attraction panic cobweb

At one end of the vegetable garden there seems to be a dearth of bees and butterflies in the Summer. So last Spring, across a flower bed I spread a muslin sheet impregnated, if that is the right word, with hundreds of seeds, of insect-attracting plants. The result exceeds expectation. And here is a bee, one of many which have arrived, and very welcome too.

 In the train, I hear  the voice of a woman  behind me say to her companion, like the owner of the voice, out of sight, "I don't know why I woke up this morning panicking. I had to get up..."  I think to myself that a door is left ajar revealing for a moment a glimpse of someone's entire life.

An early start this morning. The sun is low in the sky.  No one is in The Grove.  A freshly spun cobweb gleams behind one of the litter bins. Something you might expect in Autumn but not perhaps in July.

mallow torch fox

Mallow in its commoner forms has a tall untidy habit but its large, purple flowers are photogenic. The translucent petals  show off their fine veins and with the shadow of other petals behind them, a  range of tonal variation, which is not always  so evident in other flowers.

With the London  Olympics due to begin next week preparations are starting to intrude and the arrangements, security and otherwise, to irritate members of the public, but to be positive about the games, it seems that many people are genuinely excited about their proximity.  Hundreds of thousands of people have lined the streets to see the torch which has been carried through   UK towns and highroads and nothing should be allowed to take away their pleasure at the spectacle. Last week it was carried up Tunbridge Wells High Street. We asked our friendly waitress at The Tunbridge Wells Bar and Grill in The High Street whether she had seen it pass. "I held it," she said beaming at the memory. "The lady in charge of it gave it to me to hold."

The garden next door to the vegetable garden, as I said the other day, is now deliciously wild. Bushes have outgrown  their former gentility and their branches have mingled  freely with undergrowth and creeping and climbing plants. As I go to the fence to look into the patches of darkness which lurk in the middle of them, the grass parts and a large fox emerges.  I have noticed foxes when disturbed do not scamper away like other wild animals. This one is no exception. It walks off with quiet dignity as a human being might to find a more peaceful place to sleep.

bud Shakespeare linguine

In the foreground a rosebud with  one visiting greenfly. In the back ground a section of the vegetable garden.

On the radio I hear someone talking about Robin Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. What I didn't realise was that he and his fellow detainees were forbidden reading matter - a terrible punishment. They managed however to smuggle into their cells a single copy of Shakespeare's plays which were read assiduously over the years.

This evening a seafood linguine made with scallops, prawns, clams and razor clams. The crustacea will be dressed in a cream sauce flavoured with dry Vermouth

boots frock mullein

Every now and then a blogger publishes a photograph of his or her boots. It is a subject I always enjoy. Boots can reveal a lot about a person. So rather than talk about myself I will confined myself to say that I have had these rather smart boots for about 25 years. Fairly recently I upgraded them for use in the garden, where they have developed a character of their own. You could say in a manner of speaking that we're mates, these boots and I.

In the supermarket a tall man hurries with  long strides on his way to the check out. He is wearing an anorak and,  reaching just beneath his knees, a frock with a flower pattern.

The garden next door to my vegetable garden has been deserted and left to grow wild for the last  two years.  There are tall nettles with straggling green beards,   the rusty flowers of docks, sow thistles and bindweed scrambling everywhere with its  white bell-shaped flowers. Blackberry and fuschia mingle. And the metal poles from which  gardener used to string his beans has collapsed to form a lopside pyramid. Standing high above the wilderness two stately mullein project their yellow inflorescences into the sky. The garden variety is known by the family name, verbascum. Pax verbascum, I can't help saying to myself.







spit crowds admiration

Roasting at The Farmer's Market in Civic Way. Whether you want to hog roast hog or not, the smell sharpens the appetite.

The Olympic Torch is carried through Tunbridge Wells this morning. Crowds line the streets. They wave union jacks and long sausage-like balloons. Olympic flags are  nowhere in evidence. Sponsorship rules apparently prohibit their use except by sponsors at the Olympic site. A strange intrusion into commercial freedom. But I suppose the games have to be paid for. Away from the streets the parks are empty. A helicopter meanwhile hovers overhead. The horrendous din adds something sinister to what is on the whole a joyful occasion.

Grant and Mick, who are painting the house, cross the road to  look up and admire their handiwork. This time last year they were decorating the house two doors away. We asked them them do ours because we liked the pride they took in their work.



rock July haiku meaning





Much photographed at the highest point of The Common is a granite outcrop on which young and old have scrambled for generations. Examined closely the texture of the rock is not so easily identifiable as the familiar Tunbridge Wells outline. This would be a colour photograph if there were any colour other than black and white in the rock.

July haiku
In the summer rain
ripening rowen berries
have switched to amber

The  old lady, who curled her lip when I mentioned Shakespeare the other day, responds to my "good morning" in this morning's grey drizzle with a faint smile. "One day we'll be able to say good morning when we really mean it".  I think I could become fond of her.
















lavender Shakespeare morning glory

The colour of lavender. Pastel. Blue and purple and some white on display in Calverley Ground. Worth a diversion  in the direction of the former rose garden in the sunken area beneath what used to be the bowling green. So much better than the formal arrangement of bedding plants in so many public gardens.

"Is your television working now", I ask an elderly lady who had problems after the  recent nation-wide switch to digital. "Yes," she says and goes into detail about how helpful the young man was who came to adjust it. "But there's nothing much worth seeing" I mention Shakespeare - Henry lV  "part 2 was on last night at peak viewing time. She curls her lip and turns away. A good conversation stopper. I make a note to keep it in reserve for emergencies.

In the Spring Geoff gave me some morning glory seeds in an old tobacco carton. Every one of the seeds germinated. I set them out in a flower bed so that they could climb up some roses and other shrubs, but as I knew the scaffolders followed by decorators were coming, I transferred some to a large clay pot in case the others wouldn't survive. This precaution proved a wise one. The plants in the bed have been trampled into oblivion but those in the pot are flourishing. I make a pyramid with bamboo round which  the tendrils of the seedlings are already  winding with almost unseemly enthusiasm.

seeds interesting lunch

A close look always repays attention.  How the seeds adhere to a dandelion clock. A pattern and texture to consider carefully.

People who work in service industries where they meet the public regularly seem to be trained to make small talk whenever a silence ensues. Some are better at it than others. I find myself collecting the formulaic questions which they put to you. One of my favourite is "Are you doing anything interesting this weekend?"  Today from a young woman in the building society.  I have noted it here before but confess to having  failed to arrive at  a suitable, formulaic reply.

Outside an Italian restaurant chain in Mount Pleasant a blackboard announces at the head of a list of menu items, "Lunch on the Run". A worrying idea. Bad for the digestion and for the state of calm that a good lunch should induce. I can't imagine such a proclamation making much impact in France where lunch is supposed to be a sacred institution. But perhaps no longer. Judging by descriptions of the feeding habits of contestants in the Tour de France this massive race must be an exception.

grass 2 names sounds

Grass again. This time in Calverley Park. Here are the names of  some grasses: Sweet vernal grass, Holy grass, Feather grass, Timothy grass,  Common bent, Loose silky-bent; Meadow fox tail; Yorkshire fog; Silvery hair grass; Hairy oat grass, Cock's foot, Sheep's fescue .... I don't know precisely the names of those in my picture but one day I promise myself I will learn to identify the different grasses which grow on heath and meadow, hill and verge.

I'm looking forward Henry IV Part 2 on BBC 2 on Saturday, having caught up with Part 1 on BBC I Player and the catch-up facility on our TV. Although I know these plays reasonably well, returning to  them and  Richard II, which precedes them,  via these remarkable productions, as ever when rereading Shakespeare, brings new dimensions and new aspects of the plays to wonder at.  Much of the genius of the history plays is to be found in the support provided for historical by invented characters.The  multi-layered creation of Falstaff apart ( if there were no other, surely a  mark of  the author's genius)  the names alone of  his companions Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, Pistol and Poins are inspired. Dickens is good at inventing names, but too often they move from likely names into fantasy and caricature. Shakespeare's names  manage both to paint a picture and at the same time to make you believe that they are the  names of real people. No better instance than  the law officers Fang and Snare and country soldiers Ralph Mouldy,Peter Bullcalf, Francis Feeble and Thomas Wart In HIV2.

Devices to clap over your ears to listen to music or pod casts seem to proliferate. They are one aspect of  technology which I can reject without difficulty. Even when  there is a din as there as in the last few days with painters banging and scraping at the fabric of the house, I feel the need to hear the real world at work in the background to whatever else I may be listening. Someone the other day called it "soundscape" For similar reasons I shun sunglasses which modify the colours in my field of vision.

grass forecast 2,500

No apologies for continuing to talk about long grass. In the interests of the environment it seems that stretches of grass which were previously cropped  in early summer are now allowed to grow long and wild. In Tunbridge Wells this is the case in The Grove,  on the wide verges of London Road and in Clearly Park opposite the Decimus Burton houses, and I dare say elsewhere.  If  this land management philosophy  saves money so much to the good, but its chief benefit is to attract butterflies and bees and  to ease the eye and please the other senses too. Even our hearing. Listen to the wind blowing through the seed heads.

It rains nearly every day now. Except Thursdays. Mrs Plutarch noticed that on her birthday three Thursdays ago, the sun shone for most of the day. Last Thursday it was the same story, and this Thursday, it has been fine all day until about an hour ago when it began to shower. Hats off to her, I say. Forecasters using science to make their predictions do not seem to do much better. We're planning a picnic for next Thursday.

It nearly escaped me but I see from Blogger's stats that a couple of days ago I wrote my 2,500th post. I have missed daily posting only very seldom. It has begun to feel like second nature, yet sometimes it seems that I only started blogging the other day. One thing is certain. I would at a loss to know what to do if my senses were not sharpened by the process of  recording the events which, at least for me,  give them meaning.

hypericum sills sweet corn



Hypericum calcynum. I always found this shrub or sub shrub, as one of my books calls it, rather brassy, a little pushy you might say. And then I realised that what I didn't like about it  was its shiny leaves and its untidy habit.  In the wild it is known as Rose of Sharon or Aaron's beard. The flower itself, I have come to admire because it  looks like the sun.  It's the same with  other cultivated hypericums. Cut away the undergrowth and shape the shrub and the flowers seem a lot more attractive.
In the wild you have a number of hypericums more modest in their appearance under the banner of St John's wort. As a herb it has a lot of medical uses against among other complaints nervous disorders.
The name hypericum comes from the Greek and means "over an apparition", a reference to the belief that the herb is so obnoxious to evil spirits that a mere whiff of it causes them to fly off. Another reason for liking the plant.

The painters hack away at  some rotten sills under our windows.  " This should make good kindling," says Grant, "know anyone with an open fire?" We do. Our shredded window sills go into a big plastic bag and are delivered to a neighbour who welcomes them  into his shed.

In the vegetable garden the wet weather has brought on the sweet corn which is already sprouting embryonic ears. Whether the corn will ripen  without sunshine is another matter. But the tall plants with  their elegant plumes are decorative enough at the moment whatever becomes of them.



green Biffa terms

Now you can go.
 Verde que te quiero verde. "Green how much I love you green. Green wind, green boughs. The ship on the sea, the horse on the mountain. With the shadow at her waist she dreams on her balcony, green flesh, green hair, with eyes of cold silver. Green how much I want you green...." 
Fifty years ago I learnt Spanish so that I could read this and other poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, in the original language.

If you had to invent a name for a company in the business of emptying wheelie bins, hoisting and tipping them  with a hydraulic device at the rear of their lumbering vehicles, Biffa would do very well. But you don't have to invent it, I think to myself, as I watch a bin rising in the air and  being tipped through 100 deg as though it is tankard of beer being quaffed.   A google search reveals that Biffa was founded more than 80 years ago as a road haulage business. It has since diversified into "integrated waste management".  The hydraulics make a wild bellowing noise as they perform their task, almost a note of triumph.

The painter who preparing the front of the house before painting it,  is still scraping and scratching, banging and filling  and sanding. He gives me the terms for  the wooden structure between  the roof and the stucco wall. "That's a finial," he says. "That's the gable end, that the facia, and that's the soffit." I like to know what's what.

amber weather weights

The light that says: hang on a moment, further instructions to come. Some points to meditate on while waiting for the lights to change.  Amber is a courtesan in the eponymous  novel by Kathleen Winser set in the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, notorious when it was published in the 1940s. It was condemned  by the Catholic Church which helped sales considerably.  Amber is fossilised remains of  resin from extinct coniferous trees. It is used for ornaments and sometimes contains the embalmed bodies of insects. Hence "a fly in amber". It burns with an agreeable odour and when rubbed becomes charged with static electricity.  The word electric is derived from the Greek word for amber. Ambergris is a string smelling wax-like secretion from the intestine of the sperm whale found floating in tropical seas. It is used in perfumes. The word is derived from  the medieval French ambre gris, meaning grey amber.

People are becoming irritated with the weather I notice, pursing their lips and complaining. They seem to take the unremitting sequence of rainy days as a personal afront.

Among Nassim Nicholas Taleb's aphorisms included in his invaluable book The Bed of Procrustes, I read: "Upon arriving at the hotel in Dubai, the business man had a porter carry his luggage. I later saw him lifting free weights in the gym."

red exchange postponed

I hadn't thought much about traffic lights until recently but the closer you look at them the less they seem to have to do only with controlling traffic.

Some  freshly cut lettuces delivered  to a neighbour produces an unexpected response. I am handed a freshly roasted potato,  hot and crisp and tasting of chicken fat.

Here am I looking forward to Henry IV Part 1 on the television, only to find that at 9pm when it is advertised to begin, it is postponed. And why? An English tennis player is one of a pair playing in the mens' doubles final at Wimbledon. And the match goes on and on. I like tennis and despite  Dr Johnson's  observation that patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel, patriotic too. But there's a limit. Shakespeare an hour late stretches tolerance to the limit. I wonder if the bard would have had something caustic to unloose.

lights 2 scarlet pimpernel curtain

Light at one end and lights at the other end of the tunnel outside Tunbridge Wells Station.

Scarlet pimpernel is almost the first flower of which I learnt the name. I remember being told that if it closed its small, bright red petals it would rain.  In some parts of the country it is known as sheperds' weather glass.This year, with its creeping habit,  it is rampant among the potatoes in the vegetable garden. And it rains every day. I wonder that it opens at all, but it does.  It seems on the whole to be doing better than the potatoes which are already showing signs of blight.  In fact very little else seems to be intruding in the potato rows. If weeds are plants growing where they shouldn't, scarlet pimpernel is I suppose a weed, except that I refuse to designate as such. It was Baroness Orczy who adopted the flower as the cover name of her hero Sir Percy Blakeney in her historical romances describing his exploits rescuing of victims of The French Revolution from the guillotine. No weed.

In a room  seen through an open window a curtain sways and billows in  a dance without rhythm.

lights builder guard



My recent interest in the graphic possibilities of traffic lights has expanded to take in their photographic potential. More work needed in both departments.

In The Grove a squirrel with a long twig in one claw stands upright. I pull out my camera, but the little creature scarpers, before I have time to snap him looking like a squirrel warrior with a spear.

A security guard enters the bank. He is wearing a helmet with the visor raised. He is dressed mostly in black with some orange stripes and looks sinister enough. But worse, he is carrying a secure box on which the word Warning is printed in large letters. The problem is that the the last syllable of the word is obscured so that it reads War.



honeysuckle days rarity

Honeysuckle time. This red one has a bit more style than most, a little forward you might say compared to its creamy cousins.

Thee days when our lives were ruled by a diary are no more. And I don't miss them. An old New Yorker cartoon  where a couple on  a European tour confirm which city they are passing through with the words "if it's Tuesday, it must be Lisbon," comes to mind. I remember this when I consider how I can often  I know what day it is because of a routine occurrence. Sam, who helps us with the house work, is here, so it must  be Thursday. Keith telephones so it must be Tuesday.  The postman is early, so it must be Saturday.

Butterflies are so scarce nowadays that when you see one you draw attention to it. Look a butterfly, you say, as in the Scottish Highlands , you would say, look a golden eagle. A sad decline.

two pigeons confidence literature

Hard to resist. A nursery rhyme writes itself. "There were two pigeons sat on a roof..."

An elderly woman enjoying her Sauvignon Blanc in the pub says, "I have never known any man except my husband," and then apologises as though the world had been robbed of her favours.

A novel called HHhH about the events leading up to the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich  by two Czech parachutists dropped over Prague during World War 2 1942, refers to the members of the Resistance who helped them.  "No reader would remember the list of names," writes the author, Laurent Binet,"so why provide it?"  In order for it to remain in the memory," he concludes, it is first necessary to transform it into literature." A  good reason for literature, I think to myself. 



woundwort spray beads

Hedge woundwort Stachis sylvatica is a common wild plant in Tunbridge Wells. It features in the refreshing "wild garden" outside the Town Hall, and this year it is turned up to my great pleasure in one of my flower beds. The leaves which contain a volatile oil are used for healing wounds. Mrs M Grieves monumental Modern Herbal quotes "an old authority" which  says that the distilled water of the flowers "is used to make the heart merry, to make a good colour in the face, and to make the vitall spirits more fresh and lively."

Walking in what Jane Austen calls a "mizzling rain" this morning more than compensates for the absence of the sun.  It is a little humid. The air is still and and warm and the spray of droplets is cool and refreshing on the skin with its gently prickles.

On clover leaves in the grass the raindrops collect and glitter like glass beads.

fumitory soapiness benches

This is the flower that I photographed on the roof of a building in The High Street beside a pigeon a few days ago.  It is yellow fumitory. My  book describes it as an "introduced perennial", a garden plant which is now naturalised. It seems to have taken a fancy to odd corners and footpaths in Tunbridge Wells. Sometimes, as it does here,  it looks as though it has been put there intentionally by an ebullient  gardener with a taste for random colour. Perhaps it is also common in other parts of the country.   It seems to be in particularly good fettle this year, a plant which likes wet, cold summers.

I wonder if other addicts of soap operas have noticed two current cliches. The first, is the response "What? " when one  character confronts another who remains silent but is supposed to be affronted. It is a form of dialogue, which I not think I have ever encountered in real life. Unless it is so common that I haven't noticed it. The other is the invitation, "come here" to express sympathy by means of a proferred embrace or cuddle. The first seems confined to TV soaps but the second is an everyday occurrence in East Enders (TV) as well as The Archers (Radio).  In real life this exchange is new to me too, but from time to time Mrs P and I adopt it in jest, as people sometimes use a phrase in a foreign language as a joke.

In Calverley Ground Mrs P and I look for a bench on which to sit where Mrs P can rest her new hip. To our surprise every bench seems to be soaking wet, though it hasn't rained for several hours. A park attendant in a van watches our vain attempt to find somewhere dry to sit, and eventually drives past us, stops and  lowers his window. "Sorry," he says. Only then do we notice a power hose on the back of his van. "I only do it it once a year." Clean benches are a blessing which we longer take for granted.

worried longings Compasses

If  you could use human terms to describe animals I would say that this blackbird looks worried. But of course human concepts don't work here.  A more appropriate word would be predatory. On second thoughts both words might be used, which would sum up  the avian condition. And  the human condition too.

Enoch Powell, an austere Conservative politician with right wing leanings is remembered best for his  notorious 1968  "river of blood" speech in  the 1970s in which he expressed fears about the arrival of  immigrants  to the UK and  the problems of racial integration.  "As I look ahead," he said, I am filled with forboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."He was a classical scholar and at one time an amateur musician of some distinction. But he gave up music for academia and never returned to it. On BBC Radio 4 yesterday his precise,  lugubrious voice with its hint of a Midlands accent came back to me, when someone quoted his answer to the question: "Why do you listen so little to music?" "I do not think it a good idea," he said, " to awaken longings that cannot be fulfilled". A little sad, I thought and a hint of the human side of a man, notorious for the harshness of his politics.
Years ago someone whom I met in Australia bet me a fiver that Powell was an Australian. He was wrong of course. Powell was born in Birmingham, but  it is true  that he was at one stage of his career, Professor of Greek at  Sydney University.

Despite the reluctance of the sun to emerge we sit outside the Compasses. Geoff and Ron are there and then come Brenda and George and Glyn. A party occurs and within a few minutes there is laughter and the World's problems, to say nothing of the usual ailments of the old and aging, are disposed of, if not entirely forgotten. Rain threatens. But who cares?  There is IPA and Guiness and Pinot Grigio. It is Sunday, and this after all this is Tunbridge Wells, and The River Tiber is not yet flowing with much blood.

Roscoff onions stats meadow

No apologies for offering a further update on the Roscoff onion sets which Lucy Kempton sent me from Britanny in the Spring.  Because of the cold weather  and grey skies it has taken time for the bulbs to begin to swell. As I have said I have hoed them assiduously and I am beginning to feel  that L's kind gesture will not be in vain.
Oh yes, and I mustn't call them Roscoff onions because although the sets come from Roscoff the bulbs are maturing elsewhere.  Appelation controlee.

As I get older when considering some of the preoccupations which  afflict people of my age, I find myself consoled by certain statistics .   I like to remember that:  the Universe is probably 13. 7 billion years old; The Earth is 4.54 billion years old; life  of some kind has existed on Earth for 3.8 billion years; human beings evolved between 150,000 - 200,000 years ago; we are supposed to share something like 97 per cent of the genes of chimpanzees.

Calverley Crescent, the road  above Tunbridge Wells with the dignified spacious houses build by Decimus Burton in the 19th Century, borders  a meadow, which is at its best at this time of year. Never in my recollection has the meadow looked better, now that the grass has been left to grow and sway in  the wind as it does this afternoon. Butterflies, so rare nowadays, are back and buttercups and willow herb are in abundance. More wild flowers please, everywhere. I have made my own contribution by sowing two substantial strips in the vegetable garden.

garden wild horseless -carriages

Gardens grow in surprising places  - this one entirely by chance on the roof of a building in The High Street. The plant which the pigeon seems to be enjoying is yellow fumitory. The plant  is prolific round here, flourishing in the angles of walls and footpaths.

A local blogger (Anke The Royal Tunbridge Wells Blog) has published a photograph of the insect-attracting plants on the corner of the lawn opposite The Town Hall.  To my dismay he doesn't  approve of the mass of wild  and semi-wild flowers clustered in charming natural disorder. "They get my goat," he says. But they make to my way of thinking a welcome change, to  the regimented lines of brightly coloured bedding plants favoured by most council gardeners. As I stand to admire the scene a young man joins me. "They've made a good job of this!" he says, and begins to identify the flowers. Together we note borage, woundwort (of which he supplies the name) different mints, poppies and marigolds a-plenty. Bronze fennel bends its fine petioles above the bank of the bed. "Look there's a bumble bee," he says. It works, and at the very centre of the town, passing traffic notwithstanding.

 Technology marches on. I read in a letter to The Financial Times of Queen Victoria's reaction to the  "horseless carriage"   "I hope you will never allow one of those terrible machines to be used in my stables."

explorer goodbye hedgehog

Visitor beside the front door. Wild life is hard to resist even when it is on the slow side.

Someone with whom we have exchanged a few words departs from  a seat neighbouring ours in The Tunbridge Wells Bar and Grill. He says "see you later." It is a new way of saying goodbye which I have noticed is now becoming quite common.

 In a friends garden where we are drinking and eating yesterday evening a hedgehog appears and scurries across the path.  We follow quietly to see if we can see it. It is hiding in some shrubs watching us watching it.  Wild life again. A sense of other worlds close to and parallel with ours but managing as far as possible to keep separate.

photo-friendly guitar lavender

These alliums are everywhere in gardens nowadays made popular by flower-shows such as Chelsea. And no wonder! They are onions  I suppose. The genus includes lillaceous, strong smelling, bulbous plants such as onion and garlic. Last time I referred to them, perhaps a year ago, or was it two? Lorenzo da Ponte, then  Barratt Bonden, punningly commented, " 'spem in alium' referring to Thomas Tallis setting from the Latin Mass: Spem in alium numquam, habui praeter in te Deus Israel. -" I have never put my hope in any other but though O God of Israel". So puns lead onions  to music and  to the scriptures as music  does to almost everything, as the progenitor of Tone Deaf would surely agree.

From an open window this still afternoon when the air is heavy with unspent moisture and perhaps expectation, comes the sound of someone strumming  a guitar. It is a gentle almost reluctant sound, speaking of ideleness and relaxation, calm and meditation. And its source is distant enough not to irritate.

The sight in a neghbouring garden of a hedge of deep blue lavender over which flow drifts of white roses. Colours which can only charm  and never offend.

lights leeks Zarathustra

Traffic lights deconstructed. A  postcard-sized doodle that went wrong and which I have turned into a montage.

For the last few months I have been collecting the cardboard cylinders round which kitchen rolls are wound. The object is to use them  as collars to blanch leeks. Setting out  leek plants is easy anyway. You make a hole with a dibble and drop the young plant into it. Water poured from the can into the hole pulls the root down, and nature takes care of the rest. This time I sink the cylinder into the hole and drop the plant into the centre of it. I water in the roots as usual. The  cylinder issues a hollow gurgling sound  which is a pleasure to hear as it fills with water, a sort of thank you. With this system the leeks should should be longer as well as  more of stems being blanched.

For my grandson's birthday I set aside Frederich Nietzsche's Zarathustra's Discourses in the Penguin 60's Classics series. It fits neatly in a n enevelope with a card. The card is a copy of Traffic Lights Deconstructed above. It may amuse if not enlighten him. "Behold I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it."

doodle basket hoeing









One of the first of a the series of doodles which I began recently and which I am still engaged with.

In The High Street, a small  baby in a very modern basket all buckles and blankets. The mother places it tidily in the back of a five door VW and then, following a practised procedure, arranges a larger child in the  car and collapses the push chair in which it was sitting and adds that to the payload. It is all done with great precision, one might almost say craftsmanship.

A little sun after the rain and the weeds shoot up. Fortunately I have been busy with the hoe despite the bad weather and very few weeds persist. It is a bearable chore to eliminate those which I do with swift movents of the hoe. Nothing more satisfying thanthe rows of onions which Lucy sent from Brittany in the Spring, and which are now  hoed and swelling elegantly under their green plumes.

Mandela summer grumbling

I often pass this bust of Nelson Mandela  beside The Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames. It reflects  a world that has changed.

This morning the chill wind of the last few days persists.   Then after a heavy shower  the sun unexpectedly appears. I step outside. Blessed warmth. An on the petals of the dark blue (the plantsmen call them black) violas tiny, translucent  rain drops catch the light.

Grumbling about pigeons to a neighbour I say that they have started to nibble the tops of my cos-like, little gem lettuces. They seem to have a weakness for this variety. "I hate pigeons," she says. "They don't want to eat them. They do it because they are vicious." I have heard country people describe  fox assaults on their chicken runs in the same way, when a fox apparently slaughter far more chickens than it is going to eat. I don't hate pigeons myself, but lettuce does strike me as an unusual diet for them. I think of the blog title My Cat Eats Bananas referred to me by CC whose visits to Now's the Time I always appreciate.

reflection friends pipe

Sissinghurst gardens from the outside.

"I've made more friends here," says the Belgian nurseryman at The Farmers' Market, " than in Belgium ." He greets me with a handshake and the one word "pigeons" because we are both plagued by them in our gardens.  The pigeons have now started to nibble the tops of my Little Gem lettuces. Until  now lettuces have proved the most successful crop thanks to the rain.

I watch as a man stops to light a pipe in The Grove. He is practised smoker. Despite the wind it begins to puff out a cloud of smoke.  He walks on his pipe emitting skeins of smoke as though he is a steam engine and the pipe is a component of the machinery which propels him forward. He greets me with a cheery wave  of  his hand, the pipe still clenched between his teeth. The smell of freshly lit tobacco lingers in his wake.  

late-comer disaster horse

Cistus flowers in the afternoon visited by a late bee.

An optimist and a fantasist with little sense of time I am concerned to read to day that The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will crash into one another in 4 billion years.

In the supermarket I bring some mushrooms to the checkout. "What sort of a mushrooms are these? Do you know?" asks the check out girl. "I think they're closed-cup," I say, "but I didn't look." She examines the screen above her electronic till to identify them. "Not closed-cup," she says and summons help." After further consultation it turns out that they are horse mushrooms. Excitement all round. "Magic mushrooms." snicker the young men behind me in the queue who are stocking up with cases of beer and cider.

rare groom dentist

Chihuahua perhaps.

Moss Bros (now known as Moss) are promoting marriage or at least the hire of wedding attire in their store near Tunbridge Wells Station. "Groom goes free, when you hire or buy" proclaims a notice in the window. Free perhaps but he won't be for long.

On my way to the dentist I am waiting for the bus to Sevenoaks. The dentist who has managed by gnashers for 30 years is in that town about 12 miles from Tunbridge Wells. Along comes a couple who live nearby. "We're going to catch the bus to Sevenoaks," they say. "We're going to the dentist. It turns out to be a different dentist. But from this coincidence one might easily infer, wrongly as it turns out, that there are no dentists in Tunbridge Wells. There is still an odd element of synchronicity hanging over this encounter in my mind.

periwinkle money seeds

Not just the colour but the name made me fall in love with this flower many years ago. The genus is vinca.

The Italian delicatessen on the corner of The High Street and Mount Sion has tables outside and is now almost as much a restaurant as a deli. "I'll never make any money," says the owner. "I like to see people happy." He seems to do well enough but you feel easy with the sentiment.

June is not yet out and the longest day not yet in the past, but the seeds on the lime tree opposite our house are already showing up yellow, and miniature green conkers are already forming pyramids where barely two months ago the horse chestnut candles were alight.

cows licensing telephone

Cows again. Companionship.

Yesterday I say to the barman at The Compasses when he apologises for keeping me waiting, that there's no hurry. It seems not so long ago that at 2 pm on a Sunday the landlord used to call "time" and the clientele had to drink up and go home. He looks puzzled for a while. "Yes, " he says. "I've heard about that." He must be very young and I very old. It seems only the other day when drinking was restricted to a few hours at lunch time and a few more in the evening. "I wouldn't mind going back to that," says the barman.. "We've got a baby and I never get to see him".

|Among the sounds that I associate with this time of year are those of the starlings that nest in the capital  of the  classical column set into the facade of the house opposite.  It is a busy site, which I have blogged about before.  One family has already fledged this year. and now the demands of a second, ring insistently like a telephone, as the parents fly to and fro, slaves to their offspring.


portrait kindness Ulysses

In case anyone missed it I have reposted yesterday's post where the layout went sadly wrong.

Portrait of a lady. In a tea shop with reflections of the building opposite.

What we need in the world is kindness as opposed to preaching. I often think with pleasure of Wordsworth's "little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love". And I am reminded of his words to day by the speech delivered by Ang Sun Kui in Oslo 21 years after she was awarded The Nobel Peace Prize. "Of the sweets of adversity - and let me say that they are  not numerous - the sweetest, the most precious of all is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness. Every kindness I received small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world. To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of others."

Yesterday was Bloomsday, when the novel, Ulysses, which records a day (June 16 as it happens) in the life of Leopold Bloom, James Joyce's unlikely hero as makes his way across Dublin mixing business with pleasure as he goes. This year the BBC broadcast a shortened version throughout the day concluding at midnight. I go to sleep with with Molly Bloom's  unpunctuated, stream-of consciousness monologue with which the book ends in my ears.  "...and first I put my arms round him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

ceonothus thought compulsive

This plant photographed near here a few days ago grows wild in California and in similar climates. In an English garden, though of a lovely colour, it often strikes an alien note, among pastel shades. We had one in our small front garden a few years back.  It grew into a tree, which took up a lot of space, and  then blew over in a storm. We missed it for a while but not any longer. When it is not in flower it stops being much of an adornment and the space can be more interestingly used.

In the train I realise that I have nothing to read. Instead I decide to think. Not an easy pass time.
I don't believe that I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. But sometimes I  am nearly there. Before I go out I have to check for the following things on or about my person: Camera, notebook, pen, pencil, reading glasses, spare notebook with tear out sheets.  These are essential, and if I forget them I have to go back.  Other items - such a knife if I am going  to the garden, a handkerchief,  my wallet containing money, plastic cards and the like, and loose change - I can often do without. And I  think of myself as free.

thistle Shard chewing

Thistle growing  in full majesty in  the angle of a pavement and wall in Mount Sion.

As the train for Tunbridge Wells winds its way out of London, I catch sight of the the newly completed Shard skyscraper piercing the sky above London Bridge Station. As the line meanders southwards the glass and steel building changes its position on the skyline, and I am reminded of Proust's recollection of the twin spires at Matinville-le-Sec changing their alignment in the evening sky when seen from the carriage in which he was travelling.  He and his family had been given a lift back to Combray by Dr Percepied when one of their walks had turned out longer than planned. The experience becomes one of many which form the web of memory in  In Search of Lost Time, and which communicate their intensity to readers such as me, and so a French village  in the Nineteenth Century is linked to a new London building in the 21st.
On a bench in The High Street an elderly couple sit enjoying their lunch. In a fleeting moment as I pass I catch the enthusiasm and vigour with which they bite and chew  their generous sandwiches. The happiness with which they seem to be blessed is rare and not always, I think to myself, valued at the time.

cistus termination thinking

 A sequel to a previous photograph. Bees and cistus flower.

"This train will terminate at Tunbridge Wells,"  says the loudspeaker. Something coldly final about the word "terminate"recalls the even  more chilling  "exterminate, exterminate" repeated, with harsh mechanical croaks by the  oddly shaped, highly improbable but none the less frightening Dalek robots in the original  Doctor Who television series. The language of the railways seems to possess its own linguistic code, where passengers are addressed as"customers", which  for reasons I have never been able to fathom, I have found almost has scary as the Daleks.

Nothing to read on the train. What to do? Look out of the window at the passing countryside, the walls of green, and think. Ain't anything wrong with thinking. Perhaps none of us do it enough.

fat elder greeting

I have a weakness for number plates and slogans where hidden messages and ironies abound. Could someone have chosen this and paid for it? Or is it chance?

From the train I spy two telegraph posts in the middle of a field. Against each is an elder tree in sprightly flower. Its white saucers ride up beside  bare brown poles. Unlikely pairings but by all appearances long established. Now that I think about it, I have noticed them before at this time of year.

On my way to the vegetable garden a builder greets me: "Hello mate, are you alright?" Is it a sign of our troubled age that the possibility of things being other than alright should be implied in a conventional  greeting between virtual strangers?

tidbit rain drops more rain drops

Today's blackbird with tidbit.

From our bedroom window I watch raindrops sliding down the underside of the telephone wire which is at a gentle incline. Something makes them cling to the wire, though eventually they fall off. For a time though they resemble suspended overhead rail cars as they follow one another relentless as the rain itself this morning.

When it rains really heavily as it has been all day a puddle appears on the paving outside our front door. To tell how hard it is raining we have only to look through the glass panels of the front door to count the splashes.













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pylons rain fat

Pylons are often thought to spoil a landscape but these seem to add interest,  forming a discrete chain across the Sussex weald. They are seen here from  the village of Fletching. I have taken photographs of them before bu  make no apologies for posting this new one.

It has rained all day. Drops fall not just from the sky but from hedges and trees. Plants need no extra watering from me, and would look complacent if it were not that they, like me seem to need the warmth and colour of the sun. 

In the vegetable garden I cut two fat lettuces and place them in a round,  shallow basket to show them off  to advantage. Tonight a salad garnished with grilled  haloumi cheese.

visitor tennis commentators peppers

The cistus outside our front door attracts bees in reassuring numbers every year.

The French Open Tennis at Roland Garros is not in my opinion as good as Wimbledon . The clay courts do not produce the speed and drama of grass. While watching the tournament on TV I have been trying to imagine a device which would allow me to hear the sound of the racket striking the ball, the server bouncing the ball in front of him before serving, the applause of the crowd, even the grunts of the players, but which cuts out  the constant stream of chatter from the official commentators. (And why two commentators? One supplying the minimum of factual information required would be enough.)  The tension during a tennis match between points is a great part of the excitement of the game. It is a tension made the more poignant by the expectant silence of spectators. It is a silence which as a TV viewer I want to share.  I write imaginary letters to the newspapers asking them to imagine watching a tennis match at the court-side while two people sitting next to you talking to each other relentlessly between every rally. It makes me feel better but it doesn't solve the problem.  If the last few years are anything to go by  TV viewers we will be forced to suffer surplus jawing at Wimbledon in a few weeks time.
In the soaked earth I plant  out a row of pepper plants produced from seed. I have never grown them out of doors before. It seems madly optimistic in the coldest and wettest of June days to attempt it this year.

break corner chervil

Decorators in a doorway take a lunch time break.

Hedge cutting time again. Someone is coming to help. But there is one corner of the garden where we sit with tables and flowerpots, where for comfort and peace of mind, I always cut the hedge first. Today, with the hand shears, I clip the seven foot monster and restore a sense of order where it matters most. Help does not materialise today, but  I sit in the nest, minus the sense of frustration with which I started the day.

Under the hedge where most of the herbs grow as, I sit down  with a cup  of tea, I spot some chervil in  a pot which I recently planted but have forgotten about.   I think of omelette aux fines herbes. I suspect that in France the fine herbes would as a rule include chervil, whereas in England its delicate  flavour ( imparting a hint of lickerish) is less well known.

market flute tufts

At the Pantiles  farmers' market.

A Buddhist monk is photographed playing a bamboo flute at Chegde in Hebei province in  China.  If a photograph can be heard you can hear this one thanks to  the combination of calm and tension in the subject's  face, a fleeting mischief in his eyes and  his attentive fingers disposed over the instrument. It is for photographs like these that I buy The National Geographic Magazine's  sister magazine Traveller, even though my travels are nowadays strictly limited.

Gales have been blowing last night and all day with an unseasonable abandon. In The Grove tufts of leaves are scattered everywhere  as if a monster vandal has been at work grabbing and stripping the branches.

herd Vivaldi new

Although no expert I suspect that the breed of this herd is Sussex. It is hard to resist  photographing such gentle  beasts especially when cows and their calves are allowed to enjoy the rich summer meadow together.

In the garage through which I have to pass to reach the vegetable garden a Vivaldi  CD is playing. Builders are renovating the house. Someone is extending an ornamental pond in the garden and the regular gardener is mowing the lawn. Wheelbarrows, lawn-mowers and skips, stacks of gravel and quartets.

I begin a new note book. I enter the date.  I started the last one was June 28 2011. I realise that I began this blog in June 2005 which means that I have been seven years ablogging.

cow empty bunting

Grass.

In the super market, an old man, collects two or three items from the shelves and puts them straight into a plastic bag, instead of  one of the baskets provided. At the check-out he places his purchases on the conveyor and  shows the check-out girl that his bag is empty, before, as she registers them on her cash machine, he replaces them in the bag.

Where yesterday's jubilee party was held the bunting is still up criss-crossing the street. It chatters in the wind. A bleak sound like rain falling on a roof  top.

aerial Jubillee party

Blackbird sings on aerial.

One moment during the celebrations of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is engraved on my memory. During the concert outside Buckingham Palace last night the pop group Madness performed  its song My House from the Palace Roof. Among the images projected onto the classical facade of The Queen's  imposing  London home  was a  photograph of a 1960's block of flats. In an instant a  building which has come to symbolise royalty, riches  and privilege was transformed into one which suggests poverty and  mean streets.  Neither building  is an architectural masterpiece but the irony amid the cheery good humour of the occasion could not have been entirely lost on anyone whether republican or royalist by inclination.

After watching on TV the Lancaster bomber and Spitfires fly over the cheering crowds in  the Mall at the end of the four days of ceremony I step out into the rain for some fresh air. The Grove is deserted but sounds of music flows up from the streets between the park and The High Street. A street party is in progress. The rain is steady but a spread of cakes, meringues and sandwiches is displayed on trestle tables beneath a marquee with transparent sides. Children are running in and out of the rain and grown-ups are drinking beer and tea under umbrellas. What a strange people we are: noisy, sentimental, brash, crude, brave, kind,  vulgar,  knowledgeable, wise and often proudly, blissfully ignorant. But still mercifully alive and kicking.

cat ivy basket ball

I have often seen this cat in an upstairs window but by the time I have produced my camera, it has moved away. This time I am lucky.

From our bedroom window you can see a street lamp.  Today I notice that ivy has climbed almost half way up the standard towards the bulb container. There is something apocalyptic about the thought of a street lamp  completely enshrouded in ivy.

As we sit for a few minutes in Calverley Park I watch  a basket ball rising in the air and falling into a basket above some shrubs. It seems to be propelled by invisible hands belonging to invisible people.


petal evolution rain

Parrot tulip petal.

Going through the stack 11 notebooks  which I have filled over the last 9 or 10 years ( I wish I could be more precise,  but their object has  not been  to serve as a diary or  any other record except that of ephemeral images and thoughts as they occur), I see that when the series began my chief preoccupation was drawing flowers, trees and animals,  or people sitting at  pub table or lying on beaches, walking in towns or lounging in cities. In the space of one book  I see that the focus begins to  change and drawings give way to words, until now the pages are packed with them and there are scarcely any drawings. I realise that this change coincides with the evolution of the blog I am now writing. But an odd sense of detachment  removes me from a sense of responsibility for the blog or  for that the matter for the notebooks. Both seem  products of hazard like the weather. They seem simply to have occurred, which may explain why there is little that I can decipher in the notes and less that I can understand.

Having watched the rain falling on the later stages of the pageant on The Thames, I step into the garden where a thinner rain is falling and listen to drops splashing  on leaves. As most people are in front of  televisions, the town is quieter than usual. Birds meanwhile seem to sing louder in the rain.



fruit tea bags cut

Fruit.

 Overheard : "She said she's bring her own tea bags."

"Nearly cut my arm off the other day," says Henry who is enlarging a pond in a neighbouring garden. He shows me a scar on his forearm. "Just missed the tendon." He was using a long petrol driven hedge cutter.  Henry is  man who clears land and builds paths.  Sometimes I call him Attila on account of his energy in changing the shape of a  piece of landscape. "You have to be careful, " I say for want of anything better to say. " You never know what's going to hit you," he says. He is as proud of his scar as an old soldier of a war wound.

cornice subjects found

Cornice with pigeon.

An idea says my daughter would be to string together and make a long list of  the subjects of a year's emails.

Looking for a letter  which  I have mislaid, I find another  lost item that I had given up all hope of recovering. It is a neat little box of acquerelle crayons which I bought when visiting the Tapies Museum in Barcelona. It has accompanied me on my travels and I have grown fond of it. Somehow it has slipped over the back of a drawer into the space behind where  in my desperation I have been searching for the letter. No letter but a fair exchange I think. And then I find the missing letter too. Not in the drawer space but in a folder among some drawings. A nagging feeling  now assails me:  I can't thing of anything which I should be looking for and can't find.