Genres

It's nearly 5 o'clock again. How is it always 5 o'clock! I now seem to be homeschooling in the week and trying to catch up with work on the weekends while Tom takes over with the kids.

Such a beautiful sunny morning thought, it would have actually been a sin not to get out. Managed to persuade my eldest to come on a bike excursion with me so we could road-test his new, first camera.

He wanted snap the ducks on the Flats so we headed to Lunar Pond (Alexandra Pond), by way of 'The Trenches', which is actually a sinuous ditch that is currently sleek with rain and the perfect route to a pond for a 10 year old on a bicycle with a surplus of energy and a penchant for getting dirty. Luckily the camera is shockproof and waterproof up to 25 metres so we were well within our depth. Well, he was.

Spent the rest of the afternoon pondering genres. What am I searching for in a good book (right now, anything that will transport me to a commune in the 1960s)? Why do I dismiss pretty much all the TV I watch as 'crap TV' when a lot of it is actually really good – well I like it anyway, so is it actually 'crap'? And how do I stay within the niche of 'a botanical world' in this journal in the middle of a Covid crisis when much of the day is themed around anything but plants (the kids playing Plants versus Zombies doesn't count and I still can't believe they are playing video games anyway!).

I am, however, sat in my studio during an hour's escape eating pimento-stuffed olives, which are of the botanical world. I have just pitched a couple of articles about wildflower meadows, so that definitely counts. The paperwhites have in fact begun to bloom in 6 days not six weeks, rallied on by a bunch of jewel-coloured tulips from the Co-op that I just couldn't resist. And I have begun formulating some new book ideas.

As I preface in my book The Botanical Bible / Collin's Botanical Bible, plants are actually all around you if you stop and look. The furniture that we sit on, the food that we eat, the flowers that we arrange and in the face of nothing obvious or visible, the inherent connection that we have with plants through our existence as fellow eukaryotes (organisms that have cells with a membrane-bound nucleus).

As the American Botanist Asa Gray said in Natural Science and Religion (1880): 'In short, the animal and vegetable lines diverging wildly above, join below in a loop.'

And here ends my musings for the day.