shelter, under the sea, horses

Safe under the bonnet.

 We drive into a boxcar and pass on a long train  under the sea from Dover to Calais. A miracle
which nowadays we take for granted.

With the setting sun behind them the horses  in a field which we pass in the car seem to glow, gilded like horses in a myth.

sun, music, spaniel

 The sun behind cloud.

The lazy and indeterminate sound of music drifts through open door of a pub. The sun beats down. I sip a cold glass of lager.  Summer.

In The Grove a group of people, young and old sprawl on the grass in a circle. The remains of a picnic are scattered about them. Part of the circle is a black spaniel, sitting its legs stretched before it, its head up and alert, on the look out. From a distance it looks like a pool of blackness.

watching, seeds, arm

  A neighbour's  cat watching me through the foliage that overhangs a path in our garden.

On the lime tree the seeds have ripened and are beginning to fall, spinning down to earth and drifting on the light breeze. A few weeks ago the gutters in the road were thick with their petals like tobacco I suggested; now it is the seeds which begin to accumulate, again the colour and texture are of tobacco but this time a coarser shag.

In the open window of an upstairs room a bare arm holds up a book for reading.

cat, present, tourists

 The cat's shadow steps gingerly on the cat's paws.

In the house of some friends, they show me, a Victorian print of figures in a mountain landscape. They remind me that it was a wedding present which I gave them - it must be more than 30 years ago. Do I remember it. At first I do not, but on the bus going home, I recall  finding it in a shop in Sevenoaks and liking it enough to regret for a moment giving it away. Such reminders of time past prompt as this one does floods of thoughts and memories. Between now and then the interim seems infinitely expandable.

In The Pantiles this afternoon tourists move ponderously like sailing ships in a calm. They shift their weight from hip to hip as they advance if they advance at all. It is a way of walking which I perfectly understand because, much as I dislike it, I sometimes in idle moments, catch myself at it.

Kites or swallows, sums up the last question I put to Lucy Kempton  in our Compasses dialogue (see side panel). She has now posted her response, with a lovely poem contemplating the nature of kite -flying, messages on the pieces of paper which form a kite's tail, and the contrasting freedom of swallows. It is a complex poem and deserves reading and rereading. The question I must answer: Would I nod and dance at the end of the string or follow the free and perilous trajectory of the swallow's wing? Not as easy to answer as it  may sound. 

wagtail, whispers, stuffed

 On the brick pavement a pied wagtail steps out.

Down here in our little garden the air is still. So still it is a surprise to hear the leaves of the lime tree overhead laden with winged seeds, now dried to creamy yellow colour, whispering to themselves;  and to see the branches move slowly as though nodding in agreement with one another.

Olives stuffed with blanched garlic cloves are something relatively new, and pleasing with a glass of beer or glass of chilled fino sherry. I once saw olives stoned and stuffed with  red pepper in a factory in Spain. What surprised me was that the peppers were cooked and pressed into a  carpet-like strip, which was then cut into thinner strips, themselves fed into the olives and cut again by machine to fit the fruit. The garlic cloves  in this case are whole and probably fitted into  the olives by hand.

mushroom, sandwiches, disco

 This afternoon in The Grove, a squirrel is eating a mushroom with frantic enthusiasm. While I am taking the photograph a man pauses behind me. "I have never seen that before," he says.  Neither have I. Is it, I wonder, an hallucinogenic mushroom? Am I an hallucination? Are you dear blog-reader, an hallucination?

We are lunching outside a Chinese restaurant in Sevenoaks.  Inside there sits an elderly Chinese gentleman. It is dark in the restaurant in contrast to the sunny exterior. The light glints on his glasses. From the pub opposite a young man brings a plate of very English-looking sandwiches into the restaurant and presents them to the man, whom I take to be the owner.

We are talking about islands. "I've been to the Isle of Man," says our friend Geoff. "But I didn't mean to go there." How did that happen? "I was drinking in the pub called The Vine in Liverpool and someone said there was a disco round the corner. So I went to look for it. I heard some music and went in search of it. Then I must have fallen asleep. I was drunk. When I woke up I was in the Isle of Man. I had walked on to the ferry thinking it was a disco.  Someone had stolen my wallet. I had no money to get home. I was about 18 I suppose. It took me a week to earn some money for the fare home".

mud, safety,hair

 Discoveries in the mud beside The Thames.

At the dentist the hygienist offers me a pair of goggles. "Against the light," she says. "Health and safety,you know!"

Behind me in the train, a 13-year old girl argues skillfully but without results with her mother about her newly dyed hair. "It's dark, dark purple," she says. "Would you rather it was light purple?" "You've very pretty hair as it is," says her Mother. "I'm not going anywhere with you like that."

heads, gravlax, emeralds

 Heads above the parapet.

I first encountered gravlax in Sweden in the seventies, when as far I know it was not found in England. Literally "buried fish" or "buried salmon", the dish used to be made by burying the fish, dressed in a mixture of salt, sugar, pepper and dill, in the cold ground. Nowadays the filleted fish is cured or pickled by strewing the fillets, skin-side down, with the traditional ingredients, making a sandwich of  them, wrapping it in foil and placing the parcel in the fridge under weights, which draw the liquid from the flesh. After three days you slice it like smoked salmon, but it is more delicate and in my view more delicious. It is often served with a light mustard sauce.  Dill is often hard to find in this country so this year I have grown it in large quantities. Hence a supper of gravlax tonight.

Inside the young broad bean pods the beans nestle like emeralds in a bed of white velvet.

seed, thrush, cat

 Early seed gusted down from one of  the trees in Calverley Ground.

In the vegetable garden this morning there is flapping of wings as I go through the door in  the wall. It is not the usual pigeon, but a fledgling thrush scuttling along the ground in the manner of a four-footed mammal rather than a bird. I follow it as it hides behind an apple tree.  It runs about down there for some minutes. It seems uncertain about its potential to fly, but in the end, instinct overcomes, inertia, and it manages, miracle of miracles to launch itself into the air. My heart misses a beat  as disappears into the leaves of nearby trees.

This afternoon in the garden as I cut the grass I sense a pair of eyes watching me. They belong to the Siamese cat which lives in the terrace two doors away.  It is crouching on a brick path where overhanging herbs and ferns provide camouflage, It has a bell round its neck to warn birds of its presence. So  it has to keep very still while it stalks me. For a moment,  I know what it's like to be a bird.

telephone, voice, mats

 Telephone time.

There is a little woman who works in the shop where we are buying some pillow cases.  She is dainty as a fairy. We met her at Christmas  and now, again, she comes to our help with an answer to a query. Kindness is her trade mark and her voice  sounds like a flute. She enjoys her job.She enjoys being kind to be people; and asks for no reward other than the satisfaction of being truly helpful.

A recent cold has increased the number of tissues consumed. I have now found another use for the long, fish-shaped lid though  which, once the box is opened, you  pull out the tissues one by one. I still draw an eyes, a mouth and some scales, but use the resulting fish as a mat for tea cups as well as for book marks. I haven't yet got round to it, but these lids suitably suspended would also make good mobiles.

mud, comptitition, refrain

In the mud beside Thames treasures and mysteries abound.

In the garden of some bird loving neighbours there hangs a bird-feeder loaded with peanuts. This morning there came to a wee mouse, a wood mouse, says Pam; and, at the same time, tackling the feeder from the other side, a sparrow. No camera to hand, the photograph has to stay in the mind.

Has my Epson strains to copy a photograph, it repeats the same word. "Rambo," it says, "Rambo, Rambo..." Could it not be Rimbaud, the poet rather than the angry maverick soldier? No such: luck the emphasis is distinctly on the first rather than the second syllable. 

copying, irritated, lovely

I look down from the bridge between the embankment and Charing Cross Station to watch this pavement artist copying on to a canvas stretched across the paving stones below.

Female voice of passer-by on the pavement on the other side of our hedge:  "Michael was almost irritated by me..."
Male voice responds without commitment or emphasis: "Was he?"

On the threshold of a toy shop in an arcade, some battery-driven soft toys roll about on the floor. "They're lovely, aren't they," says an elderly woman to her elderly husband. They advance on the toys, he with his walking stick; she gazing like a child.  The toys croak and bark as appropriate to their species. "Oink, oink", says frog. "Oink, oink..." over and over and over again.

tenderness, PT, monsoon

 Tenderness by the Thames.

In the distance on The Common, I see a group of people doing PT, specifically the exercise which we used to call astride jumping. PT or whatever it is called nowadays is usually far from my thoughts, but the sight of a group of people throwing their hands up and leaping into the air at the same time induces some mild nostalgia. It always used to make me feel rather silly, but rather silly is state from which I am rarely far removed nowadays.

The taxi driver and I discuss the variability of the weather during the short drive across the town. "It's warm; it's cold," he says; "it's windy; it's wet; it's monsoon."

flying, melncholy, yew

Flags, aircraft and seagulls all are said to fly which says a lot for the verb "to fly".

By  chance while looking up the plant called Fumitory, one variety of which grows out of walls in profusion in these parts,  I come upon  the delightfully named Melancholy Thistle. Its  botanical name is cirsium helenoides, or according to Geoffrey Grigson's The Englishman's Flora, Cirsium heterophyllum.  It grows largely in the north of Britain.  It is slender and unarmed being free of prickles. "It looks pretty, if a little sad in the mountains," writes Grigson "...At first the single flower heads drop and hang; and the mountain wind turns the Fish Belly leaves, which reveal their under-surface of white."  Fish Belly is a local name for the plant. "Did this melancholy look suggest that here was a plant good against melancholy?" asks Grigson, and quotes Culpepper in response: "The Decoction of the Thistle Wine being drunk expels superfluous Melancholy out of the body, and makes a man as merry as a cricket." If while in Scotland or the north of England I ever saw this plant, how I wish now that I had paid closer attention to it.

As I cut the hedge this afternoon I note with approval how a gap in the privet is being filled by the slower growing leaves of a yew. Is this part of the process by which hedges declare their age according to the number of  different types of tree found in a given stretch. A yew hedge is, how shall I put it, a wee bit posher than privet. Or so I have always thought.  I wonder how the two will get on in time.

jetsam, broad beans, cleaning

Beside The Thames.

This year's broad beans took ages to set, but now that they have I realise that they have been conspicuously successful. I planted the seedlings in an unusually richly composted bed which may account for their strength and height. The are now nearly six foot, twice as high as usual. I have not, as in previous years, cut off the top growing-points to deter black fly which are supposed to be drawn to the tender leaves, and  still there are no black fly.  I have staked the outside of  the four long rows and held them upright with garden string, which make the sturdy plants look a little like strange animals eager to escape from a pen. And there  are  plump and promising pods protruding in all directions.

As it has rained most of the day I have with the help of Windows Clean Up been purging my computer's hard disk of surplus programs. It is a bit like sorting out the contents of old drawers and tidying up  shelves. I lean back in my chair with  a sigh of accomplishment.

silver, tastes, age

 This photograph of a leaf pressed into the tarmac has not been tweaked. It is one of  this year's leaves which has I imagine reacted to some sort of chemical oil or petrol or a mixture one or the other with water. It appeals to me because it looks as though it has been fashioned by metal working  tools - and instance of nature reaching towards art.

In Sainsbury's a young man, aged 8 or thereabouts, shouts "Mum, can I get some pickled onions." He reaches up to ample display of pickles. "No, I said, no", says his Mother. Why is it that people's preferences, their likes and dislikes, always intrigue me, regardless of whether I share them? Others I  know have found pickled onions addictive. For myself, I can take them or leave them. I have some sympathy for the boy though. Onions are a relatively innocent vice.

When rain falls outside the window I sometimes reach for Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks as a source of good cheer and wit. With the book opened at random on a day when more than on most I seem to feel my age, he quotes Jonathan Swift, who as usual seldom disappoints with:"No wise man ever wished to be younger."

buddleia, morris dancers, weeds

 Buddleia, cloud and telephone wires.

As we climb Mount Sion in the rain we hear a clanging and a tinkling. It is a group of morris dancers coming down strung out on the pavement, presumably on their way to perform outside a pub in The Pantiles. I turn to inspect their nayy blue cloaks and the bells attached to their gaiters. The weather and the forecast bodes ill for them.

I find a pretty book in Hall's Bookshop published in 1906. It is called Simply Weeds. Its author, R Lloyd Praeger. It begins with the sentence, "When there were no men there were no weeds."

collage, lads, bees

Nature, or at least a combination of wind and rain and a perhaps a man tearing off something fixed to it made this collage on a metal door with an absence of thought or planning.

On the terrace at Sankey's four lads with pints in front of them demolish baguettes and stack of chips with infectious enthusiasm, while Mrs P and share a plate of whitebait with the modest restraint of the elderly.

Bees are scarce this year. I watch them rather as individuals, entering a nasturtium and backing out, moving over the spikelets of lavender which swing  when they have concluded their ministrations and moved on to others.

bridge, lover, passing

 Frieze on the Millennium Bridge.

Love is good. The word "lover" is good too. Even when applied to inanimate objects the word is pleasing as in "book lover".  And the thoughts that go with it. Today a letter arrives in a smart envelope addressed simply to "Pizza Lover". That's not me. I like pizzas, especially the one I bake myself, but love them? I am not so sure. Inside the envelope is a leaflet advertising "Domino's Pizza Tunbridge Wells Mega Week.  Classic Pizza, Any Size. £7.99 Collection, £9.99 Delivered." I am not so sure. I am not so sure at all.

Am I alone in failing to recognise people who wave to me as they pass in their cars. People whom I am obviously supposed to  know. The only one thing to do is wave back, but when I do, I feel a bit of fraud. 

fledging, hello, crows

In a neighbour's garden.

I have used the same words myself and wondered a little at them: "Hello, there!" a local shopkeeper greets me. I used to say it when I had forgotten a person's name, so that "there" became a substitute for John or Jim. It is also I suppose a little friendlier than a crude "hello."

The two crows who at this time of year I so often see in The Grove, are back. They peck at the newly cut grass. Invariably there are just two crows, no more. I used to call them Mr and Mrs Crow and saw them as proprietors of the little park. But the time has come to say goodbye to such anthropomorphic rubbish. What is more they are probably different birds.