on the look out, unexpected guide,surprises

I do not tire of watching the greedy walk of pigeons - the way their heads move from side to side as they waddle forward searching for tidbits on left and right.

Outside The Ragged Trousers in the Pantiles, a couple have a drink and meal. On the table in front of them is a guide to St Petersburg.

I seldom go anywhere without my compact camera. I take photographs on most days. Sometimes I forget what I have photographed with the result that quite often there are, as today, some pleasant surprises on the memory card, things I have completely forgotten as though someone else has been using it.

calm, horse-chestnut, bank debt

A long , slow, sad film called In the Mood for Love by the Chinese director Wong Kar-Wei, is about unrequited love. It rains a lot. Thinking about it afterwards, I enjoy the way the characters move slowly and gracefully as they go about their daily lives.

Horse chestnuts are in bud. What will eventually be white, cone-shaped candles are now little peaks of close knit, green buds. They remind me of bunches of grapes but they point up rather than down.

The clock above the door of the National Westminster bank is an hour behind the rest of us. Presumably it has been that way since the clocks were supposed to go forward on March 30. I amuse myself by trying to calculate how much time the bank would be in the red if it banked time.

melting, lips, birthday

Yesterday's snow has not yet melted this morning. It lies in a blanket on our hedge and lines the branches of trees. Dandelions and sad daffodils appear amid melting patches. The trees and gutters drip. Lumps of snow fall from rooftops and evergreen trees. Scattered through the Grove are the remains of several snowmen. Some are reduced to small, shapeless piles of snow. Other take on unintended shapes. One looks like a squirrel.

The petal of one of the tulips, which yesterday made such a striking impact in the snow, has become separated from its flowers. Lying alone and on its side, it looks like a pair of painted lips.

"That will be fifteen sixty four" says the clark in the Post Office having added up my transactions, and then adds: "Shakespeare's birthday!"

Newfoundlands, prologue, tulips

There are two Newfoundlands in the neighbourhood. Their owners usually walk them in the Grove, and the two dogs are apparently friends. But today their meeting is special. Off their leashes, they bound towards one another. Snow, you suppose, is the habitat of the breed and they seem to recognise their inheritance - two bulky black silhouettes gambolling in a field of white.

As the snow flakes race down outside the window I listen this April afternoon to Chaucer's Prologue read on CD in Middle English by Michael Bebb:
"Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote..."

No, there is no escaping the snow today. That goes for an early bed of flame-like tulips where the collapsed petals, with a distinct sense of drama, spread like blood in the snow.

tabled, kaffir limes, hedonist

At the bottom of the steps, in front of a house, which has been turned into flats, is a small gueridon table. On it is a vase containing white roses.

A neighbour has made a tiny strip of garden off the twitten behind our house. Among his produce is a lemon tree, bearing three lemons, and behind it a kaffir lime tree (the leaves, and fruit which, when ripe, are about 4cm across, are popular in Thai cooking). There a two or three white, embryo fruit on the lime tree too. The lemon tree and the lime tree are sheltered by a mini-greenhouse, rather like a giant cloche, made from a plastic frame and polythene. It is light enough to be removed and positioned by hand. Inside it he has installed a small, tubular heater.

I stand under an awning to shelter from the rain, and watch a man walking up the hill, his head tilted back to catch the rain. He has a grey pigtail and a crude metal cross hangs on his chest. An aging hippy, a hedonist, he smiles to himself with sheer pleasure as the rain streams off his face.

kindness, drifts, mezzes

The kindness of people in buses who, in the absence of bus conductors, help one another identify the stop at which they want to get off.

At Groombridge Place, the daffodils, which we had come to see are almost finished, But on the bank of a stream there are drifts of wood anemone, like white shadows on the grass. And not yet in flower, ramsons or wild garlic, with their broad tulip like leaves. You find little bundles of these leaves for sale nowadays in smart food shops in towns.

"Two messes," calls the cook bringing two plates of mezze to customers outside the pub.

mirror, sawing, leeks

A mirror is left in the forecourt of a house. It surprises the world with its reflection.

The sound of sawing on the other side of a wall, this morning, tells me that my friend Milo is in his garden and still at work on his dingy.

The smell of leeks, freshly lifted from the garden, trimmed and quickly washed. They will form the basis of a leek and potato soup, perfumed with ceps.

bananas, pendant, watch dog

"Come on, banana cake, " says a mother to her dawdling child.

A slim and elegant MP3 player, without benefit of earpones or connecting wire, hangs round the neck of a woman like a piece of jewellry

A black and white dog is tied to the play ground railings on the outside. Its eyes are fixed on its owner and her small child. When the the child attempts something particularly venturesome on a small climbing frame, the dog's ears prick and its nose pushes against the bars.

covers, sunny side, bubbles

I have been looking at those covers in the street, which give access to drains, ducts, cables and the like. They could, I fantasize, be gateways to the underworld. Engraved on the wrought surfaces are the names of their manufacturers, such as Guest and Chrimes of Rotherham, Thomas Dudley Ltd.

In Calverley Precinct people drift over to the side where the sun is shining and desert entirely the shady side.

Bubbles float over a fence into the Grove and dance in the wind before vanishing.

origins, gardening, child noises

In Robert Birchfield's elegant book The English Language, I come across the derivation of the word "daffodil". Although there is no close botanical connection with the asphodels of the lilly family, the word apparently comes from "asphodel", having evolved from that into its present form, via "affodil".

There is a neighbouring front garden which (pleasing to me) is neglected. Earlier this year, violets grew profusely, and now prodigious dandelions are opening like aspiring sunflowers, as though cultivated with love and patience. In a way this garden answers Barrett Bonden's comment yesterday. A man accustomed to wind in the rigging, rope and tar, a tilting deck, the creak of rowlocks, the rudder under his hand and salt spray over his shoulder, may leave the land to landsmen, without guilt or misgiving. For want of the sailor's hand, the rose will flourish and the oak not perish.

In the garden through which I pass to get to the vegetables, I usually hear birds singing but to day the primary school up the road has its break, and the voices of school children are added to those of blackbirds and tits.

bollard, flames, territory

This bollard, with its strange markings and expressive cavity is to be found on the roadside between Mount Pleasant and the entrance to Calverley Grounds. If it were a piece of sculpture rather than a neglected parking deterrent, people would come from far away to see it and remark on its human pathos and resonance.

In a flower bed in the front garden of a house in Belgrove, are some red tulips, which, now that their petals have opened and become loose, resemble flames.

Mr Crow, in the Grove, is enjoying the softness of the ground after the rain. Head in the air, he waddles up and down, no longer showing any interest in searching for worms. Instead, it is the pleasure of territory which he enjoys. "Mine, mine mine," he says to himself. And nobody challenges him.

wear, narcissi, strimmer

This morning I think that I like the effects of age and long usage on artifacts and people too: the handles of tools polished by use; blades frequently honed; stone and wooden steps, worn down by many footfalls; the fine cracks under the sheen of old leather; and the lines of experience and weather on the faces of old people.

Some narcissi from the WI Market were closed when brought home. Now fully open, their pale petals boldly sport dark orange trumpets.

The on-off growling of a strimmer, as as ear-muffed gardener trims the grass round the boles of trees in the Grove, is a sort of Spring song.

relief, moss, water

In the doctor's waiting room a radio, chained to the wall, is gushing ersatz cheerfulness. It's Radio 2, as the horrible jingle keeps reminding you. I am trying to do a sudoku. Reading is out of the question. An elderly lady who is sitting next to the radio, with a single movement of her finger, switches it off. I look up. "You don't mind?" she says, half apologetically. " Mind? Thank you!" I say. Florence Nightingale herself could not have offered greater relief.

I notice on the top of a wall, at eye-level, a flourishing colony of moss. Little stalks, topped with spore bearing capsules, project a centimeter upwards from the green bed like flowers, only, as I learn subsequently from a reference book, they are not flowers. I think I have always had a soft spot for moss as it does for those who have cause to settle down upon it.

After the rain, the sun comes out. As I walk in the Grove, I hear the sound of water dripping from the trees and overflowing from the guttering of a house, and watch a stream flowing down the brick culverts at the edge of a path. The water is clean and bright in the sunlight.

penny royal, flying, hyacinths

A pot of penny royal from the WI market, will keep the summer sweet. Its Latin name is Menta Pulegium, and it is a variety of mint, possibly the most highly scented of all mints. Says Culpeper: "It is beneficial in cases of spasms, hysteria, flatulence and sickness, being very warming and grateful to the stomach."

In Calverley Ground, I see a squirrel leap from one tree to another. For a moment it is flying.

After days of cold winds, the sun appears and you can feel it warm on your face. The warmth draws out the scent of hyacinths in the flower beds outside the town hall.

reflections, daffodils persist, ITMA

The reflections of passers-by in shop windows seem in some ways more interesting and worth exploring than the passers-by themselves.

Daffodils and other spring flowers, which appeared earlier than usual this year, have, perhaps because of the cold weather, lasted longer than usual. That other daffodil poem - by Robert Herrick - which begins "Fair daffodils we weep to see you haste away so soon," is thereby contradicted. I shan't be so sorry this year when eventually they haste away.

In the window of a charity shop is a little piece of history. It is a faded box of old, 12-in records of ITMA, the radio show which nearly everyone in the country listened to during World War II. The dates 1939 -1949 are given and there is a drawing of the star of the show Tommy Handley on the label. I don't know what such things are worth, but for a collector, it strikes me that the price, £50, would not be a lot to pay.

mustard, toboggan, celandine

Lunch with some old mates. Our host, a former hotelier, offers us smoked salmon with mustard. It was, he says, a combination favoured by Ella Fitzgerald.

Outside the garden shop in Chapel Place, is an old, weathered toboggan. But, despite forecasts, a biting wind and a few dramatic flurries, there is still no snow.

The leaves of lesser celandine, everywhere else in flower, are pushing through in the triangular shrubbery known locally as the Village Green. This is despite the efforts of the council gardeners who tried to eradicate the flowers in the Autumn. They prefer, it seems, bare earth, reminiscent of formal parks and gardens. But, with luck, we shall still see the golden star-shaped flowers this Spring.

ripenning, jewels, scars

"A man is much inclined to find merit in those black eyes which can ripen fruit upon which they look.." From Mémoires des deux jeunes mariées Honoré de Balzac.

The snow flakes, although they do not settle as snow, leave little droplets on the grass which glitter in the sun.

The scars on trees where branches have been pruned look like features on a human face - staring eyes, gaping mouths. The colours and textures of the exposed and weathered wood add expression to these shapes.

daffodils, hollow loaf, snow flakes

Following the discussion inspired by Lucy Kempton's daffodil montage, I have been thinking about the poem and the flowers that inspired it. Tall Girl says by way of comment that the consensus of her writers' group is that you can't put a daffodil in a poem at all nowadays. I know what they mean but all the same I say to myself:
Bloody daffodils
Buds probe the air, hungry as birds beaks,
Or poised, the shape of fish, in green shadow,
To shoot after prey in a brazen flash;
Trumpets that gape, bold, frilled with snarls,
That Satchmo himself might learn to blow;
Mad rhythms of dancing, empty heads;
The rumble and tap of their sequestered feet
Underground, where they, from sand and rock,
Draw strength to scream like Dionysus' girls,
In this violent, unstoppable, cruel time.

A loaf is left too long to prove. The baked loaf looks alright, but reveals a gaping hollow under the crust when the first slice is taken, like the empty loft of a house.

For a few minutes big snow flakes fall, but not for long. I go to the front door to photograph them falling against the hedge and bay tree. But they melt away on contact with the ground. "Où sont les neiges d'antan!"

daisy, autobiography, stories

Why do I get so much pleasure this morning from discovering (or rather rediscovering, for I am sure that I have met it before) that the French word for daisy is pâquerette? I cannot tell, but in a curious way the little white flower is born again in my mind.

Following the fashion for six-word autobiographies, here is mine: I looked and looked and look.

The two bookshops in Chapel Place, The Oxfam bookshop and Hall's, are full of people browsing and chatting to escape from the rain, hail and snow, all of which are taking turns outside this afternoon. In Hall's, Sabrina, the owner and David, a neighbour are reminiscing about Calverley Grounds, the larger of the two neighbouring parks. In particular, they recall a couple of years ago, a one eyed fox called The Major. The park keeper had tamed him, and he used to sit around on his haunches like a dog. He would sometimes go into people's houses, and once nicked a Kit Kat bar from someone's table.

clock-view, greeting, daffodils

From the Grove I realize that I am on a level with the stations clock, which I can see and which nowadays tells the right time.

The sound of visitors being greeted as I pass an open front door, where two or three people in overcoats are bunching before going in. "Lovely to meet you," says a woman's voice. In the backgound is a man with a friendly, smiling face.

Sprays of broom with buds like yellow scales.