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I've just signed a tenancy agreement on a new place. I then had tea with my nice new landlady in her lovely green garden. Yes, it's the very first place I went to see; it came through.
So I'm sorted, and I'll be moving in next week.
Hugely relieved.
Then went and had a celebratory pizza with my darling stepmum Jane, who'd been at Kew for the day enjoying the Plantasia festival.
And the sun has shone today, and Kew is beautiful and full of roses.
I feel, for the first time in ages, that maybe things are going to come out okay.
Showing posts with label roses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roses. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Friday, 9 July 2010
Gulp...
I just did it. I’ve made my first attempt.
I just sent the pitch letter (in about its fifteenth incarnation), synopsis and first 10,000 words of “Gabriel Yeats” to the first literary agency on my list. There. Now I’ve done it once, it can only get easier, no? I hope so (I feel all quivery at the moment).
It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock and I’m going home to try not to think about what I’ve just done. Cold beer ahoy (after I’ve done the watering).
It’s been a wonderful, scorching hot day. I went out into the Gardens on my bike at lunch, to see how the Rose Section is looking. Stunning, is the answer, despite needing a bit of dead-heading. One could smell all the roses as one came up the path, even from behind the ten foot yew hedges. In fact, everywhere I went the air seemed to be scented; linden blossom, pine needles, dry grass, lavender, roses, the resiny fragrance of Cistus ladanifer…
“There still remains summer, the yellow essence,
And your hands touching the sea bells in the water.
Your eyes unveiled suddenly, the first eyes of the world,
And the marine caves.
Bare feet on the red earth.
There still remains summer, the fair-haired marble youth;
A little salt that has dried in the hollow of a rock,
A few pine needles left after the rain
Raggedly strewn, and red like tattered nets…”
George Seferis; from “A word for summer” (translated by Rex Warner).
It’s that kind of summer day.
And I have finally made a start on trying to get an agent for “Gabriel Yeats”.
I just sent the pitch letter (in about its fifteenth incarnation), synopsis and first 10,000 words of “Gabriel Yeats” to the first literary agency on my list. There. Now I’ve done it once, it can only get easier, no? I hope so (I feel all quivery at the moment).
It’s Friday, it’s five o’clock and I’m going home to try not to think about what I’ve just done. Cold beer ahoy (after I’ve done the watering).
It’s been a wonderful, scorching hot day. I went out into the Gardens on my bike at lunch, to see how the Rose Section is looking. Stunning, is the answer, despite needing a bit of dead-heading. One could smell all the roses as one came up the path, even from behind the ten foot yew hedges. In fact, everywhere I went the air seemed to be scented; linden blossom, pine needles, dry grass, lavender, roses, the resiny fragrance of Cistus ladanifer…
“There still remains summer, the yellow essence,
And your hands touching the sea bells in the water.
Your eyes unveiled suddenly, the first eyes of the world,
And the marine caves.
Bare feet on the red earth.
There still remains summer, the fair-haired marble youth;
A little salt that has dried in the hollow of a rock,
A few pine needles left after the rain
Raggedly strewn, and red like tattered nets…”
George Seferis; from “A word for summer” (translated by Rex Warner).
It’s that kind of summer day.
And I have finally made a start on trying to get an agent for “Gabriel Yeats”.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
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...
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...
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