Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New blog

Please note that I have started a new blog called Cetera, also on Blogger, which is to contain every entry that isn't either attempting to be literary or about the garden. The first post is some pictures of today, showing a short walk and some odds and ends at home. I hope you like it!

http://whereeverythingelsegoes.blogspot.com/

Friday, February 6, 2009

Writers are Other People

Writers are Other People. They write; I read: that's how it goes. I'm not saying they're all members of the Garrick or sit about in dressing gowns smoking Gitannes and scaring small children, but... they are Notme.

It's a bit like top French wine: I just can't imagine it being local. It seems inherantly foreign. Not so physically remote perhaps but just as exotic as oriental silk, sultry spices or a palm-fringed beach.

Ideas like this are fun to indulge, but some of the potential implications turn out to be false, and inhibitingly so. It isn't the case that whatever is local must be inferior. As it happens there's a vineyard up the road from us which, for a price, can sell you a remarkably fine bottle of wine. Any small town might harbour a shop, a workshop, or a great factory, in which goods are produced that are the best in the world; distance may lend the goods an alluring unfamiliarity, but to someone, they're local.

"There is a woman within you who already wears Pethek Philippe."

So went the seductive advertising slogan - or at least I found it so, in my more susceptible days (ahem). But there is a writer, who is me. How good she is I don't know (and I doubt she'll ever afford a posh Swiss watch on the proceeds). But I have met her.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The garden blogosphere

We stare into our fires and plan our seeds,
and feast in heated rooms against the cold;
our gardens sleep while others' blaze with green:
a Mexican wave of flowering laps the Earth.

Young human generations unfurl now,
but garden time runs true, life's orrery:
ephemera preserved for them in blogs,
while your reflected sunshine joins our fires.

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[I apologise for cross-posting this with my other blog.]