Readers’ questions: on grass and writing and weeds.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Note:

Excessively long, I am afraid. You might want to get a nice cup of tea before reading.

 

Today is Readers’ Questions, because a Dear Reader asked an interesting writing question a couple of days ago, and I thought I am sometimes very naughty at not replying to queries. So I must remedy the omission.

Ages ago, someone asked if horses can live on grass alone. The wonderful thing is they can. Horses in hard work need hard food, and some do drop condition and need more attention than others; also you have to be careful about laminitis, one of those horrid equine diseases which comes from grass and affects the hoof. But essentially, if you are lucky, the answer is: yes.

I was thinking about this because of all the attendant worries of having a horse, and a thoroughbred in particular. I do get fretful about Red sometimes, and have to drop everything and dash up to make sure she is all right. Normally, she has just been given carrots by her packs of admirers, and is dozily grazing, or gazing out to the west, which she watches as if it were a fascinating television programme. She looks up at me as if to say: what are you fussing about? And then I feel a bit foolish. But her well-being is the thing I carry closest to my heart, just now.

And here is where I struck the equine lottery. She is what the old horsemen call a really good doer. It was one of my late father’s finest compliments for a horse. It means that they happily eat all their food, without fuss. Some horses are terrible picky eaters, or refuse to eat up at all, and cause no end of scratched heads. A good doer also looks well on a pretty simple diet, and causes no worries. When Red first arrived, I sent off for all manner of special foods and supplements, determined to treat her like a queen. Turns out: I need not have bothered. She thrives on the good spring grass, is well-muscled, has exactly the right amount of weight on her, and her coat is soft and glossy. She is the best doer I ever saw.

The second question is the writing question. Anon asked, of the book: ‘How long has it taken you to write it? Is it fiction and how do you approach it? Structured, unstructured, just write whatever you can, basic idea?’

Anon describes themselves as: ‘Just a person with a burning question and a headful of random words. And just fascinated to know how you do it all.’

Anon: this is a very, very dangerous question indeed, because I could write about it for hours. I’ll try and keep it as brief as possible.

This book is non-fiction, and has taken months and months. This is partly because it took a lot of research, and also I got a bit lost and screwed up the first draft, and so there was a very slow and painful re-write.

On a more general level, let’s take the basic idea question. Here I do have a rule. I often tell beginning writers that really there are no rules; trust your heart and bugger on. But my rule for the central idea is quite strict. It is: write the book you want to buy in the bookshop but can’t. It must be the idea that fascinates you; that will not leave you alone; that dogs you and bugs you and wakes you in the night. This is partly because you are going to have to live with it for an awfully long time. It is also because readers have a finely tuned radar for passion. Someone wiser than I once said: if your writing does not keep you up nights, it won’t keep anyone else up either.

Structure is a very big question, with no easy answer. For fiction, I think the three act structure of the screenplay is quite a useful tool. (William Goldman is the best man to read for this.) There are little tricks which can help, like finishing a chapter on a question or a moment of tension, and always starting a scene half way through. So, you don’t have to have someone coming through the door, taking their coat off, sitting down; instead, start with them shouting ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me the dog was dead?’

For non-fiction, structure is even more various. I like to start with a big overview chapter, and then try and follow the subject through reasonably thematically. A big, serious chapter might be followed by a snappy, more light-hearted one. Varying the tone is really helpful, as it keeps the thing alive; otherwise you risk sounding as if you are just playing one note. If the random words are a problem, you can help by giving your chapters strict, one word headings, like Love or Food, which will help to corral your thoughts.

Oh, and you don’t always have to start at the beginning. This sounds a bit mad, but it works. Say you are writing a memoir: it might be better to charge in with the pivotal scene of greatest drama rather than the much duller: I was born. (Personally, I always rather skip the childhoods; I want to get to the meat, which happens in the adult years.) This idea comes back to the notion of the hook, which is another screenwriting device. What’s the hook? What is the one thing that is going to grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and make them sit up and take notice? That may be your beginning.

The best advice I can give to anyone who has words in the head and does not know how to get them onto the page is: just start. But you may need psychological tricks to bash through the fear barrier. The fear is generally that of being judged, and the neophyte terror that you simply do not know what you are doing. Do not worry. I have been doing this job for nearly twenty years, and often I don’t have a damn clue what I am doing. I just bash bash bash the fingers on the keys, even on the darkest day. So your best trick is to make it a secret. This takes away the fear. Set up a file called Top Secret, swear you will show it to no one, so no human will be able to point and laugh, and let yourself rip.

It doesn’t matter if it is crap. First drafts are always awful, anyway. Let it go. Give yourself permission to be as wild and unrestrained and quirky and goofy as possible. Put Mozart on at full blast. Forget about the rules. Enjoy yourself. Let the words dance. Doesn’t matter if they are all doing different steps. You can fix everything in the second draft.

Try and write every day, even if it is only for five minutes. This builds up muscle memory. Read until your eyes give out. Particularly read the kind of books you want to write, to get into the rhythms of your chosen genre. If you find yourself getting stale, read poetry, even if you are not writing it, to remind yourself what leaping miracles words can perform, just in their bare selves. (I especially recommend Eliot for this, and most especially, Prufrock.) Love your thesaurus. Be specific. Avoid jargon. Don’t be afraid of using unexpected words, or minting novel phrases, but be aware of the golden rules of grammar. Clarity is queen.

My own personal bugbear is the dangling modifier, which is mostly a clarity thing. It is also because I think your readers need to feel safe; they want to know they are in the hands of a pro. If you dangle a modifier, there is the danger the reader will not respect you in the morning.

How do I do it? Determination, cussedness, love, and a lot of coffee. Also: monomania and obsession. I get insane tunnel vision when I am deep in a book, and can think of nothing else. It’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of when I go to bed. I adore language; I obsess over the semi-colon. I think too writers need to be stupidly curious. The received wisdom will never do. Why, why, why? is the endless question. I dig and prod and poke at the human condition, and sometimes it drives me nuts that I shall never get to the bottom of it. Writing is my puny attempt to scratch at the meaning of things.

And finally, you might, if you are very lucky, make some cash or get some praise, but that is not what you are in it for. I’ve had crashing failures, and wilderness years, and some fleeting moments in the sun. Oddly, they are not that different. The thing that matters is the writing itself. That’s where you find the love and satisfaction and reward. Any cheques or compliments are only the icing. The putting of words into sentences is the cake.

One final question. A reader asked if I had help with my weeds. I do indeed have a very kind, very young gentleman who comes, and for a small hourly fee, battles my ground elder. (I refuse to use chemicals, so it is rather a scourge.) The only problem is that on account of his extreme youth and doughty determination, he pulled up all my mint the other day, in a frenzy of bed-clearing. For a moment, I was disproportionately sad. I love my mint. But I can plant some more, and not having to fight the ground elder on my own is worth a little disaster every so often. So I put a smile on my face and made a very great deal of mint tea.

And, finally, finally, thank you all so much for your very kind comments on the end of the damn manuscript. It was like having a little squad of cheerleaders, and I was really, really touched.

 

Some Sunday pictures for you.

When I get grumpy about the rain, and the gloomy June weather, I remind myself that it does produce this wonderful green:

A Dear Reader asked for hens; so there are hens:

This is the face Red makes after I have been working with her. I love this face. See how her head is down, which means she is completely relaxed. Her ears are pricked, and her jaw is soft, and her eyes are a little dreamy. I could look at that dear face all day long:

And off she goes, her work done, to have her lunch:

Her view:

As I drove away from her this morning, this is what I saw in the woods:

And this, this, is the face the Pigeon makes when I say the word ‘biscuit’. She really should have been on the stage; she is wasted in real life:

No hill today; the cloud has come down and there is only grey sky where there should be a blue peak.

Out of step

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

WARNING FOR LENGTH, RANTING, POLITICS OVERLOAD, AND CONTRARINESS.

Years ago, London’s glittering West End put on a show called The Play Wot I Wrote. (Or something similar; too tired to Google.) It was a huge, whacking, roaring, screeching success. People fought in the streets for tickets. Hardened critics sobbed with joy.

I ruthlessly sold my grandmother and got tickets. I took my lovely Man of Letters and his Beloved, as a very, very special treat.

The theatre was packed to the gunnels. (I am sure that will go soon onto John Rentoul’s banned list, so I am using it while I can.) Almost from the moment the actors came on stage, people started to bark with laughter. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I checked my funny bone. No tickling yet. Never mind, it would surely come.

It never did. For two excruciating hours, I sat, with a face like stone, whilst the rest of the audience rocked and wept with hilarity. At one point, the waves of laughter were so corporeal it felt like being on board ship in a high swell.

I did not dare look at the MOL. I did not hear him laughing, but perhaps he was shrieking on the inside. As we filed out of the theatre, the three of us looked at each other, a little island of solemnity amidst the happy crowds.

‘Awful,’ we all said in unison. ‘AGONY.’

There was a tremendous, streaming comfort in knowing that at least we had each other. But we spent most of dinner discussing what was wrong with us. We could not work out why we were so utterly out of step with the taste of the great British public, the chattering classes, and the theatrical establishment. Sometimes it’s rather a lovely idea, being a contrarian; sometimes it just makes you feel slightly peculiar.

I had that over the MPs’ expenses. I could see it was bad and regrettable and wrong, but I did not see that it was the most scandalous scandal that had ever hit British politics. I remember thinking at the time that it was nothing like as bad as the scandal of the billions of pounds wasted on IT projects that did not work, or the fact the soldiers in Afghanistan did not have boots, or the practice of extraordinary rendition, and no one made a huge fuss about those for week after week.

I start to feel the same about the hacking scandal, and its political ramifications. It’s a fascinating story; it’s a shocking crossing of journalistic lines; it should absolutely be remedied. But it’s being treated as if it is the only news just now. Is it really as important as the fact that the entire Euro Zone is teetering on the brink? If the Euro goes smash, on account of Greece defaulting and God knows what happening in Italy, Portugal and Spain, then the banking crisis will look like the Teddy Bears’ picnic.

At the very same time, even if President Obama finally gets a deal on the debt ceiling, the ratings agencies are threatening to downgrade America’s credit rating. This sounds very dry and geekish, but it will have unintended consequences as far as the eye can see. (One clever person I know speculates it could even spell the collapse of NATO.)

Gold is shooting through the roof, always a sure sign that the people who know are panicking. I am starting to consider getting goats and planting carrots and going self-sufficient.

As all this outrage rages, it is quietly reported, by a journalist who should know, that the head of one electricity company took delivery, last week, of a large home generator. Old coal-fired plants are reaching the end of their lives; there has been no coherent policy announcement about what to do to replace them. The CEO clearly knows something we do not: there is a real danger that the lights will start to go out. Along with the keeping of goats and the growing of root vegetables, I may have to start collecting firewood and stockpiling candles.

Disproportion is always a worry, in any story. I still can’t get over George Monbiot saying ‘this is our Berlin Wall moment’, when Mr Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB was withdrawn. Now, people are starting to say: Worse than Watergate. Twitter is alive with reports that William Hill has the odds of David Cameron resigning at 8-1.

As I write, the House of Commons is baying at the Prime Minister over the matter of Andy Coulson. Apparently, according to the Leader of the Opposition, this is the most important matter of the day. Over the last two weeks, he has repeatedly said that he is acting on behalf of the People of Britain. ‘The People think,’ he says. ‘The People want to know.’ When the BSkyB bid failed, he actually said: ‘This is a victory for the People.’ A poll out yesterday revealed that six percent of The People put the hacking scandal in their top ten concerns. SIX PERCENT.

It’s a very easy thought experiment. Imagine you have just lost your job. Is your number one worry that the Prime Minister hired Andy Coulson? Or would you not want to know what his policy is for employment, economic growth, and the welfare state? Would you consider it a resigning matter that his erstwhile Director of Communications once edited The News of the World, or would you hold your fire until you see what he will do when Greece defaults?

It’s not that political leaders and newspaper tycoons should not be held accountable for their decisions, but that there should be a sense of proportion. But I suppose that does not make for a sexy headline.

It’s not that I am not interested. I’m slightly embarrassingly interested. It’s geek heaven. But it’s not the most important thing in the world, and I worry that it is being treated as if it were.

And one more thing, since I am ranting. I feel embarrassed and ashamed that all this newspaper dodginess happened on the watch of a Labour Party for which I voted. I voted for them proudly, until Gordon Brown lost me. There is something slightly odd about the current tone of self-righteousness coming from the Left, when it was Mr Blair and Mr Brown who were all over Mr Murdoch, with tea parties and weekends and flying visits and wedding trips and the horridly named ‘slumber parties’. Where was the outrage then? And how does the outrage now actually help in the running of a very complicated country? I’m just asking.

I suppose I should at least be grateful that all these questions are taking my mind off my bashed old heart. Perhaps I should stop being cross and write all those shouty outragers a nice thank you letter.

And, to reward you for your patience, here are some diverting pictures of the garden and the trees and the sheep and the DOG:




































Look at old Posy Posington, all ready for her close-up. At least she knows what is important. To whit: biscuits, and rabbits. Oh, and The Love, of course. Perhaps she should be running the country.

Really must stop now, before I am entirely overcome by whimsy.

Writing Workshop, Day Five.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Last day, my darlings. I salute all of you who have stuck with it.

Some practical matters, and other ephemera, which may or may not be helpful. As always, take what you want and leave the rest:

Work out how you work best. Some people prefer a pen and pad; some find typing much easier. If you do not know how to touch type, and there is a way you could learn, learn. It only takes a couple of weeks. If there was one piece of advice I would give to any young person, it is: learn to type.
Do you need silence? Or is silence overwhelming? I often write to Mozart. The scientists say he stimulates parts of the brain other composers do not reach. I’ll take any help I can get.

Get a really good thesaurus. Get in the habit of using it. Read it for fun. It is a good habit to go rummaging for the exact right word; do not put up with second best. On the other hand, be careful. Sometimes the thing just is red. It is not vermilion or scarlet or carmine. Sometimes, as Gertrude Stein once said, a rose is a rose is a rose.
Read the kind of books you want to write. If you long to write thrillers, read them. Read the good ones. Read up.

Have at least one special subject. Even if you do not use it directly in your writing, it will enrich it. At the same time, it’s good to be a bit of a generalist. Collect knowledge. Someone cleverer than I said: know everything about one thing, and know a little about everything.

I find that reading poetry is helpful, even if you do not want to write it. It gives depth to your feeling for language. I like Auden, Eliot, Yeats, Robert Lowell, Hugo Williams. Find a poet you love and go back to them every week, even if it’s only for five minutes.

I also think that you should read Shakespeare every once in a while. I know that makes me sound like a schoolmarm, but he was the master and there is so much that he does with truth and words and the human heart that you should know. There should be a bit of you which is infected with Shakespeare. I often find myself unconsciously paraphrasing him: the slings and arrows, the sorrows that all flesh is heir to. He can bring a richness to your writing and thought. You don’t have to read all of him, but I do think a working knowledge of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet and Anthony and Cleopatra is really helpful.

Take a notebook everywhere. You will forget. That piece of deathless prose that runs through your mind while you are cooking will die. That brilliant idea you had just before you went to sleep will have evaporated like water on glass by morning. I like the little Moleskin books. Have one in the car, by the stove, beside your bed.

Learn to listen. This sounds mad: of course all humans know how to listen. Actually, I think it a skill like any other. Often, in conversation, you get so excited by your own ideas that you are just waiting to say what you want to say, rather than really listening to the other person. Quite apart from the fact that it is a human courtesy, it is vital for your writing.
Watch, too. Be a human detective. Learn to look out for the tiny things. It is fascinating how much people can reveal through the smallest twitch or movement or shift in tone.

Do not forget the senses. It’s not just cerebral. What did things smell like, taste like, feel like?

Ask questions. You can do this of people, although sometimes you may fear this is rude. Ask questions of yourself, of the culture, of the accepted wisdom, of the things you take for granted.

Allow yourself enthusiasms. Passion is important in writing. Be a bit obsessive, if you want to. (This may be a massive great rationalisation on my part. I am obsessive, so of course like to spin it into a Good Thing. It might be just what it is.)

Remember the universal emotions: love, hate, fear. Everything comes back to those. But the secondary emotions are interesting too: indifference, like, grumpiness. If it is all about love and hate, then the medicine is too strong.


A note on Motivation:

I want you to think about it. People do things for such strange reasons. People kill for money. MONEY. We all take that for granted because we’ve heard it on a million crime shows and read it a hundred times in the actual paper. But if you get to thinking about it, it is a fabulously strange thing to do. You would take a human life so, what? You can go shopping? Have a nice holiday? Get a diamond or a boat? You cross the ultimate human taboo for a bit more cash? A man was convicted of killing his wife last year. He murdered her so he could collect her life insurance. It was around £300,000. That’s a just a nicer car and a couple of good suits and a better pension. For this, he slaughtered, with thought and care, the women he had sworn to honour and love. It’s not only brutal and tragic, but it is beyond strange.

People kill for shame: they perform honour killings, which have nothing of honour about them.

You do not have to go to the macabre or the extreme. Think of more ordinary motivations, especially the ones that one tends to take for granted, but are in fact quite odd, once you dissect them a little.


And a final word, on first and last lines:

I always says that generally you should not write with a reader or a publisher or a market in mind. Always remember that you are writing to fascinate and entertain and entrance yourself. If you can delight yourself, the chances are you might delight your reader.

Occasionally, it can be helpful to write with one, perfect, Platonic reader in mind. But if you set out to be commercial and successful by second-guessing the tastes of the public or the needs of the market, you will fail. Never forget that Harry Potter was turned down by tens of agents and twenties of publishers because at the time it was universally agreed that no one wanted to read boarding school stories. Also, trying to meet some artificial idea of what sells can induce a degree of self-consciousness. So my advice always is: do not think of the readers, but write the book you most want to read yourself, which you cannot find on the shelf.

However, there is a debt of honour you owe your readers: if they give you their precious time, you give them the best prose you can manage. And there is one other moment when you need to be acutely conscious of an actual person picking up your book, and that is when you are writing your first and last lines.

The first is for a very obvious reason. Someone is in the bookshop, there are hundreds of books before them, you do not have a famous name, you have not slept with a film star, why should they choose yours? They open the first page. If you do not grab them with a zinging first line, they will put the book down and move onto your rivals. Also, the first line is important for you because it will set the tone. If it contains the perfect chime of truth, you are more likely to go on to write a good story.

Here are some of my favourite examples:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

In a village of La Mancha the name of which have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase.
- Cervantes, Don Quixote

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno

James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and though about life and death.
- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
- Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier.

(Of this one, I said to my students today: it is a high risk opener. If Maddox Ford does not live up to that promise, then we are going to ask for our money back. Luckily, he had the good stuff to back up his bold claim.)

Mrs Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself.
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

The good last line is for a slightly different reason. The book is bought by now; you are not working on purely mercenary motives, you are not trying to catch anyone’s attention. But I do think you owe your faithful reader something lovely and satisfying and complete, so that when they put the book down, they feel a proper sense of closure. Also, and this is the mercenary part, if you leave something evocative and haunting in their memory, they are more likely to buy your next book.

Here are a clutch of my favourite last lines:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
- Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

We shall never be again as we were.
- Henry James, Wings of the Dove.

Everything he hated was here.
- Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theatre.

My students were very splendid. They were brave and good and true. They did some wonderful writing today; there were gasps and laughter and even a tear in the room. I hope they, and those of you who have followed this online, go on to write the books and stories of their, and your, dreams.

I did at last take a picture of the garden, so here are some growing things:


















And the most lovely Pigeon, with her little ears:

Fathers’ Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It was a gentle, slow morning. I went out into the garden and inspected all the plants. I am delighted with the big, established things that are going great guns, like the salix and the honeysuckle and the astrantias and the geraniums, but almost the ones that give me the most pleasure are the tiny plants which are miraculously battling on after the hard winter. There are some minute shrub roses which I thought had had it, but are slowly coming back (one or two have even put out a flower), and two baby lavenders which are refusing to die, and a little astilbe which I thought had gone the way of all flesh, but is gamely hanging on.

I was amazed and thrilled that the Pigeon wanted to catch her stick, for the first time since she got sick. I only threw it twice, a very short distance, because I am under strict instructions to take her very, very slowly, in her recuperation. But the fact that she was once again bouncing up and down, her ears up, her eyes bright, gave me keen hope.

I planted some parsley and potted up some cuttings and got my hands black and dirty with compost, which I find very reassuring, just at the moment. I need the feeling of the earth.

Then I went inside for lunch and suddenly, out of nowhere, there were tears. I have been edging back towards a small feeling of normality in the last couple of days; I had a feeling that the worst of the white water was past. So I wondered why, now, so abruptly. Then I realised: it is Fathers’ Day.

I have a staunch resistance to any kind of artificial commercial construct, probably invented by Hallmark, to make us all spend our austerity-hit cash. But just as on Mothers’ Day I always end up taking my mum a bunch of flowers, so on Fathers’ Day I would usually ring up Dad. Now that telephone call is not possible, because there is no one on the end of the line.

I suppose I have been thinking of him all week, in the back of my mind, because of it being the Royal Meeting. Dad decided, years ago, that he would never go to Ascot again, partly because he always lost so much money, and partly because he became maddened by all the social side of it, with those people wandering about in big hats not knowing one end of a horse from the other. But he also knew that if he was in the country, he might not be able to resist. So each year in the third week of June, he would go abroad, safely out of danger.

I remember the last time I saw him at Ascot, before he put in place his self-imposed ban. I was sixteen, and it was up in the Irish bar, which was always the place where you had the most fun on the entire racecourse. He was getting stuck in with a real old mucker, a tall, laughing fellow from Limerick, whom he obviously had known for years. They were swapping endless horse stories.

‘Darling, this is Bill,’ said my father.

I instantly adored Bill. He was the kind of grown-up who treated me, a raw teen, as if I were the Duchess of Alba. He bought me Guinness and laughed at my jokes. We had the most splendid afternoon. It was only much later that I discovered that Bill owned great estates in Ireland, could trace his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, and had fought bravely with the Hussars in the Second World War. Dad did not mention any of that. That was him all over. He did not care about property and lineage. As far as he was concerned, that tall grandee was just his mate Bill, who got pissed with him in the Irish bar.

It was one of the great lessons I learnt from my father, although he never sat me at his knee and told it to me in words. I learnt it by watching him. He took people exactly as they were, and judged them for themselves, not for success, or connections, or cash, or social standing. (I know I have written of this before, so forgive me, but in some ways I can’t say it enough.)

He was impressed, of course, by the people he knew in his profession who were very good at their job. He could admire a great trainer or a world-beating jockey. But he had just as much time for a young assistant trainer, or a small permit-holder, or a youthful apprentice, as he did for the mighty titans who cleaned up at Cheltenham and got their name in the papers.

When I was young, I thought everyone was like that. It was what I was used to. In the way that you start out thinking everything your parents do is normal, I was quite surprised that not everyone sang Irish songs and told antic and slightly dodgy jokes and threw open the doors of their house to all comers. So it came as a shock to me that there were people in the world who minded very much about the things my father did not even notice, like status and money. Funnily enough, even though I like to think of myself as quite worldly, even though I’ve been round the block more than once, I am faintly shocked by it still.

That’s the legacy my dad left me, and I think it’s a pretty good one. Judge humans on how they act, whether they are kind or funny or interesting or interested, and let all the rest go hang. It’s a really good way to go through life, and the lovely thing about my father was that he did it quite naturally, without thinking. For him, it was like breathing out and breathing in. I wish I had thanked him for that great lesson, but I never did. I suppose I thought that he knew, but I wish now that I had put it into actual words. Maybe that’s the other small lesson that I think of today: always say the thing, before it is too late.

Anyway, today is dedicated to my late, lovely Dad.

 

Now for the pictures, which are of the garden:

The most elegant delphinium:

The new cotinus tree, which is settling in beautifully:

I’m not crazy for pale pink in the garden; I mostly prefer dark blues and purples and whites, with the odd dash of singing scarlet. These rambly little hedge roses were planted right at the beginning, before I really knew what I was doing. I am rather fond of them now:

A festival of honeysuckle:

A perfect party of astrantias:

A most delicate gathering of salvias:

You can see here the wonderful markings on the bark of the salix, which never ceases to make me smile, and the beautiful silvery grey-green of their little leaves:

The hellebores are starting to look a bit faded and dusty now, but they have been flowering since February, so I am just amazed they are still here:

The pretty new lavender, against the granite of the shed:

The Pigeon, on the mend, on the mend:

(Can you see that her nose is once again shiny and wet? Always the best sign.)

And the return of the hill, against a very typical Scottish summer sky: