Well it has been a wee bit quiet on ‘pining’ for a few days. I’ve been busy with house and garden stuff. Yes, the sun came out and it warmed up enough to go out and cut back more dead stems from last year, like the Michaelmas daisies and all my herbs, things are starting to grow and a female blackbird has actually been gathering nesting material today, I don’t know where she is building it but it seems to be quite luxurious as she was pulling the old mud encrusted and half-rotted water lily pads off the top of the water, I think that’ll be used to draught proof her nest.
My first daffodils should be flowering in a few days but sadly most of my crocuses have looked like burst balloons as all that snow and ice just came at the wrong time and they didn’t get a chance to open properly. My lenten roses are flowering but as usual they’re too low down for anyone to see the flowers, unless you are fairy sized. Next year I’m going to cover them with a large plant pot or something similar, as Beverley Nichols recommends, so that they will grow longer stems to reach the light. So it seems like spring is finally here, although it’s still coldish, especially at night. And here’s a photo which I took on Saturday from Dysart, looking over to the snow covered Pentland hills near Edinburgh. The snow looks quite a bit whiter than the clouds.
I did find some time to read the Guardian Review and thought that some people might be interested in this article by Michael Prodger about John Ruskin. A new book has been published – Marriage of Inconvenience by Robert Brownell – which casts some more light on the reason for the non-consummation of Ruskin’s marriage to Effie Grey. Even this Guardian article was enlightening to me as I hadn’t realised that Ruskin and Effie had been childhood friends as they both grew up in Perth. There’s just one thing that everybody seems to ‘know’ about the Ruskin marriage – yes the pubic hair theory, if you’re interested in another theory have a look here.
There’s also an article by Jeanette Winterson about suffragettes. If you’re interested have a look at Smashing the glass. Winterson mentions Sheryl Sandberg and Pussy Riot too.
The grass in my garden is squelching, as it has been wet for months now but it’s a different situation in the Highlands where the weather has been so dry that moors have been engulfed with flames, have a look here if you don’t believe me!
