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.