From Last Week's Notebook

Hi Everyone

Thanks so much for all the good wishes. I’m afraid I spoke a little too soon about my recovery - there have been complications, namely a plastic tube extruding into my eye. Not nice! I’m mightily relieved to say they were resolved yesterday by a very kind consultant. I am now stent free and though it should have stayed in place until February, it appears as if the operation is still a success. Fingers crossed. My eye can now heal. In the meantime another short piece from me taken from last week’s notebook:

On a November morning, with the winter sun struggling to break through the cloud, in still, mild air and with the help of J, I plant tulips in anticipation of spring. A Tuscan mix, Byzantine colours, old favourite Apricot Beauty and the pale Flaming Purissima. Like the sun I'm struggling after my eye operation and its troublesome complications. I think, I hope, surely by the time the tulips flower, my eye will be healed.

J sweeps leaves, tidies paths, uses the last of the manure on the roses. We put the garden to bed for winter, for rest and renewal. I think how important it has been this year as a counterbalance to the work on the page, to the personal journey that is still unfolding.

I’m in the kitchen making coffee, looking out of the window when a robin perches on the rake leaning against the fence. It wouldn't be winter in the garden without this small visitor and its miraculous red breast. How easily we take for granted its colour, its fearlessness, its willingness to approach and be seen.

On another matter and not from my notebook - it gladdens my heart that Samantha Harvey won the Booker for her beautiful, lyrical, novel Orbital. It is without doubt a story for our time. A meditation on travelling through space, on 16 sunsets and 16 dawns, on both the ordinary and the profound, it invites us to look anew at our precious planet and its silent, fragile beauty.

“Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye . . . An Anthropocene book resistant to doom.”—Guardian

And finally - overnight - SNOW - it’s come early and has still not disappeared from the lawns and roofs outside my window. Take care in the snow and ice.

As always thanks for reading

Avril x

See you in a fortnight

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