other a large saw. While the guitarist strums, his companion extracts from the saw a haunting, wailing sound, which, thanks to the absence of an amplifier, doesn't carry far.

self-portrait, rescue, attack

Self-portrait with shattered window.

Although I have mentioned the other neighbourhood pub, the best pub in Tunbridge Wells is also round the corner from where we live. This is not just my opinion, but it is the view of more practiced connoisseurs than I. It is called the Grove Tavern, and, apart from the quality of its beer and the welcome which its mustachioed manager bestows on regulars and newcomers alike, its landlord Steve Baxter is a computer expert, and a white knight. This morning my machine refused to connect me to the Internet. In desperation I rang Steve on his mobile, and by 11. 30 he was on our doorstep. By mid-day the problem was solved. When I thanked him and tried to discuss remuneration, he declined saying "mention us on your blog." I had no idea that he knew that I had a blog. (Google has much to answer for). Thanks again Steve.


Such a to do this morning! A magpie attempts kidnap and murder in a nearby starlings nest. It is immediately set upon by a wave of at least a dozen shouting, angry birds. Judging by the din, the defence, on this ocassion, has taught the marauder a lesson. It is not a fuss about nothing. Last year Heidi saw a magpie devouring a nestling on top of our bay tree.