The Barbary nuts are flowering

I had a wonderful lunchtime walk today – not a long walk, just down through the Rock Garden and back – but it felt like being a thousand miles away from the office for fifteen minutes.

It’s an odd day, weather wise; constantly threatening to rain, yet never amounting to more than a shower. All the time I was out, there were occasional spots of drizzle coming down, and smooth, grey clouds overhead, lowering ominously and giving a strange, haunting, muted light. At the moment the forecast for Beltane tomorrow is for heavy rain >sigh< - of course, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend...

But the Rock Gardens are a mass of wonderful Mediterranean flowers; carpets of aubretia and dwarf phlox, scarlet rock rose and snow-white iberis, and all the wild iris species including my beloved Barbary nuts (pic above reproduced with my thanks from http://www.casarosa.net/wildflowers.htm). Seeing them carried me back ten years, to another strange, haunted grey day like this, walking in the hills behind Montejaque in Andalucia; coming up a long, steep trackway and over a ridge to find myself in a little alpine meadow full of these lovely stubby iris-flowers, so thick on the ground that the whole field looked violet-blue.

I’m having my usual struggle at the moment to book a holiday for my annual leave in May; I really want to go back to Greece, but the fact that Greece may not have an economy fairly soon is a trifle alarming. But my yearly dose of Greek food, walking in olive groves, swimming in the Aegean and painting the views is very precious to me, and (Andalucian nostalgia notwithstanding) I feel my heart is in its home when I am in Greece. If reincarnation is the answer, then I was Greek in a past life.

I’m sorry never to have managed to write properly about “Cinderella”. I had managed to get a ticket for the divine Miyako Yoshida’s last performance in Britain, and it was a moving occasion. She has been a delight during her years at the Royal Ballet – a luminously musical dancer, the epitome of grace and lightness, never showy, never hammy, exquisite but never precious. She was a lovely Cinders, as she has been a magical Ondine and a definitive Sugar Plum Fairy in recent years. I will miss her…

Bank Holiday weekend now, hurrah!