Bugger the Blog

Taking the time to write anything has taken an effort these past few days.

I haven’t suddenly developed writer’s block (some would say I’ve never been anything else) but right now the weather is so perfect that staying indoors, for any reason, verges on the sinful.  Outside my window, through which the sunshine streams from a cloudless sky, the daffodils in my lawn are fluttering in a light breeze and the fruit trees are burst into blossom as if before one’s eyes.  A blackbird, clever fellow, is in full voice.

England, the newspapers have been telling us, is hotter than North Africa; and, one might add, without the relentless heat and the pitiless flies that I recall from my adolescent treks across the Saharan littoral.

How hard it is not to succumb to Wordsworthian lyricism.  Because in all my travels around the world, I have experienced nothing in the natural order that provides the sensory joys of a pristine spring morning in England, all the elements coming together to create an improbably idyllic pastoral scene of the kind seen on English Heritage calendars.  A thunderstorm over the Grand Canyon; a volcano spitting flame at sunset behind a tropical horizon in Indonesia; the Victoria Falls tipping the Zambesi into a vast gorge – all these have provided intervals of wonder.

But the modest panorama through my French doors, singular in its predictable ordinariness, excites as much admiration as all of them. 

So, please don’t take offence when I say Bugger the Blog to slope off into the greensward and do nothing – except watch my corner of England unfurl.