AS IN THE LONG AGO

I always enjoy planting leeks. Mysteriously, one buys leek plants by the score, although Bartrums of Beccles seemed to lack confidence that the modern gardener would understand the word. They advertised their plants as coming 'about 20 in a bundle'. When I first started growing vegetables in a garden in Yorkshire a long time ago I had a great book called The Vegetable Garden Displayed which was full of photographs of men in hats digging enormous trenches and growing enormous crops of vegetables in black and white gardens. I followed all the instructions meticulously and grew plenty of enormous vegetables. My other favourite vegetable gardening book is Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables by Lawrence D Hills. How come I have mysteriously lost both these books? At least I can still plant leeks because I can still remember how to make a hole, drop the leek in and fill the hole carefully with water. Very satisfying!

I went for a bike ride yesterday and took a look at the new outer harbour which they're building in Great Yarmouth. Yarmouth has a long spit of land which runs south from the tourist area to the harbour mouth, squeezed between the river and the sea, covered with warehouses and storage yards, many of them run-down or apparently derelict. There was once a caravan site here; a place where it was hard to imagine anyone would have ever wanted to stay. Between the road and the sea was a narrow strip of wasteland and a beach that few people walked on, but now it's all changed.    It is strange to see the coastline extending into the sea on a shore that elswhere is being eaten rapidly by the waves. These cranes are supposed to start unloading containers later in the summer, although a male Cassandra with a face burnt almost black by the sun and a couple of diamond earrings told me, as we stood on the Haven bridge watching young men fishing the river for sea bass as the tide swirl...

This is a nice thing to see in the email on a Monday morning!

Almost by accident I found this little gem about Alison Uttley online. When I was a child I don't think it ever occurred to me that it was possible to actually meet the authors of the books about the Famous Five or the Swallows and Amazons or William Brown. Anyway, as far as I was concerned the authors of those books had merely set down accounts of events that had actually happened. I didn't even want my friends to read the same books as me. I was a jealous, possessive reader. If someone else shared my experience it would be diluted. I lived with the characters, imagined myself somehow there beside them. How could there possibly be room in the books for another reader?  I don't know how common an experience this is, but I do know that children often ask me when I've finished telling a story if it's true. I simply tell them that I heard it from someone so that they can carry on believing, if they want to. And then when I have to be an author in front of ...

My favourite collective noun has always been a 'charm' of goldfinches, so it's very nice to have a charm in the field outside my window. There seem to be about a dozen of them, flitting to and fro all day long, and occasionally resting for a moment on the topmost leaves of the winter-flowering viburnum. The list of collective nouns in the back of my primary school English textbook used to fascinate me, and I tried to become expert at remembering them. I loved all those lists - homonyms and synonyms and the rest of them, though I could never quite remember which was which!

They wound me and they bless me  with strange gifts The salt of absence The honey of memory Norman McCaig  I wonder how many people these days feel the resonance of the words wound and bless that occur at the climax of this deceptively simple poem? (the full text is a couple of posts back) There was a time when almost everyone would have recognized that the words, used in conjunction, have a religious significance. I cannot hear them without thinking of the images of Jesus that haunted my Catholic childhood, one hand raised in blessing, the other indicating a chest apparently split by a gaping wound which reveals a beating heart within, and which echoes that other wound, the one in Jesus's side which Thomas felt obliged to test by inserting his fingers.  Strangely though, I stopped believing in God when I was seven years old, about the time when I made my first confession and God took no punitive action when I failed to admit all my sins. I then proceeded to take m...

Well, I was going to fit these photographs tastefully into the post about Norman MacCaig, but I couldn't make them go where I wanted them, so here they are in a new place. The first picture was taken in April. I stumbled into this ruined village by accident - it wasn't marked on the map. The other two were on a misty August afternoon. It was a very rainy week and I was lucky to be able to see anything at all. I don't suppose you'll ever see a crowd on the top of this hill, like the one we met on top of Snowdon this Easter, as you have to walk several miles before you can start climbing.