happy new year!!!!

Happy New Year!!!!

last of the beetroot soup

Today we finished the last of the Christmas beetroot soup.

midwinter harvest, easter?, christmas reading, transformative lighting

On the allotment earlier, harvested carrots and beetroots for tomorrow's lunch. Afterwards went for a bike ride. Green fields and singing birds - it felt like Easter not Christmas!

Lovely to be spending Christmas and New Year at home! Wonderful to be together. Lots of delicious food and gorgeous long country walks.

Finished - and much enjoyed - moving and thought-provoking Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Have now returned to Jane Eyre - perfect midwinter reading.

The holidays started excellently with Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti performed by Bampton Classical Opera in St Mary's on 21st December. Quite apart from the beautifully emotive music and voices, there was tasty mulled wine - not to mention transformative lighting!

home for the holidays!

This photo was taken when I was at a bus top in Witney waiting for the S1 to Oxford early yesterday morning.

This was the last time I'll be taking this journey until the new year. I love my job and I love Oxford but it will be so lovely to be at home for a couple of weeks.

The photo shows Densham's Butchers - a shop we go to: https://denshamsbutchers.co.uk. Though in the interests of fairness, Patrick Strainge in Bampton is another excellent butcher: http://www.patrickstrainge-butchers.co.uk!

Our Christmas decorating and shopping are almost done - just cheese and wine to go.

frosty mornings, christmas parties, trust: a family story - finished?, political shenanigans, escaping...

Lovely walks on frosty mornings.

Happy memories of a weekend spent with family in Kent.

Lots of departmental and college Christmas parties - a consequence of my varied University affiliations. Pacing oneself is an art. Great, though, to spend time with colleagues - such a rarity these days; these busy days.

I confess that it was quite difficult starting work again after our short holiday. It was almost as if my mind had decided that Christmas had come early. Now the mad dash to get everything done before we finish. Apart from one or two things, Christmas shopping remains to be done.

Finished Trust: A family story the week before last. I say finished - and I'm pleased the work is done - but there is still much to do. Rereading the whole work to see how the rewrites and reorderings flow. Not to mention deciding where to take it next.

Things for the new year.

Was fascinated by the recent political shenanigans. Fascinated and appalled. Where are we going? Why? What for? Endless questions without answers.

Like many, I suspect, Christmas will be a period of escaping from it all; like no other, this year. These Brexit days are ones of subdued, numb uncertainty and wishing we had never got ourselves into this mess.

time off, lovely winter walks, contrast

Had a couple of days off. Lovely winter walks on the Barrington Park Estate and along the Windrush between Burford and Swinbrook. Quite a contrast to this time last year when there was heavy snow.

cycling, rewrites, reading, port of destiny - "peace"

Joyful late autumn day. Loved cycling through the west Oxfordshire countryside.

I've had some time on the bus to and from work recently to continue with the Trust rewrites. About 85% done now, though the bits I'm focusing on involve painstaking work. Sometimes it's just a couple of hundred words in an hour.

It's funny but when I finished this section I thought it worked really well. Even when I first re-read it some six months later it still flowed. But when I re-read it again a year ago, after I'd received feedback from colleagues and friends, I realised how much needed doing. There's some excellent passages but the structure and integrity of the sections was weak and tenuous. I'm enjoying the process of the work nevertheless. It's exciting to work at something and gradually come up with solutions to problems.

Returned to Jane Ayre a few weeks ago but then got distracted by Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, which I was inspired to read by Eyes Wide Shut, which we were watching at the time. Both film and novella intrigue but are rather soulless in the end. The former more than the latter, perhaps. Now reading Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Quite slow to get going but when it does it is so compelling. Exquisite precision to characterisation.

Currently watching Night of the Hunter. Saw most of it years ago but have wanted to watch the whole things ever since. Is there any wonder that Cahiers du cinéma voted it the second best film of all time (after Citizen Kane).

Very much enjoyed attending the Latin American Centre's screening of Port of Destiny - "Peace" during the week and the question time with former President Santos afterwards.

in memoriam

In memory of my great-uncle, Claude Meysey-Thompson, who died in France in 1915 and whose body was brought back by my great-grandfather and buried in the family plot at Little Ouseburn in Yorkshire.

On his gravestone is written: "In Loving Memory of Captain The Hon.Claude Henry Meysey Meysey-Thompson, 3rd Battalion Rifle Brigade. Only Son of 1st Lord Knaresborough. Born 5th April,1887. Wounded in the Trenches near Ypres 6th June, 1915. Died at Bailleul in France 17th June, 1915 in the presence of his father who brought back the body to England and it was interred here on the 22nd June, 1915."

With thanks to this thread on the Great War Forum for information about Claude. In the thread it is pointed out that his body was probably one of the last to be brought home for family burial because this was stopped by the government. There was an interesting article in the Times this week that discussed people's outrage at not being able to bring the remains of their loved ones home, entitled 'Don’t bury our brave boys like dogs'.

The article begins:

'"Is it not enough to have our boys dragged from us and butchered without being deprived of their poor remains?"

So pleaded one bereaved mother during the First World War, joining thousands in expressing outrage that the bodies of fallen soldiers would be buried in mass cemeteries abroad rather than returned home for private family burials.'

bruton catch-up

...Some pics of our escape to Somerset in September. Someone said there wasn't much to see in Bruton but we loved the little tucked away places there.

And there are tons of other things to enjoy. See this Evening Standard piece, 10 reasons why you should visit Bruton, Somerset from 2016. (We had an excellent al fresco lunch At The Chapel.) Then there's Godminster cheese!

It was At The Chapel that we saw the wood wasp coming and going.

st margaret's, binsey

On Saturday I worked in Oxford.

My walk took me to St Margaret's, Binsey, where we were married. I haven't revisited the country lane (that is both within the ring road and outside time) that leads from the hamlet to the church for quite a while.

What a beautiful place! Especially on a bright sunny frosty morning in October.

giant beetroots and carrots!

The carrots and beetroots on the allotment have come - more than - good, putting on astonishing growth in the late summer after going nowhere for months!

last alpine holiday snaps, happy memories, gentians, spruce needle anthills!

These are the last pics from our holiday in the French Alps.

Such happy memories of seeing our friends and of walking in the forests and on the hillsides above La Chapelle-d'Abondance.

Loved seeing wild mushrooms and flowers, including gentians.

The extraordinary ant hills made of spruce needles were amazing. I can find articles about forest ants in the Jura and Swizerland but clearly they are found in the French Alps too!

propelled, summer memories, the future

It almost seems a lifetime since I last posted.

The Michaelmas 0th and 1st Week turbines have propelled me from the lingerings of late summer to the supercharged pace of the academic year.

Suddenly the town is teeming with new students and there are inductions to do. The old year's finals papers tumble through the letterbox for marking.

The patterns of working are refound, hopefully with new ideas that have suggested themselves unconsciously over the last twelve months.

This October everything is heightened by a summer that refuses to yield fully and the memories of unending sunny days. Evenings spent at the top of the garden: drinking wine at the old table above our pond (that table has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember); reading; watching the bats and listening to the owls as the light faded. Of holidays in the Alps and Somerset. Of eating apples picked from our trees.

This weekend there is a brief moment or two at dawn, as I write, to savour the future - brim full of concealed potential - and the past, as the trees sough in the gales outside.

--

The last of the Alpine photos and some from the Somerset trip to follow.

anna beer's patriot or traitor: the life and death of sir walter ralegh, osney memories

Outstanding in-depth Times review today of my friend and colleague Anna Beer's Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh.

Today's post first appeared on the jtns Instagram account earlier (above photo: Osney allotments from across the Thames).

It's a long time ago that we left Osney Island, where we were members of the local allotment association. In those days I was a citizen of west Oxford, in between leaving the University and being reclaimed by it to work as a librarian and to teach. The Island was a different world to ts expensive exclusive present incarnation. There were two pubs and a bakery-cum-village shop. Memories of collecting the bread early in the morning and the smell of the baking in the frosty air. And the floury-browed baker in his cap and apron. There were residents who had been born on the Island. The author John Wain used to walk to the Waterman's Arms from Wolvercote for a pint - his Where the Rivers Meet trilogy was about the two sons of a fictional Waterman's lanlord, one a don the other working at the car plant at Cowley pre WWII. Parts of my first novel were also set in a fictional Waterman's. Coincidentally it was to be published by an imprint founded by John Wain's son. The allotments flooded every second or third spring and the Thames seemed to bring fertility. We were members of the committee and each September I would help take the rents, recording the payments in a ledger. Our allotment neighbour was a former trades unionist and City Mayor. We learnt much from him about local politics and local history. I think he hoped I might go into local politics and I attended some meetings. But I'm not a political person. I'm a floating voter - a much derided sort of voter. Yet democracy assumes floating voters and what would it be without them?

happy memories, cow bells, catching up, rewriting and editing, tls life-writing special issue, coxes, 30th reunion gaudy...

Such happy memories of our holiday near La Chapelle d'Abondance.

The pictures above show the Eglise St Maurice and the post office. The bottom photo is of the wonderful mountain restaurant on the Col de Bassachaux a few miles away. See the website of the Office de Tourisme de la Chapelle d'Abondance.

If you'd like to hear the cow bell recording I mentioned last time, you can do so at my SoundCloud account.

I'd expected that I would make this post earlier but there is so much to catch up on workwise after a holiday. Also, I've been doing some furious rewriting and editing of Trust: A family story in the early morning and in the evening, inspired by the response to my talk about it at the summer school. Well over half of it done now.

On the subject of life-writing, this week's Times Literary Supplement is a life-writing special issue.

Finishing up beans, courgettes and cucumbers, all of which are running out of steam on the allotment. Very early finish this year. In the garden, we have moved from the James Grieves to the Coxes - which are fantastic!

Keble 30th reunion gaudy tomorrow. Thirty years - unbelievable!

holiday, montreux, freddie mercury, abondance cheese, dippers, back to west ox, the black prince by iris murdoch

A brilliant trip to the French Alps, via Montreux, Évian-les-Bains and Lausanne.

Photos and post, part one.

In part two there will be a recording of cow bells from the high meadows.

Delicious Abondance cheese.

Amazing walks. Saw so many dippers - a dozen or more - on one particular walk beside an Alpine river just before thunder and storms, including the one getting ready to dive in the video.

Also a lovely visit to the Casino restaurant in Montreux - past the Freddy Mercury memorial statue on Lac Léman. (Generous, beloved hosts' uncle Jim soon to be seen played by Tom Hollander in Bohemian Rhapsody.)

Back to a still summery west Ox. Some of the fierceness has gone out of the days but they remain gorgeous.

Decided to take a break from Jane Eyre and read The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. What a novel - dated to begin with but then the sense of past idioms falls away and one is immersed in the essential humanity of the writer. And what momentum. Unputdownable!

Some prime quotes - three rather bleak, if wry, a fourth rather sublime:

--

The wicked prosper in front of our eyes and go on and on and on prospering. What a blessing it must have been once to be able to believe in hell.

--

The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull their sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of tiny interconnections. My lightest whim can affect the whole future.

--

It stirred some memory of a childhood holiday. Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

--

Some clever writer (probably a Frenchman) has said: it is not enough to succeed; others must fail.

oxford creative writing summer school, self-explanatory?, riverbank plants, produce, kentish treasures

Gosh, the Exeter College Creative Writing Summer School sped by. Two groups this year so quite a lot to do. But what groups - loved working with them.

Talked about and read from Trust: A family story at my plenary session, which was entitled Self-explanatory? The blurb read as follows:

This talk is about life, fiction and some of the varied forms of life-writing: memoir; real-time (blogging); and poetry. It is a personal story that explores broader writing questions, including relative truth – neither the self nor the past stand still, it seems – the value of life-writing and our ethical responsibilities to others... and to ourselves. The talk includes readings of prose and poetry.

There were a lot of questions at the end. I was touched by the positive comments.

Worked in Oxford yesterday. Lovely walk beforehand, including along the Thames to Port Meadow from Osney. Took the photos above on Fiddler's Island. The banks orgiastic with riverbank plants.

Have been enjoying the James Grieves. They are delicious this year - sharp but sweet. Today I harvested some 'quick' beetroots, spuds, French and runner beans, courgettes and cucumbers. Also did some digging - this was before the still-fierce sun came out and the plot felt quite autumnal. J is making cheese sauce for the beetroots to have with ham hock.

Meanwhile, J went to Kent last week and came back with three excellent Shepherd Neame beers, including the classic Master Brew, and a bottle of Westwell Naughty Hare Chardonnay. The last of these was outstanding! An extraordinary mineraliness that reminded me of the curious flint you get in some of the more intriguing Côtes du Rhônes.

first james grieve, roasting hot!, cucumbers, onions and shallots

Our first apple of the season - a James Grieve faller.

Softer flesh than last year but an intense sweet flavour.

Roasting hot out - and inside the house. Yet things on the plot are keeping going. Excellent cucumbers this year! Onions and shallots lifted yesterday in the end.

downpour, harvests contd, creative writing summer school, mst alum daisy johnson, everything under, man booker, beware the bonak

Downpour at about five this morning. Ran to close the wide-open windows - though in about ten minutes it was gone. Welcomely cool now.

Harvested the last of the blackcurrants earlier in the week. Delicious lightly stewed. Intensity of flavour; rich fruity syrup!

The apples are rounding, despite the drought. If they grow to maturity, their taste will be the best, according to a piece in the Times.

Am hoping to dig the first spuds tomorrow - Maris Peer - but am not hopeful of a big crop.

Will lift the onions and shallots this afternoon, all being well, and put them in trays to dry.

The Creative Writing Summer School is underway. Wonderful to meet the students.

Took a break from Jane Eyre to read Daisy Johnson's debut novel Everything Under. An alum of the Oxford MSt in Creative Writing, her book has just been long-listed for the Man Booker.

Oxford canals, modern-day Oedipal plotline, lexicography, monsters, myths, identity, the persistence of past in present... What's not to like.

Not that the canals remain 'Oxford' ones for long. Realism shading into Gothic psycho-landscapes and dramas. The waterways - are they rivers or canals? - peopled by outsiders making their own rules, telling their own stories, living individual lives in a strung-out parallel society.

Humans and animals appear and disappear (sometimes underwater and for good), fear stalks the towpaths in the form of a jaw-snapping beast - the Bonak.

Johnson is excellent on the bewildering tangle of deep-riverside wastelands, inescapably littered with human detritus. The nymphs have certainly departed. There is a relish of the grime and filth of nature into which the characters slip and slide and are coated by. Childhood fascinations lingering in adulthood that you find in Sartre's La Nausée, perhaps.

I also liked her observations of a delightfully dysfunctional - house-living - family that the principal narrator Gretel stays with for a time on her quest for the mother who abandoned her. Johnson is great at evoking the impulsive behaviour of the kids, the scars born by the house - 'toys with no heads, holes in the walls, the handle to the bathroom pulled right off'. There is relentless inquistivness, experimentation and lifefulness. Small wonder the dad is a secret drinker.

The family, though, isn't what it seems. The couple's children are adopted, a child who was their own has disappeared. Part of the jigsaw of changeable human relationships, psychologies and sexualities that the novel pieces together.

Are there things that don't work? Of course. The balancing of the characters is somewhat uneven. Gretel is the principal narrator but her story can be overshadowed by those of the other characters. Not necessarily a problem - plenty of novels do this - The Great Gatsby for one, Elmet by Fiona Mozley for another - but I felt that if Gretel's prominence could have been amplified a touch more from time to time, the relationship between the reader and her would have been stronger. This would have made the book's final pages more powerful. I also felt that the moment when Gretel realises her and her mother's private language has set her apart from the rest of society could have been done more convincingly.

But such quibbles can't take away from this novel's vividly created world, the range and complexity of its emotional and psychological preoccupations and its shear un-put-downable momentum.

I knew what the Bonak would look like a long time before it appeared. I know that beast.

With Everything Under, Johnson taps into the zeitgeist of our terrors, needs, confusions and desires.

harvests, high water, spider's web, tim pears' the wanderers, charlotte brontë's jane eyre, downton abbey the movie

Harvested blackcurrants on the allotment earlier. Also French and runner beans and several different kinds of Italian courgette. Lots of watering having to be done too. The plot is amazingly parched. Although the rivers and streams of west Oxfordshire are remarkably full of water, given the last time it rained was ages ago. Perhaps all that snow during the winter stocked up the aquifers.

Yesterday, when arriving at the allotment early, I saw this spider's web on the gate, drenched in dew.

Finished reading Tim Pears' The Wanderers this week. What a wonderful book! Gentle and relatively slow of pace but totally involving. Such vivid evocations of rural life and a remote country estate just before the outbreak of the First World War. Can't wait for the third part of the trilogy to be published.

Have now started re-reading Jane Eyre. What a writer, Charlotte Brontë is!

Meantime, Downton Abbey the movie has been given the go ahead - wonder if they will be filming it in Bampton. Hope so.

common?, hh, ci, ba, strolling through the showers, harvests

Saw this 'Common' Brimstone butterfly in the garden of Howard's House hotel.

Excellent stay in Wiltshire at the Compasses Inn, Lower Chicksgrove, with excursions to HH and the Beckford Arms.

Somewhat stunned by the hot weather, although there was welcome rain on our Wednesday walk. We took an umbrella but in the event just enjoyed strolling through the light showers.

No rain at home. Lots of garden and allotment watering. But first French beans and Italian courgettes have been picked.

potato dibber catch-up, maris peer, bike in the mud, the sentence by stephanie scott, mary anne sate, imbecile by alice jolly

I realised that I never posted pictures of the potato dibber this year. Well here it is - and here are the Maris Peer spuds I planted, almost ready to be lifted.

And on a mud and bike theme, here is a bike in the mud on the bank of one of the streams near Osney that flows into the Thames. Photographed on my walk to work earlier in the week.

This weekend, it's the MSt in Creative Writing Guided Retreat - the last time the tutors meet their students before finals. On Monday there will be the annual end-of-course student readings at Kellogg College, which I'm really looking forward to.

Talking of the MSt, a student I supervised several years ago got in touch to say she had sold her first novel, The Sentence. That neutral-sounding 'sold' doesn't say the half of it - see the MSt blog! So  pleased for you, Steph!

And again, talking of the MSt, I was thrilled to receive my copy of my fellow tutor Alice Jolly's brand new novel, Mary Anne Sate, Imbecile. A summer reading treat!

in flower, heady scents, end of the academic year, education continuing, vibrant expectation

So much is in flower in J's garden now, as we approach the longest day.

Heady scents too.

Can't quite believe that Oxford has reached the end of the academic year. University spaces are suddenly significantly quieter.

Though many courses - particularly Department for Continuing Education ones, which include Creative Writing at masters and undergraduate levels - never stop. Some even only begin to pick up outside full term.

A time of mild exhaustion and vibrant expectation.

angelica, digital editions, guide to northern archæology, great-great-great granddad, invisible

Alternating between walks across the shoulder of Cumnor Hill and along the Oxford canal.

This photo of a stem of grass and a wild angelica plant was taken beside the canal just below Wolvercote.

A highlight of the past two terms has been the Taylor Digital Editions course, which I did in Hilary before presenting two of the sessions in Trinity.

The course has been written by my colleague Emma and is tremendously rewarding and hugely enjoyable. It introduces both students and librarians to techniques used in the creation of digital editions. Course participants choose interesting texts from the Taylor collections and week by week learn skills including creating digital images of selected pages, encoding text according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) principles and depositing their digital edition in the University's data archive.

From the librarian's point of view, the course gives valuable insights into the world of our Digital Humanities researchers.

The book that I chose was one that my great-great-great grandfather edited, entitled Guide to Northern Archæology, which includes a translation of an academic paper written by the Danish antiquarian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788-1865), which sets out his system of dating archaeological artifacts by reference to co-occurrence and archaeological context, including ancient literature. The inscription on the Taylor copy says it was presented by my ancestor on the 19th February 1852. Little did he know that one of his descendants would be working there many years later!

It was great fun to work on a few pages of a book that my ancestor had edited and presented to the library.

The images of the pages were uploaded to the Bodleian Special Collections Flickr group and the edition itself appears on the course webpage. The image and xml files were deposited in ORA-Data.

The last of these tasks means that the record for my ancestor's book sits alongside the uncut, unedited version of my second novel Invisible, which was uploaded into the research archive not long after it was published. Because it was written when I was teaching creative writing at Oxford, the work represented a research output. The version is a curiosity - there were reasons that some 10,000 words were cut!

water lilies, bees, rewriting and editing trust: a family story, consultation, hard to do

The water lilies in our pond are flowering. The peonies are about to. There are many more bees. Things are looking up! Only a sole honey bee, though.

Have started at long last to rewrite and edit Trust: A family story. Am learning a lot about the text as I do so. Have achieved quite a lot in a relatively short space of time. Am loving the activity of rewriting and editing, if not some of the memories stirred.

Contributed to the Domestic Abuse Bill consultation in respect of coercive and controlling behaviour and economic abuse. Very hard to do. Stirred a lot of memories.

oxford canal mural project, sunny days-chilly evenings, where are the bees?

One of the highlights of my Oxford canal walk is the Oxford Canal Mural Project. Perhaps the most striking work is Richard Wilson's kingfisher under the bridge near the Trap Grounds. Though all the murals are a joy to see.

Loving the sunny weather. Great to sit at the top of the garden at sunset - despite the chilly evenings.

What isn't so great is the almost total absence of bees this summer. With shrubs like the weigela in bloom and aquilegia flowering, I would have expected the garden to be buzzing but there's hardly anything.

As the Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust says, 'Heavy use of toxic sprays on flowers, intensive agriculture and a reduction in the number of insect pollinated crops has brought about a huge drop in bee populations. Urbanisation and loss of habitat have hit bees hard. Indeed some wild bee species are close to extinction. Never more so than now, bees need your support.' But, can this sudden absence be explained by sprays or was the hard winter to blame? Will numbers increase? If so when? The garden soundscape without bees is so unnerving.

amazing bank holiday weekend, late lunches, rediscovering oxford canal walk, library tour

What an amazing bank holiday weekend! So hot and sunny!

Wasn't able to get to the allotment till Monday afternoon because I had office work to do but we had some lovely late lunches at the top of the garden by the frog pond.

Went to the allotment today to catch up. No sign of the spuds yet, although the shallots and onions are doing well. Last year's chard has come back. Should be picking some tomorrow.

Have been rediscovering the old Wolvercote Green-Oxford Canal-Jericho walk I used to do before the 18 bus route was axed. Having enough time to do this walk before work is dependent on traffic on the A40, which is why I've not done it for ages. There used to be long queues but I'd heard rumours that things were better, so, knowing that the mud on the towpath would have dried out by now, I decided to catch the S2 from Witney rather than the S1 and see what happened, Wednesday and Friday. Plenty of time! (I think also that in part I may have avoided doing the walk because it seemed so sad that the 18 had been cut...) The photo shows graffiti and lichen on a wall beside the Oxford canal near Jericho.

--

Very much enjoyed showing Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil, 2011-2016, round the Bodleian Library prior to her lecture at St Antony's on Monday.

let's hear it for the nettles!, mark cocker's our place, busy start, planting

When walking through the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr in west Oxford last Saturday - I was on way to work (one of my library Saturdays) - I saw bluebells growing amongst nettles.

I was reminded of a sobering Sunday Times book review by Christopher Hart of a few weeks ago. The book was Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? by Mark Cocker (Cape, £18.99, pp.349). A self-evidently hard-hitting work that, amongst other things, challenges the British love of nature. Here's a quote:

'Cocker makes no apologies for the bleakness of his book. Truth matters. He also queries the sacred idea that the British "love the countryside". Do we mean, we love driving through it? Visiting pretty villages and nice pubs for lunch? He suggests that we are really a nation of gardeners: fatally tidy-minded, the wild joy of nature's riotous abundance lost to us, instead spraying weed killer on stinging nettles even though it's the weed killer that’s carcinogenic, not the nettles - which are crucial larval plants for peacock, red admiral, painted lady, comma and small tortoiseshell butterflies.'

Enough to make one unplug the strimmer's battery charger for good? Possibly.

Certainly a case of, Let's hear it for the nettles!

--

A busy start to the term. Without good spring weather to keep up energy levels. Still, the forecast is promising for the bank holiday weekend and I should be getting more spuds planted. The Maris Peer rows went in last weekend and onions and shallots the week before.

spring flower walk, fritillaries, cowslips and a snail on a thorn, pippa's song by robert browning, sackler sundays

Too wet to garden last weekend, so starting on the allotment was delayed yet more.

Went on a spring flower walk beside the Thames instead. Wonderful!

Love snake's head fritillaries!

Was intrigued by the snail on the blackthorn, though - and there were many more of them.

Brought to mind Robert Browning's poem, Pippa's Song:

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!

Why do snails like to climb thorns!

--

At the Sackler Library, we recently introduced Sunday opening - all the year round. This has been an exciting development - one which has been really popular with readers. I wrote a piece about it for the library blog before Easter. While it has my byline, however, this was very much a collaborative post involving a number of colleagues, who added design and editorial content. Then there's the Sunday team, who make everything work!