1. Today Bettany takes two great long naps.
2. Alec sitting in his toddle truck, which is tied with garden twine to a large cardboard box. He says it's a boat, and would I pour some water on the ground to be the river so he can go sailing the oil-dark seas around Greenland. He propels himself down the garden by turning the front wheels with his hands and peers into a pastry brush spyglass, straining to distinguish icebergs in the dead white fog.
3. There is drama among the fine green tracery of the fennel plant. Aphids the colour of chocolate limes have colonised the stems, followed by punk rocker ladybird larva and lanky spiders marbled cream and freckle-brown. And a few blackfly stand nervously on the cottony shells of their eggs: tourists dropped off in a bad part of town by a careless coach driver.
