don't confuse the narrator

duck, goose, swan

Most of the photos I post on the blog are of flowers. Indeed, most of the photos I take are of flowers. That’s partly because I like them, but also because plants are helpful enough to keep still when I point a camera at them.

That said, it’s been very windy recently which means that the plants haven’t been such good sitters. So I was looking back over pictures that I’ve taken in the last month to find something to post, and was surprised to find several quite successful ones of birds, who are normally far too flighty to make good subjects for my scant camera skills.

roaring drunk

I spent an interesting morning on a private visit to Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, where I found the beast in the photo.

The young lady who showed us around told us that the word “plastered”, meaning “drunk”, derives from the habit of adding white wine to plaster to keep it malleable: the artisans who worked with the mix were exposed to the alcoholic fumes all day. What’s more, she said, they were allowed to keep and drink the wine that remained unused at the end of the day.

I’m really not convinced that a drunken artisan could produce the spectacular plasterwork of which the lordly lion was just a tiny motif. I note, though, that the decoration was in the room known as “the saloon”.

summer time

Today we are back on British Summer Time, so it would make sense if the blog post were about summer or clocks.

Yesterday, the weather was glorious and there were plenty of summer-like flowers to be photographed. For some reason, though, although there were plenty around, I failed to take a picture of a dandelion (either in bloom or as a clock). I did find these water buttercups**, though:

spring poetry

This week I seem to have missed both the first day of spring and World Poetry Day. I suppose that is as good an excuse as any to post a poem started back in February. It was inspired by a walk in what is said to be a fragment of the old Forest of Arden, a few miles up the road from the scene in the picture.

The poem still isn’t where I want it to be, but I think at least some of it is salvageable.
Continue reading “spring poetry”

stars and stats

The poetry course that I’m taking started with a discussion of sand and stars. More precisely, with the statement that there are ten times as many stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. (If you’re interested, here’s the maths that backs up the estimate.) I don’t think we mentioned, though, that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.

Either way, macrocosmos or microcosmos, a number that big is hard to comprehend, and the human brain tends to look for simplifications and ideas closer to home.

I’ve just been out in the garden and, unlikely as it seems, I suppose I’ll just have to assume there are more stars in the universe than there are blossoms on the plum tree.