loosestrife, grandad, papers

Purple loosestrife after summer's strife becomes a grey tangle, hard and dry.

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On the train to London two little girls run between the seats towards a grey head facing away from them. "We thought you were our grandad, " says one, as she comes level with him. "He's some body's grandad," says the girls' mother apologetically, and one presumes speculatively.

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A Londoner by birth and proximity, even if I haven't always read them, I have always been aware of the City's evening papers. Once there were three, and I can still hear the news vendors shout from street corners: "News, Star and Standard...". The Star was the first to fold. Then it was The Evening News. The Evening Standard still survives, but since my last visit to London, it has become a free paper, having shed its price of 50p in an attempt paradoxically to become solvent. The new owner, a former Russian diplomat, bought the loss-making tabloid for £1.00. The principle is that if you increase the circulation and cut some overheads, greater advertising revenue, will compensate for the loss of revenue from sales, and be enough to begin to make a profit. As a purveyor of information on culture, restaurants and entertainment in London, and helped by its website, perhaps it will now win through. Meanwhile it is good this evening to hear the news vendor outside Charing Cross still calling although his cry has changed to "Free newspaper...Free newspaper."

disintegration, book, seeds

Today's leaf and a flattened wad of chewing gum masquerading as the moon.

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One of these days I will have an electronic reader and I look forward to the convenience and comfort which it will provide. But today, as I start again to survey my shelves for a book, which I read only recently and which now eludes me, I find myself reflecting that there are certain books, which , as far as I am concerned, will always be impossible to replace. There are books that I wouldn't swap for a wilderness of e-readers. This feeling has little to do with the nature of books in general but rather with the relationship built up over the years with specific books. And it is not the content to which I refer; it is rather the familiar signs of usage on a cover or on a page; a coffee stain perhaps; a forgotten bookmark; a marginal note; a dedication; a deteriorating spine; an elusive smell of mustiness or soap. I think of books which have travelled with me to different parts of the world and in time, travelledwith me through 70 years and more. I take one or two down from the shelf. Here is my Oxford University Press The English Poems of John Milton, still holding together although it has sat in countless numbers of my pockets - so much to value in such a small space and yet with a clear, readable type. Countless books would, I know, fit into the same space on an e-reader, but that worn, navy blue cover has been faithful to me and I to it since my schooldays. Another loyal companion is the Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (Price 5/=), which has been repaired with sellotape and whose yellowing pages now recall the aire amarillo of the time before sunset in southern Spain, and the phrase itself, which I must first have come across within its covers. And here is The Faber Book of Comic Verse, which I have read over and over again for it reservoir of wit and fantasy, nonsense and its few shreds of sublime wisdom, which are close to nonsense but go far beyond it. I still fail to find the book I am looking for, but I find a lot else to think about.

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My Autumn digging is now almost complete, and all the beds dug and weeded for the frost, when it comes, to work over. And today, arrives the seed catalogue just at the right time. With the almost empty beds fresh in my mind, I begin to see myself sowing them, and the tidy rows of emergent seedlings that will follow. If Winter comes...

garden, cravat, secure

On a dead branch is this unexpected garden.

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From a note in Balzac's strange novel Le Peau de Chagrin, I learn that the word "cravate" which means a necktie in French, and in English, well....a cravat, comes from the word croate and refers to the ornamental garment, which has been "since the 17th century a part of the uniform of Croatian soldiers." The narrator in the novel refers to some young men as "cravatées à déspérer toute la Croatie"

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All night the wind buffets our house, rattling the windows, and rakes the branches of the lime tree opposite. In the morning I raise the blinds to see if the world has changed, but everything is in its place.

window, doves, enchanter

Dressing up.

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There are nearly always ring doves in the area of The Grove behind Christchurch. Last year there were two, now there are four. This is I suppose their territory. The soft grey of these birds is as gentle as a misty morning.

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The wind is behind me as I cross The Grove this afternoon. If I were a ship I would be scudding before it. In front of me the leaves race as though "from an enchanter fleeing".

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Oh, and Qartsilluni has just published my poem on the theme "Words of power", which I submitted back in September. It is odd but satisfying to me, if to nobody else, to hear my voice droning from the speaker. I can't help feeling as we used to say "chuffed".

dry, starlings, marching

Today's leaf.

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Starlings are back in the Grove. I hear, rather than see them as they gather in one of the trees. What is the collective noun for starlings? In a book which I had as a child there was a list of collective nouns, among them "murmuration" for starlings. Seeking to confirm this, I find the word in the The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. But there, it only signifies "murmuring", and its usage appears to be confined to "late Middle English". No mention of starlings. But my childhood reference and memory are vindicated by Chambers, which calls it a "doubtful word for a flock of starlings". All the same, murmuring is rather an understatement for the noise the birds make when they gather - a sound higher pitched and more raucous than what normally passes for a murmur.

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There is a tall, elderly man of upright bearing who wears an overcoat and a tweed cap. In the summer I have seen him in an old, military beret worn in the army style pulled down over one ear. He is to be found, most afternoons at the entrance to Calverley Precinct, across the road from the hideous Millennium Clock. Here he performs a slow and meditative march, to and fro across the width of the Precinct, his eyes straight before him. He walks so that his heels, hit the ground first, a little before the rest of his foot. It is a sort of slow march but not ostentatious. He is performing for himself and not an audience, in the parade ground of his mind.

umbrella, dandruff, organised

Triangles.

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A new farm produce shop in the High Street is being stocked ready to open next week. In the doorway a man is cutting a plank of wood with a power saw. Pale dust rises in a cloud. A girl moving cartons through the door says: "Hey, you're covering me in dandruff". A notice in the window explains that the staff will be new to the equipment (which includes a juicer behind the bar) and to the products, and asks for the forbearance of customers.

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Another BBC weather forecast phrase to enjoy this morning refers to "organised bands of showers". If I am not mistaken I have in the past heard a forecaster speak of "showers marching across from the West."

print, haiku, goodbye

Sometimes leaves are so forcefully pressed on to the tarmac by passing traffic that they seem to be printed on its surface.

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There can be no better recommendation as far as I am concerned for the new president of Europe than his reputed espousal of the Japanese poetic form known as haiku, and now enthusiastically taken up by some western poets. A haiku (usually set out in three lines of five seven and five syllables, respectively) may, one would like to think, turn out to be an inspiration to other politicians, because of its brevity certainly; but above all because the form requires careful and balanced thinking, sensitivity and a respect for silence. For a haiku should be conceived in silence, end in silence and incorporate a hint of silence in the hiatus, which develops between an initial image and a second concluding image, with its slight jump from one logical impulse to another.

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On the way up Mount Pleasant, I meet a neighbour, who has just left her husband, now getting on in years, up a ladder pruning some shrubs. It begins to rain. "He will be pleased that it's raining, " she says, " so that he can pack up and go in doors." "Doesn't he enjoy gardening ?" I say. "He's not been too well, recently," she observes; " I said goodbye to him before leaving, in case I never see him again."