No bonus, bonus, paintings on show

On the train: "There are two carriages of students at the back," says the guard to the catering attendant. "No bonus!" says the catering attendant from behind his trolley.

Flowers rising above the achitectural leaves of hosta appear as a bonus.

Familiar pictures in a new setting. Seven of Heidi's were today installed in the bar of Langan's Brasserie in London, where they will be on display for the next three months.

New view, lime petals, out of context

From the Grove, a high point in Tunbridge Wells, I note an unusual view of the tower of Trinity Church (now an arts centre). In the foreground are the upper floors of Hoopers, the department store. From the roof of Hoopers, flies a bold red flag, upon which is inscribed the single word: sale. The flag almost obscures the Victorian gothic church tower.

A rain of petals blows down from the lime tree, swirls in the sun, and covers the table in the garden, with crumbs of green and gold.

I like meeting people in unexpected places. There is a Spanish woman who works on the delicatessen counter at Sainsbury's. We often exchange greetings in Spanish when I am stocking up with serrano ham. Today, when in Tesco at the top of the town, I feel a tap on my shoulder, and there she is, back from her holidays in Spain, but a customer now, and shopping in a rival chain.

rabbit, baby and tree, aaron's rod

In the street, I pass a fat, ginger-coloured rabbit. As it nibbles the grass verge, it looks at me without much interest. It is clearly a pet and not a wild rabbit. After a while it lopes off and hides under a car. I believe I might know its owner but that would only be a guess. How do you capture a rabbit? Should I grab its ears and carry it that way, as I used to see farmers carrying rabbits for sale in Spanish market places? This afternoon I meet the supposed owner in the street. People think it's mine but it isn't," she says. " It lives on the other side of the road. It's always getting out. It's called Biggles."

A woman takes her baby out of its pushchair and carries it to the trunk of one of the spreading copper beeches in the Grove. She introduces the child to the tree. It pats the bark and laughs.

The tall, yellow spikes of Mullein, also known as Aaron's Rod, Verbascum thapsus, are appearing just now in neglected and uneglected gardens. It is a native perennial, a wild flower, but looks like a garden plant. Geoffrey Grigson, in An Englishman's Flora, says "It is a plant that cannot be overlooked," and quotes Henry Lyte (1578): "The whole toppe with its pleasant yellow floures, sheweth like to a wax candle or taper cunningly wrought." According to another book its leaves were once used to treat bronchial troubles and smoked in a pipe as herbal tobacco."

New things, flying, peace

Particularly where flowers are concerned discovering the French name is like seeing the flower for the first time. This comes to me when I note for the second or third time in my filter of a memory that hawthorn in French is aubépine.



By chance, I dsicover that Google Earth has been upgraded. Playing with the new program, I type in the addresses of people in my address book, watch the earth tilt beneath me, and close in on their back gardens or front doors.



Peace. The central heating engineers have said goodbye. I don't believe that I have used the word before, but the quiet is palpable.

song, dog, jays

One of the noisy, cheerful young men who are upgrading the central heating unexpectedly sings, in a falsetto voice, the line of a song along with the radio which has been blasting all day: 'cos I know you're gay... " Judging by page 3 of the tabloid newspaper, which he left behind yesterday, he is not.

A car passes with a terrier of some kind, its head out of the window of the front passenger seat. Exhilirated by the airstream, it barks at me and other pedestrians.

On the common, I see a party of three jays flying with slowly flapping wings among the trees. I have alway liked jays for their bright plumage. They were one of the first birds I learnt to recognise as a child. As I walk on, one of them says "skaak", behind me, which is what jays are supposed to say.

keeping dry, prosecco, snapshot

After one day without rain, while in the vegetable garden, I forget for a moment about showers, and down comes a heavy one. I stand in the greenhouse while the drops clatter on the roof and slide down the glass. I watch the paving begin to shine and the earth to absorb the water. A moment of mindless happiness.

Workmen have come to replace our old, very old gas-boiler, and shout to one another from floor to floor and room to room. One is called Flash and another Stew. They are efficient and cheerful and noisy. The kitchen is inaccessible. I buy a couple of sandwiches from the Italian shop at the bottom of the hill, open a chilled bottle of Prosecco, and we picnic among the books.

In the street, I pass a baby in a push chair. Father pushes the chair; the mother holds the baby's hand as though the baby was walking rather than sitting beside her. The thumb of the baby's other hand is in its mouth. A fleeting family portrait, which, probably, no one will remember except me.

silence, ok, sounds of tennis

Silence is to be treasured. But do we ever experience complete silence? And do we want to? When there is silence, there is usually the wind somewhere about, or the sea, or a distant engine , or the sound of breathing, or your heart beating.

In Waitrose this morning, I realize that I still feel pleased with myself, when "pin ok" comes up on a credit card reader.

Now that Wimbledon is over, there will be a rest from the sounds of tennis on the tv calling you to the room, when you have taken a break from it. The crowd-sounds, like waves breaking or a lorry passing outside the window; the shriek or grunt of the players as they strike the ball ( a new feature of the game, this), the drone of the commentators. I won't miss them, but I enjoyed them while they were there.

dust, lords and ladies, no euphemism

A piece of fluff, a solitary amalgamation of dust , left over, I suppose, after my book-clearing yesterday, scuttles across a table moved by a breath of air, so that I think for a moment it is an insect.

In a shady corner of the garden, the as-yet green fruit of lords-and-ladies or cuckoo pint cluster among broad, pointed leaves. They seem to be selling something sinister, or is it just the promise of autumn, when summer has hardly begun.

The man who owns the fish and chip shop up gets up from his table outside the pub and, on his way to the gents, says to his companions: "I'm going to hang my willy out".

book space, torta, dry

Making space on bookshelves is the hardest of tasks, but rewarding when the shelves are unencumbered with books resting horzontally on top of their properly arranged companions, or squeezed in too tightly where they don't belong. Sad though to say goodbye even to the scruffiest of books which you are least likely to need again. Though you know, that once it is gone, you will remember it and find a need for it.



A thin, Spanish biscuit made with olive oil, sugar and flour and season with aniseed. Rich but not too sweet, crunchy but giving.



A day, the first for a week - it seems a month - with any rain at all.

Correction

Please note that the link to Compasses in yesterday's post has now been corrected and is working.

explorers, dressing, understanding

Lucy Kempton has just completed a set of five more illustrations of my sequence of poems Handbook for Explorers. I have been looking forward to them as though they were the next installment of a serial story. Though I know the words, I don't know how Lucy will have interpreted them. When I see the photographs, the words, though they are the same, seem seem to have been refreshed and to have taken on new dimensions. http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/

A salad dressing made with mustard, lemon juice and vinegar, into which an egg yoke has been beaten, and to which oil is added drop by drop. It's like mayonaise but lighter and more spicey.

This morning I had to read something in French several times, until, eventually, I experienced one of those dawns of understanding, which make you see an object as though for the first time. This is one of the reasons why it is always worthwhile to read something in another language.

broad beans, baby conkers, contrast

The youngest and freshest broad beans, picked this morning, are not much bigger than garden peas. A pithy smell when they are taken from the velvet lining of the pods. On the plate, the emerald beans, peep through fissures in their grey jackets.

Summer has scarcely begun, yet bunches of spikey, conkers already hang from the horse chestnuts.

The sun is shining and the sky is blue in one corner. In the other corner, is a massive, purple bank of cloud, against which trees and rooftops are highlighted by the sun - the light and the dark.

balloons and reflections, jungle, asleep

In his classic biography Shelley - The Pursuit, Richard Holmes describes how the poet, aged 20, distributes subversive political views, with the help of miniature, hot-air balloons. He was living at the time with his wife, Harriet, in a cottage in Lynmouth, Devon. They cut up pieces of silk, from which they made the balloons, and suspended pamphlets beneath them, before launching them, complete with fire baskets, over the Bristol Channel. From the moment I read that, I was won over to Shelley, whom I had not previously fully appreciated. Now, I read in an article by Anne Wroe, author, of a new book on Shelley, descriptions of him staring into lakes, pools and puddles, enraptured by the relationship between the real and the reflected world, which makes me like him all the more. After several descriptions of the poet transfixed by such reflections, she quotes from Promethius Unbound:

"And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries
With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay,
Those lovely forms imaged as in the sky".

She quotes him again asking from Pisa:

"Why is the reflexion in that canal far more beautiful than the object it reflects. The colours are more vivid, & yet blended with more harmony & the openings from within the soft & tender colours of the distant wood & the intersection of the mountain line surpass & misrepresent truth".




Plants such as ferns and broad leaved trees flourish in the humid atmosphere where rain is followed by sun. They release powerful scents; oils and resins infuse the air. I walk out after a heavy shower among dripping plants as if in a jungle.


On the Common, I see a person asleep on a bench sheltered by a canopy of branches. Birds are singing. The sound of traffic is distant. There are worse places to be asleep.

Received Idea, expectations, fleeting

"Alright: What everything's going to be". From Joe Plutarch's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

When I make my way to the vegetable garden after a couple of day's absence, I always feel, as I did this morning, a strong sense of excitement and anticipation of growth and abundance. It reminds me of a similar feeling I had on my way to the tennis courts, when I used to play tennis, and looked forward to the satisfaction of hitting the ball square in the middle of the racket.

When you catch sight of something in the corner of your eye, fleeting past, and you think, if I believed in angels, that would be an angel.

connected, sparkle, lions

Around 6 o'clock, I get up for a pee, and, just for a minute, switch on radio 4 (BBC world service at this time on Sunday). It is not to wake me up, but rather to top up my dreams which are losing definition and crowding out of my head. I hear a woman's voice (American) talking about the interconnectivity of the universe. "We are not separate from nature", she is saying; "We are part of it. We are not part of a hierarchy as we used to believe; we are part of a holarchy. Then she quotes someone, who said: "Pick a flower, and you'll move the furthest star". As good a s a dream.

In the sun, after the rain, everthing looks washed. Tiny drops glitter in the grass, on bracken, on the leaves of trees. The tarmac on paths shines like a mirror. Steams rises


There are benches in the High Street, with wooden slats, and cast iron frames, painted a sort of faded burgundy. I haven't looked closely at them before, and, this afternoon, note for the first time that the lateral frames curl over, behind the backrest, in the shape of lion's heads. Moulded into the side of the frames, the face of a lion stares out from beneath the seat on either side.

collecting, accuracy, sentiment

When I was a child I collected postage stamps. After giving up, I did not again consciously collect anything. Until fairly recently, that is. I have come to realise that for the last two years, since I started this blog, I have, every day, been collecting and seriously looking for the sort of things that go into it - things that give pleasure, amuse, make you think. To look out for them every day seems to me to be better than collecting stamps, or collecting anything else for that matter.

Watching Roger Federer on TV for a few minutes yesterday evening, I realize that powerful serves and drives in tennis are nothing without elegance and accuracy. Elegance and swiftness in footwork and balance, accuracy in postioning the ball where you want it and your opponent doesn't- at the baseline, just over the net, in the corner of the service box. A backhand drive whizzing low over the net down the tramlines is thing of beauty and a joy for ever.

I woke to day thinking, I don't know why, about sentimentality. "I don't like sentimentality," said a friend of mine recently. Neither do I, I said. And no more do I now. But somehow the subject drifted away. I didn't say what had been on the point of saying, an esprit de l'escalier. This morning, I say it to myself: Sentiment is another matter. Sentimentality distorts the truth; sentiment reinforces it.

Early rain, raindrops, St Martin's,

This morning as I wake, I hear outside the window, a stationary lorry with its engine running. Then I realize, with pleasure, that it is the hushed sound of rain falling, steadily and without any urgency.

As I pass the big oak on the corner of the Grove, I hear heavy rain drops, and consider taking shelter under it. The rain continues overhead, until I realize that the drops have gathered on the leaves after the last shower, and the breeze is throwing them down. Beyond the canopy of the tree, it is not raining. I think of a large dog shaking itself after swimming.

The church of St Martin's-in-the Fields in Trafalagar Square is being restored. To protect the builders and avoid an eyesore, huge hoardings have been erected round the building. On them, as on a piece of stage scenery, the church as been accurately recreated life size. The bell tower rising above the hoardings is the only part of the building visible. It is as though a famous person was hiding behind his portrait.

time off, flags, horsetail

On the train a young man, in a faded baseball cap, says to one of his mates: "When I'm 30, I'm going to save up some money, take a couple of years off, get a camper van and travel all over America. Know what I mean..."

In the Mall, union flags, at a 45 degree angle, reach across both side of the road, all the way from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace. In Bond Street, flags, at a 45 deg angle reach across both sides of the road, as far as the eye can see. Each flag bears the name and logo of a well known consumer or fashion brand, whose premises are below: Max Mara, DKNY, Tifany, Omega, Mount Blanc, Rolex, Aspreys ....

From the train, I spy horsetail, the most pernicious weed I have ever encountered - it used to inhabit an allotment, I once ran - but there on the embankment, the feathery jointed stems and scale-like leaves, which I remember so well, seem innocent enough and admit nothing of their deep and persistent root system.

Compasses updated

Five more poems and a new set of photographs on http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/

right page, lettuce, beard

This morning, the dictionary opens in the right place, with the word I wanted keyed at the top of the page.

I cut two perfect lettuces, like giant, green roses.

In a corner of the vegetable garden there is a tennis ball. It is in good condition, with the nap still on it, and the words Wilsons" and "open", still legible, except that a large tuft of grass grows out of one side like a beard.