Twilight time …

… Ronald Blythe...: Ronald Blythe takes in his late-summer garden, leaning on a new stick. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In church we remember 4 August 1914, first silently, with Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, and then with touches of compline. I read Rupert Brooke's "Safety" and "The Soldier". His safety lies in the indestructible heart of things. Very soon, in the same fleet as bore my teenage father to Gallipoli, a mosquito would take his life. He was 27. And here am I, old in the old garden, eating raspberries, telling tales to the white cat, thinking of what to say on Sunday.

I have an ash-plant stick myself, as did Joyce. I got it in Ireland.