Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

The last year's leaves are on the beech:
The twigs are black; the cold is dry;
To deeps byond the deepest reach
The Easter bells enlarge the sky.
O ordered metal clatter-clang!
Is yours the song the angels sang?
You fill my heart with joy and grief -
Belief! Belief! And unbelief...
John Betjeman

I'm going away for a few days to Dorset; there's a lunch on Saturday to celebrate a golden wedding, and I hope we'll get in some beach walking and a visit to the Neece. Can't say I'm much looking forward to the drive on Easter week-end, the motorways will probably be jammed solid.

I went hunting for something new to wear to the Saturday 'do' and found a white tailored jacket to wear over black (of course), it fits like a glove. I looked at the price tag and nearly fell over - Final Sale Reduction - marked down fom £48 to a fiver! There's a bit of luck.

The wonderful flush of new leaves is just beginning here and the early blossom is out. The village looks amazing - two whole Sundays spent by volunteers planting bulbs have resulted in drifts of daffodils on every green space around the place. Our hens are laying again and the Egyptian geese have five yellow babies. This is the v best time of year.

Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver; the Lagoon, Venice and an unattributed study saved from a birthday card. Never mind their respective skills, I love the contrast of mood. Whistler is soft, reflective, solitary, concerned with the quality of night itself. The other catches the scent of a city alive with possibilities, the feeling one has before setting out for an evening in an exciting place.

I used the Photoshop watercolour filter on this - rather interesting I think. View large to get the effect. The trees here are beginning to get too big, we are losing light and sky. If that pine fell it would reach the house roof. Yet I hate to cut down beautiful things, it's quite a problem given that there are so many on the 3 acres. Our neighbour paid a terrifying price to have several trees felled; three were twisty old Scots pines over 100 years old - gone to make way for a garage.

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Time Magazine's lively list of the 100 Best English language novels since 1923. I was chuffed to see an American list include Elizabeth Bowen, she is one of my special loves and I own all her titles; I thought her nearly forgotten. Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" is also there, a magical novel that I have been recommending for years.

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Odd how several strands of luck come together to make a big break. In Thetford, our neighbouring town, there is a factory and UK research unit of one of the larger chemical companies. One of their PR team spoke to the WI in 2004 and though I'm not a member I went to that meeting with a friend.

His talk was "Science - new frontiers or dark ages?" and his thesis was that although we have now immensely sophisticated techniques, we have still failed to solve many of the perennial and often really basic problems of humanity.

One of the things he mentioned was soil erosion and the problems caused by large open field units. I kept thinking about some sort of natural 'adhesive' type of spray that could be applied at the same time as ploughing or sowing. It would have to be organic and have no soil build-up. G and I thought of egg albumen; we tried some egg whites beaten into water on one of the hens' dust patches; it worked. On an absolute whim, I rang the PR bloke and told him. Two days later I had a call from one of his staff chemists.

To cut a long story short, apparently it does work, but in a different solution. It is ideal because the catering industry has a huge by-product of unusable albumen. It has had a year's trial strictly under wraps and will go into production in 2007.

The patent is registered to the company, but yesterday I received a cheque that I, and you, would hardly believe. We also hold a small percentage interest in future sales. I KNEW keeping hens was a good idea. Now we can have the tarmac done on the drive, and the renew the roof, and......