Wikipedia shows that there are many plants known as “starflower“, including shrubs, succulents, alpine plants, bulbous perennials and the summer-flowering herb that I know as borage.
Although the flowers of borage are undoubtedly star shaped, and usually a really rather lovely heavenly blue, they tend to face earthwards and grow so low that you end up looking down at their backs, which is not the usual angle for star gazing.
Continue reading “looking down on stars”
This last year, as there haven’t been any opportunities to go to meetings in person, I’ve been doing a lot of “virtual networking”. I used to attend face-to-face events regularly, and after the first couple, I was reasonably comfortable walking into a room of strangers and starting a conversation. But it’s been difficult to re-create the atmosphere and dynamic of a physical meeting in an online situation.
It’s certainly all a lot easier than it was back in spring last year, and everyone is a lot more confident about being seen on screen, but the hosts are still uncertain who will turn up and how experienced they will be in the virtual world, so they often fall back on fairly simple ice-breaker activities.
Continue reading “desire towards the ‘otherness’”
Yesterday, I ended the blog post with a photograph of rose hips craning their necks to reach between the uprights of a black iron fence. It made me think just how many such photos I have, of flowers and fences.
I don’t actually have many photos of anything on the computer I’m using at the moment – they are mostly copied off onto an external drive- But even among the few that I can access quickly, I have found enough to confirm that, as a general rule, plants appear to want to escape the caged confines that humans impose on them.
Continue reading “flowers & fences”
As I have no doubt said many times on the blog, I don’t really celebrate any of the popular festivals and holidays, religious or otherwise. Other people do, of course, and I get the impression that this year a lot of people decided to take extra time off to recoup after a difficult year. Certainly many of our clients have been very quiet over the Christmas period, which has meant that the last couple of weeks has seemed rather like yet another pandemic lockdown.
Or perhaps it actually is another lockdown.
Continue reading “effervescent & irresolute”
I’m pretty sure there’s no bus service that calls at the local supermarket, so I’m not sure why there is a bus shelter in middle of the car park. Perhaps it’s a trolley shed, though I don’t know why they’d need to be kept protected from the elements – especially as any that stay out after hours are most likely to be found wandering at the uttermost extremes of the car park, not tidily lodged for the night.
Whatever it is, though, bus shelter, trolley shed or something else entirely, where there are perspex walls, there is likely to be vandalism, so I was unsurprised to find one of the panels shattered when I was out on an early morning walk recently.
Continue reading “broken”
don't confuse the narrator 