Yesterday I had a rather random but very lovely visitor - a girl I met on the plane on the way back from Sweden last weekend. She was knitting a sweater for her baby-on-the-way, which got us chatting about this that and everything. Knitting is a great conversation starter! She ended up needing a place to stay last night, so she came here. A super-good Bangladeshi dinner, a mini-tour of Oxford in the dark and an apple-porridge-breakfast later, she's on her way again. A good start to the weekend:)

'Twilight, the gradual softening of the day into darkness, is surely the gentlest, most natural way to prepare for sleep. And yet it is a pleasure we deny ourselves with the switch on the bedside lamp. Even the guttering of a candle or the afterglow of a paraffin lantern is less abrupt. A couple of generations ago most country people went to bed when it was dark, at least in the summertime. And so we miss the time of darkling shades in which our pupils can dilate by slow degrees and dreams drift in as, wide-eyed, we enter the rook-black night.'
Roger Deakin, Wildwood

On the somewhat magical subject of twilight, a very early Boris Pasternak poem was read out on the radio a while back. I only managed to catch a few snippets:
'... And what is creativity if not compassion for twilight? ... a thousandfold nameless agitation that has missed the path and lost itself...'

'I'd made myself believe that I was fine and happy and fulfilled on my own without the love of anyone else. Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.'
Mary Malone (Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass)

Starting a blog was meant to be something in the lines of a New Year's resolution, but it has been kept about as tentatively as it was made. So this is a renewed effort.
This is my first day back in Oxford after ten days or so in Sweden over Easter. It's funny how a place grows on you. When I was in Sweden coming back here felt like a bit of an effort, a bit of a strain, but now I'm here I've slotted right back in. Spring is well ahead of Sweden here, with the more eager of the chestnuts already in full bloom, bluebells among the thriving weeds in the garden and the magical and startling realisation that summer may after all be more than an beautiful myth. I started reading a book about Linnaeus, and this was, unsurprisingly, his favourite time of year. There's the sadness of an ending to full-blown summer that so quickly ushers in the harvest. And yet I suppose at the end of the day, the harvest was the point of the whole thing.