2 Favourite Flower Photos

Mountain Blooms

The mountain speaks to the flowers and the flowers speak to the mountain, and the air is filled with beautiful secrets.

Swallows

Papy likes to sit out in the barn, smoking his pipe, reading, and musing himself about how to keep the tiled floor clean from blown leaves and bird droppings. He decided to remove the old swallows' nests, all but one which was in a place convenient to him, and then he built a special dropping catcher held under the nest on metal brackets.

Here it is - under a nest cobwebbed and abandoned - for the swallow mummy was having none of it and constructed a new nest next door, where she could arrange for all the droppings to be properly cast out onto the floor.

There comes a time when the nest begins to feel too small, and a young bird wonders if he might fly. There comes a time when a swallow mummy must stop shrilling for the babies to stay in the nest, and start shrilling for them to come out.

The moment of flight.

Piano Lessons

We found a piano teacher, a piano djinn, who was prepared come to the aid of absolute piano beginners with no piano and no prospect of continuing with lessons, and she said: Your wish is my command.

R's wish was to learn how to play Mission Impossible straight off without learning how to read music.

The piano djinn obliged with an easy arrangent. R played with guts and brio, without warning and without waiting for advice, which probably explains why the teacher is sticking out her tongue. However R stuck at it, practising on other people's pianos, until the right and left hand were able to coincide and the melody was struck.

B's desire was to learn to read Bass Clef (so he can teach himself whatever he wants he later explained) and to play something by Henry Mancini of Pink Panther fame. After the neccessary set of exercises, B played, with finesse, a rendition of Moon River which was enough to make female relatives weep. I didn't realise good old Henry (was responsible for so many easy listening classics: them from Love Story and Midnight Cowboy and Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Windmills of your Mind... when he was 11, innocent of films and music, his father took him to see one, he decided there and then that he would be a composer of film scores.

Both children were utterly enthused by this teacher, who showed infinite patience during the near impossible mission, and after five days of one half hour lesson a day, R was also able to hammer out the theme from Indiana Jones and the Pirates of the Caribbean, and B a rock and roll number, and later on Mamy and Papy's piano, he was able to read and teach himself an arrangement of Strauss' Blue Danube.

The photo shows R explaining to B non-verbally that he should remove his hand from the keys and stop interfering.