Monday in brief

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Some days, I somehow manage to avoid the radio entirely. I have been reading and working. (996 words of book.) I look up at almost six o'clock and find I have no idea what is going on in the world. I find this both disconcerting and oddly calming. Instead of pondering geo-political developments, I go outside to look at my new fruit trees, which have just arrived. There are cooking apples and eating apples and plums and pears and cherries. I feel as excited as if someone has just given me a prize. The poor old eucalyptus might have died in the winter storms, but I have plums and pears.

Am still slightly overcome by the cascade of kindness which greeted yesterday's post. You are a most remarkable group of readers. After Sunday's attack of melancholy, I am now back to determined but tempered optimism. The dear dog, as if sensing this, appears much more cheerful, and spent her afternoon flirting with the kind gentlemen who came to dig in the trees. (I would so love to pretend that I did it myself, in true bucolic fashion, but, like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie, especially not about trees.)

The weather is very low and still. There is an odd feeling that time has stopped. The only hint of the world outside is the sudden roar of a fighter jet, coming low over the trees, probably from Lossiemouth, headed for who knows where. The bright deserts of Libya, perhaps.

Things are slowly growing. Today's pictures are of the growing things.

And other things of ravishing beauty:

The hill today, even in the low light, was a thing of splendid colours: