I’ve come downstairs early this morning, to sit at peace in the new day. Radio 3 is on, but quiet. The new person I knew was starting today opening with “On the nature of daylight.” Gorgeously.
Outside, the sky as I got up was a suspicious pinky-orange, like it’s still having the named storm of yesterday. So perhaps there’ll be no allotment. Though I’d like to get some of those cabbage-collar things the allotment shop’s got, for when I plant all the brassicas this week. The first batch of them - cabbages, sprouts and cauliflowers, nurtured here on the back step for long enough now, are all separated out and ready to go.
I’m reading “Seed to Dust”1 again, at least the early part of the book. Where I’d made no notes of things I wanted to remember. Because for the first fifty or more pages of any book I’m never sure whether I’ll read the rest of it. And at least half the time don’t. So I was feeling my way in this one until about then, when the special things and my notes of them began. So many of them before the book was anywhere near finished, that I decided to take the library’s copy back and buy my own paperback version. Easier to carry round, and now it’s mine I can make any marks I want in its margins. Which I’ve already started doing,
Beginning what I suspect will be the book’s life. To be like one of those breviarys the priests at school used to have. Aids to contemplation I believe they were. Like “Waiting For the Last Bus”2 has already has been for me, for several years now. These are the only books I end up keeping, ones with a continuing purpose.
As for today, I will make no plans. I hardly ever do now. Now the diary’s mostly empty and my life is mostly, and happily, this quiet. The wind outside is still high and the dawn sky still looks stormy. So this is going to be a day off even the mildest of to do lists. I’ll read, definitely walk and there are those cabbage things from the allotment shop I might get. But they’re all the ideas I have or want, here in this quiet of an early day.
“Seed To Dust: A Gardener’s Story” Marc Hamer, Penguin/Random House, 2021.
“Waiting For the Last Bus” Richard Holloway, Canongate Books, 2019.