Show Me The Treasure

On this side, what I consider to be the up side, of the planet, at this latitude, it is time to plant parsley, which as a garnish Michelle Pfieffer in the movie 'The Fabulous Baker Boys' once deemed the equivalent of the song 'Clouds', though the otherway around. Of course, the garnish parsley which she so flippantly flipped

Of all the farmhand work, edging the gladioli is perhaps the most exacting, and accordingly attracts the highest hourly rate. Frank Winkler considers himself to the Glad Hand par excellence has told most of the folks between Lambertville and Princeton that there is a Gladiologist Guild and anyone hired for Glad work, either edging, as we see here,

There might be something not quite rational - OK there is definitely something not rational - that while I am happy to blog prose, pics, micro-text like words, punster titles and drawings I am often shy of posting poems, it seems too like self-publication ( yes, yes, see above). However once something has slipped off into the state

Last year this list of classics, purportedly from the BBC, very often with the claim that someone in the BBC said, on average, people (presumably British peeps) had read only six of these. Invariably, in a classic case of self-selection, every bookish soul who read the list reported they had read three or four or a dozen times

There is something deft and comforting about wrapping a piece of cake, or here two smallish pieces of a homemade granola bar, in greaseproof paper, and securing the paper with an elastic band. Parceling - even the word suggest the faceted transformation from the smooth roll to the three-d creases of the parcel. There is something deft and

Yellow so pale the sun shines through it, like heads on sticks, nodding yes, yes, no, oh, Ok, the daffs reinforce the rumour, started by the riot of jasmine in the driveway, that summer is but two bends away. And on matters of riot, and the freedom to bloom, I've just been on line to buy a Pussy

Some jobs on the farm are tricky, none more so than disarming a hornets nest. Here we find stalwart Mr Farmhand, a little dizzy from the convolutions, attempting to whitewash the nest with his hoe. It might be that he's a tad disoriented as originally he thought the job was to clean out hair nets, or perhaps that

Here Bart Brassica ponders, not just if he has ordered too much butter for his cake, but what might be done with his butter hillock. Unbeknownst to most everyone, and until very lately Bart himself, Bart is a fan of contemporary poetry and his contemplation of this lardish lump has evoked in him a reverie, a recollection of

Over the summer months Mavis Eggwhistle has hinted in no uncertain terms that Bart should increase his level of geniality and hold a harvest picnic for the Farmhands and neighbours. In an effort to convince Mavis that he was a bona fide exponent of the art of geniality, he set to and did some research on his family

The gecko who, to anthropomorphise, seems here intent on blending into the weathered timber table, even to mimicking the tiny grains of sand (left side) but the tail does not seem to be co-operating. Why does the tail, which so nearly mimics the head's shape, giving it that I Don't Know If I'm Coming Or Going look, so

In the ongoing project of retakes on photographs of famous writers, Sigmund Freud is arresting on a number of levels, though the scratchboard sketch, with its lurid revelations of undercolours is perhaps, the most Freudian. On the subject I will pointedly ignore the cigarillo. I admit I did the pink and the pencil sketches simply to make

The collie, centre front, had hedged his bets on keeping warm, with a coat so thick that he appeared almost to be a box hedge on legs. The end of day is naturally, exaggerated by the laziness of only scribbling in the foreground figures. A month plus two days after the winter solstice and the sun has only

This might well be a Once Upon a Time report, as I am tempted to start off writing about the phenomenally good lunch we had at Vulcans in early July with: Once Upon a Time, S and I went to dinner at Oasis Seros in Paddington. I wore my favorite black velvet cocktail dress, and an older woman,