Saturday, May 12, 2007

Lie-in, persistent and we who are about to die.

1. Sleeping on after the alarm has gone off.

2. A green vine has worked its way into the attic at work and down into the meeting room.

3. Timewatch describes the finds in a gladiator's cemetary. The Austrian team that investigated the bones enlisted the help of a crazy professor who fought gladiator-style to get a better idea of how it all worked. When I was at university my tutors used to tell us about the German classicists, who had a reputation for not being armchair historians. One of them marched up and down a field in Athens wearing full hoplite armour to demonstrate a point about battle formation. Another munched his way through a pile of laurel leaves to see if they caused the prophetic hallucinations that influenced the Delphic oracle.

Bud vase, tomato and the poem I needed to hear.

1. Among the faded cut daffodils that I'm putting on the compost heap there is one that will do for another day in a bud vase. 2. For th...