No time is wasted, though all time is lost. Maybe.

Ellena said in a comment a couple of posts ago, that 'nothing is pointless, not even wasting time', which made me think about temps perdu. In French one speaks of losing time, to mean wasting it. This made me think of Proust, and how that element of wordplay in the title is not something I've heard referred to (in my admittedly not very vast reading of the small number of the fifty million and one things ever written about Proust). And that in turn, made me think of Joe, and something he once said, and owing to the wonders of web-based e-mail, by recalling some keywords in the conversation, I was able find it:

'Time Regained is  almost my favourite part of A La Recherche. It explains one aspect of the work which doesn't seem to have been widely noted. That is that it is a book about someone who wants passionately to be a writer and becomes, at different stages, disillusioned with literature and convinced that he is not cut out to produce any. Until, that is, in a moment of epiphany (the uneven paving stones outside the Guermantes house which remind him of similar stones in Venice), he realizes that he carries the past within himself (something much more than memory) and the way in which he will write the work (the one which we have just read and nearly finished) becomes apparent and its realization a compelling need.'

Proust is always going to write, but not doing it, frittering his time in socialising, pursuing hopeless, dysfunctional relationships, or growing cynical and lackadaisical. But by a miracle (though possibly the result of a neurological weirdness most of us wouldn't be able to stimulate) the memories could be triggered in their entirety by sensation, and all the lost/wasted time, all the dialogue and observations of the awful, vapid, cruel people, every microcosmic detail of every seemingly empty moment, every vein on the asparagus, and every shifting mental state as he observed them, could be researched, mined, extracted and transmuted into text. Sometimes mind-bendingly difficult, infuriating, impenetrable text, often exaggerated, but also intensely real, exquisite, vivid, frequently laugh out-load funny.

There was someone on Amazon, whom I've not been able track down again, who wrote brief, funny spoof reviews of well-known books; on A la Recherche she said something along the lines of 'Blimey, he really did remember everything, didn't he? A bit of selective amnesia wouldn't have gone amiss.'  There's also this excellent New York Review of Books article I just found, which considers Proust as an 'accidental Buddhist', but also tells how its writer was 'worried that I might not live long enough to see him through to the end...a wise editor of mine had once written an article on why no one should read Proust before the age of forty'. The paradox is that it is only age and the growing sense that time is short which brings on a sense of timelessness: that it doesn't actually matter whether we complete the grand project which beckons and beguiles us, it's the embarking on it which matters.

So, I got distracted reading through old e-mail conversations with Joe, about Proust and which translation he favoured (Moncrieff), and about meeting Heather, who's also part of time past now, and who could look at a wall 'woolly with light' through a long morning with no sense of wasting time and who would frown at me for needing a translation of Proust at all, and about poems and long gone qarrtsiluni, and food of course. As always when allowing myself to be distracted I feared I was wasting time, but I don't think I was really. Much of it I didn't remember writing, or the events happening; fugitive stuff, life. Electronic media, e-mails and this blog, for example, can be made to recall some of it, but that's only really another way we tell ourselves what we remember; the actual experience still eludes us. Better than nothing, though, and there are things, and people, who represent and offer some continuity.

Ellena also picked up the link I left to the post and video I made just after my sister died, more than five years ago. Reading through that, with its intense protestations and pledging to honour her life by using mine well, I know it was real, sincere, but it begins to seem like somebody else writing already; that imperative has changed, diminished or grown into something else.

For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.
Proust, Time Regained.

I know not all griefs are so for everyone.

Saturday's, not eternity's, sunrise.

Scapes, Balbec, octopods

Three things which have brought much pleasure.

Leek scapes. Our retired farmer usually brings me a bunch of leek plants late in the summer, which he has grown from seed and has spare of. I've usually got a bed free for them by that time, the broad bean patch is good having been well tilled and nitrogen-fixed, so they're a useful and appreciated resource through the winter. This last lot I must have planted at the right phase of the moon or something, as they grew well, stayed rust-free and went on well into spring without bolting. However, they did start throwing out these rather elegant flower buds eventually. At the back of my mind was the idea that perhaps these were usable, so I looked them up, found various suggestions, and that they are known as scapes, so I threw one into the soup one evening as a test, and found that it was good, so gathered a whole bunch and steamed them on their own.

I'd long heard about leeks being known as poor man's asparagus, but not fully understood why. I've had good results steaming the small ones and dressing them with vinaigrette (one made with hazelnut oil with a few toasted chopped hazels on top is pretty sublime), but these flower heads really do have a texture and flavour which easily rivals asparagus. It would be well worthwhile to let the plants bolt every year; in fact it would almost be worthwhile just to be able to use the word 'scapes'.

~

Just finished the second of Patrick O-Brian's Aubrey Maturin series, Post-Captain, now fully hooked, and glad to know that, if I'm spared (as my granny used to say) I have the rest of my life for the remaining eighteen and a half. I enjoyed the first very much but found I couldn't always quite see the ships for the rigging. The third is on order, which posed a small dilemma as I actually find I especially enjoy reading them on Kindle, where somehow I obtained the first two for some kind of promo-price, because the on-board dictionary, though frequently confounded by some of the more technical sea-going vocabulary, is useful - I rarely, I can say without bragging, need a dictionary when reading novels, but P O'B is an exception, - as is the facility to search for previous references. However, the Kindle prices from now on are more than I'm prepared to pay for an e-books when I can buy second hand more cheaply, so print on paper it is.

Anyway, one small thing that made me almost squeal with self-satisfied joy was when, late in the novel, seeking a target on the French coast on which to exercise the Lively's guns, Aubrey decides to lay waste to the small battery just off 'the little port of Balbec'. Unlike most of the French locations mentioned, Balbec does not in fact exist, save in the pages of Proust, where it is the chic seaside town where Marcel goes with his grandmother, and falls in love with Albertine, among other things. Not only is it gratifying to one's vanity to spot such an arch kind of literary joke, but I also rather enjoy the conundrum of Balbec's existing in Napoleonic times as a little fishing port, then a hundred years later in Proust's time having grown into a famous resort, while O'Brian re-conjures it eighty years on from that as it was a hundred years before... etc etc. You don't really need science fiction to play about with the space-time continuum, any fiction can do it.

(This observation has also enabled me to help rekindle momentarily, and gain some small kudos among, a small Ravelry discussion group of formidable women amongst whom I am a mere tyro, who have put down their knitting mostly to read the entire canon of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, sometimes more than once. The group calls itself 'The Lesser of Two Needles')    

~

Knitting: Sumer is icumen in, and this tends to mean either cotton knitting, which I have some of on the go but which you can quickly tire of, as can the tendons, or socks, which are light and portable. A belated present for my old friend Glenn, who when he visited with partner and dogs earlier this year, was bearing a very delicate and interesting small tattoo of an octopus, which he had copied from an ancient Greek vase painting, on his upper arm. This put me in mind of the time, some twenty-five years ago, when he and I were traipsing round the Peloponnese in the tracks of Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and we lodged for some days (the next bus out was the other side of the weekend) in a small coastal hotel, and every evening we asked the middle-aged spinster daughter of the house what was for dinner, and she showed us the pots in the kitchen, and every night she showed us the same pot of stewed 'octopoooos', so that by the third night octopus tentacles and the suckers on them had parted company and the latter were floating about on the top.

So, octopods being something of a theme, I made him these socks, for a biggish birthday, a bit late.

They are based on this pattern, but only really the chart and the general style, the helix knitting being somewhat beyond me. In spite of being quite fine wool, and the fairly tight stranded knitting, they came out rather large (they're on my feet in the second photo), but he says he has been wearing them as slipper socks, and will try them inside wellingtons too.

Latest things happening; a soapstone shape; white arthropods; cone flowers; TMI Marcel?

Cooking chicken Kievs this evening, a nostalgic indulgence from the time when they were Marks and Spencers' signature dish, I found myself scraping the residue of milk, cornflour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs into a blob and throwing it in the pan to make a little fritter.  Molly's portion, as always. What else could I do?

I ate it myself, it really wasn't bad, she did all right.

We picked up her ashes today. Tom had been quite distressed and fretful about the limbo which we were in regarding them. I'd tried and probably better succeeded in telling myself it didn't matter too much, that her poor tired little body was all finished with anyway, and all would surely be being dealt with conscientiously and properly, even if it was the holidays and there were delays, that many a human cremation was delayed far longer. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the peace of mind and sense of resolution it brought, and also how nicely it was done; the paperwork which we had been too distraught to take any notice of at the time assured us that they understood it was a painful and difficult time, that by deciding on this course we wanted to do things decently and that they promised to do their part of it with all respect and kindness.  The certification and packaging looked lovely and used her name, and there was even a little piece of card with flower seeds pressed into it that we could plant for her in the place of our choice. OK, maybe it was all calculated marketing but we appreciated it and considered it well done. I don't remember anything so warm and personal with my parents' ashes, and it really wasn't an expensive service.

The vet and her husband asked rather shyly if we were going away this summer because if not they would very much like to invite us over, as friends, now we weren't customers...? That touched our hearts too.

~

We have Tom's daughter K, her husband and children coming for their summer visit tomorrow, and now we feel better able to cope with it, and enjoy their company.  I'm always slightly surprised how much it pleases me transforming my blue room into a cosy den for the kids, and stocking up on oven chips for the traditional moule frîtes fest, and Tom and K always benefit from a bit of time together.

~

Jantien has been back in Moncontour for the remainder of her residency there, and encouraged me to come for another sculpture class.  This isn't really serious sculpture as she does it, more like a simple session of soapstone polishing, but it is immensely satisfying, since whatever happens, at the end of the afternoon one has a beautiful piece of polished stone to show for it, as well as skin, hair and clothes covered in a layer of coloured talc which is curiously pleasurable.  I had a notion this time to make something to do with garlic, having been seduced into buying some very beautiful pink garlic imported from Argentina, a thing I would never normally do as, without being too sanctimonious about it, I do try to buy and eat as seasonally and locally as possible.  But these were so beautiful and reminded me so much of a sculpture, with their pink polished cloves pushing out through their chalky white husk.  

Jantien always says there are two ways to go with sculpture: you can have an idea what you want to make, find the right stone and shape it into it, or you can let the stone lead you to the sculpture.  In fact I suppose I took a path between the two, as there simply weren't any raw pieces which would have lent themselves to becoming a pink garlic bulb, so I let the idea go and picked up a piece of pinky brown soapstone with a flat base and some interesting speckles, and began to smooth it off, but the garlic idea persisted, along with another that came through.  When I'd told Jantien that I had an idea what I might do, she'd chuckled and said she didn't think she had a black piece of stone. In truth the notion of trying to make a Molly sculpture hadn't occurred to me; I'm afraid I do rather find the idea of making effigies and portraits of one's dead pets rather naff and anyway, I don't feel equal to representing Mol in such a way. Yet the shape that came about was about her; as well as being a garlic clove, 

it is also a tear drop.

Not great art or anything, but, as I say, deeply satisfying to make and to have.

~

A few more photos to season things. 

J'suis descendue dans mon jardin...  Going to pick some white Winchester Cathedral roses (for a friend and neighbour's 100th birthday, a rather strange event which I thought I might write about but am now out of time and probably your good graces to do so) I displaced a curious resident, a white spider, with a speck of pink, like a chameleon to the flower. 

Pray tell me arachnophobes ( which I am only quite mildly), is a spider less frightening coloured thus? Is it the darkness of them which disturbs?

Another white arthropod, a marbled white butterfly.

They are all over the place just now, won't be for long.

Some echinacea with and without bumble bees, just because.

and some poppy seed heads which Tom put to dry in the rough glazed bowl, even though the blasted things sow themselves all over the garden in all the wrong places without any encouragement anyway.

I don't think he meant it to be tasteful but I thought it was just so terribly much so.

~

And finally, for Robbie really but also anyone else who might be interested, proof it it were needed that Proust really was weird. Never mind every kind of snooping voyeurism from Françoise killing the chicken through Vinteuil's daughter's girlfriend spitting on his picture to the Baron de Charlus getting thrashed by a sailor, never mind locking your girlfriend in your flat in case she might be a lesbian, this is really perverse:

...but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber pot into a bower of aromatic perfume.

There's a lot of asparagus in Swann's Way. I'm going back over it with audio book, picking up particular passages that interest and checking the text in the original and Moncrieff's translation as and when the fancy takes me, which having them on the Kindle makes easier.  The audio book is heavily abridged, of course. I loved the asparagus description but on checking found they had rather coyly left out the last bit about the chamber pot.  Wrongly I think, for any discussion about asparagus, as with Jerusalem artichokes, is not complete without a mention of the after effects, is it? No, what's weird is that what most people would be more inclined to liken to the miasma surrounding Bridgwater cellophane factory (go on, follow that link, you know you want to) he describes as 'a bower of aromatic perfume'. Now that is strange.

So what have you been doing lately?

I really don't like that question.  It's often asked by the nicest of people, with the kindest of intentions, but also those whose lives seem to be full of meaningful, productive, worldly activity, just hearing about which makes me feel daunted and somewhat tired.  In an instant my existence becomes a void, a slough of idleness, I have nothing to tell them.  Seriously, I often avoid people and let friendships slide because of the widening gaps these moments make evident (I toyed with using 'evidence' as a verb there, and decided against). It's probably not even as though they want an answer anyway, it's just a polite formula, like 'how are you?', to show they are interested and not self-centred, but really, I'd much rather hear all about their busy, active, important lives, and not be required to give an account of myself.

And I suppose blogging is rather the same, though it shouldn't be, since this is the place where the trivial does have value, because it's seen in one's own terms, not in the (perceived) judgement of others, and by and large those who come and comment give me the kindest of affirmation.

So, what have I been doing lately?

Currant confections.  The white currant crop was good but the red currant one poor, a consequence of the cold late spring I think. Both red and white currants are the principal ingredient of Bar-le-Duc jam.  Bar-le-Duc is a village in the Berry region (appropriately), the jam has been made there since 1300.  It is the most expensive jam in the world, because each and every currant has its seeds individually removed by hand while being left intact, then is suspended in the syrup jelly.  This act of fructal evisceration is performed by ladies wielding the sharpened quill of a goose, who rejoice in the job description épépineuse.  

I think it is largely the pips, visibly suspended in the gel inside the translucent skins, like tiny vegetal souls awaiting rebirth into another realm, which make the currants so beautiful.  We decided to grow currants partly with a view to serving them with oysters, having tasted this in a restaurant once.  However, we have never got up the nerve to buy, open and serve our own oysters, fearing injured hands.  But the currants, we find, go well with all kinds of things, scattered on green salad, with chicken or pork, either straight or sautéed (awful Franglais) with a little honey, or with oily fish. We don't mind the pips.  We had about half a kilo, which amounts to quite a few currants.  I froze some and sweet pickled a small jar. Unfortunately, once suspended in pickling syrup they look less like pearly soul-vessels and much more like frogspawn.

Knitting, of course. Just a week after the materials arriving I'm already fifty inches (I had gone almost entirely metric in recent years but find that with taking up the needles I am slipping back into imperial) into Emily's Hufflepuff scarf.  I have also found a source of good quality German felting wool in lovely colours close at hand and am wondering whether if we live out of the garden for a few weeks, I can afford to go and stock up on it, and make felted slippers for everyone. I've requested a basketwork chest for Christmas or birthday to accommodate my growing wool stash, like the one we have for blankets and linen, the kind of thing that used to be called an Ottoman, an instance of the most cosy and banal, possibly feminine, of domestic items being named after a culture conventionally perceived as fairly fierce and butch; the other one that come to mind is calling those sweet old crochet blankets 'Afghans'.  Now how many Pushtun tribesmen do you see wrapping themselves up in granny squares to keep themselves warm in the Tora Bora region, I ask you? I'll probably do a knitting post soon with photos anyway.

Sea swimming, again.  It was as clear as Gordons' gin but much warmer.

Prom watching and listening.  Loved Rachmaninov's 2nd.

Courgette cutting - argh, the marrows are coming! (Despite grating them into Spanish omelette and anything else I can think of, thanks Joe).  I'll post pictures of the bed they grow in later.

Munching mussels; you should photograph that, said Tom.

There's a shortage of other bivalve sea-food with which to make coquillages farcies just now, especially since we're scared to open oysters.  I resorted to buying frozen scallops and putting them into the empty halves of the mussel shells for variety.

Picking up pine cones.  Sometimes when Mol and I are out we do this, we gather quite a few over the summer when they drop, and burn them the following winter.  On one occasion I brought one in and put it down on a pile of renovation materials and forgot it.  When Tom went to use said materials, he lifted the pine cone and, in the words of the old story, it came apart in his hand. This strange Fibonacci marquetry was revealed:

Sadly seeking Cyril. He became quite bold, coming frequently in the day for his hazelnuts,

I would often hear quite a loud sawing noise as he got into them, he clearly knew we were around and that he was being watched.

He always picked the nuts up with his mouth, only using his 'hands' to manoeuvre and manipulate them.

After a while though, only one or two nuts would be taken, and now he comes no more.  I don't know enough about their life cycles, perhaps they are fairly nomadic according to the season, or perhaps he was a she and was only desperate enough for food to come while feeding young.  I hope nothing's happened to him, but one can't protect wild creatures much really.

There he was gone.

I have painted the bathroom extension, on the outside, though not the window surrounds or wall plate.  It's been about fifteen years since I last did it; beige rosé has been re-marketed as ochre de Provence but it looks the same colour, and now it's water-based like almost all paint, which is a vast improvement. While it's satisfying to see it done, and good to feel confident on a ladder again, I'm slightly shocked and disappointed at how my energy levels have waned in that time.  Then, I remember, I undertook to get the whole job - scrubbing it down with the village Karcher, a high pressure water-cleaner that was joint owned by a couple of local households and which was handed round according to need, a situation one couldn't imagine now - applying primer then topcoat (it was bare rendering), and painting the window frames - done in about four days while we were waiting for something else, like a delivery of slates for the roof or something.  I didn't even use a roller, just a wide brush which I thought would be less messy, and a couple of our elder women neighbours stood by making supportive and curious comments: Why not use a roller?  Isn't she hard-working! Well yes but if we were thirty-six again... This time I did it over a much longer time, but was still exhausted almost to tears by the end of the final roller coat.  I did do all of that part of the job in one day, a hot one and working my way round to the hottest side at the end, because I couldn't face the thought of cleaning up the roller and tray then having to get it all out again, and the roller, loaded with masonry paint, is remarkably heavy, but still, I felt too much like beaten.

Coming back to Proust listening at long last, over four years from when I started the project. Having tidied and reclaimed my blue room, and with work in my hands to be done and listening easier really than reading, it's been a good moment to pick it up again. I abandoned it for long periods, boggled by his bizarre and frankly nasty obsessions with same-sex relations, culminating in and made almost worthwhile by the hilarious and surreal flagellation of a disappointed Baron de Charlus by a bored and kind-hearted sailor whose heart just isn't in it, spied upon by a shocked if prurient Marcel through an interior window. The strange episode at the Guermantes' where everyone has turned into white-haired, wrinkled benign old people, in a lapse of time that can't seem to be accounted for, seems to chime with the sense that I have on waking sometimes, that here I am in my fifties, and how has this happened, when I was only back there just then? Or indeed, when the paintwork on the outside wall needs renewing, those neighbours who were in their sixties and seventies then are in their eighties and nineties now, that years and seasons and fruit and vegetable crops and animals and birds, and people, come and go, always changing and always the same, and people ask 'So what have you been doing lately?' and there doesn't seem to be much to say in response.

Otherwise, not a lot of reading, still less writing.  I did, however, enjoy The Secret Life of Objects by Dawn Raffel, which also inspires an idea, perhaps.

Proust, port and other pretty or peculiar things.

"Proust's in here, Mol," said Tom, indicating the bathroom of the blue-ceilinged room, which I am painting simply cream this time " I think Lucy's with him."

They'd just come back from a foray to Leroy-Merlin, seeking more materials (Did I really just supply a link to Leroy-Merlin's English language webpage? Expatriosis must be terminal...). We're trying to get this room done for when his daughter and her family come at the weekend. They're only staying for the weekend, so it's not really necessary to be busting a gut to this extent, as they could doubtless make shift perfectly happily with less finished accommodation, but we find deadlines can be useful and challenging, even when they are artificially imposed.

However, the pressure brings Tom's perfectionism to pathological levels, and it gets difficult to stop. I concluded the only way I was going to get time to do this blog was be reclaiming my 6 o'clock in the morning habit, but as I rolled groggily out of bed, I was only too aware my boon companion was extrememely alert already.

" I'm terribly worried about the varnish round the door" he told me.

"Shut up and go back to sleep for god's sake."

Molly is disgruntled at our attention being shifted away from the sofa, the kitchen and outside. She is at a time of her yearly cycle when nest-making becomes important, and insists on living dangerously among the dust sheets in the bathroom to make her point.

(She has had another abscess by her ear, which threw us into momentary misery, but it didn't seem so painful this time, and with all the regular vets being away on holiday, we saw a very kindly retired locum, who was inclined to be less needle and scalpel happy and more hands-off, and he prescribed oral antibiotics and a regime of cleaning, which seems to have worked fine, fingers crossed...)

" That Proust bloke always pisses off when I come into the room." says Tom, suspiciously.

"That's because he's a great big wuss," I reassure him, adding for good measure, "and a mummy's boy and a big girl's blouse" to allay the creeping jealousy he is evidently feeling about my current devotion to darling Marcel, who is, of course, all of those things, none of which prevents him from being sublime. In fact I turn the CD player off because I need to concentrate on listening and if we chat, or fret about varnish round doors, or whatever, I miss bits.

Which brings me on to Lovely Things Coming in the Post. This from Joe.

I had just been thinking that it would be really handy to have some kind of reference of who was who and where and how they fitted into the scheme of things, and was there a real place that Balbec was based on and wondering if I could afford more time on-line searching for such things, and little did I know that not only did such a book exist but a copy of it was already winging its way toward me! Now, without even possessing the full print text, but armed with a set of CDs, this book and Alain de Botton's 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' - another of the things that spurred me on to undertake this project, I am well on the way in my career as an apprentice Proustian.

And it really is a project. I do need the text, and preferably two translations at least, because the latest Penguin one is doubtless fine but really one needs Moncrieff as well, and I would really like it in French, not because I'm ready to embark on reading it in the original in its entirety but because sometimes something comes up where I really want to know how it was rendered. For example, when little Marcel reads in a grove of hornbeam and savours the other charms of the garden, is there a pun on the word 'charme'? Does Proust descend to puns, even such dainty ones? (Come on, all French people descend to puns, all the time...). And when he refers to Gilberte's 'wisdom', I'm thinking no, that's not right, Gilberte may be many things but wise isn't one of them, but perhaps it's 'sagesse', as in un enfant sage, that she is 'being good'. In other words, I want to be a smartarse to myself, perhaps to cover for the lack of profound and pithy things I really have to say. But I am just a beginner after all.

So, yes, with three sets of text, a set of CDs, sundry works of reference and comment, plus enough room to spread them all out, one could really set up a whole room of the house consecrated to total Proust immersion. Joe probably has.

At about the same time, Lovely Sister, (who is sometimes capitalised, sometimes not), sent me a parcel with this dear little pen in it,

along with a DVD of 'The Painted Veil', which I haven't watched yet. I'm slightly uncertain that the blurb describes it as 'a captivating love story', which from what I remember of the book, from about 30 years ago when I read it, it wasn't exactly, but perhaps I'm wrong, and the scenery certainly looks sumptuous.

The garden is sadly neglected in this blitz on interior work, but with all this, nature is never spent, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things... it carries on doing pretty things all on its own, like these snapdragons that had the nous to seed themselves right in front of the red grasses,

Japanese anemones, which are very easy-going,

and gladioli. These flowers are an area of some horticultural divergence of opinion, Tom wants to grow them, and I am not inclined. I am not, be assured, a garden snob, their vulgarity doesn't bother me; I like blousy rhododendrons, sky and cobalt blue hydrangeas, all sorts of loud dahlias, and many many plants and flowers that rate very poorly in terms of what is usually considered good taste. It's just that gladdies seem to be somehow on the wrong scale, and their colours and texture seem to me to be of some different material than that of other plants and flowers, and they have a lamentable tendency to keel over without much provocation.

However, I am prepared to make an exception of these lime green ones, which are smaller and finer than the others.

Evening primrose happily plant themselves all over the place, and are much more subtle in their demeanor,

and, its dismally jolly and unimaginative name notwithstanding, the Golden Celebration rose is a delight every year. It also smells gorgeous.

If I were a cricket, I'd probably want to live inside one too.

Going short of exercise and having to take pills smeared with butter, on account of her being poorly and our being busy, Molly has put on weight. Once she was better, and I had literally painted myself into a corner and could do no more until it was properly dry, a longer walk down the la Tantouille road and a visit to the mirabelle hedge was in order. The late, fine spring at the time when the trees were in blossom, and some sunshine in the intervening months, have, as I hoped, produced a good crop. So it'll be tarte aux mirabelles for Dick's visit, and perhaps some more foraging by way of entertainment for next weekend's visitors.

"Let's have a glass of white port to celebrate." I proposed.

"Celebrate what?"

"Getting a new bottle of white port?"

I'll end this tour of what I've found on my camera and other matters of little import with a whimsical interior shot of the sunlight filtering throught the not very effective fly curtains and falling on the telelvision table and stand. This was rather inspired by some of the photos on Jean's blog 'à la recherche de l'Absolu'. I've seen this one on other people's blogrolls for ages, so I'm probably very slow coming to it, but I find it a most compelling photo blog, especially the ones of quite ordinary aspects of life - often interiors, a plainly tiled corridor, a stainless steel tea pot and some glasses, the sun on rush-seated chairs, or the green tops of some leeks - but with the light catching and penetrating them in such a way that they sometimes become quite transcendent. I hate to say it, but what with the title and all, it's just a little bit Proustian...