Dead trees in view

A long night's sleep awakening to a warm day of sun and clouds. After our Saturday pancake breakfast, I wrote a reflection for Thursday's morning prayer and finished tomorrow's sermon. Clare made fish pie for lunch with which we ate some succulent french beans harvested from our garden plants. A few weeks ago, Clare brought home from church a cutting from a large lily root, and planted it in a corner of the garden. It a short time it has grown prodigiously and produced several large flowers, an amazing sight in between the damson tree and the blackcurrant bush. 

After lunch, I walked into town to buy some guitar strings, as both my Spanish guitars have broken a couple of their lower ones. The music shop assistant commented that the most frequently replaced string on an electric guitar is the top E, whereas on a classical guitar it's the D string. When I thought about it, that has been my experience too, over the sixty five years since I started to learn how to play guitar.

Clare had a siesta and then walked into town to do some shopping, so we met at John Lewis' and had a drink together. Then she continued her mission and I walked home through Bute Park. One group of trees on the edge of the rive has been damaged by recent strong gusts of wind, losing the top third of the trunk in two cases, causing more damage as they fell. The entire crown of one of them is in the river. Will it be removed, or just left  until flood waters return (as they inevitably will later in the year) to carry it away and cause problems downstream? Within a hundred metres of this site another large old tree was felled during a storm last year. I wondered if this was a zone whose shape encouraged wind to funnel and gain strength. Last year's drought certainly affected many trees which seemed to snap mid trunk, more often than at the roots. 

It's strange, there's one dead tree which looms at a precarious angle over the foot path by the cricket stadium. It's been like that for several years, and I don't understand why it's not yet been blown down or snapped in two. I've photographed broken trees in our parks for the past three years. Some get cut up and cleared away within days, others are tidied up and their trunks and maybe bigger branches left lying to decompose and provide insects with shelter. Most remarkable are the remains of big ash and beech trees killed by pests. They stand in place and dry out over time, sometimes losing their bark going silvery grey in their permanently wintry appearance.

After supper this evening, I continued working rather than watching telly, to try and get ahead of myself, then went to bed earlier than usual, though it's roughly the same time as usual when the lights go out.