dreaming

… dreamed I was cycling through Kent very early on a warm misty cuckoo morning & passed through a village of huge stone buildings festooned with ornament & coats of arms that might have looked more appropriate in Whitehall or Santiago. Perhaps I was thinking of the venerable public school we deliver cheese to in Tonbridge. The air was filled with birdsong, no human was to be seen or heard, there were masses of laburnum & ivy & virginia creeper everywhere, & families of deer tiptoed daintily on the tops of walls & on every ledge to tear off & feast noisily upon their juicy boughs …

garlic on toast

i used to share a kitchen with a lovely feller named robert stredder who ate garlic as if it were fruit ... there was uproar one sunday morning when i bit into my toast and realized he'd just used my shiny new breadknife to chop his little mountain of garlic