crisps, what is it? climbers

In Cafe Nero, they display packets of potato crisps,where you queue to get you coffee. A notice has the unusual message: "Please do not squash the crisps".



One row of seeds which I forgot to label is sprouting today. The only way to tell what it is, is to nibble one of the leaves, which are just beginning to form. Parsley. It is notoriously slow to germinate, which helps to explain, why I forgot what it was. There is an old country belief that the seeds go down to hell seven times before sprouting, which accounts for the superstition that you should not transplant parsley. I invariably do.



In one of the farmers markets I noticed some climbing nasturtiums clambering up four stakes in a pot. Nasturtiums grow in the vegetable garden like weeds spreading every year and taking the place over, if I am not careful. Today I bring four of plants home and arrange them round a wigwam in a flower bed

Joey, glooms, contrast

There is a resident dog, part Jack Russell, to judge by his appearance and his independence of character, at Sankey's bar and restaurant. His name is Joey. Adam, his owner says he frequently crosses the town unaccompanied, when he feels inclined. He chases rabbits on the Common or goes shopping. "The other day," Adam says, "he went to Tesco on his own. I found him waiting outside".

A heavy, overcast afternoon, warm and humid. Where there are trees, I am reminded of John Keat's phrase "verdurous glooms".

Through some iron railings emerge the pink and white flowers of dicentra or love-lies-a -bleeding.

slow walking, mysotis, swifts

I don't walk fast mostly because there is so much to see. I saunter. I like that word, saunter, which is close in meaning, I think, to the French flâner. Another good word which describes something I like doing.

The scattered petals of forget-me-not (mysotis) make a mosaic of bright blue fragments on the path.

As we sit ont he terrace outside Sankey's I hear, before I see the summer's first swifts. Their sharp cries, as they wheel and swoop in the air, is alway a thrilling sound, a link to the wildness in all of us.

leeks, green, blackbird

I like leeks. I like growing leeks. They are easy to grow. You just make a hole with a dibber and drop in the leek seedling straight from the seed-tray or seed-bed. You fill the hole with water and leave it. Leeks come to mind today because of a word I came across in a French dictionary. The word is poireauter, which comes from, poireau the French word for leek. Poireauter, means to hang around, which is, one supposes, what leeks do until you are ready to lift them. I have never heard the expression used, but according to the dictionary you can also say faire le poireau to mean hang around. I look forward to using it myself next time I am in France, but who knows, perhaps the usage is obscure, and no one will know what I am talking about.

Verde que te quiero verde! The green of moss, the green of verdigris, the green of pistachio nuts.

A blackbird sits on a tv aerial and sings his heart out.

bamboo, box for notes, pigeons

A clump of bamboo in the Grove waves and nods in the wind. Sometimes it looks like an animal sniffing the air.

A red laquered, Chinese box is just what I wanted to store the notes, mostly on yellow post-its, which I write to myself, several times a day. Eventually I will decide what to do with them. But for the time being it will keep them tidy, make them feel cared for.

There are nearly always children in the playground on the slides and swings. But today, in the wake of a heavy shower, there are only pigeons pecking at the grass.

Tour baby, notices, puddle

One of the partners who run the restaurant called Ragged Trouser in the Pantiles is a guitarist. He has just returned from a tour of the USA with his rock group, which is called Todd. He is tall and thin, and usually wears a flat tweed cap. Describing the tour he says: "We did not make a lot of money, but we had a good time," and stroking his stomach, to indicate a degree of drinking and eating, " I've come back with a bit of a 'tour baby'".

I have always been fascinated by notices. There is one fixed to the shopping trolley ,which I am using in Sainsbury's this morning. It says: "The trolley will stop suddenly beyond the red line." There seems to be a metaphysical significance there, which extends beyond the matter in hand. I used to love the notice on London buses, when I was a young man. It said: "At the sign shown on the right all buses stop. At the sign on the left buses will only stop if you hail the driver."

There is an occasional puddle in two of the paving stones, which our friend Dave laid last year to replace some ugly, concrete squares. It drains away in less than an hour, so it doesn't worry us too much. And it serves a useful purpose. If you want to know how hard it is raining, or if it is still raining at all, you can tell by the number and intensity of the splashes on the surface.

wake-up word, cook, raddish

Often I wake up with a word in my head, without knowing where it comes from or why it is there. Today the word is "Rumpelstiltskin". He is of course the dwarf, in the fairy tale who helps a miller's daughter weave straw into gold, in return for which she promises to give the dwarf her first child, when she becomes, as surely she does, queen. In time she marries the king and has a child. When she is reminded of her promise, she tries to persuade the dwarf to excuse her handing over the child. He relents, but only on the understanding that she must guess his name within three days. The princess sends a mesenger far and wide to find out the dwarf's name. He has no luck. But on the third day the messenger comes upon a cottage in a wood, and there, through the window, he sees the little man dancing round his fire and singing:
Tomorrow I bake, tomorrow I brew,
Today for one
Tomorrow for two
Little knows my royal dame
Rumpelstiltskin is my name.
The messenger tells the queen, and she says to the dwarf: "Is your name by any chance Rumpelstiltskin?"

At the back door of Carluccio's restaurant in Mount Pleasant, I see a stately cook, clad in a white smock down to her ankles. She wears a circular white hat. From her pocket she produces a mobile phone into which she begins to speak, like a princess.

Bunches of fresh white raddish in the Farmer's Market give promise of munching bliss.

peonies, composition, not wanted

The buds of the peony, not the most modest of flowers, are about to open, and manage to look demure, as though to disguise the shock of their imminent maturity.

Under the canopy of a young copper beech, a blackbird forages in the grass among daisies and dandelions. No photograph is needed: a picture is composed in the mind.

Among the things to rejoice in not wanting: a cyberman mask and voice-changer from Dr Who, in the window of the BBC shop in Mount Pleasant. On the other hand ...

ceonothus, resin, hops

A ceonothus, a shrub, which I have always liked since I saw it growing wild in California, rises over a wall like a cloud of blue smoke.

There is something haunting about the smell of resin, and its taste, if you are eccentric enough to enjoy the white wines of Greece and Cyprus, where a little resin is added to the must. Its use as an ingredient of wine goes back to the Romans, who coated the inside of porous amphorae, to preserve the wine better. That reason for resinated wine eventually became irrelevant when wooden casks were introduced, but it seems to have survived because people had grown accustomed to it.
Thoughts of resin come to me today because of a passage in the wonderful, but sadly neglected part-novel, part-memoir, Years of Childhood, by the Russian writer Sergei Aksakov, published in 1858. Like the other two book in the trilogy, which covers life in Russia spanning the end of the the eighteenth and the and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is full of beautiful things. This is just one:
"Then I begged successfully for little bits or drops of the fir resin which was everywhere on the walls and window-frames, melting and dropping and making little streams, cooling and drying as it went, and hanging in the air like icicles, with a shape exactly like the common icicles of winter. I was very fond of the smell of resin, which was sometimes used to fumigate our nursery. I smelt the sweet transparent blobs of resin, admired them and played with them; they melted on my hands and made my long fingers sticky..."

In the Pantiles a man with a carrying voice is guiding a group of tourists, who seem unimpressed with what he is saying, or perhaps do not know enough English to understand him. He points to the frieze above the Corn exchange. "Those represent hops," he says. "Hops are used to flavour beer." I keep hearing those words in my head as I move away. For no reason I can think of, I still hear them.

pink, trained, gentleness

Under the horse chestnuts, the largely white, individual petals from the "candles" are stained with the sort of pink, you associate with sweeties and party frocks.

At the edge of the curb, an over zealous spaniel, its front paws stretched out, lies, rather than sits down, at its owner's word, before crossing the road.

A gentle rain today, so gentle you don't get wet, a sweet rain.

Laburnam, rhubarb, wind

When I was a child I used to climb into a laburnam tree in my grandparent's garden. Now, as I do today, when I look at the yellow tresses among the pale green leaves, I can see and feel the black trunk where you could sit comfortably and watch grown ups below.

If you don't like eating rhubarb, and refrain from cutting down the flowering stems, you can enjoy looking at the big leaves and majestic, cream-coloured inflorescences.

A rough and busy wind has torn off horse chestnut blossoms and sprays of leaves in the Grove.

definitions, flowers and fruit, visitors

As part of my pleasure in reading French, I have recently started to translate favourite passages, which seem relevant to my way of thinking just now. Two passages have come together. One is from the novel Gros Câlin about a man who lived in Paris with a python. The other is the first two verses of the poem on the art of poetry by Paul Verlaine. Both, in an odd way, seem to make the same point, though I didn't realize it when I started on the exercise.
The novel is told in the first person, by the protagonist, a young man, who seems quite lost and out of touch with other people, but whose eccentricty has a consistent and often surprising logic of its own.
He says at one point: "I often use expressions of which I am cautious about recognising the meaning, because there, at least, some possibilites remain. It is a part of my philosophy. I always look into the background of expressions, because there, at least, you can believe that something different is intended".

Verlain's poem opens:
Music before everything:
In its empire, prefer what is irregular,
Hazy, primed to melt in air
Where all is free and weighs nothing.

In choice of words avoid the hard and clear
And hold nothing more dear
Than the grey song of shades
Where well-defined and vague concur.

I note more flowers and fruit on trees, usually defined by their leaves. Lime tree flowers are now in bud, each flower attached, one might almost say welded, by its stem to the leaf-like wing, on which, in time, it will be ferried in the autumn wind. Then there is the maple fruit, with its twin, green, pink-tinted blades, more heavy duty and propeller-like than the delicate fruit of the ornamental acer (also of the maple family) that I photographed the other day.

hanging clematis, coming and going, sweet cicely

A clematis montana rubens has clambered up into some trees in a back garden. A long stem has fallen from the branches. It hangs down, two or three meters without flowers, then at the bottom, a wreath of the little pink flowers, sways gently in the breeze.

I pass a stately, elderly couple on my way into town. They have loose clothing and a guide book and both wear straw hats. They look relaxed as they walk towards the Grove obeying instructions in the book. On my way back through Calverley Park, I see them again, walking in the opposite direction. I find myself hoping that they have not been disappointed and that they will tell someone in a post card or on the telephone how much they have enjoyed Tunbridge Wells.

In someone's front garden I spot a sweet cicely plant. For as long as I can remember this early flowering herb, with its fern-like leaves and flowers in close, white umbels, has grown in my own garden, where years ago I planted it long ago. It smells of aniseed. Its leaves are said to be slightly sweet, and may be used as a substitute for sugar. It is pleasing to see it in another garden, a bit like coming across an old friend, unexpectedly at a party.

Acer fruit

petition, acer, asparagus

A British bulldog looks on while a photograph of Winston Churchill presides over a stall where passers-by are invited to sign a petition against the introduction of identity cards. Winston Churchill, we are reminded, abolished identity cards, which were introduced during the World War 2, when the war was over.

There is a dark red acer near the entrance to Calverley Grounds. I note little green, winged fruit, less than two centimeters from tip to tip, among the feathery, palmate leaves. They comprise the winged seeds common to members of the maple family, which spin through the air later in the year. These pretty fruit, for that is what they are, are beautifully designed. There are two wings, pink at the upper edges and green where they join the thin brown stem. At the junction there a small swelling where, through the transparent membrane, you can see the single, as yet, unripe seed.

In the Farmers' Market there is an asparagus stall - bundles of stems in three degrees of thickness, starting with the thin sprue, freshly cut with the promise of fine, green flavours, their slightly purple heads waiting for melted butter. A photographer, who is patrolling the market, his camera at the ready, has a bunch sticking out of the pocket of his jacket.

extremes, viridian, hoop and squirrel

Under a tree, a group of young people sprawl deep in conversation. One wears a dark grey, hooded top with the the words "extreme music for extreme people"printed on the back.

I look for a colour word for the dark, blueish green of the feathers just above the tail of magpies. you normally think of magpies as merely black and white, but they deserve a closer look. Viridian, I think, where it meets winsor blue on the palette. Unpopular, thuggish birds, magpies; but their arrogance impresses.

In the Grove I hear a squirrel quacking ( I can't think of a better word, though a duck might object to the association) in a holly tree. It sits there quacking but I can't see a reason for the din. Then I notice a child's white hoop hanging among the branches. I have heard squirrels make this noise before, and I am sure that it is nothing to do with the hoop. But the image remains; a squirrel and a white hoop in a holly tree.

new words, composition, prolific rose

The gardener across the road enquires after my heath. "They don't call them operations any more," he says. "They call them 'procedures'".

Have you noticed how animals, people, objects arrange themselves in fields as you pass in the train? Three crows in a diagonal line; or one crow who thinks he's god; a group of cows all pointing the same way in one corner, the rest of the field empty; a pod of sheep; one man and a dog like a yo-yo running off and coming back.

Last autumn, being a little incapacitated, I crudely amputated the shoots of a climbing rose rather that tying them to the wall as I should have done. Now my brutality is rewarded by more deep crimson, heavily scented roses than ever before. And you can almost see the branches making up for lost time, as they push towards the sky.

Holly blue, clothes dance, guess who

A holly blue butterfly hovers round the hedge in out garden. The book, which I use to identify it says that the adults drink "honeydew, sap and juices of carrion".

From the platform of Sevenoaks station, I watch one of those circular, rotating clothes airers, which you unfold and erect in gardens. Partly hidden by shrubs, the clothes which are drying on it, in the stiff wind, resemble people engaged in an endless circular dance. Round and round they go, crowding and pushing one another as in the hokey-cokey.

In the train today a group of young people play a guess-who game. Each has a label stuck on his or her forehead with the name of a person or thing, and has to ask the others question to find out what identity they have been given - a jolly train.

leaves, catkins, brakes

It strikes me as I watch the countryside from the train that trees in leaf, uplifting as they are, have their downside. They hide the secret places of their trunks and branches as well as the fuller view of fields, hedgerows and hillsides, which you have from the train in winter.

In the corner of the Grove, the the big oak is shedding its long catkins, they fly in the breeze more or less vertical, and form little piles and drifts on the paths.

The melancholy sound of heavy duty brakes comes up from the London road as a lorry approaches the roundabout, the terrestrial equivalent of a whale.