magnificent

Political commentary is a bit dry, so I’ll add this photo to brighten the page up a bit.

The tree was grown from seed and although it’s about twenty years old, it’s been kept small and is only about six foot tall. It has around ten flowers each year.

The slightly strange framing here is because the photo was taken ‘blind’ from underneath with just a phone camera.

The photo prompts me to post a fragment of a collaborative poem from a couple of years ago. I really should go back and worry it into some kind of shape, but, for the moment, these are the last few lines:

[…] Thoughts
range free and grandiflora
blossom a pink edge
to our Saturday night
magnolia love.

The poem was pretty much an exercise in free association of ideas, and with the election still so much in the air, the “grandiflora” – rather than the “Saturday night magnolia love” – has me thinking of MacMillan’s “never had it so good.”

But the magnolia in the photo is a Wilsonii, not a Grandiflora, and so I looked for quotations from Harold Wilson. And I found this:

May I say, for the benefit of those who have been carried away by the gossip of the last few days, that I know what’s going on. [pause] I’m going on, and the Labour government’s going on.

Wishful thinking? or ‘Nuff said.