Monday 1st June - Ah, Summer...

 Basil cuttings; Sue (but which Sue? Suffolk Sue, I think) wrote in her blog about taking cuttings from her supermarket plant. She made it sound simple, so I had a go. 

I took a good long length from several bits of my basil, trimmed off the lower leaves and stuck them in a jar of water on the kitchen windowsill.  

113It didn't take long for the first roots to appear. I let them grow some more, and now I have potted them up. I hope they like their new home.

,,,,,

Last month wIas a spectacular success for increasing my step count, which translates as being generally a lot more active.

Just look at the height of that last entry! And an amazing total of nearly 102,000 steps for the month. That's a lot more than the previous maximum steps counts of approximately 80,000 steps. 

I wonder if I can manage something similar for June? It would mean trying to average about 3,500 steps a day. 

....

There's a passage in the novel 'A Small Bomb at Dimperly' by Lissa Evans, where Valentine, recently demobbed from the army at the end of the WW2, returns home because he is the heir to the family title and crumbling country house. His brother, Felix, had been reported as missing in action, and it has just been confirmed that he died, and so Valentine has become the new head of the family. 

He is given the task of reading the lesson at his brother's funeral, a tricky task as he is severely dyslexic. Back then, dyslexia wasn't recognised, and so he was labelled by his family as rather stupid and useless. However he has memorised several useful passages, one of them being the Ecclesiastes chapter I quoted yesterday...  here's the bit in the book;

All was going well, until he spotted an old friend in the congregation...

He’d no sooner spotted her than, with solemn deliberation, she stuck out her tongue at him and then the next word didn’t arrive. ‘… a time to … to …’ 

A dreadful nothing. A silence that reminded him of the moment when a doodlebug engine cut out and the world below sat waiting for the smash. 

He looked down at the page, at the impenetrable thicket of lines, and spotted the word ‘dance’ tangled in the undergrowth, but surely he’d already said ‘dance’? And hadn’t he also said ‘weep’ and ‘rend’ and ‘sew’ and ‘cast away stones’? Which left … what? 

His thoughts thrashed around and lighted on Felix. ‘… a time to … to hunt and a time to … to shoot; a time to spend and a time to … refrain from spending; a time to … turn left and a time to turn right; a time to fly and a time to … to …’ – he’d got himself into a mess with this one – ‘… to … to perch.’ 

There was an uneasy stirring at the edges of his vision, but just as he thought he would have to cut and run, possibly as far as Watford, the real words came surging back again (‘… a time to keep silence and a time to speak …’), and he rattled through the last few phrases at panicked speed and then flipped the Bible shut as if it were a hated text-book. 

Looking up, he saw the congregation staring at him with the expression of spectators at a fairground Wall of Death. Apart from his mother, who had her eyes shut.

I hugely enjoyed this book, so much so that I've read it several times and even listened to the audio version.