pix in the sand

The amazing thing about Kew Gardens is that one moment you are on a busy road in a busy area of busy London and next you are in this enormous green space full of fantastic plants and trees and it is a quiet haven of tranquillity. OK, shared with a few thousand other people at the wekend.

The treetop walk is great fun. Whoever thought that putting holes in the metal path was a good idea needs firing. It was disturbing yet intriguing to see a small boy jumping up and down on it, tesing its flexibility.

Sissinghurst

Now it's light and I can look out and see the garden all very green and leafy and nothing like the garden at Sissinghurst Castle which belongs to the National Trust in Kent. This is the view I remember from the top of the castle.

I was looking at a TV program about Virginia Woolf last night. She lived in London but had a passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West who lived at Sissinghurst and designed the iconic gardens there. Virginia sadly committed suicide in 1941 by drowning herself in the River Ouse. There was a grim image of her putting stones in her coat pockets before wading into the river. I visited Sissinghurst ages ago. What a delightful place it was and probably still is. That's what I love about the internet, you can think of a place, a person and explore all the links related to it whilst listening to some random jazz produced by by a group faintly linked to a musician mentioned on the World Service.

. . . opening marks

Hi, this is the launch. Not too glitzy . . have gone for a muted style as it's 4.59 in the morning and it's too dark to even see the bunting that I was going to hang up.
The truth is I am spending more and more time at my desk at this time of night for reasons which will become apparent. So this doesn't seem such a wacky thing to be doing when compared to some of the other time-passing activities I have been engaged in . . mostly centred on You Tube and Google maps, especially the street view. Finding an old address book recently provided some rich pickings but even so there is a limit.
I would of course rather be sleeping but this is harder than it sounds. A slipped disc has been pressing on the right leg nerve for the past few months so sleep only comes along like a fox in the garden, not very often and not for very long.
So this is a way to capture some of those thoughts that crop up in the middle of the night (or day) and usually get lost or forgotten, like waves running over marks in the sand.