Personal Blogs

Benny Andersen was a popular Danish poet I recently came across. I rather like his witty verses. Here’s the first verse of Restlessness, translated from the Danish by Michael Goldman.

My suitcase opens wide imploring                             
Feed me                                                                      
fill me with socks
stuff me with shirts and underwear
fatten me with folded things
load me with longings and a shaving kit
I beg you
give me one more chance
to be tumbled around in trunks
relegated to backseats
treated like a dog on conveyor belts
let me be emptied
put through customs
and refilled
with dirty socks
half-emptied bottles
abducted ashtrays
let my contents spill out onto foreign sheets
hang on interesting hangers
plop in bidets with a guttural accent.

We'll gather lilacs in the spring again
And walk together down a shady lane
Until our hearts have learned to sing again
When you come home once more…

https://youtu.be/T29bxIh_krI

My fellow gardner sent me a photo – is this lilac? It smells lovely – I thought yes but uploaded it to Name This Plant, Microsoft's visual search on Bing, and it came back with Syringa. But a little more digging revealed that is indeed lilac, which is one of about a dozen plant species in the Syringa genus. It originates in the Balkan and the Greek name is paschalia, to do with Easter; pascal is derived from pascha = passover.

The name lilac ultimately stems from Persian nil = blue, which has a variant form nilak, and it has reached us via French < Spanish < Arabic. This made me think of the colour eau-de-nil ("water of the Nile"); could there be a connection.

Well perhaps. The Romans and Greeks called it Nilus and Νιελος, but beyond that the source is very uncertain. However, one possible root that's been suggested is indeed nil, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile#Etymology_and_names

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My garden is so overgrown

Nothing there but tall ferns

Which the occasional bear visits.

Everything’s gone to bracken and bruin.

We've been working hard to create a pocket wildflower meadow on the front lawn. There are a few introduced species; for example Snake's Head Fritillaries and Cyclamens; but also a whole mix of weeds that grow naturally round here. The latter are all wildflowers though, so we will manage rather than remove them. I counted at least 12 flower species on the go last week, not including grasses. We are adding to the variety and have recently put in some plugs of Yellow Rattle, and we shall plant more plugs in the autumn.

We decided we needed a 'cultivated corridor', a mown passage, to get more easily to the herb trough (that you can just see to the right of the path toward the end, but also to show a balance between management and nature.

We hope this little wildflower meadow will please the eye and provide an environment in which our all-important poillinators will flourish.

AIMILIANOS MONAI, ALEXANDRIAN, A.D. 628–655, epitaph

Out of talk, appearance, and manners
I will make an excellent suit of armor;
and in this way I will face malicious people
without feeling the slightest fear or weakness.
They will try to injure me. But of those
who come near me none will know
where to find my wounds, my vulnerable places,
under the deceptions that will cover me.
So boasted Aimilianos Monai.
One wonders if he ever made that suit of armor.
In any case, he did not wear it long.
At the age of twenty-seven, he died in Sicily.

When I was very young, I have been told, I was sick down the back of Denys Watkins-Pitchford, a friend of my father. Watkins-Pitchford was an artist and an author of children's books, writing as 'BB' but illustrating them under his true name. His books are less well-known now, but perhaps worth a revival.

At the front of every book BB included his motto, which his father had recorded from a tombstone in the north country apparently.

The wonder of the world

The beauty and the power,

The shapes of things,

Their colours, lights and shades,

These I saw.

Look ye also while life lasts.

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I hear a lot about mutant but I don't get it. I didn't even know ants could talk

At one time I was an international boat-napper. It’s an unusual occupation, but basically I used to take rowing boats and hold them to ransom.

I remember one episode in Scandinavia, where people with names like Lars, Magnus, Gerd and so on all had dinghies pulled up on the beach next to their chalets. With so many to choose from it was a difficult decision, but finally I took the hull by Bjorn’s.

Won a gardening competition yesterday. Behind at one point, but luckily I had an acer up my sleeve.

Q. How do cats make their morning coffee?

A. With a purrcolator.

A creative friend has created a magical garden-within-a-garden. We bought most of the plants, the pond liner and some of the materials, but we also scavenged a lot of cobbles and the wonderful Cornish limestone slabs you can see. We currently have a drought locally, so the pond is not filled yet.

This miniature pond is designed to be soothing to the eye and spirit, but also to act a wildlife sanctuary for a variett of small animals, We had hardly finished when this young hedgesparrow came really close to us. LIke robins they follow the gardener.

At night the area appears magical.