I've just woken up to the first snowfall of winter, just a slight white layer over the garden and rooftops. It looks very pretty.

This week I began reading A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin, this is the first time I've read one of his novels after years of reading his poems and letters. It's about a girl called Katherine who works in a library. I started reading it on my long bus journey home from the ornithological library I help at and it was very wintery and cold that day so it was all quite fitting. I don't really know what I think of it yet, it's very uneventful but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just like a few days passing by. ..."library assistants are forced to do everything to books except read them"... ..."Because Katherine was so young she hitherto thought love a pleasant thing"...

Last week I finally finished reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. It is a phenomenological text about how humans experience intimate spaces. There are chapters on everything from huts, to round spaces, to nests and shells, to cupboards, wardrobes and drawers. It was very beautiful and one of the most wonderful things about it was that all his illustration and evidence for these feelings came from poetry and literature. But how else could we describe such often intangible feelings? I don't exactly know how to write about it because it is such an immense and magical book. I feel like it contains the universe. There is actually a very interesting chapter in it on miniature "Words are clamour filled shells, there is many a story in the miniature or a single word." I think that is one of the cleverest ways of thinking of about words and language that I have read. I hadn't thought of it before but it's so obvious. I suppose I was aware of that while reading poetry, that so much can be contained in such a small collection of words and equally that sometimes reading a single word can trigger intense emotions. I just hadn't thought of a word as a miniature before and I think it's such a lovely way to do so. I feel that reading this book has enriched my life and my way of looking at things and also gave words and companion to many things that I feel about life and being alive.






Some pictures from the museum. One day there were three Buddhist monks in the museum wearing their beautiful orange robes and they were looking at the Buddhas, it really made the most interesting scene. I would have liked to talk to them but they were very reserved and only said hello and bowed.




Astronomical almanac and ephemera










It feels like we still have a long winter ahead of us and yet there are already signs that spring will come We planted bulbs a few weeks ago and they have been coming up already, these ones are Oxalis triangularis, they are so interesting in that their leaves close up at night and so they look like little mushrooms. Here they are by night and by day.






As always I hope you are all well and I really appreciate everyones support and all the great people I've met on here and as usual, I'm very far behind with my correspondence so I apologise for that! I actually got an anonymous gift from someone here, it was Spinoza's Ethics. Let me know who it was from so I can thank you. I am looking forward to reading it.

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