poppy, birthdays, litter

Poppy in a packet.

Following a recent crop of birthdays, I wake up thinking that today is not the birthday of any one I know well enough to know when his or her birthday is. I think to myself: why do anniversaries seem so important? Everyday is, after all, an anniversary of something. On Sunday July 6th 2008, of which I could celebrate the anniversary today, for example, I posted here a photograph of ivy leaves and their shadows reflected on a white wall, counted 18 buds on a potted agapanthus (I can count only three today) and embarked on reading A la Recherche du temps perdu, for the third time, which, with interruptions I have been reading ever since, and now have only a couple of hundred pages to finish.The nature of time is something that preoccupied Proust and many others. Some have suggested that there is no such thing as time. Perhaps, they say, we exist in a vast, static structure where everything happens for ever, and we simply travel through its many layers and dimensions. Others suggest a multitude of parallel universes, where what we think of as time is divided infinitely into coexisting and perennial moments.

The lime tree opposite has shed its flowers, formerly a yellowy green, now the colour of Virginia tobacco. The minute petals are scattered over our garden table and brick patio, over the road outside and accumulate in the gutters, a strange and pervasive litter, for which no vandal other than Nature can be blamed.