broad beans, constraint, camera

The flowers.

In recent years I have tried to write verse that rhymes. In doing so I found that looking for a rhyme often helped to develop the sense of what I was looking for and could produce something unexpected but true to the way I was thinking. At the back of my mind I felt that somewhere I had read something to that effect, but could not remember where. Now, in the early stages of rereading A la recherche du temps perdu, I realize that my source was Marcel himself. He is describing his mother's tact in asking a difficult question of the Prousts' neighbour, Swann, and how,when interrupted in her approach to Swann, she has to defer the words she has planned. "My mother, had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines."

I have found the camera I was looking for. What I wanted to complement my Sony Cyber Shot, which goes everywhere with me, was a machine with a zoom lens, which would allow me to photograph birds and animals at a distance, and at the same time to come in very close to a flower or an insect only a centimeter or so away. I had come to realize that an SLR was not for me, as the macro and zoom facilities would have required separate lenses, and unless I went for one of the more expensive SLRs, I would not be able to view the subject on the screen, having to rely on the viewfinder. The answer I discovered thanks to a helpful photographic shop, which understood my needs perfectly, is the Olympus SP 570UZ.

tomato, wild, crane

Don't forget the flowers, humble though they may be.

The word "wild" seems to have a new connotation nowadays, as in "wild salmon" to distinguish it from farmed salmon. "Wild rocket", so described by supermarkets and seed merchants, is not really wild but a variety close to that which, one assumes, is found in the wild. Now I read in today's paper of "wild snails". Madeleine le Chartier, from Culey-le-Patrie in the hills of lower Normandy is quoted by the Indpendent newspaper as saying; "Wild snails, they are quite different. Ah the taste of wild snails!" Both "wild" and the French "sauvage", however, suggest to me something free and slightly dangerous and beyond our control.

In the train a man, says to another man, sitting opposite him, in facing window seats: "There's a big crane, out there". "What sort of crane? asks the other. "A mechanical crane," says his companion. Crane is not strictly speaking a homograph since the origin of the word for a mechanical crane is the same as for the bird, the machine being named after the bird. The same applies , I have noted, in other languages. For example grue in French and grua in Spanish

shadowed, agapanthus, Proust,

Ivy and the shadow of ivy.

I count 18 buds on the potted agapanthus which produced no flowers at all last year. This year's prodigality is due to plentiful feeding, which in my ignorance, I failed to administer last year.

My fellow Proustian, Barrett Bonden is to blame. The search,which he initiated for the motor car in A la recherche du temps perdu, has lured me back into the immense, all-encompassing oeuvre for the third time. As I jumped about more or less at random seeking the car episode, I kept hooking on to passages that I wanted to read again. The number of these siren passages grew and before long I had resolved to read the entire work again from the beginning. Goodby Zola, now, for quite long time! I first read A la recherche in my thirties. I bought the 12 volumes of the original Scott Moncrieff translation one by one over a period of three or four years, and that was the time it took me to read the novel. I won't say I appreciated it to the full. It was something of a chore, but I felt proud of having acomplished it. The second time I read it more quickly, now in the Terence Kilmartin revision of the Scott Moncrieff original, more thoroughly and with much greater enjoyment. But, as my search for the motor car confirmed, there is still so much more to be discovered there, such richness of detail, such deep insights into relationships, such fineness of language reflecting so many shades of feeling, perception and character, that I have still only apprecated the surface of the novel. There is much more to be discovered. Since my second reading I have, as a result of a constant assault on French novels in the language of origin, come to enjoy the process so much that my third reading of Proust has to be in French. And I have to say, now that I have started, that many of my fears of those long, long sentences have proved groundless. Although I still hear, almost feel, as I slowly negotiate the majestic paragraphs, the languid and sinuous English rhythms of Scott Moncrieff, I am now ravished by the more delicate, searching and precise music of the master himself. I find it, although there are problems, reefs where I founder, to be, on the whole, easier to read in French and much more satisfying, if only because, having to concentrate harder, I feel myself grasping the sense better. And of course a translation however good it may be, becomes something other than the original, and usually something less.

mustard, child-friendly, 2 minutes

Among the mixed salad leaves which I sow every year, there is always a variety of mustards. The flowers are too often overlooked.

While in the garden I hear, from the pavement on the far side of the hedge, a woman say loudly into a mobile phone: "...The house is not child-friendly...He's going to spend two weeks with a seven year year old. How in God's name..?" Because she is walking so fast, we are robbed of further details of what could be an intriguing story.

In a You Gov survey I am asked this question: "Have you READ a national daily newspaper within the last 12 months? The question is qualified by the words: " By READ we mean looked at for at least 2 minutes in any location".

bud, story, art

Nasturtium about to open.


A youngish man with long hair and a guitar case in one hand passes me in the street. At first I think he must be on a mobile phone, but he is talking to himself, telling himself a story or perhaps composing the words of a song. "... and he had a really fit bird with him..." he says.

While I am trimming the long hedge, which borders our house, a man passes and says: "that looks good... a work of art". I am gratified but, having just watched Federer demolish Safin , I wonder whether that is an over statement. Then I think of Marcel Proust, and I decide reluctantly that it is.

rocket, framed, hush

Rocket flower. I sometimes scatter these over a salad to accompany the leaves but I had not noticed how interesting are the petals with their elegant veins. I think to myself that rocket is a homograph, a word spelt like another but of a different origin. Thank you Clare Grant for a list of homographs the other day in Three Beautiful Things.

From the street I look up at a window in which, between a pale coloured, drawn curtain and the glass, is suspended a pair of jeans on a hanger. It is framed as though it is a picture.

In the quiet garden across the road, through which I walk to my vegetable garden, you can hear the breeze moving leaves even on a still day. The leaves seem to say "hush, hush."

another rose..polenta, basket

..and why not?

From time to time I cook polenta, that golden corn meal from northern Italy, which is made initially into a kind of porridge. It has little taste of its own but borrows it elegantly from other ingredients such as cheese and butter. I love the routines associated with it: letting the meal run through your fingers into a pan of boiling water, stirring it steadily and then simmering it until, as it thickens, you can stand a spoon up in it. It is a beautiful thing, though I didn't think so when I first encountered it. I remember a dish of polenta and salt cod in Padua some years ago, which I found rather strange, but would have liked now. What is left over from the original porridge is almost better. I enjoy the process of cutting into strips the flat cake, which results from the warm polenta being poured on to a dish and allowed to cool. I like the strips grilled or fried as an alternative to potatoes as much for their texture as for the tastes which accrue..

You don't see many laundry baskets nowadays - sturdy trunk like containers constructed from heavy duty wicker, with leather straps and rope handles. Today, I notice one in the dry cleaners, with its lid open, under a hatch through which out-of -hours customers can push their clothes for cleaning. There was something about their smell, which I liked when they were delivered full of clean linen.

pimpernel, silence, cent

When I was a child I loved the idea that the scarlet pimpernel foretold the weather by closing when it is about to rain. The little flower appealed all the more when I read Baroness Orczey's books about the exploits of Sir Percy Blakeney. And how in the guise of a fop whom no one took seriously, rescued French aristocrats from the guilotine at the time of the Revolution. I can still hear the voice of Leslie Howard, as Blakeney, the Pimpernel, in the 1934 film reciting in the false voice of a would-be wit:
"They seek him here,
They seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere,
That demn'd elsuvive pimpernel!"

While queuing at the Bank I an able to watch tennis at Wimbledon on a screen throughfully provided. There is no sound. What a pleasure it is to be excused the commentary, most of it superflous, which accompanies television broadcasts. And even better to miss the grunts, groans and shrieks of the players as they execute their strokes! I would switch off the sound at home, if it were not for the need one, somehow, feels to hear the racket hit the ball.

"What a sweet little coin!" says the woman in the health food shop, when I give her a cent in mistake for a 1p piece.

salad, bollards, kiss

Two fat lettuces ready for the table.

They are painting the bollards in the pedestrian precinct opposite Royal Victoria Place. The colour is the pleasant tone of burgundy that is the corporate colour of Tunbridge Wells. It is, in fact the colour of aged Burgundy wine, but the bouquet is just paint.

The buds of the sow thistle, just about to open, are like pursed lips on the point of blowing a kiss.

creeping, fat gulls, cool dog

There are, according to Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora, nine wild flowers called locally "Creeping Jenny" . Here is the one which I know best. It is a wild flower but is also cultivated as ground cover to deter other more intrusive plants. That is one of its purposes in a difficult patch in our garden, but we alway look forward to its flowering, at this time of year, and its energetic way of speading its favours. For the sake of precision its latin name is Lysimachia nummularia. Apart from Creeping Jenny, its other widely employed common name is Moneywort. As a medicinal herb its most common use is to reduce bleeding.

As we queue for passport control at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, we see three fat seagulls wandering among the slow moving wheels of cars. Someone has been feeding them from a car window. They show no fear of the wheels; if they were big enough, they would kick the cars out of the way. Seagulls look better when they are flyimg.

In the closed train, which carries cars in the tunnel under the English Channel, we see that a woman is making her labrador comfortable in the rear compartment of her shooting brake in preparation for the 35 minute journey. Not only does the dog have a bowl of water, but an electric fan, powered from the dashboard.

Underworld, reader, thought

The way in or the way out?

In the Grove, a grey-haired man on a bench is reading A Brief History of Time.

Tunbridge Wells, where I live, is in the news. The Borough Council has banned the use of the phrase "brain-storming" because it believes that it may offend people suffering from epilepsy. The charity The National Council for Epilepsy says that it has no objection to the term, which it claims to use in its own work environment. Tunbridge Wells Council prefers its employees to say "thought shower".

wildness, paths, not so bad

One grassy area of the Grove, instead of being mowed like the rest of the grass, has been allowed, in the hope of encouraging wild life, to follow its own inclinations. The result, after only a few weeks, is the appearance of wild flowers not usually seen in this little park. Buttercups and clover are profuse. There are docks and sorrels, bugle and a patch of heath bedstraw, shown here among the blades of grass.

Walking across the Grove from the Sutherland Road entrance to the Compasses, I strike out across the grass, and ignore the paths. I reflect that most roads and paths are the result of people or animals taking a particular route over the years until it becomes established. New routes, new paths, new roads take time, and sometimes courage.

A middle aged woman comes out of the front door of her house holding a compress to the top of her head. Her husband leads the way to their car. "It looks worse than what it is," says the woman. She laughs, perhaps to reassure me.

new, bones, frisbee

I pick and open a pod of the first broad beans, couched in a bed of white velvet. They are still small and tender enough to eat raw, which I do one by one.

My favourite restaurant in Tunbridge Wells is Sankey's. Fresh fish purchased "direct from the coast" is its theme and speciality. Like most of those, who serve the public nowadays, however, the management has to be careful in case somebody sues it for the least mishap, as this warning on the menu demonstrates. "Please be aware that Fish may contain bones, even the filleted ones. Oysters are consumed ALIVE... Customers do so at their own risk."

I am struck by the aerodynamics of a frisbee, which two young men are throwing to each other in the Grove. Unlike more primitive frisbies, it is not a saucer, but rather a flat and narrow plastic ring, skillfully shaped for uplift. I guess that the air in the middle of the ring, stirred by the ring's circular motion, becomes like a balloon (or perhaps the motion creates a partial vacuum), which accounts for the way it floats and soars, as it seems to rise of its own accord after it is thrown.

pride, evolution, unexpected buds

For many years I have stopped to pass the time of day with these ladies on London's South Bank. The sculpture is by Frank Dobson and is called London Pride.

As I walked past the office just off the South Bank where I used to work 25 years or more years ago, I was struck by the thought that I had shared the room with an old fashioned office typewriter. It had keys that clattered like a machine gun. There were carbon paper and white bottles of correction fluid and the smell of typewriter ribbon. I suppose I might be nostalgic but I'm not.

For some years now we have had an agapanthus in a pot. For the last couple of years it has not flowered. But I heard someone say on the radio that, although the roots like to be crowded, they also liked to be fed. Ours had not been fed. This year over generous applications of feed have resulted in at least five buds, shooting up among the spikey leaves.

honeysuckle, gibbous, framed

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms...
So doth the woodbine - the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist.

Awake early, I look out of the window to see, pale against the pale morning sky, a gibbous moon. What a good word, gibbous!

Across the area of sky framed by the terraced houses and roof tops of Grove Avenue, and the trees which mount the slopes of the Common, big, fluffy clouds pass in rapid procession on this windy day.

poppy, fledging, bubbles

The architecture of a poppy. When the flower is over and its petals shed, the globular seed capsule remains. Here on top of the globe, the sesile stigmas, (that is stigmas without stems), radiate from the centre, and nurse beneath them the numerous seeds.

Starlings, as in previous years, have been nesting in the capital of the column set into the wall of the house opposite. I have mentioned before the constant din of the young demanding food. Yesterday, as I passed in the street, I looked up to see that the nestlings were in the process of fledging. It is wonderful to see them fluttering from ledge to ledge before taking to the air, and to think that they must have emerged from a clutch of eggs only a few weeks ago. Today, the nest is silent and deserted and the new generation is busy looking after its own needs.

As I round the corner of an alley off Mount Pleasant and alongside Calverley Ground, I encounter a solitary soap bubble. It floats past me in the wind on an " urgent volantary errand". Soon I meet another and then another. By the time I turn into Mount Pleasant, there are bubbles galore. They are produced by a machine on the pavement outside Hoopers department store. Beside the machine is an empty deck chair and a rug suggesting a picnic. It is clear that the bubbles are part of a summer promotion to draw visitors into the shop in the hope that they will buy leisure clothes. I have seen the machine before when it was engaged in a similar marketing exercise, and it has featured here. It consists of a resevoir filled with soapy liquid. An electic powered, rotating wheel supports plastic rings positioned as though they were the blades of a water wheel. As the rings pass through the water, they form bubbles and impel them into the air. The device seems to require little suppervision.

escape, sun, the past

Another plant that likes to grow on walls and in corners, out of cracks and crevices. There's lots of it in these parts. Nobody takes much notice of it. It is described as a garden escape. Its common name is Yellow FumitoryIt is also known as Yellow Corydallis.

I say to the chicken farmer at the Pantiles Farmer's Market: "It looks as though the sun's coming out". "Shh," he says, "The bugger 'll go away again."

As I walk down the street called Hatfieldsoff Stamford Street on the South side of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, I count the third window from the left on the second floor and look up at the office I used to occupy 25 years ago. I try to remember what was on the window sill next to my desk, and I think of the years that have intervened.

wall lettuce, lamp post, mayonaise

This is wall lettuce, Mycelis muralis. It is not much noticed because it grow in cracks and corners of walls and other unloved places, but deserves more attention. I like it for it little yellow flowers and elegant stems which are often of a purple hue. Its deeply lobed leaves may, apparently, be eaten as salad.

Glimpsed from the train, a lamp post, round which wild clematis clambers, and to judge by the protruding tendrils, embraces energetically.

I have taken to making mayonnaise again. I used to think it a delicate operation (in fact, the fear of the liaison separating, when oil joins the egg-yoke base, far exceeds the likelihood of it happening. Beating egg yoke into vinegar, lemon juice and other flavourings takes barely a couple of minutes and whipping in a steady stream of oil, only a little longer. I used to use a food mixer but the old fashioned hand-held, bulb-shaped, wire beater is easier. And the smooth, creamy, savoury sauce, which results is a beautiful thing. Making it is one of those little creative acts, which round off a day.

foxgloves, precision, shower

So uniform in shape and function is the foxglove, yet the spots inside the corolla seem to be scattered at random.

To read spare, precise and accurate yet simple descriptions of objects is a special aspect of the pleasure of reading. Two instances, one in poetry and one in prose, have come my way recently.
One is the content of Barrett Bonden's blog www.bbworkswell.blogspot.com (already mentioned in this one on a number of occasions. No apology for doing so again).The other is to be found on Dave's www.vianegativa.us, where a series of 20 poems describe familiar tools (Odes to tools), so as to allow the subjects effortlessly and wittily to transcend themselves and lead naturally to new associations. An example from Ode to a socket wrench must suffice:
" ...Its accommodating nature
its chrome-plated steel,
its handling of torque.
It can make a complete revolution
From the smallest arc..."
Read the lot. They deserve to be.

To wait for a shower to end and walk out in the warm sunshine and smell in the damp, aromatic air, the oils and resins released by leaf and flower, is one of the pleasures of an uneven and unpredictable climate such as ours.

mostly students, oil, lime flowers

This wall outside the Tunbridge Wells Education Institute where evening and other adult education classes take place. The names and countries testify to a number of overseas students.

Somebody in the pub says: "My brother's in oil". It reminds me, though I do not say so, of a cartoon in which one woodworm beatle says to another: "My husband's in antique furniture." I think, now, of two sardines having a similar conversation.

The lime trees are begining to flower.The tight spherical buds open beneath the pale green bracts, which will soon carry the seeds in the wind. Miniature spiked green balls are already in the horse chestnut trees. It is strange to think of Autumn when Summer is barely with us.

end, hand, seagull patrol

Unable to resist a creative flourish, the smith who made this to secure an iron gatepost, could not refrain from turning the end of it into a snake's head. No more can I resist photographing it.

Caught in a tangle of seaweed, where the waves are breaking, I see what I take to be the claw of a small crab. Close inspection reveals thet it is the tiny arm of a minute, plastic doll. It is a surreal image, which reminds me that Salvador Dali lived a little way down the coast on the other side of Barcelona from us.

On this windy day, I repeatedly see a patrol of six or seven seagulls. They keep formation, their wings barely moving, as they look down on the shore and the sea front.
This the last of the holiday images from my notebook. Tomorrow, it's back to real time.

Strelitzia, conference, rivers

This, I think, is Strelitzia nicolai; or it could be Strelitzia Caudata, also known in South Africa as "wild banana". It grows by the hotel pool alongside other exotica. The more common Strelitzia regina, bird of paradise flower, with its strident orange and blue flowers, also grows by the pool in pots.

Beside the tranquil pool, is a conference room with a long table, tall, sliding, glass doors and space for a maximum of about 20 people. While swimming, we are aware of a dozen or so men in shirt sleeves, sitting at the table, an open lap top in front of each of them. One man looks longingly at the water through a partialy open door. Not a smile, not a laugh is heard, only the steady thrumb of a single, authoritative voice.

On one rainy night, the water streams down the steep, narrow streets, flows through broad ducts under the road beside San Sebatian Playa and forms miniature rivers and estuaries on the sand.

no grafitti, depth, clouds

Although the occasional squiggle and twirl of graffiti has appeared on the panels of the beach huts used by the town hall for beach maintenance, none seems to have disfigured the white walls of Sitges. Perhaps it is because of this magisterial prohibition in Catalan. Identical blue and white porcelain plaques are fixed to walls throughout the town.

When, as a nipper, I first learnt to swim, my mother would stand at the edge of the sea and tell me not to go out of my depth. It is partly for the pleasure of ignoring her orders and partly for the equal pleasure of leaving the shore as far behind as possible, that I have always enjoyed being out of my depth. It is a state, which come to think of it, I have been in for the best part of my life. Now, however, as Heidi, following her hip operation, swims parallel to the beach, I find myself doing the same.

From the balcony, this one wet day of our holiday, I watch a long line of low, black clouds move slowly, like a freight train, from left to right above the sea and against a background of higher grey cloud.

bougainevillea, bat, pusher

Now is the season when bougainevillea scrambles over white walls of houses and gardens in Mediterranean countries. Beside our hotel swimming pool there is a an entire wall covered with a red variety. I used to think of it as a prolific purple or red flower. What I haven't noticed before is that, what appear to be its butterfly-like flowers are reallybracts. There are in fact three small white flowers, the true flowers, to each group of bracts. I learn that the plant is named after Louis Antoine de Bougaineville, who sailed round the world between 1766 -69.

D H Lawrence wrote a poem called Bat, set in Florence in which he describes "swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together" as the evening draws in. And suddenly as darkness falls:
"Bats!
The swallows are gone".
I am reminded of this poem as the swifts, shrilling above us in front of the sea , vanish with darkness and are replaced by, as far as I can see, just one bat. Its wings are, as Lawrence declares "... like bits of umbrellas."

Walking in front of us up a narrow pedestrian street, is an elderly man, dressed in black, with straggling long hair. With the ferule of his umbrella, he obsessively pushes dog ends into the narrow gutter that runs down the centre of the paving. Sometimes he stops when the rain has made a dogend heavy and unmanoeuvrable, and putts it like a cautious golfer eager not to miss his target.