You may have to choose between two types of sorrow.
If you can’t be happy, be busy.
9.30 am: An away day. We took our visitor to the National Botanical Gardens at Carmarthen. This was a first visit for all the others in the group too. It’s not the Eden Project, Cornwall. Nevertheless, the Great Glasshouse, by Norman Forster and Partners (the highlight of the trip) is an elegant realisation of a simple building structure turned architecture. It sits upon the landscape like a downed flying saucer. My mind also returned to the hill in the Teletubbies series:
Touch is another way of seeing. Physical contact is a mode of metaphysical communion. This is as true in our relationship to inanimate things as it is between family, friends, and lovers. The boundary between object and observer, one and another, is breached:
Greenhouses can be places of contemplation. There were moments of reverie this morning, as I contemplated the virtues and deficits of taking one of two contrary courses of action in a month or so:
We saw captive owls in action, explored within the walled garden, distinguished rhubarb from chard, and picnicked under the shade:
Cabbage-white butterflies have been in abundance this summer.
On our return home, we stopped off at Aberaeron, to walk the harbour wall:
