Good days of many kinds

It’s such a beautiful day.

The sky is clear deep blue, there’s a fresh breeze, and a chaffinch is singing in the tree outside my office window. I went out into the Gardens in my lunch break and cycled down to the formal rose garden by the Palm House. It looks an absolute picture. The whole rose garden was replanted last spring, with hundreds of shrub roses donated by David Austin; the whole list is mouth watering, from classic old rose varieties like “Maiden’s Blush” and “Empress Joséphine” through to some of the most recent Modern English Hybrids like “Darcey Bussell” and of course “Kew Gardens”. The scent as they all come into bloom is simply incredible.

I had a lovely weekend and a lovely couple of days off . How lucky I am; I have interesting friends who have parties with home-made meringues, ukulele-playing and a trampoline; I live in an interesting and culturally vibrant city; I have a bit of garden to plant (with a lot of cadging of cuttings and nurturing of seeds); I have my bike, I have my tele and my radio, I have enough money to go to the theatre and occasionally have a meal out…

Friday after work I went to the Royal Ballet triple bill, and was thrilled silly by it. By damn, the Company are at the top of their game at the moment!

Saturday I gardened and did my grocery shopping and cooked a huge casserole and cleaned the whole house and ran the washing machine twice and dyed a pair of old trousers turquoise blue. And was knackered; but felt completely entitled to make whoopee on Sunday.

Sunday I went to a party in Reading and made whoopee; met some extraordinary people, had some fascinating conversations, ate too much, and had a whale of a time on the trampoline. Now that’s what I call a good party; well worth the ridiculous complications of trying to get from Chiswick to Reading and back by public transport on a Sunday (I could probably have got to Stockholm quicker).

Monday I got up late, and gardened.

Tuesday I met my Mum in the West End for a Moroccan lunch and a lot of exhibition-going. An hour in the National Gallery, where the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have been rehung with some of their other radical contemporaries from elsewhere in the world; then lunch; then to the BM for the South African wildflower landscape, “Treasures of Mediaeval York” (on loan from York Museum) and the exhibition of bronze and terracotta sculptures from the Kingdom of Ife. These last are astonishing. The show closes in early July; if you are in the London area before then, go.

Good days...