Saturday 25 April 2020

Tomatoes and The Blue Flower


The packet of Moneymaker tomatoes that I got turned out to be empty. Its perfectly sealed sachet was void of seeds. Odd, very and in a long history of gardening, my first experience of emptiness. Without naming it I ripped the packet open and poured out emptiness. Not a satisfactory satori. There’s been a run on seeds this year so I’m stuck with a lot of post viability seeds in my shoe box which I sowed anyway and got a few results. Two decent tomato plants and two with co-morbidity. It’s like that now, what with dancing nurses in empty hospitals. As I said to Dr.Sean – do we stick with what we have or chance something worse?. We are all statisticians now. The real humbug is coming from the cocooning bioethicists (over 70) who claim that they would forego ventilators in favour of the younger patients. As an emeritus prof if continuing to teach courses he is taking the place of younger staff. His wisdom is very valuable and let us hope that he is not put to the test.

What beautiful weather. Now is the time to inspect the gentian that grows freely on the burren near us.

‘His father and mother were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall ticked with a monotonous beat, the wind whistled outside the rattling window-pane. From time to time the room grew brighter when the moonlight shone in. The young man lay restlessly on his bed and remembered the stranger and his stories. “It was not the thought of the treasure which stirred up such unspeakable longings in me,” he said to himself. “I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there. But where could this stranger have come from? None of us had ever seen such a man before. And yet I don’t know how it was that I alone was truly caught and held by what he told us. Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention.”’
(from The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald)

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