Beautiful

Lots of things are turning out beautiful just now. For a start, Beautiful Daughter and her chap are here for a couple of days.


And the very beautiful proofs for my first ever picture book text have arrived. I can't draw, so I much admire Holly Sterling and all those who can. Can't wait for you to see this book.

And this is our first year of this garden, which is promisingly beautiful too. Little blue muscari are springing up here and there, and we have little yellow celandine. The cowslips I liberated from Mytholmroyd are beginning to flower, too. The green leafy thing turns out to be a camellia. Very pretty, too. And the thing with little furry buds like rabbit paws is finally doing something, and what a surprise! It's a magnolia and I always thought I'd like one of those. It just gets better.

Unfortunately I also have a merry little display of chickweed, bittercress, dandelions, groundsel, great hawking thugweed and ground elder. (I made up great hawking thugweed, but the rest are real.) Apparently ground elder was brought to this country by the Romans, and I don't suppose anybody asked them why. They were Italian, for heaven's sake. They could have brought wine, or at least a vine or two to get us started, or garlic bread, bolognese sauce and tiramisu. They could have brought opera, or sculpture, or a few decent footballers wouldn't go amiss, not with Newcastle the way they are now. But no. The Romans brought us a pernicious weed. Nearly two thousand years since they left the Roman Wall and I'm still digging the stuff out.

Listen for the evil chuckle. I have ways of dealing with ground elder.