Now lockdown is over for a while I’ve stopped baking bread. Unfortunately I didn’t shut the cupboard door where all the bread flour is kept – spelt, wholemeal, wholemeal with seeds, white with seeds, white without seeds, rye…. And also unfortunately the cupboard is in the same room that Noa sleeps in at night. When I came down in the morning she and the floor were covered in flour mix – all the packets had been dutifully chewed and their contents scattered to the four corners of the room. What made it worse was that she’d gone outside in the rain and had turned herself into a pastry dog. It took a lot of clearing up and washing her down. At least she didn’t find the yeast or she might have turned into a large seeded loaf.
Here she is sitting stubbornly in the stubble. Too late for the wheat
to add to her flour collection.
All the birds have gone now but there was a time when there was just one crow left. I left the door wide open so it could leave whenever it wanted but for ages it didn’t. Sometimes it would wander off outside but always returned. However one of his jackdaw friends would come back daily for a chat and a bit of grub. I’d find them sitting together. Discussing this and that. Here’s a picture of when two crows remained and the jackdaw came back the first time. So now as Autumn approaches they have all flown off to make new lives for themselves. The jackdaw though still appears in the eucalyptus tree in the garden and chatters away. He/she can see the chimney from there and I daresay is planning a takeover come Spring to make a nest up there.
I asked Pocket how his play writing was going and he told me he was considering writing one called The Mousetrap. I said that had been written a long time ago by Agatha Christie and was still running in the West End (the butler did it.) He curled back his upper lip and said that didn't matter as he’d had one accepted already called Pocket on a Hot Tin Roof. I said don’t you mean Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams? Exactly he sighed and did I know any actor managers because as well as penning it he thought he would star in it. You're getting too big for your boots I told him. Mmmmm - he replied - good title for my original new pantomime then - Puss in Boots.
The lilies rescued from the garden before the lily beetles could get them have cast their intoxicating smell throughout the house.
The Just
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please
him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid), in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems
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