http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajy0w1XPJk8
We'll do it all, everything
On our own
We don't need anything
Or anyone
If I lay here, if I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know, how to say, how I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough
If I lay here, if I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we're told, before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life
Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
If I lay here, if I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
All that I am, all that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see
I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all
If I lay here, if I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Those Three Words Are Said Too Much
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Early May Sunshine
A week ago, I awoke on the first morning of May to the dawn chorus. It had been warm overnight, and I remember getting up during the darkness to open the windows. When the dawn chorus began a handful of hours later, the birdsong filled and filled my world. Each morning since began mistily, chilly, with heavy condensation coating the lawns, the pots, the car. But during the long drive to work after the school run, the sun appeared and burned off the morning mists, leaving glorious mornings of pale blue skies and the promise of a lovely day ahead.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Corey's Dad
Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. He is just as large now as
when I last saw him. His diminished size and total loss from my sight is in
me, not in him.
And just at the moment when someone at my side says his is gone
That is what dying is.
Lift us up, Oh Lord, that we may see further
Bishop Brent
Sunday, April 06, 2008
On Snowing All Day


Tuesday, April 01, 2008
On Stuff White People Like
I like this blog, it makes me larf.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Alstroemeria In Easter Flowers
On The Arrival Of Frogs And Toads
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
On Avoiding Gardening, Part 2
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Palm Sunday
I see the King of glory
Coming down the clouds with fire
The whole earth shakes, the whole earth shakes
I see His love and mercy
Washing over all our sin
The people sing, the people sing
Hosanna, hosanna
Hosanna in the highest
I see a generation
Rising up to take the place
With selfless faith, with selfless faith
I see a near revival
Stirring as we pray and seek
We're on our knees, we're on our knees
Hosanna, hosanna
Hosanna in the highest
Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like You have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks Yours
Everything I am for Your Kingdom's cause
As I walk from earth into eternity
Hosanna, hosanna
Hosanna in the highest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7SMUf6QcyQ
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Oh Dear
Looks like it's Gay Porn Day over at Pioneer Woman's site...
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Some Kind Of Wonderful
Friday, March 07, 2008
Homesick
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Narcissus Obvallaris
Narcissus obvallaris, or the Tenby daffodil, appears in my garden about three weeks after the little Tete-a-tetes and Jetfires make their appearance around the pond. N. obvallaris is taller and a more buttery yellow than the perfectly-formed wild N. lobularis which has yet to make an appearance. When my little beauties begin to flower, spreading through my garden like a creamy wave of baby smiles, I know that spring is truly here, that the long days of winter are finally behind us and soon I'll be eating breakfast on the terrace again. The cowslips flowered throughout the winter, the prostrate rosemary too. At least the pinks had the decency to stop flowering in December and make a stab at dormancy.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Walk Of The Month: Derbyshire
I've lifted the enclosed in its entirety from this weekend's Daily Telegraph, because that's the view I have driving merci beaucoup enfant deux to school over the mountains. Although obviously, I don't actually climb Stanage Edge...On a pub sign I spotted a likeness of Little John, Hathersage's most famous son. The fierce but genial giant who once tumbled Robin Hood into a stream stood depicted in tunic of untraditional blue, his nickname abbreviated to a curt, if trendy "LJ". Up in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels I found his grave, long enough for two ordinary mortals.
Those who opened the grave in 1784 reported finding an immense thighbone nearly three feet long. Little John's mighty bow and cap of Lincoln green hung in St Michael's Church for hundreds of years; his cottage near the churchyard stood until it was demolished in the 19th century. Whatever the facts about Robin Hood's right-hand man, Hathersage continues to bask in the reflected glory of the Big Man of Sherwood Forest.
I pondered his provenance as I climbed the frost-whitened field paths north of the valley. In the 12th century the Hope Valley lay within the northern bounds of Sherwood Forest. Could bold Robin and brave John have lain among the ancestors of these oaks and beeches, the grey goose-feather flights pulled tight beside their ears, a fine fallow hart in their sights?
The handsome Tudor house of North Lees Hall stands close under Stanage Edge. Its tower spawned a tale in the mind of a 19th-century governess, a fable that has earned an immortality to equal that of Robin and his Merrie Men. Charlotte Brontë first caught sight of the pale stone tower in 1845 when she came for a three-week stay in Hathersage with her friend Ellen Nussey, sister of the village vicar.
The local surname of Eyre caught Charlotte's inner ear, too. Soon Jane Eyre would apprehensively approach the dark tower of Thornfield Hall, lair of the saturnine Mr Rochester: "It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look."
Those battlements were the setting for one of the most dramatic scenes in literature, as poor mad Mrs Rochester made her final bid for freedom from a terrible fire she had started: "...she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off... She...had long black hair; we could see it streaming against the flames as...Mr Rochester ascended through the skylight...we saw him approach her; and then, ma'am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement."
Stanage Edge, the rocky rim of what was once a gigantic dome of millstone grit, is a climbers' and boulderers' heaven. The grey adhesive rock, fractured into steps, cracks and layers, offers challenges to test tyro and expert alike. Famous names from that introverted, macho and phenomenally athletic world, the hardest of the "hard man" school - Don Whillans, Nat Allen, Joe Brown - cut their teeth along these modest-looking crags.
They and their successors dubbed every climbable crack and interstice with names superbly curt and clipped: Goliath's Groove, Agony Crack, The Unconquerables, The Vice, Blockhead Direct, Queersville, Eliminator.
I strode the flat, tricky gritstone pavement along the Edge, face to the wind, in a kind of high-level ecstasy. Climbers crouched and sprawled in impossibly heroic poses on every crag. Beyond them, a most enormous view opened to the south and west across the frosted fields and shadowy moors and edges of the Dark Peak. To the left ran cream and purple moors, the wind streaming their pale grasses so that the whole wide upland appeared to be in motion, racing north into Yorkshire.
Quitting Stanage Edge at last did not mean quitting these wonderful heights. Higger Tor and Carl Wark lay ahead, flat-topped tors like castles. I stormed their walls in an outpouring of supercharged energy.
Then, breathless and buffeted by the cold and wind, I dropped down through tumbled meadows around Mitchell Field Farm and the mock-baronial miniature fortress of Scraperlow House; down towards Hathersage, the warmth and light of the Scotsmans Pack inn, and the grey church spire that marks where Little John lies sleeping until Robin's horn wakes him for one last chase through the glades of the eternal Forest."
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Freezing February Morning

Saturday, February 09, 2008
This beautiful picture appears on the Telegraph's website this morning, and makes a delicious header for my list of gardening tasks to do this morning. Clear skies overnight made for a stunning display of stars, and a "red sky in the morning," dawn. Makes it jolly cold, too. So here I am, my breakfast of toasted prune and chocolate bread and the ubiquitous cup of tea to hand, listing tasks;Of course, it's far too early to be moving the damson, as stone fruits really need delicate and well-timed handling. But sometimes irritability outweighs horticultural sense. Now let's get moving, we have a glorious morning in the garden calling to us.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
"You could ride an elephant through the Tube and no-one would be particularly surprised."
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Early Morning And A Dusting Of Snow

Friday, February 01, 2008
Friday Five: What Are You Eating This Week?
Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide. Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
United States: The Revis family of North Carolina. Food expenditure for one week $341.98
Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11

Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca. Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 MPesos or $189.09 .
Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna. Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27 
Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo. Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
Bhutan: The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village. Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp. Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFAFrancs or $1.23
Sunday, January 20, 2008
I Want, I Want, I Want.


Ungrateful wretch, I know. But I enjoy this gallery's choice of online art, and I really, really, really want someone to buy me these pictures. They are probably sold already, so lucky fellow whomsoever bought them. Oh Abbott & Holder, I surfed into your website a few years ago chasing a link to Edward Ardizzone (now there's an illustrator way out of my reach). I have day dreamed over your lists ever since. Saturday, January 19, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Happy Birthday, London Underground
"Many Happy Returns to the Tube. On the 10th January 1863 the world's first ever public underground line opened. The Metropolitan Line had trains running every 10 minutes and carried 40,000 passengers between Paddington and Farringdon that day."
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Epiphany




Monday, December 31, 2007
This Precious Stone Set In The Silver Sea
This royal throne of kings, this sceptre'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Against the envy of less happier lands,—
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
King Richard II Act ii. Sc. 1.







