hello

It’s May. Here’s Monty Don:

1. “When I die I shall go to May. It will be green – not environmentally correct, for things will just be, without measurement or judgment, but the colour green in all its thousand shining faces. Every day will feel like Christmas Eve when I was 10. Every green leaf will be perfection exactly as it is and yet will grow and change every time I look at it. Every moment will be like the arc of a diver breaking the waters of a green lake. I know this because this is what May is like here and now. Almost unbearable, really. It does not hold for half an hour. Yet in the shifting, growing hymn of light, colour and leaf is the still, simple reason that I garden.”

   The 23rd of May entry from Diaries of Note.

2. This ‘exit interview’ with Michael Bierut is lovely. I especially like the ending; his stories about Stephen Sondheim and his advice to the retired to lift up the next generation. I put it at the end of this episode of 4764 if you can’t be bothered with a whole podcast.

3. The Observer publishes a Sunday poem now. Here’s the beginning of today’s by Jeet Thayil:

   “At the end Bolaňo made coffee just for the smell of it, holding it to his nose like a rare liquor. His liver – jigaram in Persian, but more of that in a moment – could not process caffeine, so he treated himself to the aroma.”

4. I enjoyed this AJP Taylor quote on the belief that everything is getting worse. He suggested that declinism

   “means only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing up”

   (From this Diane Coyle review)

5. Mickey Galvin’s video technique is brilliant. Simultaneously open and controlled, loose and tight. She just talks, then edits, she shows us her desktop and her documents, yet it’s still all very, careful.

   

   SELF-PROMOTION

   I had a thought about writing and presenting. It’s on YouTube, on my blog and on instagram. Take your pick.

russell

(There are 1051 of you. Tea and Sugar was a provision train that delivered supplies along the 1051 mile journey from Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie, Australia. On some trains there was a bank car, which allowed residents to make financial transactions, and in December there was a Christmas car, with a much-anticipated Santa.)