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.