17. Spring!

Easter Monday.  20 April.  6:53 a.m.  Back home in Saffron Walden.  Peter's birthday.  A. Hitler's birthday.  Don't know whether it was the chocolate, the lamb, the red wine, the coffee, the temperature or the customs book I read last night, but I tossed and turned.  Perhaps it's just spring time.  Thinking in the last couple of days how I can come to see time not as an enemy but as something that brings me closer to God: it is only through time that I can achieve my purpose.

 Thursday 23 April.  8:25 a.m.  Collette's advice to George Simenon, his credo:

 Keep it short.

Make it readable in one afternoon or evening.
Make the reader want more.

1:45 p.m.  Too many letters to the moon!

2:10 p.m.  Seasons here seemed to have split into two six month periods, with cold, dark days beginning in the end of October and the warm, long days with us now in the end of April.  The tulips are absolutely lovely now, especially our own: bright red, with a touch of orange and a texture that is a cross between velvet and plastic.

Thomas, Me and the Tulips in April

Thomas is very disappointed now when he hears, as he has this week, that there is no school.  Next week.  So many whys!  Mara, whose name, I forgot, means bitter (from the Book of Ruth) also has many, many whys.

6 p.m.  It is hard to know how much of the new country one should put on, and how much of one's own to keep.  "When in Rome" the expression goes, "do as the Romans," not "be."  But that is a fine line sometimes.

Why is it that a smell?

And so we planted sycamores
In our yard to bring us back
To places foreign and near
From time to time.

Friday 24 April.  To London, 10:35 a.m.  Oh the yellow fields of rape!  Trees rapidly filling.

The Rape!!

Live happily, live hidden.  French maxim (from days of the guillotine and the French Revolution?).

Notes on the train ride home:

The Times.

The Guardian.  ("I'm a Guardian reader.")
The tabloids: The Sun, The Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Mail.
Walking in the rain today.
Picadilly, different faces, picture poses, French school children with back packs (in Munich: Canadian 17/18 year olds; in Firenze: Spanish 15 year olds).
More rape, white blooms.
Earrings.
Wise cracking, Cockney accents.
Heyworth: Jesuit college, Cavendish Square.
Beggars and bums, old ladies, tramps.
 
The last time I was on this train, the morning of March 24th, poor woman who left her bags to get a cup of coffee, was gone too long, girls called BR officials and took off the "unattended" bags.  What a surprise when she returned!

Lot of lagoons lately.  What happened to all the Canadian geese at Audley End?  Did someone bag them in the dark of winter?

Surprising how the water flows north through Cambridge.

London poems on the Underground, standing up, leaning with the train.